New Books in Gender New Books Network

What isn't counted doesn't count. And mainstream institutions systematically fail to account for feminicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women. Against this failure, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action (MIT Press, 2024) brings to the fore the work of data activists across the Americas who are documenting such murders—and challenging the reigning logic of data science by centering care, memory, and justice in their work. 
Drawing on Data Against Feminicide, a large-scale collaborative research project, Catherine D'Ignazio describes the creative, intellectual, and emotional labor of feminicide data activists who are at the forefront of a data ethics that rigorously and consistently takes power and people into account. This book is also a forceful intervention that challenges hegemonic data science by exploring the possibilities and limitations of counting and quantification and drawing lessons for a restorative and transformative data science.
This book is available open access here. 
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In Dangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946 (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. Tessa Winkelmann examines interracial social and sexual contact between Americans and Filipinos in the early twentieth century via a wide range of relationships—from the casual and economic to the formal and long term. Dr. Winkelmann argues that such intercourse was foundational not only to the colonisation of the Philippines but also to the longer, uneven history between the two nations. Although some relationships between Filipinos and Americans served as demonstrations of US "benevolence," too-close sexual relations also threatened social hierarchies and the so-called civilizing mission. For the Filipino, Indigenous, Moro, Chinese, and other local populations, intercourse offered opportunities to negotiate and challenge empire, though these opportunities often came at a high cost for those most vulnerable.
Drawing on a multilingual array of primary sources, Dangerous Intercourse highlights that sexual relationships enabled US authorities to police white and nonwhite bodies alike, define racial and national boundaries, and solidify colonial rule throughout the archipelago. The dangerous ideas about sexuality and Filipina women created and shaped by US imperialists of the early twentieth century remain at the core of contemporary American notions of the island nation and indeed, of Asian and Asian American women more generally.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new 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.
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Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023) provides a critical and nuanced analysis of the relationship between popular culture and politics in Russia during Vladimir Putin’s first two decades in power. It traces how the performance of Russian citizenship has been remolded according to a neoconservative agenda characterized by increasingly exaggerated gender roles. By connecting gendered and sexualized citizenship to developments in Russian popular culture, Julie Cassiday argues that heteronormativity and homophobia became a kind of politicized style under Putin’s leadership. Examining everything from memes to the Eurovision Song Contest and self-help literature, Cassiday untangles the discourse of gender to argue that drag, or travesti, became the performative trope par excellence in Putin's Russia. Provocatively, Cassiday further argues that the exaggerated expressions of gender demanded by Putin's regime are best understood as a form of cisgender drag. The book also demonstrates that while the multiple modes of gender performativity generated in Russian popular culture between 2000 and 2010 supported Putin's neoconservative agenda, they also helped citizens resist and protest the state's mandate of heteronormativity.
Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism has been shortlisted for the 2024 Pushkin House Book Prize.
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The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (Columbia University Press, 2023) explores how an incredible group of Black women writers, including Alice Walker, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, and writers and intellectuals convened an informal group called “The Sisterhood” and how they transformed American writing and cultural and educational institutions in the decades that followed. Thorsson traces the personal, professional, and political connections that led to the group’s emergence and explores the remarkable legacy. While focusing on the organizing, networking, and community building that nurtured Black women’s writing, The Sisterhood provides an impactful model of Black feminist collaboration.
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The Limits of Sexuality Education: Love, Sex, and Adolescent Masculinities in Urban India (Routledge, 2024) explores different strands of thinking about sexuality education in contemporary urban India. It interrogates the limits of sexuality education as we know it today by rethinking adolescent masculinities in middle-class urban India.
This book contributes to the wide gap in theorising sexuality education and adolescent masculinities in urban India. It presents an adolescent perspective on sexuality education, looks at adolescent love from the school teachers’ perspective, and tries to understand a teacher’s negotiations with student romance. It unravels the sexual and romantic lives of adolescents and examines the circulation of sexual knowledge and sources of information on sex that adolescent boys in India have access to. This book uncovers the limits of sexuality education by examining State, feminist, Christian, and sexological materials on sexuality education in Mumbai and Delhi. Based on detailed research and narratives from teachers, young men, and women, the book explores adolescent male romance and its affective registers, adolescent male sexual knowledge, and the regulation of romance in school spaces.
This book will be of interest to students and researchers of education, sexuality and gender studies, masculinity studies, and sex education as well as those interested in education policy, education politics, educational research, and inclusion and special education. Located at the intersection of sexuality studies, education, masculinity studies, and cultural studies, it will also appeal to those working in sexuality education in urban India within the complex web of the middle classes, consumerism, post-feminism, romance, adolescent masculinities, and cinema.
Rituparna Patgiri has a PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Her research interests lie in the areas of food, media, gender and public. She is also one of the co-founders of Doing Sociology. Patgiri can be reached at @Rituparna37 on Twitter.
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The Chosen We: Black Women's Empowerment in Higher Education (SUNY Press, 2023) elevates the oral histories of 105 accomplished, college-educated Black women who earned success despite experiencing reprehensible racist and sexist barriers. The central argument is that these women succeeded in and beyond college by developing a Chosen We—a community with one another. The book builds on their words and insights to offer a powerful rethinking of educational success that moves away from individualistic and competitive models and instead imagines success as a result of recognizing what people owe to one another. It also uncovers the importance of the type of institutions that students attend for higher education, comparing Black women's experiences not only by region and era but also by whether they attended a predominantly White institution (PWI) or a historically Black college or university (HBCU). The Chosen We features theoretical and methodological exemplars for how to conduct research across lines of difference. The Black women's oral histories shared here manifest the wisdom from which many groups in the United States might benefit—that liberation is only found through community.
Rachelle Winkle-Wagner is Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the coauthor (with Angela M. Locks) of Diversity and Inclusion on Campus: Supporting Students of Color in College, and the author of The Unchosen We: Black Women and Identity in Higher Education, among other books.
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