Marie Griffith, “Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics” (Basic Books, 2017)
Marie Griffith‘s new book Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (Basic Books, 2017) offers a portrait of how religious views regarding sexuality became entangled with multiple political debates including those over feminism, gay rights, sex education and in charges of communism and secular humanism. Beginning with the controversies over birth control in the 1920s, she takes us through the twentieth century to the most recent battles over same-sex marriage dividing American Christians both politically and religiously. Moral Combat features pivotal figures including, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, the fundamentalist radio preacher Billy James Hargis and the first gay Episcopal Bishop Gene Robinson. She demonstrates how pro and con positions were not always clearly defined and adherents could change sides in a matter of a decade, finding surprising allies. In the new millennium two distinct religious visions for society and human sexuality had taken root unraveling any hope of consensus. Marie Griffith is the John C. Danforth Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis where she directs the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics. This episode of New Books in Gender Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Lilian Calles Barger is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, forthcoming in 2018 from Oxford University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
20 Feb 201857min
Sarah Fishman, “From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France” (Oxford UP, 2017)
In her latest book, From Vichy to the Sexual Revolution: Gender and Family Life in Postwar France (Oxford University Press, 2017), Sarah Fishman offers reader a social history of French families in the years that followed the Second World War. Fishman is focused here on illuminating the daily and practical lives of the men, women, and children who worked and often struggled to transition from wartime to peacetime. After 1945, French families had to negotiate a variety of changes that shaped, and were shaped by, shifting ideas and attitudes about gender roles and relations, love, sexuality, marriage, and parenting. To access the lives of French working and lower-middle class families, Fishman draws on a wide range of sources, including previously neglected popular press publications that reflected the politics and experiences of working people. She also uses juvenile court records from the period that detail family lives and dynamics, as well as state and societal norms and expectations. Tracing the contours of a broad transformation from a vision of family centered on (paternal) authority to an emphasis on relationships, including fatherhood, the book also considers the impact of the ideas of figures like Freud, Beauvoir, and Kinsey on the everyday beliefs and behaviors of ordinary people. Attentive to the continuities and changes that ran throughout the period from 1940 to the late 1960s, the book places the postwar in a context that remembers the war while also setting the stage for the eruption of French political, social, and cultural life in 1968. Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University. Her current research focuses on the representation of nuclear weapons and testing in France and its empire since 1945. She lives and reads in Vancouver, Canada. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send an email to: panchasi@sfu.ca. *The music that opens and closes the podcast is an instrumental version of Creatures, a song written by Vancouver artist/musician Casey Wei (performing as hazy). To hear more, please visit https://agonyklub.com/. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
29 Dec 20171h 1min
Regine Jean-Charles, “Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary” (OSU Press, 2014)
Regine Jean-Charles’ Conflict Bodies: The Politics of Rape Representation in the Francophone Imaginary (Ohio State University Press, 2014) foregrounds black women as speaking subjects in narrating and protesting sexual violence. Jean-Charles emphasizes a transnational black feminist framework that makes a critical intervention in rape cultural criticism. She contends in this work that taking rape as a starting point to theorize colonial and postcolonial violence provides a more effective way to understand the gendered contours of violence. Drawing on a range of primary sources including novels, photographs and films from Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, Jean-Charles highlights the global implications of sexual violence and the importance of paying attention to its representation in order to rethink the very fundamental notions of human rights. Regine Michelle Jean-Charles is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African Diaspora Studies at Boston College where she teaches classes on francophone literature, black feminisms, African film, and Haitian Studies. Annette Joseph-Gabriel is an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her forthcoming book, Decolonial Citizenship: Black Women’s Narratives of Resistance in the Francophone World examines Caribbean and African women’s literary and political contributions to anti-colonial movements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
26 Okt 201741min
Naoko Wake, “Private Practices: Harry Stack Sullivan, the Science of Homosexuality, and American Liberalism” (Rutgers UP, 2011)
The influential yet controversial psychiatrist, Harry Stack Sullivan was pioneering in his treatment of schizophrenia however the way he lived privately did not always correspond to the theoretical ideas he espoused publicly. With meticulous research and access to clinical and historical records, historianNaoko Wake, examines the life and work of this pioneer of American Psychoanalysis from an unconventional perspective, quite different than the usual biographical approach. In this interview we discuss Sullivan’s sometimes contradictory life work, especially his time at Sheppard-Pratt Hospital, his private practice in New York, and his wider, global ambitions later in life. Private Practices: Harry Stack Sullivan, the Science of Homosexuality, and American Liberalism (Rutgers University Press, 2011), is compelling book and a welcome addition to the historical record of American Psychoanalysis. Find Chris Bandini on Twitter @cebandini Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
1 Aug 201758min
Lisa Wade, “American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus” (Norton, 2017)
“Hookup” has become a buzzword, a misleading concept for students, parents and educators alike–one that confuses more than explains the nuances of this complex and pervasive trend. In American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus (W. W. Norton, 2017), Lisa Wade analyzes its cultural roots: the evolution of courtship, our unrealized feminist revolution, America’s new business model of higher education, and the increasingly tenuous economic futures faced by young people. The hookup came to dominate college campuses in this context, but the trouble extends beyond hooking up to the culture itself. It rewards students who endorse and embrace meaningless sex, while ostracizing those who don’t. And there is no escaping it. It permeates not just dorm rooms and frat houses, but dining halls, quads, Facebook and Instagram feeds, and even classrooms. It is now part of the quintessential college experience, necessary for forming and maintaining friendships, and it often determines social status, whether students opt in or out. By including students’ own perspectives and experiences through their college years and beyond, Wade presents a personal and compelling portrait of hookup culture, exploring how it affects a diverse range of students and what it says about the changing face of dating and sex in Tinder-era America. By the end of their senior year, even the most enthusiastic supporters of hookup culture wanted to feel more in hookups and to hurt or be hurt less, to abide by their own standards of attraction, and to opt out of a culture of sexual competition that leaves very few winners and too many losers. Wade challenges readers to envision new sexual cultures, ones that are more equal, more pleasurable, more respectful, kinder, and safer. Wade’s takeaway is for educators, parents, and students alike, asking not “How can we go back?” but “Where do we go from here?” College campuses have always been and should be a place of cultural revolution, and there’s no better place to re-imagine hookup culture and transform American culture in the process. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
6 Apr 201745min
Gregory Mitchell, “Tourist Attractions: Performing Race and Masculinity in Brazil’s Sexual Economy” (U. Chicago Press, 2015)
Moving through the saunas of Rio de Janeiro, the Amazonian eco-resorts of Manaus, and the Afro-Brazilian heritage of Bahia, Tourist Attractions: Performing Race and Masculinity in Brazils Sexual Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2015) explores sex as an epistemology – a way of knowing. The ethnographic, theoretical and prosaic prowess of Assistant Professor Gregory Mitchell captures the individual experiences and identities of male sex workers and their transnational clients. Delving into the complex and refractive affective flows that attempt to make desire legible – across culture, race and sexuality – Tourist Attractions proposes that sex work be reframed as a form of performative labor. Exploring how affect and labour shape the performance of masculinity, Mitchell makes a robust contribution to ideas of queer kinship, authenticity and cultural memory. It follows that the conceptual depth of Tourist Attractions is also met by the contextual breadth of its subject matter – from the influence of political economic considerations, to the missionary agenda of gay rights rhetoric, to the metonymic role of the body in heritage tourism and ecotourism. The reader cannot but help become an enthralled audience member to the social choreography that Mitchell observes, navigating the culturally specific affects of individual sexual exchanges and cross-continental tourism. Taylor Fox-Smith is teaching gender studies at Macquarie University and researching the gender gap in political behaviour and psychology at the United States Studies Centre in Sydney, Australia. Having received a Bachelor of International and Global Studies with first class Honours in American Studies at the University of Sydney, Taylor was awarded the American Studies Best Thesis Award for her work titled The Lemonade Nexus. The thesis uses the theme of marital infidelity in Beyonce’s 2016 visual album Lemonade as a popular cultural narrative of institutional betrayal, and parallels it with police brutality in Baltimore city. It argues that the album provides an alternative model of political formation which can help to understand redemption in the wake of an urban uprising. Rewriting the traditional protest to politics narrative with an iterative nexus named after the album, Taylor’s research continues to straddle political science, gender studies and popular culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
13 Mars 201755min
Anthony M. Petro, “After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion” (Oxford UP, 2015)
Emerging in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic was not just a public health crisis. It was a moral crisis too, argues Anthony M. Petro in his new book, After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2015). Throughout the book, Petro describes the entanglements between the supposedly secular field of public health and the religious spheres of American Christianity during the long 1980s. After the Wrath of God, however, is not merely a book about the religious right or Protestant evangelical responses to the HIV/AIDS crisis. It is a broader exploration of the ways that a set of sexual ethics inspired by Christian doctrine encompassing abstinence and monogamy within heterosexual marriage came to become the national moral prescription against the epidemic as well as the religious and medical leaders who shaped that national sexuality and the AIDS activists who fought against it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
2 Dec 201650min
LaShawn Harris, “Sex Workers, Psychics and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy” (U. of Illinois Press, 2016)
LaShawn Harris is an assistant professor of history at Michigan State University. Sex Workers, Psychics and Number Runners: Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy, (University of Illinois Press, 2016) offers a colorful look at the lives of black urban women who worked and lived in the space between the legitimate and illegal economy. Her subjects are women not previously considered in histories of the working class: mothers, single ladies, churchwomen, hustlers, and partygoers who worked in the underground economy. Motivated by many factors, they sought economic autonomy, to provide for their families, or individual pleasure and fulfillment. The underground economy offered women a break from middle class respectability and opportunities to forge complex identities of self-sufficiency and an escape from the confines of New Negro womanhood. Working outside the wage system in illegal gaming, sex work or as supernatural consultants, they experienced the dangers and thrill of illicit trade, and challenged black progressive crusaders and promoters of racial uplift. As entrepreneurs and cultural produces, they reinforced and reconfigured the race, gender and class hierarchies of black urban life. Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her current book project is entitled The World Come of Age: Religion, Intellectuals and the Challenge of Human Liberation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
3 Nov 201654min
