New Books in Gender New Books Network

Sreeparna Chattopadhyay's book The Gravity of Hope (Crossed Arrows, 2023) is a non-fictional account of women’s lives who sometimes endured, often resisted and ultimately coped with marital violence as best as they could in an informal settlement in northeastern Mumbai. It uses anthropological methods and two decades of research-driven insights to analyse the role of gender, marriage, structural violence, family, and informal and legal institutions in tackling wife abuse in India. In conclusion, there are many reasons why domestic violence in India continues unabated; the most important is the social norm that views marriage as the primary, and often the only, path to securing women’s financial futures.
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 Weimar Republic is well-known for its gay rights movement and recent scholarship has demonstrated some of its contradictory elements. In his recent book entitled The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic (University of Toronto Press, 2020), Javier Samper Vendrell writes the first study to focus on the League for Human Rights and its leader, Friedrich Radszuweit. It uses his position at the center of the Weimar-era gay rights movement to tease out the diverging political strategies and contradictory tactics that distinguished the movement. By examining news articles and opinion pieces, as well as literary texts and photographs in the League’s numerous pulp magazines for homosexuals, Vendrell reconstructs forgotten aspects of the history of same-sex desire and subjectivity. While recognizing the possibilities of liberal rights for sexual freedom during the Weimar Republic, the League’s "respectability politics" failed in part because Radszuweit’s own publications contributed to the idea that homosexual men were considered a threat to youth, doing little to change the views of the many people who believed in homosexual seduction – a homophobic trope that endured well into the twentieth century.
Michael E. O’Sullivan is Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. It was recently awarded the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for 2018.
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Rustam Alexander's Gay Lives and 'Aversion Therapy' in Brezhnev's Russia, 1964-1982 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) examines the autobiographies and diaries of Soviet homosexual men who underwent psychotherapy during the period from 1970 to 1980 under the guidance of Yan Goland, a psychiatrist-sexopathologist from Gorky. The examination of these unique and little-known documents contributes to our scant knowledge about the practices that many would call a Soviet proto-type of 'aversion therapy'. It also helps us understand the way homosexual people faced "queer dilemmas" of the self and how they sought to reconcile their queer desire with being Soviet.
Tatiana Klepikova is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism.
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Fiercely intelligent, fantastically transgressive, Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex (PM Press, 2023) is an intimate portrait of the lives of sex workers. A polyphonic story of triumph, survival, and solidarity, this collection showcases the vastly different experiences and interests of those who have traded sex, among them a brothel worker in Australia, First Nation survivors of the Canadian child welfare system, and an Afro Latina single parent raising a radicalized child. Packed with first-person essays, interviews, poetry, drawings, mixed media collage, and photographs Working It honors the complexity of lived experience. Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hardboiled, these dazzling pieces will go straight to the heart.
Matilda Bickers is an artist and writer originally from Boston’s South End. Her experience in sex work, which she entered at age eighteen, has enabled her to focus on art and activism and the vital intersection of the two. She has performed her written work at the Radar Reading Series in San Francisco, and with Sister Spit in Portland, OR. Witnessing the experiences of other people faced with only terrible options in a world uninterested in their success or even survival, Bickers has worked to create spaces to amplify and showcase their creative work, from Working It, a quarterly zine of sex worker art and writing, to the annual Portland Sex Worker Art Show. Bickers is currently writing and illustrating Aspiration Risk, a graphic novel about her ongoing attempt to leave the sex trades for a career in healthcare, and the painful parallels between the two industries.
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How are notions of justice and equality constructed in Islamic virtue ethics (akhlaq)? How are Islamic virtue ethics gendered, despite their venture into perennial concerns of how best to live a good and ethical life? These are the questions that Zahra Ayubi, an assistant professor of religion at Dartmouth college, examines in her new book Gendered Morality: Classical Islamic Ethics of the Self, Family, and Society (Columbia University Press, 2019). Using akhlaq literature by al-Ghazali, Davani and Tusi, Ayubi closely studies the ways in which these male Muslim scholars constructed ideas of the self (nafs), particularly in relation to the family and the society. Despite the ethicists’ differing sectarian and theological orientations in Islam, they still concluded that the status of a perfect ethical human was only achievable by a male elite. Meaning that the capacity to utilize rational faculty, which is central to self-refinement, was deemed not accessible to females, slaves, and non-elite males. In unpacking these gendered and hierarchical dynamics around ethics and comportment, Aybui masterfully applies feminist and gender analysis to deconstruct ethical texts. In light of her findings, she calls for a “philosophical turn” that must employ critical gender analysis when reading these texts not only in the context of Islamic philosophy, but broadly in the study of Islam. The book is a must read for scholars and students interested in Islamic philosophy and gender and Islamic studies.
M. Shobhana Xavier is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Queen’s University. Her research areas are on contemporary Sufism in North America and South Asia. She is the author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism(Bloombsury Press, 2018) and a co-author of Contemporary Sufism: Piety, Politics, and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2017). More details about her research and scholarship may be found on here and here. She may be reached at shobhana.xavier@queensu.ca.
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In many countries, property law grants equal rights to men and women. Why, then, do women still accumulate less wealth than men? Combining quantitative, ethnographic, and archival research, The Gender of Capital: How Families Perpetuate Wealth Inequality (Harvard UP, 2023) explains how and why, in every class of society, women are economically disadvantaged with respect to their husbands, fathers, and brothers. The reasons lie with the unfair economic arrangements that play out in divorce proceedings, estate planning, and other crucial situations where law and family life intersect.
Céline Bessière and Sibylle Gollac argue that, whatever the law intends, too many outcomes are imprinted with unthought sexism. In private decisions, old habits die hard: families continue to allocate resources disproportionately to benefit boys and men. Meanwhile, the legal profession remains in thrall to assumptions that reinforce gender inequality. Bessière and Gollac marshal a range of economic data documenting these biases. They also examine scores of family histories and interview family members, lawyers, and notaries to identify the accounting tricks that tip the scales in favor of men.
Women across the class spectrum—from poor single mothers to MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos—can face systematic economic disadvantages in divorce cases. The same is true in matters of inheritance and succession in family-owned businesses. Moreover, these disadvantages perpetuate broader social disparities beyond gender inequality. As Bessière and Gollac make clear, the appropriation of capital by men has helped to secure the rigid hierarchies of contemporary class society itself.
Céline Bessière is Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris-Dauphine.
Sibylle Gollac is a researcher in sociology at the National Centre for Scientific Research. 
Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.
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