Shakespeare's Adolescents: Age, Gender and the Body in Shakespearean Performance and Early Modern Culture (Manchester UP, 2024) by Dr. Victoria Sparey examines the varied representation of adolescent characters in Shakespeare's plays. Using early modern medical knowledge and an understanding of contemporary theatrical practices, the book unpacks complexities that surrounded the cultural and theatrical representations of 'signs' associated with an individual's physical maturation. Each chapter explores the implications of different 'signs' of puberty, in verbal cues, facial adornments, vocal traits and body sizes, to illuminate how Shakespeare presents vibrant adolescent selves and stories.
By analysing female and male puberty together in its discussion of adolescence, Shakespeare's adolescents provides fresh insight into the age-based symmetry of early modern adolescent identities. The book uses the adolescent's state of transformation to illuminate how the unfixed nature of adolescence was valued in early modern culture and through Shakespeare's celebrated characters and actors.
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.
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Victoria Sparey, "Shakespeare's Adolescents: Age, Gender and the Body in Shakespearean Performance and Early Modern Culture" (Manchester UP, 2024)

Interviews with Scholars of Gender about their New Books
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Social Sciences

Science & Medicine

Science

'A woman, a dog and a walnut tree, the more they are beaten, the better they’ll be.' So went the proverb quoted by a prominent MP in the Houses of Parliament in 1853. His words – intended ironically in a debate about a rise in attacks on women – summed up the prevailing attitude of the day, in which violence against women was waved away as a part and parcel of modern living – a chilling seam of misogyny that had polluted both parliament and the law. But were things about to change?
The Walnut Tree: Women, Violence and the Law – A Hidden History (Mudlark, 2024) is a vivid and essential work of historical non-fiction. In it, Kate Morgan explores the legal campaigns, test cases and individual injustices of the Victorian and Edwardian eras which fundamentally re-shaped the status of women under British law. These are seen through the untold stories of women whose cases became cornerstones of our modern legal system and shine a light on the historical inequalities of the law.
We hear of the uniquely abusive marriage which culminated in the dramatic story of the ‘Clitheroe wife abduction’; of the domestic tragedies which changed the law on domestic violence; the controversies surrounding the Contagious Diseases Act and the women who campaigned to abolish it; and the real courtroom stories behind notorious murder cases such as the ‘Camden Town Murder’.
Exploring the 19th- and early 20th Century legal history that influenced the modern-day stances on issues such as domestic abuse, sexual violence and divorce, The Walnut Tree lifts the lid on the shocking history of women under British law – and what it means for women today.

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.
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Kate Morgan, "The Walnut Tree: Women, Violence and the Law – A Hidden History" (Mudlark, 2024)

The low-wage service industry is one of the fastest-growing employment sectors in the US economy. Its workers disproportionately tend to be low-income and minority women. Service sector work entails rigid forms of temporal discipline manifested in work requirements for flexible, last-minute, and round-the-clock availability, as well as limited to no eligibility for sick and parental leaves, all of which impact workers’ ability to care for themselves and their dependents.
Pregnant at Work: Low-Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal Injustice (NYU Press, 2024) examines the experiences of pregnant service sector workers in New York City as they try to navigate the time conflicts between precarious low-wage service labor and safety net prenatal care. Through interviews and fieldwork in a prenatal clinic of a public hospital, Elise Andaya vividly describes workers’ struggles to maintain expected tempos of labor as their pregnancies progress as well as their efforts to schedule and attend prenatal care, where waiting is a constant factor—a reflection of the pervasive belief that poor people’s time is less valuable than that of other people.
Pregnant at Work is a compelling examination of the ways in which power and inequalities of race, class, gender, and immigration status are produced and reproduced in the US, including in individual pregnant bodies. The stories of the pregnant workers featured in this book underscore the urgency of movements towards temporal justice and a new politics of care in the twenty-first century.
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Elise Andaya, "Pregnant at Work: Low-Wage Workers, Power, and Temporal Injustice" (NYU Press, 2024)

What isn't counted doesn't count. And mainstream institutions systematically fail to account for feminicide, the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women. Against this failure, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action (MIT Press, 2024) brings to the fore the work of data activists across the Americas who are documenting such murders—and challenging the reigning logic of data science by centering care, memory, and justice in their work. 
Drawing on Data Against Feminicide, a large-scale collaborative research project, Catherine D'Ignazio describes the creative, intellectual, and emotional labor of feminicide data activists who are at the forefront of a data ethics that rigorously and consistently takes power and people into account. This book is also a forceful intervention that challenges hegemonic data science by exploring the possibilities and limitations of counting and quantification and drawing lessons for a restorative and transformative data science.
This book is available open access here. 
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Catherine D'Ignazio, "Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action" (MIT Press, 2024)

In Dangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946 (Cornell University Press, 2023), Dr. Tessa Winkelmann examines interracial social and sexual contact between Americans and Filipinos in the early twentieth century via a wide range of relationships—from the casual and economic to the formal and long term. Dr. Winkelmann argues that such intercourse was foundational not only to the colonisation of the Philippines but also to the longer, uneven history between the two nations. Although some relationships between Filipinos and Americans served as demonstrations of US "benevolence," too-close sexual relations also threatened social hierarchies and the so-called civilizing mission. For the Filipino, Indigenous, Moro, Chinese, and other local populations, intercourse offered opportunities to negotiate and challenge empire, though these opportunities often came at a high cost for those most vulnerable.
Drawing on a multilingual array of primary sources, Dangerous Intercourse highlights that sexual relationships enabled US authorities to police white and nonwhite bodies alike, define racial and national boundaries, and solidify colonial rule throughout the archipelago. The dangerous ideas about sexuality and Filipina women created and shaped by US imperialists of the early twentieth century remain at the core of contemporary American notions of the island nation and indeed, of Asian and Asian American women more generally.

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.
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Tessa Winkelmann, "Dangerous Intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898–1946" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023) provides a critical and nuanced analysis of the relationship between popular culture and politics in Russia during Vladimir Putin’s first two decades in power. It traces how the performance of Russian citizenship has been remolded according to a neoconservative agenda characterized by increasingly exaggerated gender roles. By connecting gendered and sexualized citizenship to developments in Russian popular culture, Julie Cassiday argues that heteronormativity and homophobia became a kind of politicized style under Putin’s leadership. Examining everything from memes to the Eurovision Song Contest and self-help literature, Cassiday untangles the discourse of gender to argue that drag, or travesti, became the performative trope par excellence in Putin's Russia. Provocatively, Cassiday further argues that the exaggerated expressions of gender demanded by Putin's regime are best understood as a form of cisgender drag. The book also demonstrates that while the multiple modes of gender performativity generated in Russian popular culture between 2000 and 2010 supported Putin's neoconservative agenda, they also helped citizens resist and protest the state's mandate of heteronormativity.
Russian Style: Performing Gender, Power, and Putinism has been shortlisted for the 2024 Pushkin House Book Prize.
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Victoria Sparey, "Shakespeare's Adolescents: Age, Gender and the Body in Shakespearean Performance and Early Modern Culture" (Manchester UP, 2024)

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