New Books in Gender

A woman miscarries and is charged with murder. A new mother tests positive for a drug her hospital administers and loses custody of her newborn. Four women are convicted of horrific crimes against children they never touched, based on junk science and homophobia and spend nearly twenty years in prison before being exonerated. A queer teenager takes a photo of a child’s diaper rash at work and is sentenced to 126 years. These cases are not aberrations. They are symptoms of a system that punishes women and queer people not for what they have done, but for who they are. In the United States, nearly three-quarters of all wrongly convicted women were convicted of crimes that never occurred at all.

Valena Beety, co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project and award-winning legal scholar cited by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reveals how ordinary tragedies—a child’s sudden death, a husband who dies in his sleep—are transformed by prosecutors into murders that never happened. These “no crime” convictions disproportionately target women and queer people, whose identities are recast as evidence of guilt through bias, junk science, and entrenched stereotypes. Drawing on devastating real-life cases, Professor Beety exposes how prosecutorial overreach, flawed forensic science, and cultural panic converge—and how fetal personhood laws, the fall of Roe v. Wade, and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation have dramatically expanded the reach of criminal law. What emerges is a chilling portrait of a legal system that increasingly criminalizes pregnancy outcomes, motherhood, and queer identity itself.

Guest: A wrongful convictions litigator and former federal prosecutor, Valena Beety is the McKinney Professor of Law at Indiana University-Bloomington Maurer School of Law and a co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project. Her coursebook The Wrongful Convictions Reader is used in classrooms nationwide to teach about wrongful convictions.

Host: Dr. Christina Gessler is an academic writing coach and editor. She uses her Ph.D. in history to explore which stories we tell, and what happens to those we never tell. She is the creator, producer and show host of the Academic Life podcast.

Playlist for listeners:

Reproductive Justice

Stitching Freedom

You're Doing It Wrong

Witchcraft: A History In 13 Trials

The Turnaway Study

The Coroner's Silence

Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine

Secrets of the Killing State

Carceral Apartheid

Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!
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There is no alternative. The End of History. Climate Apocalypse. It
seems that our contemporary moment is defined by the idea that things
can only get worse or, in the most optimistic reading, perhaps stay as
they are. Ideas for things getting better, utopian ideas, seem in short
supply. It is this which Joe Davidson confronts in his book Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (MIT Press, 2026).
Davidson links this apparent decline in utopian thinking to a change in
‘time consciousness’, the ways in which our sense of the future seems
less open to possibility than it once was. Despite this he notes the
persistence of utopianism in a new form, the ‘postdystopian utopia’
which takes account of the assumption the future will be worse and uses
this as a spur to utopian thinking. He then explores how this manifests
itself in various utopian works in different traditions, from Black
utopianism considering the tragedy of the slave trade, feminism mining
the nostalgia of previous battles to consider how things could be
different and climate change utopianism confronting catastrophe.

In our discussion we explore the changing fortunes and forms of
utopianism over time, the value of ‘utopian studies’, why Silicon Valley
tech-bros might be as utopian (or dystopian) as they make out and think
about why it is important we all imagine the possibility of different
worlds. Joe also makes a number of reading recommendations for
postdystopian utopian novels.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (Anthem Press, 2026) along with other texts.
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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

There is no alternative. The End of History. Climate Apocalypse. It
seems that our contemporary moment is defined by the idea that things
can only get worse or, in the most optimistic reading, perhaps stay as
they are. Ideas for things getting better, utopian ideas, seem in short
supply. It is this which Joe Davidson confronts in his book Saving Utopia: Imagining Hopeful Futures in Dystopian Times (MIT Press, 2026).
Davidson links this apparent decline in utopian thinking to a change in
‘time consciousness’, the ways in which our sense of the future seems
less open to possibility than it once was. Despite this he notes the
persistence of utopianism in a new form, the ‘postdystopian utopia’
which takes account of the assumption the future will be worse and uses
this as a spur to utopian thinking. He then explores how this manifests
itself in various utopian works in different traditions, from Black
utopianism considering the tragedy of the slave trade, feminism mining
the nostalgia of previous battles to consider how things could be
different and climate change utopianism confronting catastrophe.

In our discussion we explore the changing fortunes and forms of
utopianism over time, the value of ‘utopian studies’, why Silicon Valley
tech-bros might be as utopian (or dystopian) as they make out and think
about why it is important we all imagine the possibility of different
worlds. Joe also makes a number of reading recommendations for
postdystopian utopian novels.

Your host, Matt Dawson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow and the author of G.D.H. Cole and British Sociology: A Study in Semi-Alienation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and co-editor of The Anthem Companion to Henri Lefebvre (Anthem Press, 2026) along with other texts.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies

Karl Whittington joins Jana Byars to talk about his new book, Queer Making: On Artists and Desire in Medieval Europe (Pennsylvania State University Press,
2025). What role does desire play in the making of art objects? Art
historians typically answer this question by referring to historical
evidence about an artist's sexual identity or to particular kinds of
imagery. But what about anonymous artists? Or works whose subject matter
is mainstream? We know little about the identities and personalities of
most premodern artists, but this should not hold us back from thinking
about their embodied experience. In this book, Karl Whittington contends
that we can "queer" the works of anonymous makers by thinking about
their embodied experiences creating art. Considering issues of touch,
pressure, and gesture across substances such as wood, stone, ivory, wax,
cloth, paint, and metal, Whittington argues for an erotics of artisanal
labor, in which the actions of hand, body, and breath interact in
intimate ways with materials. Whittington takes seriously the agency of
materials and technical processes, arguing that they necessarily placed
the bodies of artists and artisans into physical situations and
psychological states that can be read through the lens of desire.
Combining historical evidence with speculative description, this
evocative set of essays broadens our understanding of the motivations
and experiences of premodern artists. It will appeal to scholars and
students of art history, medieval studies, gender studies, queer
studies, and anthropology.
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In this episode of the New Books Network, we explore Ethnographic Reflections on Marriage in Dhofar, Oman (Anthem Press, 2026),
with anthropologist Dr Marielle Risse. Drawing on nearly two decades of
ethnographic fieldwork, Dr Risse offers a nuanced examination of
marriage practices among Sunni Muslim communities in southern Oman,
challenging many of the assumptions that often underpin Western
discussions of gender, family, and personal autonomy.

Rather than portraying marriage as either oppressive or emancipatory,
Dr Risse presents it as a complex social institution shaped by kinship
networks, religious values, and community expectations. Risse’s work
encourages readers to reconsider familiar ideas about family, marriage,
household, intimacy, autonomy, and social life.

Amisah Bakuri (PhD) is
an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her work explores the intersections of
religion, sexuality, gender, and migration, especially within African
diasporic communities in the Netherlands.

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Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies