Rachel Hope Cleves, "Lustful Appetites: An Intimate History of Good Food and Wicked Sex" (Polity, 2024)

In 1960, University of Illinois professor Leo Koch wrote a public letter condoning premarital sex. He was fired. Four years later, a professor named Revilo Oliver made white supremacist remarks and claimed there was a massive communist conspiracy. He kept his job. Matthew Ehrlich revisits the Koch and Oliver cases to look at free speech, the legacy of the 1960s, and debates over sex and politics on campus. The different treatment of the two men marked a fundamental shift in the understanding of academic freedom. Their cases also embodied the stark divide over beliefs and values--a divide that remains today. Ehrlich delves into the issues behind these academic controversies and places the events in the context of a time rarely associated with dissent but in fact a harbinger of the social and political upheavals to come. An enlightening and entertaining history, Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK (University of Illinois Press) illuminates how the university became a battleground for debating America's hot-button issues. Matthew C. Ehrlich is a professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His books include Kansas City vs. Oakland: The Bitter Sports Rivalry That Defined an Era and Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest, winner of the James W. Tankard Book Award. Tom Discenna is Professor of Communication at Oakland University whose work examines issues of academic labor and communicative labor more broadly. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

10 Mars 20221h

In this episode of Queer Voices of the South I talk to Dr. Sherry Scott about her new book Playhouses: Sexuality and Fundamentalism, released in February 2022 by Black Rose Writing. Three cousins fiercely defended their roles within the sanctity of their playhouses. But a six-year stint in a fundamentalist religious organization thwarted Scott's developing understanding of sexual orientation. Homosexuality was an insidious, infective spirit that conferred fear upon her adolescent naiveté, eventually eroding the relationship with her cousins. Playhouses is a journey from corrosive indoctrination to celebrating the differences in others. "Reconciling who we were took years, but survival led to relational ties without fear and a heart for activism in the face of rising institutionalized discrimination." Sherry Scott, M.D., is a pediatrician who has practiced palliative/hospice care for children and general medicine. She self-published her first literary work, The Year My Mother Died, 2011. She founded Paris Poet's Society and published a juried anthology of poetry and photography: What Brings You Here, 2016. She serves on the board of the Gendercide Awareness Project, founded in Dallas. She lives with her family in Paris, Texas. Morris Ardoin is the author of Stone Motel – Memoirs of a Cajun Boy (2020, University Press of Mississippi), which has been optioned for TV/film development. A communications leader in health care, immigration and asylum, and higher education, his work has appeared in national and international media. He divides his time between New York City and Cornwallville, New York, where he does most of his writing. His blog, “Parenthetically Speaking,” which focuses on life as a writer, home cook, and Cajun New Yorker, can be found at www.morrisardoin.com. Twitter: @morrisardoin Instagram: morrisardoin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

8 Mars 202243min

Increasingly fraught debates about sex, consent, feminism, justice, law, and gender relations have taken centre stage in academic, journalistic and social media circles in recent years. This has resulted in myriad new theories, debates and mediated movements including #MeToo and #TimesUp. In Sex, Consent, and Justice: A New Feminist Framework (Edinburgh UP), Tina Sikka explores many of the contradictions and tensions that make up these debates and movements. She looks at those that draw together contemporary understandings of justice, violence, consent, pleasure and desire. Louisa Hann recently attained a PhD in English and American studies from the University of Manchester, specialising in the political economy of HIV/AIDS theatres. She has published work on the memorialisation of HIV/AIDS on the contemporary stage and the use of documentary theatre as a neoliberal harm reduction tool. She is currently working on a monograph based on her doctoral thesis. You can get in touch with her at louisahann92@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

7 Mars 202236min

Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández once again engages in the fearless work of challenging structures of domination. In her most recent book, Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2021), Profesora Guidotti-Hernández theorizes through the idea of the masculinized Mexican subject and leads us to the possibilities of historicizing how masculinities are archived and to what degree their intimacies, desires, and emotions emerge in both private collections and public institutions. By taking a Latinx feminist and queer reading of two of the most well-known stories in Mexican History in the United States (the Flores Magón brothers and the Bracero Program), she provides us with an affective history of Mexican masculinities in diaspora. Guidotti-Hernández declares early on that “...migration and separation…altered gender relations and expressions of gender” (2). This critical understanding provides her with a foundation on which to unravel the rest of her manuscript. Dr. Nicole Guidotti-Hernández first came into contact with the highly-curated archives of these two historical flashpoints and saw what other scholars and public audiences were supposed to see, but, she writes, “Yet I also saw something else that was harder to put into words” (12-13). By exemplifying rigorous interdisciplinary research, she puts into words how migration structured and created feelings. Mexican men’s intimacies, emotions, and desires, as a result of separation, influenced their lives as political and economic subjects. Over 16 chapters and 290 pages, Guidotti-Hernández offers field-shifting contributions to Latinx Studies, histories of migration and labor, and Gender and Sexuality. Readers interested in Latinx feminist and queer approaches to history, and those interested in the history of Mexicans in the United States, should immediately get their copy of Archiving Mexican Masculinities in Diaspora. Jonathan Cortez is currently the 2021-2023 César Chávez Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. You can follow Jonathan on Twitter @joncortz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

23 Feb 20221h 15min

We tend to associate Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that decriminalized abortion in 1973, with the choice not to have children. But Roe was equally transformative for Americans' understanding of family--having and raising children also came to be thought of as a choice. In Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade (University of California Press, 2021), Sara Matthiesen highlights the distance between this idea of choice and worsening forms of inequality that have forced far too many to work harder simply to create and maintain a family. In this new and timely work, Matthiesen shows how the effects of incarceration, for-profit and racist healthcare, disease, and poverty have been worsened by state neglect. At its core, Reproduction Reconceived is an urgent historical account: of the myriad labors that families have been made to perform simply to survive, and of the inevitable costs that pile up when family making is seen as a private responsibility rather than a public good. Dr. Nicole Bourbonnais is an Associate Professor of International History and Politics and Co-Director of the Gender Centre at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Her research explores reproductive politics and practice from a transnational historical perspective. More info here. Twitter: @iheid_history and @GC_IHEID Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

16 Feb 202259min

Patricia Tilburg's Working Girls: Sex, Taste, and Reform in the Parisian Garment Trades, 1880-1919 (Oxford University Press, 2019) is at once a cultural, gender, urban, and labour history of the Belle Epoque era. The midinette is the central figure the book chases across serval chapters. Named for the lunch hour when thousands of female garment workers spilled into the streets of Paris each day, this female garment worker became a symbol of French taste and skill, the embodiment of productive labour and the pleasures of the modern capital. Represented by a range of observers during the period as young, cheerful, attractive, and sexually available, the midinette became the subject of (male) fantasy and philanthropy, her image working to assuage anxieties about a rapidly changing world. The lived experiences and activisms of the women workers who inspired these projections play significant roles throughout the book. Using a wide array of sources--state and police documents, municipal and philanthropic archival collections, press, fiction, music, letters, and more--the author ensures that the conditions of their working lives, their voices and demands, do not get lost in the swirl of ideas surrounding them. A cultural history that moves deftly between the material and the metaphoric, Working Girls is a pleasure to read, and I so enjoyed speaking with its author.   Roxanne Panchasi is an Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada who specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century France and its empire. If you have a recent title to suggest for the podcast, please send her an email (panchasi@sfu.ca). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

16 Feb 20221h 2min

In Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births (MIT Press, 2021), Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick along with more than fifty contributors consider over a hundred designs that have defined the arc of human reproduction. The designed objects that surround people during menstruation, birth control, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and early motherhood vary as oddly, messily, and dramatically as the stereotypes suggest. This volume considers a breadth of designs that have defined the relationships between people and babies during the past century. It is organized around four sections (Reproduction, Pregnancy, Birth, and Postpartum) and includes designs such as the menstrual cup, population policy posters, home pregnancy tests, tie-waist skirts, cesarean birth curtains, birth in film, the Kuddle Up blanket, breast pumps, and car seats. Holiday Powers is Assistant Professor of Art History at VCUarts Qatar. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in Africa and the Arab world, postcolonial theory, and gender studies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

15 Feb 20221h 5min

An interview with Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, editors of Anonymous Sex, a collection of 27 explicit sex stories unattributed to the 27 writers listed in the byline. Cheryl, Hillary, and I discuss how exactly you get writers like Louise Erdrich, Rebecca Makkai, Helen Oyeyemi, and Robert Olen Butler to contribute a story when the conceit is sex. We talk about the problem with stale erotica and the search for fresh language with which to talk about sex and desire, the necessity of understanding sex as culturally constructed, and so much more. Hillary Recommends: Michael Cunningham, Flesh and Blood ----. A Home at the End of the World Cheryl Recommends: Fumiko Enchi, Masks ----. The Waiting Years The Novels of Muriel Spark Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Associate Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro as World Literature, is under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

14 Feb 202241min