New Books in Gender

Chapal Rani was one of India’s most famous performers of jatra, Bengal’s popular theater. Traditionally, all the roles, including female roles, were played by men—and Chapal Rani was perhaps the most prominent performer of women on the stage.

He’s also the subject of a new book from Sandip Roy, titled Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal. Roy, who joins us the show today, tells the story of Chapal Rani’s life, from stardom to obscurity and later rediscovery; how Chapal Rani would transform himself every night onstage; and how jatra changes how we talk about gender and performance.

Sandip Roy is a writer, columnist, and podcaster currently living in Kolkata. He is a columnist for Mint Lounge, The Hindu, and the host of the Sandip Roy Show on Indian Express. His work has appeared in The New York Times, BBC, The San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Huffington Post, Conde Nast Traveller, among other publications. For over a decade, Roy was editor of Trikone, the world’s oldest magazine on LGBTQ+ South Asian issues. He is the author of the novel Don’t Let Him Know.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Chapal Rani, the Last Queen of Bengal. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.
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The centerpiece of Melodrama as Provocateur (Duke UP, 2026) is an essay by Linda Williams (1946–2025). Williams was Professor of Film Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her highly influential work reframed some of cinema’s most neglected or denigrated genres from a feminist perspective, including documentary, pornography, horror, and melodrama.

Melodrama is the focus of what would become Williams’s final project. In the last few years of her life, she was working on a project that traced melodrama’s divergent fortunes in France and the US—and argued for its enduring relevance in contemporary life and culture.

Williams's work on this project was curtailed when she suffered a stroke, the complications of which led to her death in 2025. In the wake of her passing, some of her friends, collaborators, and admirers joined together to make a book that honors and memorializes her. Not only sharing Williams’s unfinished work with the world, Melodrama as Provocateur also expands on that work through a series of essays by scholars working in melodrama studies across time, place, and media.

For New Books in Film, Alix Beeston sits down with the three editors of Melodrama as Provocateur: Christine Gledhill, an esteemed scholar of film and feminism who is presently a Visiting Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Leeds; Laura Horak, Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University; and Elisabeth R. Anker, Professor of American Studies and Political Science and Director of Film Studies at the George Washington University.

Celebrating the model of incisive and generous research, teaching, mentorship, and collaboration Williams provided, the editors of Melodrama as Provocateur discuss the unique shape of a scholarly book generated in response to a colleague’s unfinished labor. They also take up some of Williams's provocations, including the political possibilities of melodrama in contemporary culture—from Trumpian discourse to trans cinema and beyond—and explore the kinds of labor, thought, and feeling necessary for studying melodrama as a form that moves or provokes us.

Like their book, a work forged in grief and loss, Gledhill, Horak, and Anker's conversation casts film and media scholarship as an act of collectivity and love: a bid for a better kind of world.
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In this episode, host Andrea Talabér (CEU Press, 2026) talks with Yulia Gradskova and Ieva Bisigirskaitė, two of the three authors behind Good Mothers, Nations and Nationalisms: Cases from Lithuania, Russia and Sweden. Together with Soheyla Yazdanpanah, they explore what nationalists mean by "good mothers," demographic anxiety, and maternal activism in Lithuania, Russia and Sweden.

You can purchase a copy here.

The CEU Press Podcast delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and discuss their series or books.

Interested in CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more:

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Fifty years ago, tennis player Renée Richards made international headlines in her fight to compete in the women’s draw of the 1977 US Open—marking the first time a trans athlete sued to participate in professional sports in the gender category with which they identify. Renée eventually won her case. Though she lost in the first round of the singles tournament, she and her tennis partner made it to the finals in doubles, losing to Martina Navratilova and her partner.

Finding Renée Richards: The Groundbreaking Story of Tennis’s Trans Pioneer (HarperOne, 2026) chronicles Richards’s extraordinary life, moving from her tumultuous upbringing in Queens, New York, to her career as a successful eye surgeon; her years as a star tennis player to her role as a transgender pioneer. Now in her nineties, Renée remains a complex figure: A person who changed the sports world forever yet questions the place of trans athletes in that world today. GLAAD award-nominated sports journalist Julie Kliegman deftly probes these contradictions, drawing on intimate interviews and offering critical reflections on what is at stake for athletes, fans, and the queer community today, at a time when trans participation in sports is more hotly contested—and condemned—than ever before.

Paul Knepper covered the New York Knicks for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All. His next book, Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, is now available. You can reach Paul at paulknepper@gmail.com and follow him on Twitter @paulieknep.
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Queer theory and reproductive justice need each other—now more than ever. As liberals and leftists increasingly frame reproductive justice in terms of LGBTQ+ rights, often adopting the language of “queerness,” it has become difficult to see that their political demands and strategies are often quite conservative. In Reproductive Justice, Queerly (U California Press, 2026), Carly Thomsen examines typical reproductive justice issues—including abortion, surrogacy, crisis pregnancy centers, paid parental leave, and parenting—in queer ways. She shows what can happen when we bring queer theory and reproductive justice together: a queerer, more powerful articulation of what we are fighting for.

Your host Yining Pan is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis.
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