Susan Sontag (1933- 2004) was a writer, critic and activist, one who isn’t thought of (and didn’t think of herself) as conservative. In this episode, your hosts talk with Prof. Merve Emre to think through Sontag’s writing on gender and on the women’s movement. How do Sontag’s leeriness about identity and identification, her ambivalent attitudes to bodies, sex and beauty, and her elitism land in today’s political climate and landscape?

Episode 3: Susan Sontag with Merve Emre

Welcome to In Bed With the Right, the new podcast from the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Hosts Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub welcome a range of scholars and critics to analyze right wing ideas about gender, sex and sexuality – and to plumb the ways in which these ideas persist in and shape our present moment.

Society & Culture

Personal Journals

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Philosophy

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Sexuality

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Health & Fitness

Moira walks Adrian through the strange, tragic, enraging life of RFK Jr.—vaccine skeptic, presidential candidate, and literal brain worm survivor. Along the way, your hosts touch on Kennedy masculinity, American aristocracy, and the fine art of styling yourself as an outsider while the whole world can't stop deferring to you.

Episode 23: RFK Jr.

Adrian leads Moira through the life and career of composer Richard Wagner—a not-so-great man with some of world history's worst fans. Aesthetics, politics, revolutionary zeal that curdles into something far more ominous! This one is—as befits its source material—epic!

Episode 22: Richard Wagner: Act I

Samuel Catlin (University at Buffalo) joins Moira and Adrian to talk about "The Campus" -- about the peculiar mental image Americans seem to have, how little it comports with reality, and the uncanny power of that it nevertheless exercises.  You can read Samuel's essay "The Campus Does Not Exist" over at Parapraxis magazine: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-campus-does-not-exist You can read Moira Weigel's article "Hating Theory" (which we refer to in the episode) here: https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/21427 And you can pre-order Adrian's book "The Cancel Culture Panic" (which he's heavily cribbing from in this ep) here: https://www.amazon.com/Cancel-Culture-Panic-American-Obsession/dp/1503640841/

Episode 21: "The Campus" in the American Imagination with Samuel Catlin

Moira and Adrian speak to political scientist Jeff Dudas about his 2017 book Raised Right: Fatherhood in Modern American Conservatism. The conversation touches on campus panics, Clarence Thomas's many father figures, and neoconservative failsons. 

Episode 20: Conservatism's Daddy Issues

In this episode, Moira and Adrian delve into Judith Butler's latest book -- about the worldwide movement against "gender" and the role it plays in right-wing politics.  

Episode 3: Susan Sontag with Merve Emre

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