Category: Episode

Episode 10: Reproductive Genocide

Harper Nichols

10. Reproductive Genocide – Feminism, Fascism, and the Future

In this episode we speak with Professors Isis Nusair and Bayan Abusneineh about reproductive justice in Gaza and learn that we can only have reproductive justice in Gaza if we acknowledge the reproductive genocide of the Israeli state, not just against Palestinian reproduction, but the reproduction of non-white Jewish bodies as well. In this episode, we invite you to consider not just the starvation of women and children now in Gaza, but the effect that can have for generations to come. We also invite you to consider how transnational feminism, the kind of feminism that links women dying in parking lots in Texas because they can’t access reproductive care, is linked to the reproductive genocide in Gaza.

Episode 9: Repro Justice Confronts Fascism

Harper Nichols

9. Repro Justice Confronts Fascism – Feminism, Fascism, and the Future

In this episode, we talk to activists and academics working in the field of reproductive justice. We’re trying to find out how to keep working for the feminist future we want even as the US is increasingly fascist when it comes to the basic right of being able to have- or not have- children.

Episode 8: Creating a Feminist Future in Argentina

Harper Nichols

8. Creating a Feminist Future in Argentina – Feminism, Fascism, and the Future

In this episode, we travel to Argentina to interview the feminist academics, activists, and artists who are fighting fascism and building a future for all of us. Having a fascist autocrat in power is not stopping people there from creating a better world for all of us. So if living in Trump’s America is getting you down, take a listen and get inspired to get into the streets and fight like a madre!

We Talk to Really Smart People: Loretta Ross

Harper Nichols

We Talk to Really Smart People: Loretta Ross – Feminism, Fascism, and the Future

Loretta Ross is an acclaimed professor, author, feminist, activist, and founding advocate of reproductive justice. In this interview we delve into Professor Ross’s new book, Calling In: How to Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel. Learn what it takes to build a better world… and how to have fun doing it! 

Episode Interviews

Loretta Ross

Loretta Ross is an academic and activist who has dedicated many years to advocating for women’s rights and reproductive justice. Most notably, she is a cofounder of SisterSong and Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, served as a previous Executive Director of the D.C. Rape Crisis Center, and is one of twelve women credited with coining the phrase and framework “reproductive justice.” Ross continues to be regarded as a voice of authority on women’s rights. She continually combats racism, sexism and sexual violence, particularly by creating coalitions by and for women affected by these inequities. 

Source

Bonus: The Power of the Small Minority

Harper Nichols

Bonus: The Power of the Small Minority – Feminism, Fascism, and the Future

Have you been out there protesting? Well…you should be! In this bonus episode, we explore the importance of protest. Participating in a protest isn’t just a cute look – it’s a statistically effective way to make change. So, let’s get out there and fight fascism together!

Episode 7: How They Come for the Professors

Harper Nichols

Part 1

7. How They Come for the Professors (Part 1) – Feminism, Fascism, and the Future

In this episode we talk about the BIG LIE: that any criticism of Israel is anti-semitism. The GoP and even some Dems have been using this lie to attack professors, often feminist scholars who are themselves Jewish. In this part of the episode, we talk to Nicole Morse, former head of gender studies at Florida Atlantic University, and Jessica Pabon, who taught gender studies at SUNY New Paltz. Both were punished by their institutions for criticizing Israeli policy in Gaza.

Part 2

7. How They Come for the Professors (Part 2) – Feminism, Fascism, and the Future

Tenure is supposed to protect professors to teach what they know. That stops political idealogues like Donald Trump or Joseph McCarthy from controlling knowledge. Unfortunately, it’s no protection for professors in this political moment as Moira Finkelstein found out when she lost her tenured job as an anthropologist at Muhlenberg College over an Instagram Story that was critical of Zionism. Zionism is an ideology, not a religion, and many Jews, including Dr. Finkelstein, are critical of it. But that didn’t stop her from being labeled antisemitic.

Episode 6: Mexico City (Part 2)

Harper Nichols

6. Mexico City (part 2) – Feminism, Fascism, and the Future

This episode is the second part to Episode 4: The Anti-Gender Movement in Mexico City. This time though, we have a lot more hope to offer. Dive into these exciting interviews to learn about the feminist resistance happening in Mexico City and all the ways we can fight back!

Note: the interviews for this episode were done in Spanish, so the interviewees you hear aren’t really them – it’s an English voiceover.

Bonus: A New(ish) Book and Other Cool Research

Harper Nichols

Bonus: A New(ish) Book and Other Cool Research – Feminism, Fascism, and the Future

In this episode we talk about some new, important research, namely the book Transnational Anti-Gender Politics: Feminist Solidarity in Times of Global Attack featuring an interview with the authors, Tomás Ojeda, Billy Holzberg, and Aiko Holvikivi. 

Links from the show:

Episode Interviews

Dr Tomás Ojeda is a queer researcher and trained psychotherapist. He held an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Brighton’s Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender (2022-2023), and Visiting Fellow position at the LSE Department of Gender Studies. His research interests lie in the intersections of queer theory, psychosocial studies, anti-gender politics and LGBTIQ+ mental health, with a particular  focus on activist and academic responses to current attacks on gender-affirming care. He is the co-editor of the volume Transnational Anti-gender Politics: Feminist Solidarity in Times of Global Attacks (forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan), and is a member of the Engenderings editorial collective.

Billy Holzberg is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Social Justice. His research, teaching and public engagement draw on transnational, liberatory, and collaborative queer feminist approaches.

Prior to joining King’s College London, he was a Fellow in Gender and Sexuality at the Department of Sociology at the London School of Economics, where he also completed his PhD in the Department of Gender Studies.

Billy is broadly interested in the sexual and affective life of power. His research grapples with the role that sexual desire and emotional attachments play in fuelling social inequalities, nationalisms, and neo-fascist politics today and how such dynamics might be counteracted. In exploring these questions, he draws on and contributes to work in queer studies, transnational feminism, affect theory, postcolonial critique, and critical migration and border studies. His work is informed by cultural, visual, and media analysis and he is interested in bridging innovative methodologies and reading practices between the humanities and the social sciences.

His first monograph Affective Bordering: The Emotional Politics of Race, Migration, and Deservingness(Manchester University Press) explores the interplay between affect and migration control, revealing how emotions work to reinforce racial and national hierarchies. Taking the construction of migration as crisis in Germany as its case study, the book brings together queer feminist theories of affect with postcolonial border studies offering an incisive perspective on the reproduction and contestation of borders in today’s world.

Aiko Holvikivi is Assistant Professor of Gender, Peace and Security at the Department of Gender Studies and an Associate Academic at the Centre for Women, Peace and Security, LSE.

My research is interested in transnational movements of knowledges and of people, and how these are produced by and productive of gendered and racialised (in)security. My first monograph, Fixing Gender: The Paradoxical Politics of Peacekeeper Training (Oxford University Press 2024), interrogates these themes through an examination of the practice of ‘gender training’. This research traces the ways in which training produces knowledge about gender; the processes of circulation, translation, resistance and negotiation that are involved; and the epistemic and political effects of such training. The book draws on fieldwork with military and police peacekeepers in East Africa, the Nordic region, West Africa, the Western Balkans, and Western Europe.

A second project through which I have investigated these themes relates to transnational anti-gender politics, how they work, and how activists and scholars are resisting them. I am co-editor, with Billy Holzberg and Tomás Ojeda, of the book Transnational Anti-Gender Politics: Feminist Solidarity in Times of Global Attacks (Palgrave 2024).

Further questions on which I have recently worked include: forced displacement in the WPS agenda; gender experts and expertise; feminist research methods; and sexual exploitation and abuse in international deployments.

I have extensive experience with policy engagement and stakeholder outreach. Before re-entering academia, I worked on questions related to gender and security at the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) and the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Home Affairs. In these roles I built up experience managing projects on policy research and technical advice and capacity-building in the field of gender and security sector governance, and worked with UN Women; the Albanian State Police and Ministry for Defence; the South African National Defence Forces Peace Mission Training Centre; the Sierra Leone Police; and the UK Stabilisation Unit. As an academic, I have guest lectured at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies and the UK Defence Academy, and serve in an advisory capacity to the Elsie Initiative for Women in Peace Operations (Measuring Opportunities for Women in Peacekeeping) and the Security Sector Reform Advisory Network to the United Nations.

We Talk to Really Smart People: Clare Hemmings

Laurie Essig

We Talk to Really Smart People: Clare Hemmings – Feminism, Fascism, and the Future

In this episode we talk to Prof. Clare Hemmings of the London School of Economics. Prof. Hemmings helped to start an international research group on the anti-gender movement. Prof. Hemmings puts a lot of what’s going on into historical perspective for us by linking white supremacy, transphobia and the colonial imagination together.

Episode Interviews

Clare Hemmings

Clare Hemmings is Professor of Feminist Theory. She has been working at the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics since 1999.

She has two main areas of research focus – feminist and queer studies – and is particularly interested in thinking through the relationship between these, as well as the ways in which both fields have been institutionalized at national and international levels. This interest has led her to think about how participants in these fields tell stories about their history as well as current form, and to explore how such stories resonate with (rather than against) more conservative agendas. To find out more, go here.

We Talk to Really Smart People: Judith Butler

Harper Nichols

We Talk to Really Smart People: Judith Butler – Feminism, Fascism, and the Future

As another term under Tr*mp looms before us, let us turn to a Really Smart Person – none other than Professor JUDITH BUTLER! In this episode we hear about Butler’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? and all the ways they offer hope, inspiration, and wisdom during these hard times. As fire spreads, literally and figuratively, we cannot give up! Take care of yourself, take care of each other, and keep dancing!

Episode Interviews

Judith Butler

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and formerly the Maxine Elliot Chair in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. They received their Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. They are the author of several books:  Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (1997), Excitable Speech (1997), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (2004); Undoing Gender (2004), Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in 2008), Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), Is Critique Secular? (co-written with Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, and Saba Mahmood, 2009), Sois Mon Corps (2011), co-authored with Catherine Malabou, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political  (co-authored with Athena Athanasiou 2013), Senses of the Subject and Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), and a co-edited volume, Vulnerability in Resistance, with Duke University Press (2015), The Force of Nonviolence 2020, and What World is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology (2022). Their most recent book is Who’s Afraid of Gender (2024).  Their books have been translated into more than twenty-seven languages.

They served as a founding director, with Martin Jay, of the Critical Theory Program at UC Berkeley. They received a Mellon Foundation grant to found and developed the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (2016-2020) where they serve now as Co-Chair of the Board and editorial member of Critical Times. Earlier, they served as Department Chair of the Department of Rhetoric in 1998-2003 and 2006-7, and the Acting Chair of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, 2002-3. They also served as the Chair of the Board of the University of California Humanities Research Center in Irvine. They were elected member of the Executive Council of the Modern Languages Association and chaired its committee on Committee on Academic Freedom and Professional Responsibilities before serving as President of the organization in 2020.  They are also affiliated faculty with the Psychosocial MA Program at Birkbeck College University of London and teaches as the  Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School in Sass Fee, Switzerland.  They have taught as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in Philosophy at the New School University in 2020-2022. They were the intellectual in residence at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2023-24.

Butler has been active in several human rights organizations, including the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York and the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace. They were the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities (2009-13) and received the Adorno Prize from the City of Frankfurt (2012) in honor of their contributions to feminist and moral philosophy, the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime achievement in gay and lesbian studies, and was named the Albertus Magnus Professorship from the City of Cologne, Germany in 2016. They are the past recipient of several fellowships including Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford, American Council of Learned Societies, and was Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. They have given the Wellek Lectures at Irvine, the Carpenter Lectures at the University of Chicago, the Watts Lecture at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, the Gauss Lectures at Princeton, the Messenger Lectures at Cornell, the Tanner Lectures at Yale University, and the annual Freud Lecture at the Freud Museum in Vienna.  They have received 14  honorary degrees: Université Bordeaux-III, Université Paris-VII, Grinnell College, McGill University, University of St. Andrews, Université de Fribourg in Switzerland, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Liège Université, the Universidad de Costa Rica, Universidad de Guadalajara, Universidad de Chile, University of Belgrade, Universidad Veracruzana, and the Autonomous University of Mexico and appointed an Honorary fellow at Birkbeck University of London. In 2014, they were awarded the diploma of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the French Cultural Ministry and subsequently reappointed as Commandant. They served as well on the Advisory Committee of the Institute fuer Sozialforschung in Frankfurt.   In 2015, they were made an “honorary geographer” by the American Association of Geographers and was elected as a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.  They were also elected as member of the American Philosophical Society and  elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. In 2022, they received the Catalonia International Prize from the canton of Catalunya and the gold medal from the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid.