In this episode, columnist and writer Suzanne Moore discusses female desire, the prescriptive nature of gender today and the way in which we are required to submit to ideology that goes against materialist analyses and reality—to include the materiality of the female body. Moore situates the current ideological trend that requires the subject to abandon reason within the larger and theoretical landscape of Prince, Foucault, Freud, and Riviere while vituperating an ideology that was born from theories entirely unhinged from Marxism and historical materialism. Querying Butler’s work on gender, Moore asks, “If gender is a performance, why are we compelled to keep repeating that performance?” Moore also elaborates her departure from The Guardian noting that many writers on the left are finding their journalistic “homes” in more conservative publications due to the ideological drive within the left. Offering glimpses of hope for the future, Moore notes how academia has been recycling the same theorists for decades as it is currently stuck within a discursive aporia while proposing that good journalism venture into difficult places and subjects.

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