We all know part of Project 2025 and the Trump regime is trying to increase the birth rate. But it’s not just the far right that wants you to have babies. It’s the tech brogeoisie who run this world. In this episode we talk to researchers who have been unraveling the bizarre connections between pronatalism, tech billionaires, and the far right.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
On this episode of FFF, we travel to see how the anti-gender movement has played out in post-Roe Texas and, of course, how people are resisting! After all, we might all be Texas now…
Check out the East Lubbock Art House website: https://eastlubbockarthouse.org
In this episode we travel to Mexico City, exploring the anti-gender ideology movement on a local level. We encounter a lot hope and feminist joy along the way. Join us in exploring anti-gender politics and feminist resistance in Mexico City.
We have to talk about sex if we are going to talk about the anti-gender movement. You see, the anti-gender movement is rooted in the belief that sex is simple- boys and girls, penises and vaginas. But actually, sex has never been that simple and rather than assuming we know what sex and gender are because they’re “obvious” we talk to one of the world’s foremost authorities on just how messy sex and gender are. In this episode, feminist writer and journalist Judith Levine talks with Rebecca Jordan Young, author of Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography. We also talk with Julianna Neuhauser about how this right wing belief that sex is easy to understand overlaps with trans-exclusionary feminists’ “gender critical” stance. And how sometimes, the politics of believing sex is a binary can make for really strange bedfellows.
Rebecca Jordan-Young: “I am an interdisciplinary feminist scientist and science studies scholar whose work explores the reciprocal relations between science and the social hierarchies of gender, sexuality, class, and race. My recent book, Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography, coauthored with Katrina Karkazis (Harvard 2019) upends a lot of entrenched thinking that props up hormone folklore as if it is established fact. So familiar that it can go by a single initial, T is at once a mercurial cultural figure and a specific molecule. We take aim at received wisdom about T in six domains: female reproduction, aggression, risk-taking, power, sports, and parenting. Along the way, we show how “science-y” stories about T are used to recycle stereotypes—not just about gender differences, but also class and racial distinctions. There are also quite a few good stores about how preconceived ideas about this so-called “sex hormone” can sometimes make it hard for scientists to see evidence that’s right under their noses. Testosterone won the Gold Medal in Science from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Brocher Foundation, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship and an American Council of Learned Societies Research Fellowship.
My first book, Brain Storm: The flaws in the science of sex differences (Harvard 2010), was the first systematic analysis of the idea that early hormone exposures “hardwire” sex differences into the human brain. Tracing definitions and measures across hundreds of studies, I found that the research overall doesn’t support the idea that human brains are “organized” for gender and sexuality by early hormone exposures. Brain Storm was awarded a Distinguished Book Award from the Association for Women in Psychology (2011) and has been translated into French (Belin Press, 2016). My essay “Homunculus in the Hormones” summarizes the argument and main findings. You can download it here.
I’m on the Board of the international Neurogenderings Network, and enjoy collaborating with colleagues in fields that range from cognitive and developmental neuroscience, developmental biology, and physical chemistry to cultural anthropology, political science, history, and sociology. I’ve published in a wide range of scholarly journals, such as Feminist Formations, Nature, Science, Neuroethics, BMJ, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and the American Journal of Public Health, as well as popular outlets like the New York Times, The Guardian, and Discover Magazine.”
Julianna Neuhouser is a transfeminine translator and writer. Her texts have been published by Revista Común, Gatopardo, Malvestida and Zona Docs. She was the coordinator of the book Polarization and transphobia: Critical looks at the advance of anti-trans and anti-gender movements in Mexico
In this episode we talk to a variety of experts on the anti-gender ideology movement. They explain its history in the Catholic Church and how it slipped into far-right political movements starting in Russia, but spreading through Europe, Latin America, and the United States. Find out why Vladimir Putin and Ron DeSantis have the same policies and why feminists, LGBTQ activists, and others are fighting back to save democracy itself.
Agnieszka Graff is Associate Professor at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. She is a feminist activist and public intellectual. Her articles on gender in Polish and U.S. culture have appeared in Public Culture, Signs, European Journal of Women’s Studies, Feminist Studies and East European Politics and Societies. She has authored five books of feminist essays in Polish, among them Świat bez kobiet (World without Women, 2001, anniversary edition 2021) and Matka feministka (Mother and Feminist, 2014, Spanish edition 2021). She coedited the Spring 2019 theme issue of Signs “Gender and the rise of the global right.”
Alexander Sasha Kondakov is Assistant Professor at the UCD School of Sociology, Ireland. His international experience includes positions at the University of Helsinki in Finland, the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the United States and the Centre for Independent Social Research in St. Petersburg, Russia. Alexander’s career started in Russia, at the European University in St. Petersburg, where he pioneered LGBT and Queer Studies. He has extensively published in journals such as Sexualities, Social & Legal Studies and European Journal of Criminology.
