Feminist Professor

As the second season of Feminist Professor launches, we begin a multi-episode and closer examination of Project 2025. In this first episode, we focus on the larger plan to regulate, obstruct, and ultimately end the provision of abortion services in the United States.

In this episode, we discuss the important political and personal necessity of rest. Because we live in a grind culture that insists on incessant productivity and normalizes exhaustion, we have lost the capacity to define and defend rest. Thanks to Tricia Hersey’s work in Rest is Resistance, this episode describes how we are damaged by the ‘cult of urgency and busyness’ and how we might begin to reimagine the radical potential of learning how to rest.

We will continue exploring the assumptions that underlie ‘woke gender ideology.’ This particular episode will focus on the purported ‘biological reality of sex’ as defined by the Trump administration’s Executive Order ‘Defending Women from Gender Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.’ More specifically, we will explore how a scientifically inaccurate understanding of biological sex is leveraged in anti-gender and anti-trans political efforts.

In this episode, we begin to discuss the new rhetoric of ‘woke gender ideology’ and the way that it is weaponized in the current political climate. We pay special attention to the concepts of ‘wokeness’ and ‘ideology’ this week; next week, we will focus entirely on the vilification of gender.  This episode also discusses how to allow for despair without falling into paralysis and what active hope might make possible.

This episode continues the conversation of last week, Preparing for Trump 2.0.  In it, eighteen speakers from the larger podcast community share brief and powerful insights into what they are doing differently or refusing to do in this volatile political climate.

In this episode, we consider how we might differently approach the second presidency of Donald Trump. How can we guard against overwhelm and dysregulation? How can we direct our energy and attention to meaningful projects rather than fall into another extended outrage cycle?

In this episode, we discuss the rise in trans panic, or the cultivation of widespread anxiety and fear at the very fact of trans existence. We talk about the ways in which trans panic serves particular political ends as well as underscores the phantasmatic nature of gender. Using gender affirming care as an example, we consider how much trans panic relies on fictitious stories about gender and ignores the lived realities of trans youth specifically.