The Chatterbox

Chris Washington reads Jane Austen differently from how she is classically understood; rather than the doyen of the cisheteronormative marriage plot, Washington argues that Austen leverages the generic restraints of the novel and envisions a nonbinary future that traverses the two-sex model of gender that supposedly solidifies in the eighteenth century. Here, Washington discusses a politics built on plurality and possibility with Marquis Bey, Christopher Breu, and Alison Sperling. Access a transcript: https://share.transistor.fm/s/57e6a465

Chris Washington is associate professor of English at Francis Marion University. He is author of Nonbinary Jane Austen and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.

Marquis Bey is professor of black studies and gender and sexuality and critical theory at Northwestern University. Bey is author of several books including Cistem Failure, Black Trans Feminism, and The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender.

Christopher Breu is author of several books including In Defense of Sex, Insistence of the Material, Hard-Boiled Masculinities, and coeditor of Noir Affect. Breu is professor of English at Illinois State University. 

Alison Sperling is assistant professor of literature, media, and culture at Florida State University, and a visiting fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin.

REFERENCES:

Derrida’s Of Grammatology

Foucault

Trans Femme Futures / Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift

The Anthropocene Unconscious / Mark Bould; Alison Sperling review in Los Angeles Review of Books

The Matrix film

Black on Both Sides / C. Riley Snorton

Fred Moten

Judith Butler

We Are All Nonbinary (essay) / Kadji Amin

Edward Said

Histories of the Transgender Child / Jules Gill-Peterson

S. Pearl Brilmyer / “The Ontology of the Couple” issue of GLQ

A Mercy / Toni Morrison

Sojourner Truth

Nonbinary Jane Austen is available in the Forerunners series from University of Minnesota Press. An open-access edition is available at manifold.umn.edu. Thank you for listening.

The phrase “Black girl magic” has deep roots in enslaved women’s lives. Lindsey Stewart is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Memphis, and she joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the medicine that stemmed from African traditions that was often more trusted than white doctors’ advice, how this magic was passed down through generations, and how it endures today. Her book is “The Conjuring of America: Mojos, Mermaids, Medicine, and 400 Years of Black Women’s Magic.”

Gender Violence in Late Antiquity confronts the violent ideological frameworks underpinning the early Christian imagination, arguing that gender-based violence is not peripheral but is fundamental to understanding early Christian history. By analyzing hagiographical and doctrinal writings, Jennifer Barry reveals how male authors used portrayals of feminized suffering to shape ideals of sanctity and power, exploiting themes of domestic abuse, martyrdom, and sexualized violence to reinforce their visions of piety. The study first traces the roots of gendered violence within the Greco-Roman and early Christian imagination, and then explores the disturbing role of male fantasies and dreams in hagiographical traditions. Barry draws on womanist scholarship and engages with trauma studies and feminist horror theory in order to challenge traditional readings of Christian texts, offering new perspectives for understanding how narratives of violence continue to shape contemporary interpretations of gender and power.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Jennifer Barry is Associate Professor of Religious at the University of Mary Washington. She is author of Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity and an expert on late ancient studies, early Christianity, later Roman antiquity, and gender studies.

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studie at UMass Boston

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Keith Melton is a historian who’s been an advisor to the US Intelligence Community for decades. An avid collector and board member at The International Spy Museum, Keith has donated thousands of artifacts, and one of the most historically important is the axe used to assassinate Leon Trotsky. Keith found the weapon after decades of searching. In 2007,  he spoke with Peter Earnest, the founding executive director of the International Spy Museum, about Trotsky’s assassination and tracking down the  weapon used for the job.

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"This show is brought to you from Goat Rodeo, Airwave, and the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC."

Episode 67 of The Critical Social Worker: A Revolutionary Storytelling

PodcastGuest: Tiokasin Ghosthorse (Cheyenne River Lakota Nation)

Tiokasin Ghosthorse is an educator, musician, and founder of First Voices Radio. For more than three decades he has carried Indigenous voices into global conversations about Earth, culture, and healing. In this dialogue, Tiokasin and Professor Ace explore how language, disconnection, and modernity shape our lives — and what it means to return to intuition, kinship, and the living presence of Earth.

🌍 What You’ll Hear in This Episode

How substance abuse reflects deeper disconnection from culture and community

Why Indigenous languages carry wisdom English often forgets

The role of listening circles in restoring true communicationIntuition and heart knowledge as guides in a fractured world

Living in relationship with Earth, not in domination over it

🗝️ Key Takeaways

Healing begins with reconnection to culture, land, and community

Language shapes our reality — Indigenous languages offer different ways of being

Modernity often deepens disconnection, but Earth remains teacher

Listening differently opens pathways to self-discovery and collective healing

📖 Chapters

00:00 Intro to episode

01:20 Introduction to Indigenous Perspectives

10:06 The Role of Language in Connection

19:45 Understanding Disconnection and Reconnection

30:07 The Impact of Modernity on Indigenous Wisdom

51:17 The Importance of Listening Circles

52:37 Rediscovering True Communication

55:24 Cultural Identity and Historical Context

58:56 Nature and Spirituality: A Deep Connection

01:01:35 The Process of Self-Discovery

01:04:04 Decolonizing Language and Thought

01:07:36 The Role of Indigenous Knowledge

01:10:41 Understanding Relationships and Inclusion

01:13:36 Healing Through Present Awareness

01:16:15 Reflections on Language and Identity

01:21:51 Living in Harmony with Earth

01:25:34 Listening to Nature’s Wisdom

01:32:38 The Essence of Being vs. Doing

🔗 Connect with Tiokasin Ghosthorse

🌐 Website: akantuinstitute.org

🎙️ First Voices Radio: firstvoicesindigenousradio.org

📢 Patreon: patreon.com/Ghosthorse

💡 Support Revolutionary Social Work

For more information or to connect: [email protected]

🌐 revolutionarysocialwork.com

© UAF Social Work

After the founding of the American Republic, African-American Intellectuals never accepted passively the narratives of racial difference maintained by the defenders of slavery and segregation. At a time when the belief in human equality was under attack from religious reactionaries and scientific innovators alike, Black thinkers succeeded in vindicating the unity of the human community as a divinely created whole, in constructing their own science of the races in opposition to white theories of human inequality, and eventually in brining about the demise of the idea of race as a legitimate object of scientific inquiry.

Join Mia Bay, one of the most penetrating authors writing on American history today, as she leads us along the twisted paths which ideas of race have taken since the nineteenth century, pointing along the way to the place of Thomas Jefferson in Black American thought and the work of the great anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells. 

Featuring Alberto Toscano and Stuart Schrader on Trump’s intensification of police, ICE, and military repression. What does this all reveal about MAGA’s fascist and authoritarian project—and about the illiberalism already immanent in the US carceral and imperialist state? The SECOND in a two-part series.

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Hannah Proctor, author of Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat, returns to the podcast to talk through questions and comments submitted by listeners for the first episode of the Anti-Self-Helpline. The Anti-Self-Helpline is a new episode format where listeners write in with their experiences of political struggle so we can take seriously the psychic and emotional content of political experiences.

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Hannah Proctor is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, interested in histories and theories of radical psychiatry. She is a member of the editorial collective behind Radical Philosophy, and has been published in Jacobin, Tribune, The New Inquiry and elsewhere.Hannah Proctor is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, interested in histories and theories of radical psychiatry. She is a member of the editorial collective behind Radical Philosophy, and has been published in Jacobin, Tribune, The New Inquiry and elsewhere. Her first book Burnout published with Verso Books in 2024. 

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Soundtrack by Mark Pilkington

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It has become habitual to think of our relationship with energy as one of transition: with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear and then at some future point all replaced by green sources. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s devastating but unnervingly entertaining book shows what an extraordinary delusion this is. Far from the industrial era passing through a series of transformations, each new phase has in practice remained almost wholly entangled with the previous one. Indeed the very idea of transition turns out to be untrue.

The author shares the same acute anxiety about the need for a green transition as the rest of us, but shows how, disastrously, our industrial history has in fact been based on symbiosis, with each major energy source feeding off the others. Using a fascinating array of examples, Fressoz describes how we have gorged on all forms of energy – with whole forests needed to prop up coal mines, coal remaining central to the creation of innumerable new products and oil still central to our lives. The world now burns more wood and coal than ever before.

This book reveals an uncomfortable truth: ‘transition’ was originally itself promoted by energy companies, not as a genuine plan, but as a means to put off any meaningful change. More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (Harper, 2025) forces its readers to understand the modern world in all its voracious reality, and the true nature of the challenges heading our way.

Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian at the CNRS and the EHESS. He works on the history of the contemporary environmental crisis. He is currently working on the history of energy and material symbioses in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF).

Book Recomendations:

1. The Shock Of The Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 by David Edgerton
2. Fin du monde et petits fours by Édouard Morena
3. Accumuler du béton, tracer des routes

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