Episodes

  • Jackie Wang, "Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood" (Semiotext(e), 2023)

    Jackie Wang, "Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood" (Semiotext(e), 2023)
    Oct 14 2024
    Jackie Wang is a poet, scholar, multimedia artist, and Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. She is the author of the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (2021), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; the critical essay collection Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018); and the chapbooks The Twitter Hive Mind Is Dreaming (2018) and Tiny Spelunker of the Oneiro-Womb (2016). Her research is on racial capitalism, surveillance technology, and the political economy of prisons and police. Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood (Semiotext(e), 2023) features the early writings of Jackie Wang, drawn from her early zines, indie-lit crit, and prolific early 2000s blog. Compiled as a field guide, travelogue, essay collection, and weather report, Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun traces Jackie Wang’s trajectory from hard femme to Harvard, from dumpster dives and highway bike rides to dropping out of an MFA program, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and writing her trenchant book Carceral Capitalism. Alien Daughters charts the dream-seeking misadventures of an “odd girl” from Florida who emerged from punk houses and early Tumblr to become the powerful writer she is today. Anarchic and beautifully personal, Alien Daughters is a strange intellectual autobiography that demonstrates Wang's singular self-education: an early life lived where every day and every written word began like the Tarot’s Fool, with a leap of faith. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 18 mins
  • Helena Taylor, "Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Helena Taylor, "Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Oct 13 2024
    Women Writing Antiquity: Gender and Learning in Early Modern France (Oxford UP, 2024) recounts women authors' struggle to define the female intellectual through their engagement with the classical world in early modern France. Bringing together the fields of classical reception and women writers, Helena Taylor looks at various female novelists, translators, poets, playwrights, and essayists to see how they both reacted to and in turn shaped cultural discourses, especially around learned women and the Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns. From Marie de Gournay's polemic translations to the conteuses fairy tales, Greco-Roman culture provided inspiration, authorization, and means of self-fashioning for a wide range of women writers. Women Writing Antiquity is perfect for readers interested in classical reception, women's writers, authorial strategies, gender history, and French literature. Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Gretchen Sisson, "Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)

    Gretchen Sisson, "Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood" (St. Martin's Press, 2024)
    Oct 12 2024
    Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the otherwise partisan abortion debate. Little attention, however, has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish their infants for private adoption. Through the lens of reproductive justice, Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for women who face immense barriers to access abortion, or to parent their children safely. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, adoption increasingly functions as an institution that perpetuates reproductive injustice by separating families and policing parenthood under the guise of feel-good family building for middle-upper-class white people. Based on hundreds of in-depth interviews, Relinquished centers and amplifies the voices of relinquishing mothers, and fills an important gap in the national conversation about reproductive politics and justice. Shui-yin Sharon Yam is Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies, and Affiliate Faculty of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is the co-author of Doing Gender Justice: Queering Reproduction, Kin, and Care. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 9 mins
  • Virginia Nicholson, "All the Rage: Power, Pain, Pleasure: Stories from the Frontline of Beauty 1860-1960" (Pegasus Books, 2024)

    Virginia Nicholson, "All the Rage: Power, Pain, Pleasure: Stories from the Frontline of Beauty 1860-1960" (Pegasus Books, 2024)
    Oct 11 2024
    In All the Rage: Power, Pain, Pleasure: Stories from the Frontline of Beauty 1860-1960 (Pegasus Book, 2024) richly detailed account, Virginia Nicholson provides a richly detailed account to take us to the Frontline of Beauty to reveal the power, the pain and the pleasure involved in adorning the female body. At the heart of this history is the female body. The century-span between the crinoline and the bikini witnessed more mutations in the ideal western woman's body shape than at any other period. Who determines which shape is currently 'all the rage'? Looking at how custom, colour, class and sex fit into the picture, this book also charts how the advances made by feminism collided with the changing shape of desirability. Here are the 'New Women' who discovered freedom by bobbing their hair; the boyish, athletic 'Health and Beauty' ladies in black knickers; and starlets in bohemian beachwear. Among the first to experience true women's liberation were the early adopters of trousers. Encompassing two world wars and a revolution in women's rights, All the Rage tells the story of western female beauty from 1860 to 1960, chronicling its codes, its contradictions, its lies, its highs - and its underlying power struggle. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 10 mins
  • Aviva Dove-Viebahn, "There She Goes Again: Gender, Power, and Knowledge in Contemporary Film and Television Franchises" (Rutgers UP, 2023)

    Aviva Dove-Viebahn, "There She Goes Again: Gender, Power, and Knowledge in Contemporary Film and Television Franchises" (Rutgers UP, 2023)
    Oct 10 2024
    There She Goes Again: Gender, Power, and Knowledge in Contemporary Film and Television Franchises (Rutgers UP, 2023) interrogates the representation of ostensibly powerful women in transmedia franchises, examining how presumed feminine traits—love, empathy, altruism, diplomacy—are alternately lauded and repudiated as possibilities for effecting long-lasting social change. By questioning how these franchises reimagine their protagonists over time, the book reflects on the role that gendered exceptionalism plays in social and political action, as well as what forms of knowledge and power are presumed distinctly feminine. The franchises explored in this book illustrate the ambivalent (post)feminist representation of women protagonists as uniquely gifted in ways both gendered and seemingly ungendered, and yet inherently bound to expressions of their femininity. At heart, There She Goes Again asks under what terms and in what contexts women protagonists are imagined, envisioned, embodied, and replicated in media. Especially now, in a period of gradually increasing representation, women protagonists demonstrate the importance of considering how we should define—and whether we need—feminine forms of knowledge and power. Peter C. Kunze is an assistant professor of communication at Tulane University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • Christopher Paul Clohessy, "Half of My Heart: The Narratives of Zaynab, Daughter of Alî" (Gorgias Press, 2020)

    Christopher Paul Clohessy, "Half of My Heart: The Narratives of Zaynab, Daughter of Alî" (Gorgias Press, 2020)
    Oct 6 2024
    Today I talked to Christopher Paul Clohessy about Half of My Heart: The Narratives of Zaynab, Daughter of Alî (Gorgias Press, 2020). As Abû ʿAbd Allâh al-Ḥusayn, son of ʿAlî and Fâṭima and grandson of Muḥammad, moved inexorably towards death on the field of Karbalâʾ, his sister Zaynab was drawn ever closer to the centre of the family of Muḥammad, the 'people of the house' (ahl al-bayt). There she would remain for a few historic days, challenging the wickedness of the Islamic leadership, defending the actions of her brother, initiating the commemorative rituals, protecting and nurturing the new Imâm, al-Ḥusayn's son ʿAlî b. al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlî b. Abî Ṭâlib, until he could take his rightful place. This is her story. Adam Bobeck received his PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from the University of Leipzig. His PhD was entitled “Object-Oriented ʿAzâdâri: Ontology and Ritual Theory”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    41 mins
  • Iris Jamahl Dunkle, "Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb" (U California Press, 2024)

    Iris Jamahl Dunkle, "Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb" (U California Press, 2024)
    Oct 6 2024
    In 1939, when John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was published, it became an instant bestseller and a prevailing narrative in the nation's collective imagination of the era. But it also stopped the publication of another important novel, silencing a gifted writer who was more intimately connected to the true experiences of Dust Bowl migrants. In Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of California Press, 2024), renowned biographer Dr. Iris Jamahl Dunkle revives the groundbreaking voice of Sanora Babb. Dunkle follows Babb from her impoverished childhood in eastern Colorado to California. There, she befriended the era's literati, including Ray Bradbury and Ralph Ellison; entered into an illegal marriage; and was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was Babb's field notes and oral histories of migrant farmworkers that Steinbeck relied on to write his novel. But this is not merely a saga of literary usurping; on her own merits, Babb's impact was profound. Her life and work feature heavily in Ken Burns's award-winning documentary The Dust Bowl and inspired Kristin Hannah in her bestseller The Four Winds. Riding Like the Wind reminds us with fresh awareness that the stories we know—and who tells them—can change the way we remember history. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    52 mins
  • Deepa Das Acevedo, "The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India" (Oxford UP, 2024)

    Deepa Das Acevedo, "The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India" (Oxford UP, 2024)
    Oct 3 2024
    The Battle for Sabarimala: Religion, Law, and Gender in Contemporary India (Oxford UP, 2024) tells the story of one of contemporary India’s most contentious disputes: a long-running struggle over women’s access to the Hindu temple at Sabarimala. In 2018, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the temple, which had traditionally been forbidden to women aged ten to fifty because their presence offended the presiding deity, was required to open its doors to all Hindus. The decision in Indian Younger Lawyers Association rocked the nation: protests were launched around India and throughout the diaspora, a record-setting human chain called the ‘Women’s Wall’ was coordinated, and dozens of petitions were filed asking the Supreme Court to review, and potentially reverse, its landmark opinion. Perhaps most significantly, IYLA led the Court to openly reconsider the Essential Practices Doctrine that has been a mainstay of Indian religious freedom jurisprudence since 1954. In this first monograph-length study of the dispute, legal anthropologist Deepa Das Acevedo draws on ethnographic fieldwork, legal analysis, and media archives to tell a multifaceted narrative about the ‘ban on women’. Reaching as far back as the eighteenth century, when the relationship between temple deities and the government was transformed by an ambitious precolonial ruler, and coming up to the litigation delays caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Das Acevedo reveals the complexities of the dispute and the constitutional framework that defines it. That framework, Das Acevedo argues, reflects two distinct conceptions of religion-state relations, both of which have emerged at various stages in the—still unresolved—battle for Sabarimala. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    34 mins