Monica Liu, "Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China's Global Rise" (Stanford UP, 2022)

The history of queer politics in the United States since 1968 is commonly narrated as either a progressive campaign for state recognition or as a subcultural rejection of prevailing gender norms. But these accounts miss the true scale of queer politics in the post-war era. By centering transnational relations, practices, and infrastructures in the history of sexual rebellion, Eros and Empire: The Transnational Struggle for Sexual Freedom in the United States (Stanford University Press, 2025) provides an alternative view of US-based struggles for sexual freedom. Dr. Alexander Stoffel analyzes three prominent US-based social movements—gay liberationism, Black lesbian feminism, and AIDS activism—to argue that they were fundamentally shaped by their transnational entanglements. Departing from popular domestic framings of these movements, Dr. Stoffel recasts the history of radical queer thought and action as a project of erotic worldmaking. This project mobilized queer affects of pleasure, desire, and eroticism in the fight for revolutionary transformation on a world scale. The transnational perceptions, activities, and consciousness of queer radicals, Dr. Stoffel argues, not only conditioned the trajectory of queer history, but also radicalized wider anti-imperialist, socialist, and abolitionist struggles past and present. In this ambitious and interdisciplinary work, Dr. Stoffel reconsiders the United States' revolutionary sexual past and creates new opportunities for the study of sexual formations in relation to questions of capital accumulation, empire, and resistance. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

25 Apr 1h 1min

In Geographies of Gender: Family and Law in Imperial Japan and Colonial Taiwan (Cambridge University Press, 2024) Dr. Tadashi Ishikawa traces perceptions and practices of gender in the Japanese empire on the occasion of Japan's colonisation of Taiwan from 1895. In the 1910s, metropolitan and colonial authorities attempted social reform in ways which particularly impacted on family traditions and, therefore, gender relations, paving the way for the politics of comparison within and beyond the empire. In Geographies of Gender, Dr. Ishikawa delves into a variety of diplomatic issues, colonial and anticolonial discourses, and judicial cases, finding marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships to be sites of tension between norms and ideals among both elite and ordinary men and women. He explores how the Japanese empire became a gendered space from the 1910s through the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, arguing that gender norms were both unsettled and reinforced in ways which highlight the instability of metropole-colony relations. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there are dumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative to students. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to make academic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New Books Network with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word. Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter. 150 million lifetime downloads. Advertise on the New Books Network. Watch our promotional video. Learn how to make the most of our library. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

24 Apr 1h 3min

Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) guides readers through the history of eunuchs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the techniques of visualization that helped establish the conditions that produced sex as an object of empirical knowledge, the rise of sexology in the 1920s, the discourse of “sex change” in the press from the 1920s to the 1940s, and a famous case of the “first” Chinese transsexual in 1950s Taiwan. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of sexuality in China, and will be of special interest for readers who are interested in bringing Foucault-inspired analyses to the craft of history. Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

23 Apr 1h 10min

What does transphobic oppression have to do with sexism, heterosexism, and racism? How does a decolonial analysis help us understand trans oppression? How are the relatively recent concepts of person, self, and subject implicated in these forms of oppression? And what theorizations are already available within trans communities for thinking through this all?  In Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2025), Talia Mae Bettcher develops a new theory of intimacy and distance to show how structures of appearing—as well as liminal experiences of appearance—can help us understand trans oppression and gender dysphoria in new ways. This new theory of interpersonal spatiality also shows how we can build worlds otherwise, thinking about connections and relations in ways foreclosed by many of the currently dominate accounts of gender and identity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

20 Apr 50min

“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate scoffed at Jesus (Jn 18:38), and that’s how we think about matters today in our culture—subjectively: my truth, your truth, etc. To make the argument that there is a knowable Truth (with a capital T) that is written in the world and in our bones, theologians Deborah Savage and Robert Fastiggi examine a selection of autobiographical accounts of ‘lived experience.’ They take a number of personal essays written by those who have erred from the path of Catholic social teaching and sexual morality—in the dark forest of the world, to borrow from Dante—and their subsequent disappointments and suffering. They examine these narratives through the anthropology of John Paul II and the authority of the physical and social sciences, including medical doctors. So, there is Good News for all of us: if we find ourselves lost and unhappy in our errant meanderings, the Church can bring us home. We can always choose, as God reminded Cain gently (Gen 4:7), “sin is couching at the door; its desire is for you, but you may overcome it.” Here is the book on the En Route Books website (which includes video links)here is the book on Amazon.com. Deborah Savage’s website. Robert Fastiggi’s website (as a theology professor at Sacred Heart Major Seminary). The article we refer to by Leah Fessler, “A Lot of Women Don’t Enjoy Hookup Culture—So Why Do We Force Ourselves to Participate?” Quartz Online, May 17, 2016. Humanae Vitae by Pope Paul VI on Wikipedia and on the Vatican website. Robert Fastiggi’s previous appearance on Almost Good Catholics, three years ago (recorded in February of 2022, on the eve of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine): Robert Fastiggi on Almost Good Catholics, episode 7: Mother of All Nations: Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, Assumption, and Coronation of Mary An episode of Almost Good Catholics on the same theme: Garrett Johnson on Almost Good Catholics, episode 42: Who Do You Think You Are? Thorny Questions about Sex, Identity, and Catholic Doctrine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

5 Apr 1h 13min

In Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Julia Jarcho proposes that the desire to write is inextricably bound up with masochistic desires. In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, Jarcho tests the limits of masochism as a pleasure-making economy. Reading Henry James, Henrik Ibsen, Mary Gaitskill, and Adrienne Kennedy alongside Sigmund Freud, Gilles Deleuze, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Leo Bersani and others, Jarcho investigates the ways in which masochism rewrites and reinvigorates failures of desire, which critics have otherwise thought of as dead-ending masochism. Jarcho asks particularly difficult questions of masochism as a response to injurious social structures, which yield less uniformly white, searching, and uneasy views of both masochism and authorship. Throw Yourself Away reconsiders how writing and subjects are undone by the excesses and recesses of masochistic desire, which keeps the prospect of pleasure so painfully, so deliciously at bay. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

29 Mars 54min

It’s the UConn Popcast, and can you fall in love with ChatGPT? Can, and should, you have sex with a robot? We asked Professor Kate Devlin, a leading researcher on intimate relations between humans and artificial intelligences, to help us navigate the new landscape of sex and love with robots. Kate is a Professor of AI & Society in the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. She’s the author of the excellent book Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots (Bloomsbury, 2018), which examines the ethical and social implications of technology and intimacy. We had a rich conversation with Professor Devlin about the future of intimacy, the reality of the sex robot, the gender politics of depictions of AI in science fiction, and a lot more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

26 Mars 1h 2min

In this episode, I talk to Eliot Schrefer about his book Queer Ducks (and Other Animals): The Natural World of Animal Sexuality (Katherine Tegen Books, 2022). A quiet revolution has been underway in recent years, with study after study revealing substantial same-sex sexual behavior in animals. Join celebrated author Eliot Schrefer on an exploration of queer behavior in the animal world—from albatrosses to bonobos to clownfish to doodlebugs. In sharp and witty prose—aided by humorous comics from artist Jules Zuckerberg—Schrefer uses science, history, anthropology, and sociology to illustrate the diversity of sexual behavior in the animal world. Interviews with researchers in the field offer additional insights for readers and aspiring scientists. Queer behavior in animals is as diverse and complex—and as natural—as it is in our own species. It doesn’t set us apart from animals—it bonds us even closer to our animal selves. Eliot Schrefer is a New York Times-bestselling author, has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, received the Stonewall Honor for best LGBTQIA+ teen book, and received the Printz Honor for best young adult book from the ALA. His science writing has appeared in Discover, Sierra, USA Today, Nautilus, and The Washington Post Magazine. He has an M.A. in Animal Studies from NYU, is on the faculty of the Hamline MFA for writing for young people, and lives with his husband in New York City. Kyle Johannsen is Sessional Faculty Member in the Department of Philosophy at Trent University. His most recent authored book is Wild Animal Ethics: The Moral and Political Problem of Wild Animal Suffering (Routledge, 2021). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

6 Mars 1h 9min