In the same year the Iowa Board of Regents considered closing the University of Iowa’s Department of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, five of its professors published books.
For Brady G’sell, assistant professor and author of “Reworking Citizenship: Race, Gender, and Kinship in South Africa,” the timing — though unplanned — underscored the ongoing relevance of the department’s work.
“It demonstrates the powerful impact that it can still have and the necessity for feminist scholarship to continue,” G’sell said.
The coincidental timing, G’sell said, also adds another layer of meaning to the accomplishment of herself and her colleagues.
“It’s a real moment to celebrate,” G’sell said. “We would have celebrated it anyway, but I think the celebration becomes its own act of political resistance.”
G’sell’s book, published in August 2024, explores the meaning of citizenship for women in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on decades of fieldwork, she recounted a conversation with a South African friend ahead of the 2014 election — only the third in which Black South Africans had been able to fully participate since the end of apartheid.
G’sell remembered asking if her friend was excited to vote. Despite having the right, her friend said she still didn’t feel like a citizen.
“Her argument is, ‘We’re not citizens because we can’t feed our children,’” G’sell said.
Despite having formal education or professional training, many women in South Africa struggle to support their families due to widespread unemployment, low wages, and limited access to stable jobs. Structural inequalities rooted in apartheid-era policies continue to shape access to opportunity, leaving many women — particularly Black women — locked out of the economic benefits that citizenship is supposed to provide.
Compounding these challenges, many women receive little financial or caregiving support from the fathers of their children, forcing them to shoulder the burden of survival alone.
“They blamed men for being crappy fathers,” G’sell said. “But they blamed the state even more and said that this is the problem of a failed government.”
The last piece of fieldwork included in her book, G’sell said, is from a 2021 visit to South Africa, during which existing economic challenges were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to widespread job losses, cuts to public services, and growing frustration with government corruption and mismanagement.
South Africa’s post-apartheid government, led by the African National Congress since 1994, has expanded political rights and improved access to housing, education, and health care but has struggled to address deep economic inequality, high unemployment, and ongoing corruption.
“The democratic government successive have made bad decisions,” G’sell said. “And they were also handed a really difficult situation.”
Although grounded in South Africa, G’sell said she hopes the book will spark broader conversations about the connection between citizenship and economic freedom.
“It helps us understand what fuller citizenship could be in lots of places where, overwhelmingly across the globe, access to paid jobs and wage labor are disappearing,” G’sell said.
Also hoping her book will resonate beyond the focus group is Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, an associate professor, who co-wrote “Doing Gender Justice: Queering Reproduction, Kin, and Care” — published March 25.
Fixmer-Oraiz traced the origins of her most recent book to a conversation she had six years ago with Shui-yin Sharon Yam, an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky and her co-author.
“We were talking about some of the ways that pregnancy, childbirth, reproductive politics themselves were spaces that were deeply gendered in ways that made it difficult for trans and non-binary people to flourish,” Fixmer-Oraiz said.
The ways that manifest, Fixmer-Oraiz said, are multi-faceted: gendered language surrounding birth and fertility, feminization of pregnancy, and an assumption that childbirth must inherently be a gender dysphoric thing for masculine transgender or nonbinary individuals who become pregnant.
“One of the beautiful things that I heard some trans folks talking about on podcasts was how, for them, pregnancy was a uniquely trans experience and a very affirmative trans experience,” Fixmer-Oraiz said. “One person talked about how they had never felt at home in a body with breasts, and for the first time in their life, their breasts were useful.”
Fixmer-Oraiz said she and Yam interviewed reproductive justice advocates and practitioners — including midwives and doulas — about how they help create inclusive birthing experiences for transgender and nonbinary parents. While the book addresses the experiences of those parents, the authors chose not to interview them directly, feeling it could be extractive given that neither identifies as part of that community.
“Instead, we looked at the things that were made widely available to public audiences because we felt that could fairly capture the gift of trans and nonbinary birth but also its struggles,” Fixmer-Oraiz said.
Fixmer-Oraiz said in many societies, including the U.S., the idea of family is often used to define what the nation stands for and who belongs in it. While her book centers on the experiences of transgender and nonbinary people giving birth, she said she hopes it will speak more broadly to questions of care, identity, and inclusion.
“We have a lot to learn that is useful for all of us,” Fixmer-Oraiz said. “Not just people who are trans or nonbinary, but people who are cisgender, too, who are looking for different ways of inhabiting what it means to be pregnant and what it means to parent.”
Fixmer-Oraiz and Yam will host a reading and book signing at The Green House on March 29 at 4 p.m., with book sales benefiting the Iowa City Trans Mutual Aid Fund.
Like Fixmer-Oraiz, Lina-Maria Murillo also turns her attention to questions of reproductive justice — this time through a historical lens focused on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Murillo’s book “Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US-Mexico Borderlands” examines the history of reproductive politics along the U.S.-Mexico border, focusing on the tensions between state power, public health, and bodily autonomy. Drawing on archival research and historical records, Murillo traces how birth control access and policy have been shaped by race, migration, and shifting national agendas.
An expansion of her 2016 dissertation, Murillo said the book is the culmination of 13 years of research.
“Often, people think it’s strange that historians take so long to write books, but it’s because we want to meditate on the significance of what it is we’re writing,” Murillo said. “Oftentimes, it’s not immediately clear, and that is because we need to take into account the context.”
Part of that context, Murillo explained, is how organizations such as Planned Parenthood concentrated their outreach in primarily Mexican-American neighborhoods, like the area of El Paso she studied. She noted these efforts were influenced by mid-20th-century population control ideologies, which often targeted communities of color under the guise of public health and social progress.
“Organizations like Planned Parenthood haven’t really been taken to task for the eugenic histories that they have,” Murillo said, referencing Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger’s collaborations with public health officials who promoted birth control as a means of limiting the reproduction of marginalized populations.
This failure to reckon with its roots, Murillo said, has created reluctance with specific marginalized communities to support Planned Parenthood and similar organizations entirely. However, she emphasized that persistent threats to abortion access have frequently overshadowed more nuanced historical discussions.
As a Latina woman herself, Murillo emphasized the importance of bringing history to light.
“We need to know about ourselves, but our history has been kept from us,” Murillo said. “The challenges that our mothers and our grandmothers faced, the way that they have fought for us — that needs to be known, that needs to be honored.”
Since her book was published on Dec. 20, Murillo has been invited to speak on college campuses across the country. While the subject matter of her book is heavy, Murillo described the speaking engagements as upbeat and uplifting.
“I’m really committed to talking about the overwhelming badassery of the women I write about,” Murillo said.
In addition to G’sell, Fixmer-Oraiz, and Murillo, associate professors Meena Khandelwal and Aniruddha Dutta also released books this year. Khandelwal’s “Cookstove Chronicles: Social Life of a Women’s Technology in India” was published in October, followed by Dutta’s “Globalizing through the Vernacular: Kothis, Hijras, and the Making of Queer and Trans Identities in India” in December.