How is comedy hostile to women? In Stand-up Comedy and Contemporary Feminisms: Sexism, Stereotypes and Structural Inequalities (Bloomsbury, 2023), Ellie Tomsett, a Senior Lecturer in media and film at Birmingham City University, explores the reality of a comedy industry that, despite many changes, still has a sexism problem. The book draws on a huge range of research materials, illustrating the experience of stand-up comic performers, the views of audiences, the impact of digital and social media, and the content of stand-up’s routines. Offering both a rich history of stand-up in the UK, alongside a wealth of contemporary reflections, the book will be essential reading across arts, humanities and media studies, as well as for anyone interested in how comedy can be open to anyone who wants to make people laugh.
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Ellie Tomsett, "Stand-up Comedy and Contemporary Feminisms: Sexism, Stereotypes and Structural Inequalities" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Interviews with Scholars of Gender about their New Books
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Social Sciences

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In Haitian Vodou, spirits impact Black practitioners' everyday lives, tightly connecting the sacred and the secular. As Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha reveals in Vodou En Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States (UNC Press, 2023), that connection is manifest in the dynamic relationship between public religious ceremonies, material aesthetics, bodily adornment, and spirit possession. Nwokocha spent more than a decade observing Vodou ceremonies from Montreal and New York to Miami and Port-au-Prince. She engaged particularly with a Haitian practitioner and former fashion designer, Manbo Maude, who presided over Vodou temples in Mattapan, Massachusetts, and Jacmel, Haiti. With vivid description and nuanced analysis, Nwokocha shows how Manbo Maude's use of dress and her production of ritual garments are key to serving Black gods and illuminate a larger transnational economy of fashion and spiritual exchange.
Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha is assistant professor of religion at the University of Miami.
Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press).
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Eziaku Atuama Nwokocha, "Vodou en Vogue: Fashioning Black Divinities in Haiti and the United States" (UNC Press, 2023)

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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Rustam Alexander, "Gay Lives and ‘Aversion Therapy’ in Brezhnev’s Russia, 1964–1982" (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023)

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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Sreeparna Chattopadhyay, "The Gravity of Hope" (Crossed Arrows, 2023)

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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Javier Samper Vendrell, "The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic" (U Toronto Press, 2020)

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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Ellie Tomsett, "Stand-up Comedy and Contemporary Feminisms: Sexism, Stereotypes and Structural Inequalities" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

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