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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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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How Girls Achieve points out a simple and overlooked truth: most schools never had girls in mind to begin with. That is why the world needs what Dr. Sally Nuamah calls “feminist schools,” deliberately designed to provide girls with achievement-oriented identities. And she shows how these schools would help all students, regardless of their gender.

Educated women raise healthier families, build stronger communities, and generate economic opportunities for themselves and their children. Yet millions of disadvantaged girls never make it to school—and too many others drop out or fail. Upending decades of advice and billions of dollars in aid, Dr, Nuamah argues that this happens because so many challenges girls confront—from sexual abuse to unequal access to materials and opportunities—go unaddressed. But it isn’t enough just to go to school. What you learn there has to prepare you for the world where you’ll put that knowledge to work.

Dr. Nuamah reveals that developing resilience is not a gender-neutral undertaking. Preaching grit doesn’t help girls; it actively harms them. Drawing on her deep immersion in classrooms in the United States, Ghana, and South Africa, Nuamah calls for a new approach: creating feminist schools that will actively teach girls how and when to challenge society’s norms, and allow them to carve out their own paths to success.

Guest: Dr. Sally A. Nuamah is an associate professor of Urban Politics in Human Development, Social Policy and Political Science (by courtesy) at Northwestern University. She has received numerous awards; began the TWII Foundation to provide funding for girls striving to be first in their families to go to college; and was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and a Women and Public Policy fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Host is: Dr. Christina Gessler is the producer of the both Academic Life podcast and the show’s weekly newsletter. She is a writing coach and developmental editor for academics.

Listeners may be interested in:

• Teacher By Teacher
• Doing the Work of Equity Leadership for Justice and Systems Change
• Black Girls and How We Fail Them
• Leading from the Margins
• How We Show Up
• How Schools Make Race
• Black Woman On Board
• Remembering Lucille
• Can I Say That?
• Teaching About Race And Racism

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!

This episode was originally published Nov 6, 2020

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Susan E. Kirtley and Nhora Lucía Serrano's Women in Comics (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2026) is a richly illustrated, essential guide to the importance of women in the comics space from across time and around the globe.

Comics in the form of editorial cartoons, comic strips, digital comics, comic books, and graphic novels have combined words and images to tell stories of hundreds of years. Though often overlooked, women have played a vital role in shaping this genre, both as creators and characters within the stories themselves.

Through six archetypes frequently found in comics—the patriot, the working woman, the socialite, the fashionista, the reporter, and the spy—Kirtley and Serrano trace some of comics’ most influential women. This insightful exploration of international characters celebrates the feminist role model Wonder Woman, the warrior-maiden Oscar François de Jarjayes in the gender-defying manga tale Berusiyu no Bara (The Rose of Versailles), the real-life groundbreaking journalist Nellie Bly, and many others. Profiles throughout the book highlight the important work of female creators, heralding the bravery of political cartoonists such as Corinne “Coco” Rey and Rayma Suprani, the power of biography as reportage with Marjane Satrapi and Sophia Glock, and the value of visibility with Alison Bechdel and Mariko Tamaki.

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“If whores were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free” (ix). Notes from the Sex Worker Left: Lumpen Theory (Duke UP, 2026) opens with a quote from Clara expanding on the Combahee River Collective 1977 statement. Interweaving interviews and writing by sex workers like Clara, Notes from the Sex Worker Left by Heather Berg offers a political theory that critiques family/couple-form, work, and state, envisioning militant community care. Rejecting the pressure to fit into a category of hardworking, respectable workers dominant even in the Left, Heather Berg extends Marxist theorization of lumpenproletariat: the working-class “who were criminalized, itinerant, and otherwise making a living of ‘dubious means’ ” (13). Although lumpenproletariat is not a cohesive category, with sex workers offering different perspectives and experiences, Berg reads lumpenness as a “critical standpoint” (14) to reimagine the world where we are able to not only survive, but also thrive, collectively. Through theorizing, the book invites the readers to think with sex workers on the question of how we can thrive in this increasingly precarious world. This book is a thought-provoking and beautiful read for anyone who is interested in exploring these questions together at the intersections of gender studies, labor studies, and political theory. Beyond academia, anyone who wants to delve deeper into the couple-form, work, and state structure, dreaming of escape and alternatives, would find this to be a rewarding read.

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Immoral Traffic: An Ethnography of Law, NGOs, and the Governance of Prostitution in India (Cambridge UP, 2025) delves into the complex intersection of India's anti-prostitution law and global anti-trafficking campaigns, and how they impact sex workers in both voluntary and involuntary situations. Immoral Traffic examines the role of legal actors and NGOs in implementing these interventions, revealing the mix of paternalism, humanitarianism, punitive care, bureaucracy, and morality in their efforts. Through a sequence of interventions prescribed by India's anti-prostitution law, the book follows the experiences of sex workers, from rescues to courts to carceral shelters. It sheds light on the ways in which donor-driven NGOs draw upon this law to implement anti-trafficking agendas, and how these interventions are navigated by women removed from the sex trade. Detailed and eye-opening, this book is a valuable resource for scholars and students of anthropology, law and society, gender and sexuality studies, South Asian studies, global studies, and critical studies of NGOs and humanitarianism.

Vibhuti Ramachandran is an anthropologist of law, gender and sexuality, and South Asia. She serves as an Associate Professor at University of California-Irvine's Department of Global and International Studies, School of Social Sciences.

Saumya Dadoo is a PhD Candidate at Columbia University's Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS). Her dissertation focuses on the history of policing and punishment in colonial North India.

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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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