New Books in Gender

Campus Whisper Networks: Knowing with Sexual Assault Survivors (Rutgers University Press, 2026) examines how personal knowledge about
student sexual assault circulates within college campus communities.
Based upon both qualitative and quantitative survey data, Dr. Janet
Hinson Shope and Dr. Richard Pringle's research demonstrates that
students who have been sexually assaulted tell someone—almost always a
friend. Most college students know someone who has been assaulted.
Simply knowing, by means of relationships, that one or more peers have been assaulted affects the knowers, and the effects reverberate unevenly across campuses. 

Dr. Shope and Dr. Pringle highlight the structural properties that prohibit
relational knowledge from becoming official institutional knowledge,
confining it to whispers and secrecy within informal spheres of
knowledge. The rules governing the circulation of such knowledge create
an uneven epistemic field of sexual assault. This uneven field is
consequential for the communities, affecting survivors and their
confidants and shaping student views of the college community. Campus Whisper Networks demonstrates how personal and institutional avoidance, both the “need to not know” and “no need to know,” creates knowledge gaps that hide the community’s wounds and prevent personal knowledge from becoming social knowledge. 

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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What was life like for young people in twentieth century Britain? In We Have Come to Be Destroyed: Growing Up in Cold War Britain (Yale University Press, 2026), Dr Laura Tisdall, a Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at Newcastle University tells the story of this era through the eyes of children and young
people, offering a radical reinterpretation of Britain’s Cold War age.
The book offers a wide range of perspectives, from young people’s hopes
and anxieties for the future, through popular culture during the Cold
War, to changes in schools and the education system. The analysis also
draws on detailed engagements with feminist and gay rights campaigns,
and highlights the experiences of young people of colour, blending
microhistories of individual experience with a broader narrative that
transforms our existing knowledge of the Cold War. The book will be
essential reading across the arts and humanities, as well as for social
science scholars and anyone interested in knowing more about recent
British history.
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A serene beach. The classroom of an elite private school. The still nights in an upscale residential neighborhood. An acclaimed poet with a quiet, dignified mode of address. The sonic etiquette and experience of quiet is integral to each of these scenes. The Quiet Zone: Caribbean Expressive Cultures and the Feminist Aesthetics of Disturbance (Rutgers UP, 2026) examines what the emergence of quiet as an elite aesthetic, privilege, and entitlement means for minoritized people who are often narrated as loud, disruptive, and disturbing, sonically, visually, and otherwise. Taking the Caribbean and its diasporas as its key sites of study, the book explores what we can learn from efforts to transform the region into the quintessential site of quiet leisure, in part, through the enactment of regimes of sonic discipline and surveillance directed against its majority Black population. Analyzing the work of Afro-Caribbean artists that catalog and critique sonic surveillance, the book questions the ways that quiet gets produced both as a regulatory ideal of racial, gender, sexual, national, and civilizational belonging and as a universal object of desire.
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This episode features a conversation with Thenmozhi Soundararajan, founder Equality Labs and author of The Trauma of Caste. We discussed her own coming to consciousness of caste as the child of Dalit parents who were “passing” and how her work as an organizer has involved sustained engagement with anticaste thought, Black feminism, and Indigenous epistemologies. The conversation then turned to the practice of solidarity as the building of meaningful and not just transactional relationships and the importance of recognizing the potential of political alignments that may be foreclosed at one moment, only to be given new life in another. Finally, we addressed the need, in our current moment of dying empires and failing democracies, to both work with and beyond the law in order to open new horizons of political imagination and practice.

Guest bio

Thenmozhi Soundararajan is founder of the Dalit feminist organization, Equality Labs, and author of The Trauma of Caste.

References

Thenmozhi Soundararajan, The Trauma of Caste

Shramanic faiths: ancient Indian traditions focusing on asceticism, self-reliance, and liberation from the cycle of rebirth that rejected the authority of the Vedas and Brahmanical authority.

Ravidassia: religion based on the teachings of Guru Ravidas, a 14th century Indian saint. It was considered a sect within Sikhism until 2009 when it was proclaimed a distinct religion.

Bhopal gas tragedy: On 3 December 1984, a leak at the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, resulted in what is considered the world’s worst industrial disaster.

Reservation: India’s system of caste-based affirmative action.

Linda Burnham: activist and writer who co-founded the Women of Color Resource Center and was a leader in the Third World Women’s Alliance.

Combahee River Collective: pioneering Black lesbian feminist organization formed in Boston in 1974.

Gloria Anzaldúa: American philosopher and scholar of Chicana feminism, cultural theory, and queer theory

Iyothee Thass: Tamil anti-caste thinker and writer who converted to Buddhism and called upon members of his own Paraiyar caste to do the same.

Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule: anti-caste social reformers and pioneers of women’s education from Maharashtra.

Ruth King: Founder of the Mindful of Race Institute

Rhonda Magee: Professor Emerita at University of San Francisco and teacher of mindfulness

Resmaa Menakem: psychotherapist and creator of Somatic Abolitionism.

Eduardo Duran: Native American clinical psychologist, scholar, teacher and healer

Collective Future Fund: a philanthropic intermediary fund that works with movements mobilizing toward a collective future free from violence.

Kolar Gold Fields: former gold mining region in Karnataka, India

Equality Labs: a South Asian Dalit civil rights organization.

BAPS: The Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Akshardham in Robbinsville, New Jersey is the largest modern Hindu temple outside India. It is the subject of a lawsuit filed by Dalit workers from India accusing the temple of human trafficking and labor exploitation.
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Looking beyond the marble elegance of Michelangelo's David, the pugnacious, passionate, and--crucially--important story of Renaissance manhood. 
Timothy McCall's book Making the Renaissance Man: Masculinity in the Courts of Renaissance Italy (Reaktion, 2023) explores the images, objects, and experiences that fashioned men and masculinity in the courts of fifteenth-century Italy. Across the peninsula, Italian princes fought each other in fierce battles and spectacular jousts, seduced mistresses, flaunted splendor in lavish rituals of knighting, and demonstrated prowess through the hunt--all ostentatious performances of masculinity and the drive to rule. Hardly frivolous pastimes, these activities were essential displays of privilege and virility; indeed, violence underlay the cultural veneer of the Italian Renaissance. Timothy McCall investigates representations and ideals of manhood in this time and provides a historically grounded and gorgeously illustrated account of how male identity and sexuality proclaimed power during a century crucial to the formation of Early Modern Europe.
Jana Byars is an independent scholar located in Amsterdam.
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