Living While Feminist

Today on the podcast I’m talking with Dr Nechama Brodie.

Nechama has worked as a multi-media journalist, editor, producer and publisher for nearly twenty-five years. During this time she has dodged the secret police in Burma, explored tunnels underneath Johannesburg, gotten dusty at rock festivals, and reported on the myth of ‘white genocide’ in South Africa. Nechama’s journalistic work has appeared in leading South African newspapers like the Sunday Times, the Mail & Guardian, and City Press, and in the Hindustan Times (India) and the Guardian (UK). Nechama also previously headed up the training and research division TRI Facts for independent fact-checking agency Africa Check.

Nechama has a PhD in journalism and is a part-time lecturer at the University of the Witwatersrand’s School of Journalism and Media Studies. Her research work focuses on interpersonal violence and media representations of violence. Nechama is also a musician and singer and (unrelated) a martial artist, holding a second dan in karate.

In addition to her journalism Nechama is the author of several books - The Joburg Book (Pan Macmillan), a contemporary history of the city that was long-listed for the Alan Paton Award and has sold over 10 000 copies; and Inside Joburg (Pan Macmillan), a guide to the city’s most interesting spaces. Nechama’s best-selling history of the city of Cape Town, The Cape Town Book (Struik Travel and Heritage), was released in 2015.

Nechama is also the co-author of memoirs I Ran For My Life (Pan Macmillan), with best-selling musician Kabelo Mabalane, and Rule of Law (Pan Macmillan), with MP and former state prosecutor Glynnis Breytenbach.

Nechama’s first novel – a supernatural thriller called Knucklebone (Pan Macmillan) – was published in 2018 and was long-listed for the Barry Ronge Prize for South African fiction and short-listed for the Nommo Award for African speculative fiction.

In 2020, Nechama published two further books - The sequel to Knucklebone, Three Bodies (Macmillan) in March, and her non-fiction work Femicide in South Africa (Kwela) in July 2020. In the Introduction to Femicide she says

“Femicide – like the murders of children, and perhaps the elderly – carries such distinct features that, if we were to try and understand or profile these killings only in the context of male homicides, we would miss the point entirely. The violence meted out against women has long been distinct from the violence meted out between men” and goes on to say later in the book “most violent injuries between men arise from ‘everyday life, most often involving strangers and including poorly defined arguments and quarrels over money, women and drunkenness’ whereas most women are attacked and harmed by someone they know. Where men often participate in or even initiate violence against each other, even when they are with strangers, women are subjected to violence, and mostly by the people close to them.”

So, today I’ll be talking to Nechama about femicide, how to tell fact from fiction, and her writing life.

Today on the podcast I’m talking with Terry-Ann Adams. Terry-Ann is a writer and commentator from Johannesburg. They have an honours in history from the University of Pretoria where she focused on the disability rights movement in South Africa and Disability Representation in American Film. They has spoken and written on ableism and feminism.

In 2020 Terry-Ann published their debut novel, Those Who Live in Cages, with Jacana Media. Those Who Live in Cages is a story of five women, connected to one another through blood and circumstance  – Bertha, Janice, Laverne, Kaylynn and Kela (Raquel) – all living in Eldorado Park. As the review in New Frame puts it, “they are women full of hope for their families and futures, bumping up against the obstacles of class limitation and a patriarchal, religious and judgement-driven environment.”

It is a story where place comes alive as character. Eldorado Park is a location that shapes the lives of each of these characters, whether they are yearning to leave or destined to stay. In her interview with New Frame writer, Binwe Adebayo, Adams says:

“I think that the world is a dystopia, that systemic oppression kills any form of hope for real change or progress. As individuals, we can move forward slightly … but the greater good is not realised and many are left behind … Only when systems that oppress us are dismantled will we see real change.”

So today I’ll be talking with Terry-Ann about writing as one tool to address social issues, their work as a disability activist, and what comes next for them.

Today on the podcast I’m talking with South Africa’s self-appointed Minister of Menstruation, Candice Chirwa.

Candice is a thought leader with an avid interest in gender and youth issues in South Africa. She specialises in menstrual education for young people and brings #eduliftment with her award-winning NGO, QRATE.

Candice is the Editor of the Book – The Perils of Patriarchy, which sheds light on and unpacks women’s lived experiences of the patriarchy in South Africa. Her TEDx Talk called Bad Blood, focused on the stigmas surrounding periods.

Today I’m speaking to Candice about her second co-authored book, Flow: The Book about menstruation, out this May from Kwela. Flow covers everything you need to know about menstruating from the physical to the psychological to the political. It’s a guide that every household and school should have on their shelves so we can all be more period positive.

In Flow, Candice says:

“Having a period positive world simply means that we have individuals who do not feel afraid to talk about something that is a part of them.”

Today on the podcast I’m speaking to Belinda Mountain.

Belinda studied a business Science degree but found that her love of words led her straight into working in the world of book publishing as a graduate, and then she spent around eight years working in publishing in both the UK and South Africa.

In 2010, Belinda had a daughter, in the same year that her mother died from a brain tumour - and soon after those life changing events, she quit her job and started her own content agency with her business partner Catherine Black, called Black Mountain (which they still run today).

The story she submitted to 'Living While Feminist' was her first piece of writing published in a book but she has been published extensively in print and online in publications such as Sunday Times Neighbourhood, Fast Company and Entrepreneur magazine. In 2020 her short story was shortlisted in the Arts24/Corona Fiction competition, which has renewed her interest in writing short stories. The lockdown has reinspired her poetry too.

Belinda’s piece in Living While Feminist is called The Most Beautiful Boy the World Has Ever Seen. In it Belinda says

“My short hair becomes a message to the world. I feel people’s judgment, men and women’s in small barbs thrown my way. They are smooth things with a jagged edge, said out of their own discomfort.”

Her piece focuses on a short haircut, misgendering, and motherhood and these are just some of the things we touch on in the interview.

Today on the podcast I’m talking with Gugulethu Mhlungu. As a writer, broadcaster and editor, Gugu is a respected voice in South Africa’s media space. In her role as contributing editor for Global Citizen she’s helping to advance the organisation’s vision of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and as editor-in-chief of Careers magazine she’s driving the narrative around young people’s welfare.

Gugu is a media maverick, working in print, radio and on television. In April 2015 she was identified by Marie Claire as one of the women to watch – in recognition of her use of various media platforms to nudge south African discourse towards substantive and thorough journalism – something that in this world of fake news we really need. She has a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Media Studies and Anthropology from Rhodes University and a post-graduate diploma in media management.

Gugu is also a writer. Her personal accolades include a National Arts Festival / Business Art SA silver award for feature writing and a Media24 Legends columnist of the year. She was a contributor to Ferial Haffajee’s collection What if there were no whites in South Africa and I was very excited and lucky to publish her essay, Feminism Changed My Life in the Feminism Is collection. In that essay she says:

I love the idea of the shattering of the glass ceiling being the sum of all the women who have tried, and not just the women who finally break through it. It’s a beautiful image of what it takes for things to change, and makes us think of other women’s access as an inheritance that’s passed down from one group to another. It’s the perfect image for my own life.

Luckily Gugu’s interest in ceiling shatterers now benefits us all with the publication of her book You Have Struck A Rock: Women Fighting for their Power in South Africa, which came out this year from Kwela. The book chronicles the very many areas of progress that women in South Africa have led and helped to achieved, and also reminds us of the many more steps we need to reach full equality.

So today I talk to Gugu about women’s power, the importance of acknowledging those on whose shoulders we stand, and what she sees as important ceilings that still need to be shattered.

Welcome back to Season 4 of Living While Feminist! Thank you for tuning in. Don't forget to rate, review, subscribe and share!

Today on the podcast I’m talking with feminist literary scholar and award-winning author, Dr Barbara Boswell. Barbara is the Head of the English Department at the University of Cape Town. She has taught gender studies and African women’s literature at the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in the USA, as well as the University of Cape Town and the University of the Western Cape.

She earned a PhD from the Department of Women’s Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she studied as a Fulbright Scholar. Her MPhil was completed at the Women’s and Gender Studies Programme at the University of the Western Cape.

Barbara is the author of the award-winning Grace, a novel that was published by Modjadji Books in 2017 and won the University of Johannesburg Debut Creative Writing Prize in 2018. It was published in the United States in 2019 as Unmaking Grace. Grace has been deservedly praised by many, including the Kirkus Review, which called it “a smart, compassionate portrayal of one woman’s quest to end the cycle of violence.”

Barbara’s writing and academic activism espouses her belief in writing as a feminist and spiritual practice, and as a practice that can heal trauma and build connections. Her research interests include postcolonial African literature, feminism, and post coloniality, queer theory, black feminist thought, and intersectional feminist theory, and she has published multiple academic works and papers on these topics.

In 2020, Barbara published And Wrote My Story Anyway: Black South African Women’s Novel’s as Feminism (published by Wits University Press). The collection archives the work of several women writers, exploring their writing as a source and site of feminist theory. This year she also published an essay in Surfacing, a collection edited by fellow feminist literary scholars Desiree Lewis and Gabeba Baderoon.

In an interview with Catalyst Press about her novel, Grace, Barbara says:

“I see myself as a literary activist, an arts activist using my work to create change and a more socially just world for women and other marginalized communities.”

So today I’m going to be talking to Barbara about feminism, the responsibilities and rights of feminist writers, and the power of telling stories to change our future, and our understanding of the past.

What you can expect in Season 4 and some exciting news!

Every episode I've asked feminists to recommend books that have inspired their feminism. Now you can listen to all of those recommendations in one go, and make your winter reading order from your local book store. 

Today on the podcast I’m talking with Ananda Morris Paver.

Ananda is an editor in the edutech industry, where her role focuses on pedagogical quality and development.

She holds an MA in English and American Literature from the University of Kent with research interests spanning representations of gender and the body in popular culture, specifically in horror and fantasy narratives of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

She was the lead editor on the 4th volume of the Litterae Mentis journal and continues to write autobiographical and critical essays on a freelance basis.

Ananda’s piece in Living While Feminist is called Feminism Is the Pits, and details her experience of having her hairy underarms become a site of political discussion. In her piece she says of this experience:

"It was one of a million little manipulative moments which make up the negotiations between men and women. Each one forcing us to write and rewrite this ancient oath that everything we do is for them and not for ourselves. It felt unfair that my natural state had become a teaching moment, and yet I’d be damned if I didn’t at least try to make it clear that he was seeing the cause rather than a symptom of my feminism."

So today I talk with Ananda about body hair, and when it’s a good time to have a feminist debate.

Today on the podcast I’m speaking with Michelle Edwards.

Michelle is a writer and the editor-in-chief of the PR and Content Marketing team at Showmax.

She graduated with a Bachelor of Journalism in 2005. After that she began her journeys around the world, living in Taiwan, the UK, South Africa and Zambia.

Writing has always been a part of Michelle’s life and career. She has worked at an indie bookseller, authored a textbook on Human and Social development, worked in the media industry as a sub-editor, and gone freelance.

She has taken short story writing courses through the London school of Journalism, and two masterclasses in creative writing with Claire Strombeck and Mike Nicol.

These courses have certainly borne fruit. In 2021, Michelle published her first novel Go Away Birds, which was long-listed for the Dinaane Debut Fiction award in 2018. When she's not working in marketing or writing her second novel (very, very slowly), Michelle spends her time boating with her children, trying to train her boisterous puppy, reading feminist romantic fiction and doing New York Times crossword puzzles.

Michelle’s essay in Living While Feminist is called the Litany, which is a memoir piece detailing moments in time of crossing paths with the patriarchy and the way it can strip you of your voice and at times your sense of self. Today I’m also going to be talking with Michelle about her first novel, Go Away Birds.