New Books in Medicine

• Caitlin Killian, "Understanding Reproduction in Social Contexts" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

  In today's post-Roe v. Wade world, U.S. maternal mortality is on the rise and laws regarding contraception, involuntary sterilization, access to reproductive health services, and criminalization of people who are gestating are changing by the minute. Today I’m joined by Dr. Caitlin Killian, the editor of and one of the contributors to a new book from Bloomsbury Academic, Understanding Reproduction in Social Contexts: A Reader. I’m also pleased to host two of the chapter authors, Drs. Nancy Hiemstra and Jaya Keaney. Using a reproductive justice framework, Understanding Reproduction in Social Contexts walks students through the social landscape around reproduction through the life course. Chapters by cutting-edge reproductive scholars, practitioners, and advocates address the social control of fertility and pregnancy, the promises and perils of assisted reproductive technologies, experiences of pregnancy, miscarriage, abortion, and birth, and how individuals make sense of and respond to the cultural, social, and political forces that condition their reproductive lives. The book takes an intersectional approach and considers how gender, sexuality, fatness, disability, class, race, and immigration status impact both an individual's health and the healthcare they receive. The reader includes timely topics such as increased legal limitations on abortion, transpeople and reproduction, and new developments in assisted reproduction and family formation. The book can support undergraduate and graduate courses on families, gender, public health, reproduction, and sexuality – and I’m pleased to have contributed a chapter. Dr. Caitlin Killian is a Professor of Sociology at Drew University specializing in gender, families, reproduction, and immigration. We featured her book, Failing Moms: Social Condemnation and Criminalization of Mothers (Polity 2023) previously on New Books Network. Her articles have appeared in Contexts magazine and The Conversation, as well as numerous academic journals, and she has done work for the United Nations on sexual and reproductive health and rights and on Syrian refugee women Dr. Nancy Hiemstra is a political, cultural, and feminist geographer and Associate Professor in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Her scholarship focuses on how border and immigration policies shape patterns and consequences of human mobility. Her 2019 book Detain and Deport: The Chaotic U.S. Immigration Enforcement Regime examined the U.S. detention and deportation system, and her forthcoming book (with Deirdre Conlon) Immigration Detention Inc: The Big Business of Locking Up Migrants scrutinizes how profit making goals drive the expanding use of detention. Dr Jaya Keaney is Lecturer in Gender Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She writes, researches, and teaches in the fields of feminist technoscience, queer and feminist theory, and cultural studies. Her research across these fields explores reproduction, racism, and queer feminist practices of embodiment and inheritance. Jaya is the author of Making Gaybies: Queer Reproduction and Multiracial Feeling (Duke University Press, 2023), which was a finalist for the 2024 Rachel Carson Prize. Her writing has also appeared in journals such as Body and Society, Science Technology & Human Values, and the Duke University Press edited collection Long Term: Essays on Queer Commitment (2021). Mentioned: Susan’s interview with Caitlin on Failing Moms: The Social Condemnation and Criminalization of Mothers (Polity, 2024). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

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• Howard Chiang, "After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China" (Columbia UP, 2018)

  Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) guides readers through the history of eunuchs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the techniques of visualization that helped establish the conditions that produced sex as an object of empirical knowledge, the rise of sexology in the 1920s, the discourse of “sex change” in the press from the 1920s to the 1940s, and a famous case of the “first” Chinese transsexual in 1950s Taiwan. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of sexuality in China, and will be of special interest for readers who are interested in bringing Foucault-inspired analyses to the craft of history. Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

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• Daniel A. Rodriguez, "The Right to Live in Health: Medical Politics in Postindependence Havana" (U North Carolina Press, 2020)

  Daniel A. Rodriguez's history of a newly independent Cuba shaking off the U.S. occupation, The Right to Live in Health: Medical Politics in Postindependence Havana (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), focuses on the intersection of public health and politics in Havana.  While medical policies were often used to further American colonial power, in Cuba, Rodriguez argues, they evolved into important expressions of anticolonial nationalism as Cuba struggled to establish itself as a modern state.  A younger generation of Cuban medical reformers, including physicians, patients, and officials, imagined disease as a kind of remnant of colonial rule. These new medical nationalists, as Rodriguez calls them, looked to medical science to guide Cuba toward what they envisioned as a healthy and independent future. Rodriguez describes how medicine and new public health projects infused republican Cuba's statecraft, powerfully shaping the lives of Havana's residents. He underscores how various stakeholders, including women and people of color, demanded robust government investment in quality medical care for all Cubans, a central national value that continues today.  On a broader level, Rodriguez proposes that Latin America, at least as much as the United States and Europe, was an engine for the articulation of citizens' rights, including the right to health care, in the twentieth century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

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• Tiffany D. Joseph, "Not All In: Race, Immigration, and Health Care Exclusion in the Age of Obamacare" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025)

  Despite progressive policy strides in health care reform, immigrant communities continue to experience stark disparities across the United States. In Not All In: Race, Immigration, and Health Care Exclusion in the Age of Obamacare (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025), Tiffany D. Joseph exposes the insidious contradiction of Massachusetts' advanced health care system and the exclusionary experiences of its immigrant communities. Joseph illustrates how patients' race, ethnicity, and legal status determine their access to health coverage and care services, revealing a disturbing paradox where policy advances and individual experiences drastically diverge. Examining Boston's Brazilian, Dominican, and Salvadoran communities, this book provides an exhaustive analysis spanning nearly a decade to highlight the profound impacts of the Affordable Care Act and subsequent policy shifts on these marginalized groups. Not All In is a critical examination of the systemic barriers that perpetuate health care disparities. Joseph challenges readers to confront the uncomfortable truths about racialized legal status and its profound implications on health care access. This essential book illuminates the complexities of policy implementation and advocates for more inclusive reforms that genuinely cater to all. Urging policymakers, health care providers, and activists to rethink strategies that bridge the gap between legislation and life, this book reminds us that in the realm of health care, being progressive is not synonymous with inclusivity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

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• Womanist Bioethics: Social Justice, Spirituality, and Black Women's Health

  Black people, and especially Black women, suffer and die from diseases at much higher rates than their white counterparts. The vast majority of these health disparities are not attributed to behavioral differences or biology, but to the pervasive devaluation of Black bodies. Womanist Bioethics: Social Justice, Spirituality, and Black Women’s Health (NYU Press, 2025), by Dr. Wylin D. Wilson, addresses this crisis from a bioethical standpoint. It offers a critique of mainstream bioethics as having embraced the perspective of its mainly white, male progenitors, limiting the extent to which it is positioned to engage the issues that particularly affect vulnerable populations. This book makes the provocative but essential case that because African American women—across almost every health indicator—fare worse than others, we must not only include, but center, Black women’s experiences and voices in bioethics discourse and practice. Womanist Bioethics develops the first specifically womanist form of bioethics, focused on the diverse vulnerabilities and multiple oppressions that women of color face. This innovative womanist bioethics is grounded in the Black Christian prophetic tradition, based on the ideas that God does not condone oppression and that it is imperative to defend those who are vulnerable. It also draws on womanist theology and Black liberation theology, which take similar stances. At its core, the volume offers a new, broad-based approach to bioethics that is meant as a corrective to mainstream bioethics’ privileging of white, particularly male, experiences, and it outlines ways in which hospitals, churches, and the larger community can better respond to the healthcare needs of Black women. Our guest is: Dr. Wylin D. Wilson, who is associate professor of theological ethics at Duke Divinity School. Her work lies at the intersection of religion, gender, and bioethics. Her academic interests also include rural bioethics and Black church studies. Prior to joining Duke Divinity School in 2020, she was a teaching faculty member at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics and a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. She is the theologian-in-residence for the Children's Defense Fund and is a member of the American Academy of Religion’s Bioethics and Religion Program Unit Steering Committee. Among her publications is her book, Economic Ethics and the Black Church. Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast. Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/medicine

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