In 1936, Nazi Germany hosted the Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, amidst international calls to boycott. It was an enormously consequential event in the politics of the times, granting Hitler an international spotlight to promote the Third Reich. Much less known, as writer Michael Waters argues, is how Nazi eugenics and paranoia about transgender athletes gave rise to the gender surveillance that characterizes contemporary sports to this day. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

Michael Waters, The Other Olympians: Fascism, Queerness, and the Making of Modern Sports Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024

The post The Nazi Origins of Gender Surveillance in Sports appeared first on KPFA.

In a California women’s prison, domestic violence survivors who killed their abusers in self-defense came together to practice a politics of mutual care, solidarity, and resistance. Rachel Leah Klein details the origins, efforts, and achievements of Convicted Women Against Abuse, situating their activities within the charged political context of the tough-on-crime 1990s. (Encore presentation.)

Rachel Leah Klein, “Surviving domestic and state violence: Women’s prison organising and the gendered politics of solidarity” Gender & History (open-access through August 2024)

The post Criminalized Survivors Mobilize appeared first on KPFA.

Why has the term complicity become so ubiquitous in recent years? Are we all complicit in the system that we live under? What use, or uses, does the notion serve? These are questions that legal scholar Francine Banner poses. She makes the argument that the term bears different meanings, sometimes holding the powerful to account and other times looking for someone to blame, rather than focusing on systemic change. She considers the shifting modern use of complicity — shaped in part by problematic scholarship on the uncaring bystander — and sees parallels in how the legal system severely penalizes those for even peripheral involvement in crimes. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

Francine Banner, Beyond Complicity: Why We Blame Each Other Instead of Systems UC Press, 2024

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Is there such a thing as core gender identity? Are queer and trans people born that way? And what role does trauma play in shaping gender? Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and practice as well as queer and trans studies, Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini, each a clinician and NYU-based scholar, contest the notion that gender is fixed and innate. (Encore presentation.)

Avgi Saketopoulou & Ann Pellegrini, Gender Without Identity The Unconscious in Translation, 2023 (use discount code “KPFA” at checkout for 25% off until July 15)

The post Rethinking Gender appeared first on KPFA.

Jewish opposition to Israel, so visible recently through the spectacular actions of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, is not a recent phenomenon. Historian Marjorie Feld argues that what may seem like unprecedented criticism of Israel by U.S. Jews is part of a long tradition of dissent, which has been repressed by establishment Jewish organizations and frequently erased by historians. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

Marjorie N. Feld, The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism NYU Press, 2024

Photo credit: Marcy Winograd

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How did residents of shack settlements in South African cities like Durban become a formidable political force? Yousuf Al-Bulushi lays out the operating principles, goals, and methods of Abahlali, one of the most well-known radical formations in all of Africa. (Encore presentation.)

Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Ruptures in the Afterlife of the Apartheid City Palgrave Macmillan, 2024

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Over the last forty years, bottled water consumption has exploded. Once a rarefied item, global sales of bottled water dwarf every other beverage — totaling $300 billion a year. Environmental sociologist Daniel Jaffee argues that packaged water doesn’t only imperil our oceans and bodies with plastic waste, but undermines safe public water even more than water privatization. (Encore presentation.)

Resources:

Daniel Jaffee, Unbottled: The Fight against Plastic Water and for Water Justice UC Press, 2023

The post Commodifying Water appeared first on KPFA.

In the years following the Russian Revolution, a popular resistance movement sprang up in Ukraine that drew its inspiration from a man named Nestor Makhno. Makhno went on to organize a seven-million-strong anarchist polity amidst the chaos and brutality of the Russian Civil War. Charlie Allison describes Makhno’s appeal, his political beliefs, and his rejection of Bolshevism. (Encore presentation.)

Charlie Allison, No Harmless Power: The Life and Times of the Ukrainian Anarchist Nestor Makhno PM Press, 2023

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They struggled for public housing and public transport. They fought to reduce the police force and to have access to public space, so cities were not just playgrounds for the wealthy. More than a century ago, workers battled for the public infrastructure that we take for granted, as part of a larger struggle for socialism. Historian Shelton Stromquist discusses how we live in those socialist cities today, which elites are struggling to return to private hands.

Resources:

Shelton Stromquist, Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers’ Fight for Municipal Socialism Verso, 2023

The post Fighting for Municipal Socialism appeared first on KPFA.

Christopher Bache, a professor emeritus of philosophy and religious studies, discusses his twenty-year psychedelic journey, which is described and interpreted in his book “LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven.” (Encore presentation.)

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