New Books in Gender

Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity—and the ultimate boundary transgression.

Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In this book, Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions.

Join YIVO for a discussion of Gollance's book with Josh Lambert, professor and director of the Jewish Studies Program at Wellesley College.

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This book talk originally took place on October 26, 2023.
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With The Art of Living in Avant-Garde Paris: Ethics and Self-Making in Dada, Simultanism, and Surrealism (University of Chicago Press, 2026),
Rachel Silveri takes a fresh look at the desire to unify art and life,
an ambition long regarded as foundational to the European historical
avant-gardes. She reveals how many early twentieth-century artists saw
their own everyday lives—their bodies, identities, and relationships—as a
type of creative material and a central component
to their avant-garde practice. These artists abandoned traditional
forms of artmaking and venues of art viewing, instead aspiring to
integrate art with everyday life, creating an “art of living.” 

Considering
Tristan Tzara’s performances of Dadaist identity, Sonia Delaunay’s
simultaneous fashions and self-branding, and the collective endeavor to
open and operate the Surrealist Research Bureau, Silveri offers a new
narrative about how the artists of interwar Paris developed experiential
life practices that resisted dominant forms of “lifestyle” and
normative discourses surrounding gender, ethnicity, and office work.
This book argues that ethical questions of “How should I live?” and “How
should I relate to others?” were as important to the avant-garde as
politics, and that aspirations to change the world played out in daily
practices of self-making.

Hannah Freed-Thall is Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYU. She is the author, most recently, of Modernism at the Beach: Queer Ecologies and the Coastal Commons.
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Despite being one of the leading thinkers of the second wave feminist movement, today Shere Hite is little known, little written about, and, unsurprisingly, little read. Her groundbreaking book, The Hite Report, was the first feminist exploration of the link between sex and male power. It sold millions of copies when first published in 1976 and revolutionised the way people thought about marriage and the female orgasm. How, then, did it, and Hite, disappear from public consciousness?

In The Book that Taught the World to Orgasm and then Disappeared: Shere Hite and The Hite Report (Melville House and New South, 2026), Australian historian Dr. Rosa Campbell combines original research and sharp cultural analysis to explore the complicated life and literary legacy of Shere Hite. Expanding on her ideas about sex – namely, that sex is sexist – the book explores Hite’s fraught childhood, struggles working in the porn industry, and eventual cancellation by the far-right Evangelical movement. All the while, Dr. Campbell holds Hite and The Hite Report to account for their own failings and absence of intersectionality.

In a post-#MeToo world, with the far-right on the march globally, Dr. Rosa Campbell’s examination of shifting ideological movements is essential to understanding the current feminist movement, as well as how conservative and reactionary efforts can silence even the most successful of women.

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.
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Conscripting Breadwinner Soldiers in the Late Ottoman Empire: Family, Law and War (Edinburgh UP, 2026) by Dr. Kate Dannies examines the gender and family dimensions of mobilisation for the First World War in the Ottoman Empire, situating the war in a long-nineteenth-century social history of Ottoman military reform for the first time. It focuses on the military legal concept of muinsizlik (sole breadwinning) and how this concept shaped Ottoman military policy – namely, how militarisation and mobilisation were supported by the exploitation of women’s care and social reproductive labour, as well as the extraction of material and physical resources from Ottoman families.

In exploring how war worked at the level of the body, the individual and the family, this book demonstrates how Ottoman society and war became imbricated through processes of militarisation that led to significant consequences during the First World War and its aftermath. Based on a gendered reading of Ottoman military and bureaucratic archives, it addresses a pivotal moment in the modern history of the Middle East that has long awaited further study from a bottom-up perspective.

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.
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Over the 19th century, the women of Istanbul gradually transformed their appearance, adopting European dress and new modes of self-fashioning, including photographs. Fashion in Late Ottoman Istanbul: Photography and Identity in a Global City (Bloomsbury, 2026) by Dr. Nancy Micklewright reconstructs a complex fashion history, and the dramatic changes that took place in women's lives in this period, and given the diverse population of Istanbul in terms of ethnicity, class, race and religion, attends to the differing clothing habits of the women of the city. The book focuses particularly on elite women as fashion tastemakers and on the dress of enslaved and working women.Appealing to scholars across a range of fields, including fashion history, Ottoman studies, women's and gender history, visual culture and photography history, Fashion in Late Ottoman Istanbul provides a fascinating insight into women's histories, writing and dress practices in a rapidly changing Istanbul.

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.
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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies