The Power of Clothes

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

I remember this terrible, terrible moment when I was in the sixth form and I was a school prefect. People don't know what to say to you if you start talking about platonic love between men and women. It's actually making a lot of the same statements. And sometimes clothes are making a statement and sometimes they're monologuing. Sometimes they're not and they're not meant to.

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May.

This week Katherine chats to writer Joanne Limburg about the ways that we can find connection in the experience of outsidership.

While writing her astonishing new book, Letters To My Weird Sisters, Joanne sought out women from the past who were marked out as ‘weird’, from Virginia Woolf, who was unable to choose the ‘right’ ballgown, to Katharina Kepler, who was put on trial for witchcraft. Drawing on her Jewish heritage, Joanne urges us all to assert the humanity of those who seem unfathomably different to us - the physically and intellectually disabled people who were considered to be ‘life unworthy of life’ in the Holocaust.

There is so much hope in Joanne’s project to own and cherish her own ‘weirdness’, and to find a kind of sisterhood there, stretching across time. Many listeners will find their community here, too.

JOANNE LINKS

Online

Twitter

Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

KATHERINE LINKS

Shop all books from The Wintering Sessions

The Wintering Sessions

Katherine's writing class