New Books in Gender

Fitness for Freedom: Disability, Degeneration, and Modern Irish Writing (Syracuse UP, 2025) explores the legacy of intersectional stereotypes of disability, race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion that justified imperial rule in Ireland and the forms of oppression that continued after independence. Marion Quirici identifies models of citizenship and creative autonomy in Irish modernist literature that valorize vulnerability over ability and interdependence over independence. She uncovers a history in which an entire nation, Ireland, was characterized as disabled and therefore “not fit for freedom.” Beyond symbolism, the Famine and decades of emigration led to a perception that Ireland’s racial stocks were depleted, and that those who remained were feeble and few. The fraught relationship between disability and Irishness provides context for Quirici’s analysis of modernist Irish literature. Revivalists such as William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, Pádraic Pearse, and the Gaelic Athletic Association created new mythologies of Irish ability to counter imperial stereotypes, tacitly reinforcing the idea of disability as a disqualification for sovereignty. Certain Irish modernists, however—James Joyce, Edna O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, Brian O’Nolan, and Christy Brown—called the “fitness for freedom” ideology into question. These authors allow us to disentangle disability from unfitness and scrutinize its relationship to liberation. In their work, disability becomes an avenue for exploring the human experience and discovering the inherent creativity and collaborative potential of an interdependent life.

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This episode’s centers on Sophie Lewis’s new book Femmephilia. A collection of essays published in various outlets over the last several years, this book will take readers through a number of disparate topics, from the recent Disney remake of The Little Mermaid to experiments with psychedelics to the bizarre meanings one might find at its end. Uniting it all though is an unapologetically anticapitalist and utopian feminism, one that sees in various examples and experiences of femme glimpses both of the contradictions of our present moment and brief glimmers of what an emancipated world might look like.
Sophie Lewis is a freelance writer, with work appearing in a number of outlets including London Review of Books, The Drift and e-flux. Her previous books are Enemy Feminisms, Abolish the Family and Full Surrogacy Now.

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Across Pakistan's rooftops, pigeon flyers devote enormous care and labor to birds that soar the skies, take part in competitions, and knit together communities otherwise divided by caste, class, language, and ethnicity. Spies and Other Pigeons: Hospitality and Hostility in Multispecies Pakistan (U Washington, 2026) follows these flyers across four provinces, revealing a world of shauq (passionate pursuits) where training, feeding, and flying become affective acts to welcome a more-than-human other into the home.

When cherished birds cross the militarized India-Pakistan border, they are recast as intruders and “spies," exposing the thin line between welcome and suspicion, hospitality and hostility. Through long-term ethnography, Dr. Muhammed Kavesh traces the layered meanings of arrival, both at the home and the homeland, showing how pigeons illuminate political tensions while sustaining bonds of play, care, and enthusiasm. Interweaving anthropology, South Asian studies, and multispecies studies with the Punjabi folktale of Heer Ranjha, Dr. Kavesh offers a conceptually rich account of human-pigeon relatedness. Moving from village lofts and urban rooftops to racing clubs and borderlands, the book demonstrates how animals mediate danger, belonging, and reciprocity across contested lines.

Original and exciting, Spies and Other Pigeons reframes multispecies anthropology through a South Asian lens, revealing how the care and labor of pigeon keeping anchor local worlds and unsettle national borders.

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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This episode’s centers on Sophie Lewis’s new book Femmephilia. A collection of essays published in various outlets over the last several years, this book will take readers through a number of disparate topics, from the recent Disney remake of The Little Mermaid to experiments with psychedelics to the bizarre meanings one might find at its end. Uniting it all though is an unapologetically anticapitalist and utopian feminism, one that sees in various examples and experiences of femme glimpses both of the contradictions of our present moment and brief glimmers of what an emancipated world might look like.
Sophie Lewis is a freelance writer, with work appearing in a number of outlets including London Review of Books, The Drift and e-flux. Her previous books are Enemy Feminisms, Abolish the Family and Full Surrogacy Now.

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When the Taiwanese political drama Wave Makers appeared in April 2023, few anticipated its impact beyond the screen. Within weeks, survivors in politics, the media, academia and the arts began sharing experiences of sexual harassment and assault, giving momentum to Taiwan’s long-delayed #MeToo movement.
XinLing Li’s new book, Wave Makers and the Rise of #MeToo in Taiwan: Media, Empathy, and Digital Testimony (Anthem Press, 2026), asks how a fictional series became a cultural catalyst. Li argues that the drama gave form to experiences that had remained unspoken, while social media allowed personal testimony to circulate without institutional permission.
The book is part of the new short-book series, ‘Anthem Impact in Asian Media, Cinema and Communications’.
In this podcast, Dr Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley talks with Dr Li about television, empathy, digital testimony, and the opportunities and inequalities within Taiwan's #MeToo movement. Themes include:
Why Taiwan’s #MeToo movement came late - the gap between progressive laws and the cultural conditions that still discourage survivors from speaking.
The ‘perfect victim’ - how Wave Makers challenges the assumption that only women who conform to conventional ideas of femininity deserve belief and justice.
The feminist snap - why the line ‘Let’s not just let it go this time’ gave viewers a language for recognising accumulated injustice.
Empathy and narrative identity - how fictional characters help audiences interpret their own experiences and respond to others.
Digital testimony and affective publics - how social media weakens traditional gatekeeping while introducing new risks and struggles for attention.
Women’s solidarity - how the drama examines agency, family relationships and the historical expectation that women define themselves through men.
The limits of visibility - why migrant domestic workers remain especially vulnerable and often unable to speak without risking their livelihoods or immigration status.
One of the book’s most compelling arguments is that art can give structure to what Raymond Williams called ‘emergent feelings’: experiences without an accepted public language. Through recognisable characters and an accessible story, Wave Makers transformed a familiar instruction to remain silent – ‘just let it go’ – into a shared refusal.
The podcast also considers how the hashtag changes testimony. Survivors can now address audiences directly, rather than relying entirely on journalists and other institutional gatekeepers. Yet visibility remains uneven. Stories involving celebrities and senior politicians attract attention more readily than those of migrant domestic workers, who may face dismissal, loss of visa status or deportation if they speak publicly.
Li is cautious about treating Wave Makers as a formula for political change. No television programme can produce a movement on demand. Popular culture can nevertheless offer language and recognition when audiences are ready to respond.
The story of Wave Makers is ultimately about the unpredictable movement between fiction and public life: a drama helped people recognise experiences they had been encouraged to dismiss, while digital platforms allowed the words ‘me too’ to become testimony, solidarity and action.
Dr Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley is a Research Associate at the Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS University of London, and a host for the New Books Network. She is also a co-editor (with Professor Gary Rawnsley) of the short-book series, ‘Anthem Impact in Asian Media, Cinema and Communications’.
Dr Xinling Li is an independent scholar based in New York. He studied at Cambridge University.

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