The Intellectual

Podcast: Emancipations Podcast (LS 40 · TOP 1.5% what is this?)
Episode: Understanding Class Politics: Bourdieu with Marx feat. Lisa Mckenzie
Pub date: 2023-09-23

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What are the best theoretical frameworks for understanding class politics? Marx offers an understanding of class as tied to relations of productive labor and property ownership in capitalist society. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu offers an understanding of class which goes beyond Marx in many ways, offering a richer and more varied idea of class as a cultural formation that generates a field of power. Can Marx and Bourdieu be reconciled? Can they be combined? We are joined by sociologist Lisa Mckenzie to discuss the best ways to theorize class, the working class, class politics and more.

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Podcast: RA Exchange (LS 45 · TOP 1% what is this?)
Episode: EX.679 McKenzie Wark
Pub date: 2023-09-21

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"There are books about techno and rave, but let's fill in the blanks." The scholar and activist talks about her book Raving, bringing club culture into academia and more.McKenzie Wark, professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the New School, is a scholar and raver who has written extensively about the world of dance music and its surrounding subculture. Most recently, Wark penned Raving, a first-person account of her experiences in the Brooklyn queer and trans rave scene. Wark's writing is a unique blend of memoir and literary criticism, and Raving takes readers straight into the heart of undisclosed locations around New York nightlife. Raving to techno is an art and a technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept, she writes—but it's also for anyone who lets the beat seduce them.In her conversation with the Brooklyn-based DJ Alyce Currier, AKA Lychee, Wark talks about how the book came to be. She explains how entire chapters of the book wrote themselves out in her head, and how she carefully chose 26 characters—all of which have a letter as a name—to represent the friends and acquaintances of hers from the world of queer nightlife. Her own relationship with raving started when she was still living in Australia. At the time, she says, she hadn't yet transitioned and was experiencing an ambient sense of gender dysphoria that only dancing and nightlife could placate. She didn't actually transition until she was in her late 50s, in 2017. "After I went on hormones, I couldn't write," she says. "But the pressure [to write Raving] was enabling, and I found my voice in this book."Wark and Currier also talk about what it means to bring club culture into academia, working with fellow rave scholar madison moore and how parties can serve the communities they're designed to cater to instead of exacerbating existing social structures that already exist. Listen to the episode in full.

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Podcast: New Books in Genocide Studies (LS 36 · TOP 2.5% what is this?)
Episode: Valerie Hébert ed., "Framing the Holocaust: Photographs of a Mass Shooting in Latvia, 1941" (U Wisconsin Press, 2023)
Pub date: 2023-09-07

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Framing the Holocaust: Photographs of a Mass Shooting in Latvia, 1941 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023), edited by Valerie Hébert, compiles essays on the meaning of twelve photographs of a terrible atrocity. In December 1941, German police and their local collaborators shot 2,749 Jews at the beach in Sķēde, near Liepāja, Latvia. Twelve photographs were taken at the scene. These now-infamous images show people in extreme distress, sometimes without clothing. Some capture the very moments when women and children confronted their imminent deaths, while others show their dead bodies. They are nearly unbearable to look at -- so why should we? 

Framing the Holocaust offers a multidimensional response to this question. While photographs are central to our memory of modern historical events, they often inhabit an ambivalent intellectual space. What separates the sincere desire to understand from voyeuristic curiosity? Comprehending atrocity photographs requires viewers to place themselves in the very positions of the perpetrators who took the images. When we engage with these photographs, do we risk replicating the original violence? In this tightly organized book, scholars of history, photography, language, gender, photojournalism, and pedagogy examine the images of the Sķēde atrocity along with other difficult images, giving historical, political, and ethical depth to the acts of looking and interpreting. With a foreword by Edward Anders, who narrowly escaped the December 1941 shooting, Framing the Holocaust represents an original approach to an iconic series of Holocaust photographs. This book contributes to compelling debates in the emerging field of visual history, including the challenges and responsibilities of using photographs to teach about atrocity.

Link Mentioned in the Episode: Digitized Mizrakh Yidisher Historisher Arkhiv archive (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

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Podcast: HistoryExtra podcast (LS 70 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Women who shaped the Roman empire
Pub date: 2023-09-07

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How do you surface the stories of women in the Roman empire, when the majority of ancient texts were written by men, telling of military victories and losses, or intrigues in the political arena? Speaking to Elinor Evans, Emma Southon chronicles the Roman empire through the stories of women whose experiences illuminate war, empire and political machinations, taking readers from the foundational myth of Rome to a ‘leisure centre’ in ancient Pompeii.

(Ad) Emma Southon is the author of A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women (Oneworld, 2023). Buy it now from Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/History-Roman-Empire-21-Women/dp/0861542304/?tag=bbchistory045-21&ascsubtag=historyextra-social-histboty

The HistoryExtra podcast is produced by the team behind BBC History Magazine and BBC History Revealed.

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Podcast: New Books in Public Policy (LS 34 · TOP 5% what is this?)
Episode: Gerald O'Brien, "Eugenics, Genetics, and Disability in Historical and Contemporary Perspective: Implications for the Social Work Profession" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Pub date: 2023-09-05

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Gerald O'Brien's book Eugenics, Genetics, and Disability in Historical and Contemporary Perspective: Implications for the Social Work Profession (Oxford UP, 2023) focuses on the conceptual relationship between the American eugenic movement of the early 1900s and contemporary genetic research, policy and practices, and their relevance for social work and related professions. While the expansion of pre-natal testing and other genetic innovations are often couched as a form of "new eugenics," this description is only partially correct. This book provides the first in-depth exploration of the relationship between the emerging social work profession and the eugenic movement during the first quarter of the twentieth century and considers the historical importance of this for the profession today.

Social workers played a particularly important role in the movement of eugenic policies from targeting persons with disabilities to limiting procreation among "welfare" recipients, especially minority women. As the profession attempts to come to terms with this problematic history, it also needs to understand the dual "faces" it displays to persons with disabilities. Often purported as supporters of such persons, social workers' continued embracement of the medical model of disabilities keeps them from being accepted by many as true allies in the fight for social justice related to disability inclusion.

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Podcast: Political Junkie Podcast
Episode: Episode 36: The Reality of Desire
Pub date: 2023-09-06

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At various points in this episode, we discuss sex and sexuality, AIDS, mental illness, and suicidal ideation. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis or thoughts of self-harm, you can dial 988. Or you can call the National Hotline for Mental Health Crises and Suicide Prevention at 1-800-273-TALK (8255.) For more information about AIDS prevention and treatment, you can go to HIV.gov or plannedparenthood.org.

In 2012, Amber Hollibaugh, then the executive director for Queers for Economic Justice, explained to radio host Laura Flanders what sex and politics had to do with each other. Desire, she argued, was a way of reflecting on the past, understanding the present, and imagining a future. The erotic and fantasies about what might be sexually possible, she explained, are essential ways to connect not just to the world around us but also to the people in it who are imagining that better future.

Hollibaugh, like other queer people born in the 1940s, inherited a conservative American culture where sex was hidden and ideally confined to heterosexual marriage. She had to fight to publicly claim her desiring identities: lesbian, femme, sex worker, erotic writer, feminist, and gay liberation activist. Like Joan Nestle, who appeared in an earlier episode, Hollibaugh went to queer bars to find other sexual outlaws, coming alive in sexual communities that formed under cover of night and operated under the uncertain safety of police and mob protection.

In the 1960s, it was still illegal in many states to sell alcohol to gay and lesbian people or for queer people to congregate. Bars constantly threatened to expose their patrons with the occasional raid that reassured the public that the police were on the job. Pornography theaters, where gay men met for sex, were subject to similar raids, and sex workers were periodically rounded up, jailed, and fined.

Similarly, obscenity laws governed what could or could not be published, sold, viewed, or exhibited. And outside the arts and the theater and film worlds, a so-called “known homosexual” had difficulty finding work and could certainly not be employed as a teacher, coach, or minister—in other words, someone who had contact with the young: queer people were all seen as potential child molesters.

Because of the sexual revolution and the gay liberation movement of the 1960s, these prejudices and laws began to fall away, allowing ordinary people to come out, get good jobs, and seek sexual pleasure openly. As importantly, decisions by the Supreme Court rendered many old laws that had confined sex and sexuality unconstitutional. These decisions, and particularly those that applied the First Amendment to sexual expression, opened the door to the erotic performances, writing, film, and art we enjoy today. Initially, some of this material was little different from the forms of gritty pornography that had previously operated in a semi-clandestine way. But many newly available books were works of literature—novels like D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) and Vladimir Nabokov’s sensational 1962 novel, Lolita. Movies like Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Taxi Driver (1976) celebrated New York’s Times Square as a neon world of sexual outlaws, hustlers, and grifters.

When it came to pornography, the Court released a gusher of films, books, and magazines. Some Americans were content to use newly available home video equipment to rent a porn tape now and then or to visit the adult theaters that sprang up in chains across the nation. But feminists like Amber Hollibaugh, anthropologist Gayle Rubin, and writer Patrick Califia took erotic expression in a new direction. They published about their embrace of power exchange sexuality and their political commitment to outlaw desires like leather, S&M, and other sex play that required training and consent.

Other women promoted an idea born in radical feminist consciousness-raising: that women could take charge of their own pleasure, even if that was ordinary, vanilla, hetero sex. In the 1970s, artist Betty Dodson began giving what she called “Bodysex” workshops, which taught women how to masturbate to orgasm, with or without a vibrator. In 1984, a former performance artist and pornographic actress named Candice Vadala (known by her stage name, Candida Royalle) founded Femme Productions, an erotic film company aimed at women and couples.

While some feminists criticized women who embraced fetishes that they associated with male violence and predatory sex, the genie was out of the bottle. In the 1990s, feminist erotic writing exploded, and academic feminists were taking pornography seriously as an area of study.  By the 21st century, a feminist pornography industry had emerged to take advantage of the internet and produce erotic films that were not only sexy but had politics—on the screen and on the set. (You can read an essay I wrote about the industry for Dissent magazine here.)

One of those feminist producers and entrepreneurs is Tristan Taormino, who was born in 1971 on Long Island and whose parents were divorced when her father came out as gay. Tristan learned to love her body early on and grew up, as she notes in this episode, without any sense of sexual shame. In 1989, she matriculated at Wesleyan University, a liberal arts college in Middletown, Connecticut (full disclosure: Tristan was my student) and where she also came out into a thriving queer community.

An award-winning writer, sex educator, and film producer, Taormino has written widely on the safe practice of anal sex and has been a popular—if occasionally controversial—lecturer on the college circuit. Today, we are here to discuss her new memoir, A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten, out this week from Duke University Press. There, she writes about being raised by an open-minded mother and a queer dad, struggling with her mental health, becoming one of the most respected sex educators in the United States, and the right-wing sexual backlash we are dealing with today.

Program notes:

* Tristan notes that when she was a child, there were few resources for gay parents like her father; later, we discuss the ways that many children lost access to an LGBT parent altogether. Listeners who want to follow up on the history of gay parenting may wish to read Daniel Rivers's Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States Since World War II (University of North Carolina Press, 2013.)

* Tristan describes a first-year orientation in college, during which students discussed living in a sexually diverse community. These workshops were called BiLeGas (Bisexual, Lesbian, and Gay Alliance) and are now called BiLeGaTAs (add transgender to the acronym!) Here is a detailed 2009 description by a Wesleyan student.

* Claire references “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner,” a 1967 movie about putting one’s social beliefs into practice. Released at the height of the civil rights movement, it is about two white liberals coming to terms with their daughter’s impending interracial marriage.

* Tristan learned when she was a young adult that she had a family history of bipolar disorder. If you want to learn more about this, try Kay Redfield Jamieson’s An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (Knopf, 1995.) She also discusses how hidden depression was in the 1990s: Listeners may wish to follow up with Gary Greenberg, Manufacturing Depression: The Secret History of a Modern Disease (Simon & Schuster, 2010.)

* Claire mentions one of Tristan’s mentors in the erotic film industry, the late Candice Vadala, a feminist erotic filmmaker whose working name was Candida Royale. You can read more about Vadala at her website, and look forward to a new biography of this artist by historian Jane Kamensky, now available for pre-order.

* A second pathbreaker who made Tristan’s career possible is therapist and pornographer Patrick Califia. You can read some of his work for Poz magazine here. Tristan mentions Califia’s Macho Sluts (Alyson Books, 1994) as a particularly inspirational text.

* Tristan also mentions the feminist erotica magazine On Our Backs, which ceased publication in 2006, and the work of feminist sex journalist Susie Bright. You can read more about Bright here.

* In a conversation about how she built her business, Tristan mentions her first website, Puckerup.com (adults-only, please.) There isn’t a lot to read about the effect of the internet on pornography that is not about addiction, but listeners may wish to check out Margret Grebowicz, Why Internet Porn Matters (Stanford University Press, 2013.)

* Tristan also discusses the influence of the Riot Grrrl movement: Check out Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (Harper Perennial, 2010)

* In a conversation about why there is so little history written about the queer 1990s, Tristan name-checks Sarah Schulman’s book about ACT-UP, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2021.)

You can download this podcast here or subscribe for free on Apple iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or Soundcloud. And if you liked this episode, please join us at Political Junkie!

If you liked this episode, try another:

* Episode 29: “To Sexual Outlaws, With Love: A conversation with the legendary lesbian writer, activist, and community herstorian Joan Nestle about her new collection of essays, `A Sturdy Yes Of A People.’"

* Episode 27: “How Gay Rights Became `Special’ Rights: A conversation with sociologist Arlene Stein about her book, `The Stranger Next Door: The Story of a Small Community's Battle over Sex, Faith, and Civil Rights; Or, How the Right Divides Us.’"

* Episode 25: “Lavender and Red: A conversation with historian Bettina Aptheker about her book `Communists in Closets: Queering the History, 1930s-1990s.’"

Political Junkie is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber—or try reading for free to decide if you like it.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit clairepotter.substack.com/subscribe

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Podcast: Converging Dialogues (LS 40 · TOP 2% what is this?)
Episode: #256 - The Rigor of Angels: A Dialogue with William Egginton
Pub date: 2023-08-28

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In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with William Egginton about the nature of reality through the work by Borges, Heisenberg, and Kant. They discuss what connects these three men, role of interpretation, and different tools to ask big questions about space, time, and reality. They also talk about the origins of reality, change, Hume’s impact on Kant’s thinking, power of theory for understanding science, existence, and many more topics.

William Egginton is an author, literary critic, and Decker Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University. His main interests are in poetry, literature, philosophy, history of science. He is the author of numerous books including his latest book, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality.

Website: https://www.williamegginton.com/

Twitter: @williamegginton

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Podcast: Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast (LS 63 · TOP 0.1% what is this?)
Episode: Romeo and Juliet in Classical Music
Pub date: 2023-08-03

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The "love theme" from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture is one of the most famous themes in the history of Western Classical Music. The story it accompanies might be the most famous Western play ever written. Just like Eine Kleine Nachtmusik seems to define the powdered wig era of classical music to the general public, the passionate theme from Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet seems to define romanticism in music because Tchaikovsky's Overture-Fantasy captures Shakespeare's masterpiece with a roiling and unstoppable intensity. But Tchaikovsky's setting of Romeo and Juliet, while probably the most famous, is by no means the only reimagining of the play by classical composers. There have been nearly a dozen adaptations of Romeo and Juliet by classical composers, including overtures, ballets, suites, and operas. Romeo and Juliet, just like it has been for actors, directors, and the audience, is an inexhaustible source for composers in a way that few pieces of literature or dramatic theatre have been in history. So today we'll compare just some of them for you - I'll be looking at Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, Prokofiev's Ballet Romeo and Juliet, Berlioz's choral symphony Romeo et Juliette, a brief look at Gounod's opera Romeo and Juliet, and Leonard Bernstein's Westside Story. We'll take a look at how these 5 composers inserted their distinctive personalities onto the music, leaving no doubt that this was Shakespeare, and Romeo and Juliet, through their eyes. I'll do this by giving a general overview of each piece, and then I'll zero in on two ideas - the portrayal of Juliet, and the portrayal of Tybalt's Death(or fighting in general). This way we can see how these composers handled these pivotal characters and moments, all in markedly different ways. Join us!

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Podcast: The Documentary Podcast (LS 67 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: Invading the past: Russia and science fiction
Pub date: 2023-08-01

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Science fiction flourished from the earliest days of the Soviet Union. A rare space to explore other realms and utopian dreams of progress. But with the Soviet Union's collapse different narratives bubbled up. Many of them reactionary, imperial, violent with one sub genre flourishing above all - Popadantsy: accidental time travel where protagonists return to World War Two or the Imperial past to set the path of Russian history on the 'right' course, Historian Catherine Merridale explores how the once visionary world of Russian science fiction shifted in the time of Vladimir Putin to become a reactionary playground.

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Podcast: Conversations in Atlantic Theory
Episode: Isaac Vincent Joslin on Afrofuturisms: Ecology, Humanity, and Francophone Cultural Expressions
Pub date: 2023-07-25

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This discussion is with Dr. Isaac Joslin who holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota in Francophone Studies. Currently Assistant Professor of Francophone Studies and Global Futures Scholar at Arizona State University, he has travelled extensively for research in Francophone Africa in Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Cameroon, Togo, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, and Burundi. His research interests include Postcolonial Francophone African literatures and cinemas, aesthetics and theories of representation, theories of cultural hybridity, ecocriticism, Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, as well as pedagogical approaches for teaching African literatures and cultures. He has published scholarly articles on African literature and culture in the International Journal of Francophone Studies, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, African Literature Today, The French Review, Critical African Studies, Nouvelles Études Francophones, Oeuvres et Critiques, and others. His first monograph from Ohio University Press (April 2023) is entitled, Afrofuturisms: Ecology, Humanity, and Francophone Cultural Expressions.

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