Nora Loreto uses humour and critical debate to confront the neoliberal politics of fauxminism

Nora Loreto is an author and political organizer, and a vital voice in podcasting within Canadian politics especially. Sandy and Nora Talk Politics (https://sandyandnora.com/) features conversations with co-host Sandy Hudson on a broad cross-section of contemporary issues. She tells me, in this interview, that the podcast started by recording her conversations with Sandy -- as a consequence of their authentically friendly delivery, the podcast boasts a wildly diverse audience in this sprawling and diffuse country. We discuss the podcast’s unique sense of humour and when that sense of humour comes in handy as a means of dealing with really hard subjects, but also how that approach can sometimes alienate audiences that seem to assume that using the language of humour to express anger, to fight grief, to cope with the anxieties of the contemporary moment, is an inappropriate mode of communication. Nora says that she still plans to defiantly use humour because it’s a source of the joy that enjoins us to keep going. Last October she released a book with Fernwood Publishing called Take Back the Fight: Organizing Feminism for the Digital Age (https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/take-back-the-fight). She talks about the book here as a kind of guide to adopting a productive position of feminist self-scrutiny at a time when, she argues, feminist politics needs to be reimagined as a means of meeting the overwhelming threats to collective flourishing that we, to varying degrees, face in the current moment. Feminism should become, again, more threatening, more of a direct confrontation with the current organization of society, in part by focusing on who materially possesses power and how to undermine it. I value the ways that her book engages with the question of leadership, in particular. She talks about how no single leader can correct what she terms political “atrophy,” that our faith in this privatized notion of leadership is a symptom of an atmosphere in which revolutionary struggles are seen as a thing of the past, a vestige of a less professional or less practical time. Against this, she proposes that we need the spaces, on the left, to practice collective accountability, to learn how to bring people together, how to wield the power of mass communication and how to communicate collective demands to the public in ways that might produce the conditions for practical change. What we do not need, she makes clear, are the virtual platforms we’ve become woefully dependent upon, where we’re connected but apart, where we’re inclined toward competitive individualism and knee-jerk hostility, where learning from the other and discovering the capacity to change one’s mind is a struggle. These private spaces of digital belonging should be contested too, from her perspective, and contested from the position of what we can learn from political struggles of the past.