Pulling The Thread with Elise Loehnen

“There's a fantasy in argument, in Lean In, or Girlboss style corporate feminism that says, once you have women in charge of your company, then your company is feminist, right. Your capitalist reforms can start and end with who has the corner offices. Right. Who's populating the executive suite. And so that's not even reforming capitalism, that's just trying to save it.”So says Kyla Schuller, Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Faculty Director of the Women’s Global Health Leadership Certificate Program at Rutgers University. Today we dive into her heady new book, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism, which takes on the numerous ways in which feminism, so narrowly framed around the issues of white women, has in turn marginalized the experiences of women of color for hundreds of years. And the title has double-meaning: Because even though white feminism has been problematic, it’s also painted white women into a corner, left wondering how we got here.There have always been multiple kinds of feminism, Schuller says, a self-serving version dominated by white women, and an intersectional version dominated by women of color. White feminism, the mainstream feminist ideology, positions women as a redeemers, a salvific force whose mere presence in positions of power is enough to redeem that same power entirely. In sharp contrast, Schuller notes, intersectional feminism is an account of power, a place to interrogate the ways in which gender, sexuality, race, ability, and climate precarity coalesce to shape our lives. Only when we acknowledge these multiple, simultaneous identities, and come together across identity and power positions, will we form a strong enough political bloc to make enduring structural change. Episode Highlights Against the white woman as a civilizing force…(7:14) Harriet Beecher Stowe/Harriet Jacobs…(12:44) Alice Fletcher/Zitkala-sa…(27:07) Margaret Sanger, a eugenic feminist…(40:02) Betty Friedan/Pauli Murray…(49:28) Mainstream feminism and the optimization of women…(52:28) More from Kyla Schuller  Kyla Schuller’s WebsiteBuy her new book, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of FeminismRead her first book, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth CenturyFollow Kyla on Twitter Dig DeeperIncidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Harriet JacobsAmerican Indian Stories - Zitkala-saWriting by Pauli MurrayEloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower - Brittney CooperIntersectionality - Brittney Cooper, The Oxford Handbook of Feminist TheoryThe Nap Ministry - Rest is Resistance  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jamie Wheal is the founder of the Flow Genome Project, a organization dedicated to the research and training of human performance, and most notably, he’s the author of Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World That’s Lost its Mind. In his fascinating book, Wheal explores the perplexing intersection at which we find ourselves, each of us torn between the desire to save the world or to savor the world. “We as a generational cohort are coming of age where we simultaneously have more awareness of life...and at the same time understand our existential precariousness,” he says, “How on earth do we hold all this at the same time?” Our wide ranging discussion takes on the heady topics of healing, believing, and belonging and ends with Wheal sharing with us his ‘ten suggestions', a list of countermeasures to the fundamentalism, nihilism, and despair that threaten to swallow us whole. Episode Highlights To save the world or to savor the world…3:09 Nihilism, suspicion and our meaning crisis…6:48 Reclaiming our authority, healthy tribalism, and the ten suggestions…30:40 More from Jamie WhealRecapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World That's Lost Its MindStealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and WorkJamie's Flow Genome Project - The Official Source for Peak Performance and CultureFollow Jamie on InstagramDig DeeperThe Dark Triad traits predict authoritarian political correctness and alt-right attitudes - Moss, O'Connor - Queensland University of Technology Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“Do you want to continue to live out the patterns of your childhood? Or do you want to make different choices? Are you programmed or are you self-determining?” So says Loretta Ross, Professor at Smith College in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender, a founder of reproductive justice theory, and an expert on feminism, racism, and human rights. Loretta has co-written three books on reproductive justice and is the author of the forthcoming book, Calling In the Calling Out Culture. Loretta has been a leader in the human rights movement for decades—she worked with Reverend C.T. Vivian, one of Martin Luther King’s right hands, to rehabilitate former members of hate groups. As a rape and incest survivor herself, she taught Black feminism to incarcerated rapists. She has learned, throughout her career, to lift the hood on peoples’ lived experiences—the identity they project to the world—and determine, through courageous conversation, where their humanity lies, and where their values overlap. She believes with a certain fierceness that we have far more in common with each other—across the entire political spectrum—than not. In recent years, she has become a vocal opponent of cancel culture—ironically, people have attempted to cancel her for this—because, as she explains, she’s interested in being part of a movement and not a cult. She believes that political purity and the policing of other allies is...the opposite of helpful. And that in the process of building coalitions for sweeping social change and evolution, we alienate and lose people who would otherwise want the very same things as us.Today, she gives us a crash course in the practice of calling in - an alternative to calling out, or publicly shaming those whose behavior or beliefs we deem unacceptable. In a culture devoid of empathy and grace, Ross implores us to offer people a chance to change, to give them the opportunity to be as good on the outside as they think they are on the inside. For Ross, recognizing that how we do the work is just as important as the work we do, gives us the incredible opportunity to bring more people in, building the power base of the social justice movement. When we choose to use calling in practices, she says, we choose them because of who we are, not because of who the other person is, and when we affirm the humanity of others, we affirm our own humanity in turn. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS Identifying your circles of influence…(8:31) The Uncle Frank strategy…(21:14)  Programming vs. self-determining…(27:29) Guidelines for the creation of a calling-in environment…(42:15) MORE FROM LORETTA ROSSLoretta Ross’ WebsitePreorder her book, Calling in the Calling Out Culture, by joining her mailing listTake the online course: Calling In the Calling Out Culture in the Age of TrumpFollow Loretta on Twitter READ HER WORKUndivided Rights: Women of Color Organizing for Reproductive JusticeReproductive Justice: an IntroductionRadical Reproductive Justice: Foundations, Theory, Practice, CritiqueReproductive Justice as Intersectional Feminist Activism DIG DEEPERI’m a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture Is Toxic. - Loretta Ross, NYT Op-Ed, August 2019Speaking Up Without Tearing Down - Loretta Ross, Spring 2019What if Instead of Calling People Out, We Called Them In? - Jessica Bennett, NY Times, November 2020Up From Hatred - Michael D'Antonio, LA Times, August 1997 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“Humanity is messy, each of us starts with ourselves, it's horribly messy and then multiply that times millions. And that's an incredible, lovely mess.” So says Joy Harjo, the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, and the first Native American to hold that post. She is the author of nine books of poetry, several plays, and childrens books, and two memoirs—and is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee nation, with an innumerable number of prizes and fellowships at her back. Today, we sit down to discuss her second memoir, POET WARRIOR, which just came out. It is beautiful—not only the story of her life, but a vehicle for deep wisdom about language, metaphor, and ritual. We—as individuals, as communities, as nations, and as humankind—exist in a collective story field, Harjo tells us. Everyone’s story must have a place, a thread within the larger tapestry—and our story field must constantly shift to include even the most difficult stories, the ones we want to forget and repress. But, as she remarks, the hard stories provide the building blocks for our house of knowledge—we cannot evolve without them.To move forward, we must find ourselves in the messy story of humanity, assume our place as part of the earth in this time and in these challenges. For Harjo, it is when we turn to song, poetry, and the arts that we are able to re-root ourselves in the voice of inner truth, a knowing that has access to stories past, present, and future. And it is this wisdom of eternal knowledge that will help guide us forward—if we only stop to listen. Joy is also the winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the PEN USA Literary Award for Nonfiction, the Jackson Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Harjo is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Rasmuson United States Artist Fellowship. She is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Board of Directors Chair of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation, and holds a Tulsa Artist Fellowship. In 2014 she was inducted into the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame. EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS Finding ourselves in the messy story of humanity…(6:33) Returning to rituals of becoming…(36:14)  The story of mothers…(42:59) MORE FROM JOY HARJOJoy Harjo's WebsitePoet Warrior: A MemoirMore Books by Joy HarjoUpcoming Live EventsFollow Joy on Twitter and on Instagram Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

45-minute conversations and investigations with today's leading thinkers, authors, experts, doctors, healers, scientists about life's biggest questions: Why do we do what we do? How can we come to know and love ourselves better? How can we come together to heal and build a better world? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.