Pretty Heady Stuff

Tey Meadow is an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University. While her research covers a lot of topics, the work she’s created that has had the biggest impact on me is her writing on the emergence of the transgender child as a social category, and the creation and maintaining of gender classifications in law and medicine. The book that we focus on here is the one she put out through University of California Press in 2018: Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century (https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520275041/trans-kids). This book is teeming with insights on how we acquire a gendered sense of ourselves, the powerful constraints placed on that process, and how those constraints are both generative and restrictive. We talk about the overarching concerns of Meadow’s work and the curiosities that motivate it, but we also work through the claims of Emily Bazelon’s controversial article in the New York Times from June of this year, “The Battle Over Gender Therapy.” Meadow explains that the way Bazelon gives “equal footing” to those that problematize gender-related care is actually very misleading, because we’ve luckily reached a point, after a history of struggle for legitimacy from groups advocating for transgender rights, where it’s no longer assumed, professionally or politically, that avoiding being trans is somehow “the best outcome.” There is, now, what Meadow describes as a “massive consensus” which says that “affirming and facilitating gender nonconformity in children leads to better psychological, social, educational, physical outcomes for those children.” What also clearly matters is who is speaking, and who isn’t. Because of the power of gender norms, and the compulsion to protect kids from harm, many parent organizations that advocate for trans identities, but are not led by transgender adults, often make it their goal to produce or to promote “the most normative non-normative kids.” The effect, in some ways, is to “create a version of transness without trauma,” and one that doesn’t necessarily learn from what Meadow calls the “incredible wisdom gleaned from decades of navigating cisgender culture.”

Al Val is a comedian, actor, writer and musician who has appeared on programs for CBC, MTV, and YTV. She’s also headlined standup comedy shows all over North America. A graduate of Second City’s Conservatory Program, Val also performed with improv troupe “Starwipe” for 8 years. Val is set to co-headline Just for Laughs Toronto with Allie Pearse in the Fall, has just finished filming a reality show for OutTV, and has been performing non-stop during Pride. Val combined coming out as transgender during the pandemic with her sudden emergence as a force in Canadian comedy. She spoke with me about how, as a comedic performer, one of the first things she is driven to address is the legibility of her gender nonconforming identity. She does this with a terrific sense of timing, and also through her great command of physicality—a thing that not all stand-up comedians have. We also talked about the sense of responsibility she has to bring joy through humour; this is, of course, common among comics, but perhaps not as common as we might think. Her goal is not only to “break the tension,” but to also remind audience that they don’t need to decide what is “morally okay to laugh at,” and that there is no need for “pity” or “coddling”—affective states that are antithetical to a good comedy show and certainly not conducive to recognizing transgender as a legitimate social identity. It was really interesting to get a sense, from Al, of how the industry of comedy works in Canada. It’s a competitive market, and one where comedians don’t really receive much or any support. For this reason, she says she’s had to build a career mostly on her own. Working independently means that, as she puts it, “your attention is being pulled in so many different directions.” There can and should be more support for the art of stand-up comedy in Canada, and so we address the kinds of organizing and lobbying that’s happening around this issue, which has only been exacerbated by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The conversation really zeroes in on the question of how comedy works, and the place of vulnerability and authenticity in it. This is especially relevant to Al Val’s brand of comedy. Comedy is, from her perspective, easier when it's “honest,” and this is in spite of the fact that there’s a degree to which, when you perform, you’re always “submitting yourself to judgment” as an entertainer. That relationship between humour and truth is maybe an especially salient feature of today’s comedy, when you think about the ways that it’s emerged as a confessional, intimate, immediate art form in the last 5 years. The way Al puts it, it’s about “packaging” both “trauma and insight into joke form” to both “disguise” it and inspire people to “think and reflect” on a “thesis” for a while. A central part of her comedy right now is working through the question of “what constitutes gender.” In the words of Tey Meadow, “Gender subjectivity is tender ground. It shifts beneath our feet, eludes easy capture, and impinges on emotional nerves. Sometimes we find ourselves seeking recognition in the most unlikely places. Even when handled with care, it is treacherous territory.” We’re seeing this throughout society right now, as greater support for transgendered folks is also provoking a regressive, conservative backlash against gender nonconformity. I found it really striking that, for Val, the focus is on making sure that, with positive trans representation, we make transphobic jokes and rearguard politics “a relic of the past.” She says she just has a “nonchalant, indifferent blind trust” that we will look back in ten years and know that the backlash was the last gasp of a hostile, uncaring attitude that has no place in society.

Gernot Wagner is a climate economist at Columbia Business School. His research, writing, and teaching focus on climate risks and climate policy. Gernot writes a monthly column for Project Syndicate and has written several books, including: Geoengineering: the Gamble, But will the planet notice?, Climate Shock, which he co-authored with Martin Weitzman, and City, Country, Climate published in German. Since he’s well-versed in environmental science, public policy, and economics, I wanted to ask him some questions about the nature of the capitalist system we inhabit as a global order, and also some of the ways that system is reinforced, both through government policy and through social norms. While he readily concedes the fact that the system of neoliberal capitalism is fundamentally a flawed one, replete with problems, he makes it clear that he feels the fix for our situation is to work within it. The sense I get is that, from Wagner’s perspective, we have to hope it is possible to reform capitalism in part because the version of it we live in now is completely unregulated, it’s a space where, despite the obviousness of the truth of climate collapse, the average car now “looks like a tank.” It’s an iteration of capitalist overproduction in which “we are just letting things rip and not caring” about the consequences. I like his idea that the current state of affairs means that societies have, to some extent, made “a fetish out of” the market as a sensible source of social organization, when it is clearly not. But, to put it differently, the point is that another capitalism is possible. For this reason, Gernot says he really disagrees with folks like Naomi Klein, who say that right now, our moment of peril and precarity, is our “last best chance” to replace capitalism. He agrees that the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the global instability it has caused really did represent a “window of opportunity” for climate and energy policy, but we talk about how it has mainly led to a shift in defense spending, a widespread militarization which, incidentally, is going to worsen the climate crisis. I got so much out of talking with Gernot. He argues really clearly for attacking the problem of climate change by centring human desires, and more particularly social norms. He stresses that, given the overwhelming mess we are in, we are going to flip the switch not just by making rational arguments, but by combining the work of pushing for policy change with the perhaps more complicated work of rewriting the norms and cultural defaults that make ecocidal behaviour seem acceptable. As an economist, but also as an observer of the built environment, he’s really perceptive about the way that social norms function as a major determinant of climate action, to a greater extent than the level of knowledge we have.

Clayton Thomas-Müller is an organizer, public speaker and author focused on fighting for environmental and economic justice. He’s worked for more than two decades in support of grassroots movements and Indigenous peoples. He is a campaigner for 350.org, and has worked with the Indigenous Environmental Network, Black Mesa Water Coalition, Global Justice Ecology Project, and Bioneers. I had the opportunity to talk to him about his memoir Life in the City of Dirty Water, which you might have heard about as part of this year’s Canada Reads competition, or because it is an absolutely brilliant book. In caring, luminous prose, Clayton writes in the book about his growth into the climate activist and storyteller he’s become. A phrase that comes up a couple of times in the book is this idea of having a “PhD in hustle;” I asked Clayton about that way of phrasing it, and he talked about how the book is partly about showing how he’s seized multiple opportunities to acquire new knowledge, but without thinking of that knowledge as a commodity. Instead, for him, it’s about applying knowledge, not just forming theories. Applying knowledges means actually trying to do the work of building community. The title of his memoir has thrown some people off, he says. People assumed, from the title, that the book is only about what he calls his “day job” as an environmental activist and water protector. So, Thomas-Muller, as a member of the Treaty #6-based Mathias Colomb Cree Nation, also known as Pukatawagan, located in Northern Manitoba, is really making a “very specific reference” to Winnipeg with that title. The Cree and Ojibwe name for Winnipeg translates as "murky water" or "muddy water.” I asked him about some of the resonances, though, of that title—how it can open up conversations about the murky nature of political and environmental communication in our moment of catastrophic climate change. He emphasizes that the goal of his memoir is really to encourage readers’ own interpretations, to “agitate and create” and to just “make people think.” Because, as he puts it, “there is no one answer” to colonial violence and climate collapse. He says, ultimately, that it will likely take “a hybrid mix of Western science, traditional ecological knowledge and straight-up magic” to pull ourselves out of the dire and desperate mire of capitalist accumulation and fossil fueled modernity. The greed we see naturalized today, he feels, is by no means natural. It is a “sickness,” and the product of “disconnection from nature.” The alienation we feel is a thing that derives directly from this uprooting. It breeds “hyper-individualism” and “hyper-consumerism,” in his account. So he looks to unite people “on the jagged intersections of our movement goals and our social movement sectors, “to break down barriers and build up systems of accountability and transparency as we build the largest social movement in the history of humankind.”

Chanelle Gallant has participated in grassroots movements for sex workers rights and racial justice for 20 years as an organizer, writer, strategist, fundraiser and speaker. She is on the leadership team for Showing Up For Racial Justice in the US, she co-founded the Migrant Sex Workers Project and has worked with sex work organizations locally and nationally including Butterfly, Maggie’s, Desiree Alliance, and Red Canary Song. Her writing about sexuality, social justice and sex work has appeared in dozens of publications. Elene Lam is the founder and Executive Director of Butterfly (Asian and Migrant Sex Workers Support Network) and the Migrant Sex Workers Project. She has been involved in the sex work movement and migrant and labour activism for almost 20 years. She has also conducted training for community members, service providers and policymakers on sex work, migration, anti-oppressive practice and human rights in more than 20 countries. Shiri Pasternak is a researcher, writer, and organizer and a professor of Criminology at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto. She is the author of the award-winning book Grounded Authority: the Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the State, and the co-founder and former Research Director at Yellowhead Institute. Shiri notes that the book that she and two of her collaborators spoke with me about—Disarm, Defund, Dismantle: On Police Abolition in Canada—was, in part, the outcome of a gathering called The Abolition Convergence that was set to take place in Toronto in May 2020, but had to be canceled due to COVID. They had planned, she says, to use the event to build “trust and solidarity and understanding across movements.” But rather than accept the cancellation of the event as an ending, the organizers and contributors decided to reformulate the project and reroute their energies into creating the book. This is reflective of a spirit of relentlessness that characterizes the movement for police abolition here in Canada. While Pasternak suggests that abolition in Canada is regularly thought of as a “copycat movement” that follows and reacts to political trends in the US, it’s important to see the ways in which their local focus grows out of a commitment to communities and peoples who are directly impacted here by the violence of the settler colonial state. So, for people looking for direction and a means of mobilizing, Disarm, Defund, Dismantle is a book that, as Elene Lam explains, is important as a tool for organizing, and not just as a source of academic analysis. She is profoundly insightful on this point, insisting that we tend to assume that these “false binaries between theoretical, intellectual and practical work” exist, when, in fact, it is within social movements that “theory is generated.” Or, in Channelle’s words, the book highlights “frontline community defense against policing” and the “theoretical, political knowledge that comes from that work.” We talk about the manipulative way that the figure of the “average Canadian” is invoked, and how it is usually used to reinforce exclusion. Those seen as “outsiders” are more easily ousted, criminalized, punished, Lam explains, because they are seen as harming the community of “average Canadians.” She argues, that, in this context, the “anti-trafficking movement, the anti-sex work movement benefits everyone except sex workers. So, police, law enforcement, politicians become the heroes,” and more power flows to the police. What will it take to break the identification of working class people in Canada with “white owning classes”? What will it take to dismantle the basic logic of property rights by which so much containment, enclosure and capture continues? How do we grasp at the roots of oppression in Canada and elsewhere?

Jennifer Esposito is Chair of the Department of Educational Policy Studies and is a Professor of research, measurement and statistics. Her research focuses on how race, class, gender and sexuality impact experiences of education and how marginalized groups are represented in popular culture. In this conversation we mainly focus on her recent co-authored book Introduction to Intersectional Qualitative Research. She wrote the book with her frequent collaborator Venus Evans-Winters. Dr. Evans-Winters is a former Professor of Education at Illinois State University in the College of Education with faculty affiliation in Women & Gender Studies, African American Studies, and Ethnic Studies. She is also the Founder of Planet Venus and creator of the Write Like A Scholar program, and has worked with the African American Policy Forum and the SayHerName project, led by Kimberlé Crenshaw. Venus has a vast research purview, focusing on the social and cultural foundations of education, Black feminist thought, critical race theory, educational policy, and qualitative inquiry. Her books include (Re)Teaching Trayvon: Education for Racial Justice and Human Freedom and Black Feminism in Education: Black Women Speak Back, Up, and Out. Their book is a completely unique intervention on the purpose and practice of intersectional qualitative research. The book, they explain, isn’t only pedagogical, “it’s a political act of resistance.” They are trying to create the conditions for a radical rewriting of the very rules of the game of academia. From their perspective, intersectional qualitative research is an “intentional disruption” of the persistent “deficit narrative” that “keeps white supremacy alive” by presupposing that there is something wrong that must be fixed within BIPOC communities. In Venus’ terms, what would it mean to “embolden those who want to use intellectual activism as a weapon” against harm? We’ve largely been “hoodwinked" by a linear narrative that counts only certain texts and voices and styles as valid in academic study. “What happens,” Venus asks, “when we focus on joy?” On “movement struggles?” On “meaning-making?” We also zoom in on the question of how thinkers collaborate and write effectively together. It takes, they say, a certain capacity for “emotional labour” and for a more meaningful and relational kind of accountability. Learning to write together means sharing our “rituals” and sharing what we think it means to be “a contemplative researcher, an ethical researcher, a mindful researcher, a Black feminist thinker and researcher.” Questioning this insidious assumption that there is, as Jennifer puts it, “only one way of writing” or “thinking critically.” Against this, she says that she feels an intense responsibility to “help [students] rediscover their authentic authorial voice.” That responsibility to students is a central theme of this discussion. They really emphasize this idea that, under this system of neoliberalism that demands the commodification of knowledge and that teaches us there are certain knowledges that are just “worth more on the free market,” they feel like they have to be “up front” with students. What they frequently find, though, is that students already know or sense that there are certain ways of knowing that are more readily rewarded, and yet they still choose to pursue and produce knowledge that helps their communities. Dr. Esposito and Dr. Evans-Winters explain how they’ve charted a course from being young scholar-activists to the present day, where Venus has, in her words, “broken up with her oppressor,” and Jennifer feels her calling is to stay in the academy and “push against the boundaries and the borders,” to “chip away” while mentoring other folks that will help her chip away at the steep edifice of higher education, in the interest of advancing these core values of authenticity, integrity and accountability.

Murtaza Hussain is a reporter at The Intercept who focuses on national security and foreign policy (https://theintercept.com/staff/murtaza-hussain/). He has appeared on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, and other news outlets. We had a sobering conversation about the political structure of the globalized world. One of the many frank projections that Murtaza shares in this conversation is his sense that it’s fairly likely that the United States and China will be engaged in some form of military conflict within the next twenty years. And this is just one of the striking observations that he makes. There’s a deep analysis here that centres around a serious gap between the world that he wants and the world that he sees, and much of our conversation actually comes back to that gap between the moral aspirations that we might have as empathetic citizens of the world, the rights-based order we wish existed, and the “inherently conflictual” character of the world as it is. He actually expands on the ways that a tradition of political philosophy engages with the extent to which nations and polities are locked into efforts to constrain each other through force and dominance, and suggests that refusing to grasp that means that “we miss a lot” about the structure of societies. Again, he makes it clear that the world he reports on and tries to understand is not the one that he wants to exist, but I think it’s for that reason that he reports on global affairs in the honest, shrewd way that he does. I mean, in this conversation he is talking in no uncertain terms about how Ukraine’s decision to denuclearize, to not retain their nuclear weapons, meant that they had to abandon “the ultimate guarantor” of national sovereignty. Given up under global pressure and incentives—assurances that were not met—the loss of a nuclear arsenal, he feels, in part led to the situation it is currently in, where the international community has determined that the cost of deterring Russia is too high and the country cannot fully defend itself against Russian aggression. What does it mean that this terrifying power is an “insurance policy” in the contemporary world? Ignoring the reality doesn’t change it. And yet, as he points out, there are realities that can be ignored. While there’s little evidence that sanctions, for example, succeed in changing the behaviour of governments, sanctions are still imposed without any real consideration for the social impact or political effectiveness they will have. As Hussain says, they are “done without even thinking” because “no one is holding you to account” and the deaths that they produced are “indirect.” So, in terms of the United States positing itself as a “benevolent actor” by imposing sanctions or even arming Ukraine, it’s unclear whether anyone in the global community actually feels that it wipes the imperialist record of the US clean just because it currently seems to be on the right side of a military conflict. What I found so profound, too, in what Murtaza was talking about here is that he, over and over, comes back to this question of establishing a “moral baseline” in a world torn apart. He says that there is clearly a “grievous disparity between what lives are considered grievable or not,” and that what this means is that, outside of the political and epistemological boundaries of the nation-state, we need to really think seriously about what our principles are, beyond the vast imperialist power blocs. The alternative is a world where there is, to again quote him here, there is a “collective conspiracy of silence about human rights abuses… because we’re all doing it.”

Max Haiven is a writer and teacher and Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination (https://maxhaiven.com/). In this interview I talk to him about his most recent book Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, a new entry in the Vagabond series of books that Max edits for Pluto Press (https://www.plutobooks.com/pluto-series/vagabonds/). It's a series that tries to create a venue for, as he says, writing that engages with contemporary struggles and that tries to invent new ways of offering the public radical ideas. He talks about his high tolerance for pessimism, which he realizes not everyone shares, and reflects on how that specific threshold for the negative might allow him to consider the nightmarish history of palm oil. It’s a history that is, in many ways, written in blood and fire, and one that opens up epistemic rifts. That idea of “epistemic rifts,” however, is more rooted to the moment where you, as he says, encounter an other and realize that your traditions are particular rather than universal. This is something that looking at the history of palm oil yields. And so, the history he offers is the history of something so sublimely complex that, in a sense, no imagination can quite grasp all of the entanglements the substance represents. He wants us to attempt to dwell with that immense complexity, and also the fact that it is a complex and yet not intractable problem. Ultimately his point is that there are solutions to the problem of exploitation, alienation and ecocide that the palm oil industry produces, but that those solutions have to come from the grassroots. To quote him here: the job of experts is to listen to the people who live in relation with each other and the land. To listen to these people and lend a hand if necessary. Self-determination is at the core of his argument here, but it is a self-determination that realizes the depth of entanglement; the fact that accepting local self-determination will likely drive up the price of commodities and potentially mean we have to forgo particular commodities in order to mitigate against social and environmental harm. He says it's imperative that we learn to defetishize commodities and perhaps fetishize instead the density of our entanglement. What would that mean? It might mean moving past confining logics that confuse the issue—the notion of inflation within economics, for example. He says the debate over the inflation crisis we are currently undergoing misses that the problem is, in fact, not rising prices but extreme levels of global inequality whereby certain people are deprived of the economic power and social agency to meet their own needs. Scarcity is something that we must politicize. So too is sacrifice. Who's sacrifice? This is the key question in Palm Oil. Human sacrifice, despite the undecided nature of its history, is consistently something practiced by elites for expedient reasons. What are those reasons? And why are they considered reasonable? If it is acceptable to sacrifice some for the good of the many, who gets to make that determination. And how does the logic of sacrifice get naturalized?

Meredith Ralston is Professor in the Departments of Women’s Studies and Political Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her most recent book, Slut-Shaming, Whorephobia and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution is a remarkably self-reflexive and rigorous study of contemporary sexual politics in a supposedly permissive era. We talk about the limits of white feminism and carceral thinking when it comes to the prevalent approaches to thinking about and reckoning with the reality of sex work. Meredith speaks to her profound sense that a “pleasure gap” still exists, where the disparate and binaristic socializations of men and women position people very differently in terms of access to pleasure. I ask her about the place of biology in sex, and whether culture and context, and power, are always complexly at play in determining even our sense of the biology of sex. Ralston’s research work has largely focused on sex work and sex tourism globally, she’s also looked at unhoused women and sex work in Canada. She is also an award-winning filmmaker, and her film, Hope in Heaven received a very positive reception when it was broadcast on CBC. She also wrote and directed two documentaries with the National Film Board of Canada on women in politics. Here, though, we talk about her shifting relationship to the documentary work that she’s produced. This is where the critical self-reflection comes in, as Ralston is extremely aware of her own tendency to adopt certain conservative relationships to sex and sex work. It’s a complex topic that warrants an engaged conversation that doesn’t conveniently skip over the impasses. I would definitely recommend her new book. It thinks through the ripple effects of the #MeToo movement, which is differently relevant in the face of the misogynistic vilification of Amber Heard we’re seeing right now; it talks about the discourse of rape culture, and, most intensely, it advocates for sexual equality and justice, and an end to the sexual double standard that continues to contribute to the vulnerability and widespread dehumanization of trans women, women of colour and women in general who are open about sexual desire. We end by talking about a broader end to the policing of sex, which cannot arrive soon enough.

Rebecca Wanzo (https://www.rebeccawanzo.com/) is a Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and an Affiliate Professor of American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She’s the author of The Suffering Will Not Be Televised: African American Women and Sentimental Political Storytelling, a book that thinks through the kinds of storytelling conventions that African American women, and social beings in general, are compelled to use to make their suffering legible to specific institutions in the United States. Her most recent book, The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging, is a remarkable study of the many ways that Black cartoonists have used racialized caricatures to contest and rework constructions of ideal citizenship. Wanzo recalls being told that her subject in The Content of Our Caricature had basically been exhausted. Imagine being questioned about whether there was enough content for a scholarly book within the history of Black comics—it speaks to the ways that, as she points out, comics are still seen as somewhat juvenile, and also the ways in which Black comics, in particular, are not understood as having their own vital, varied history. It’s interesting to think that Wanzo struggled to get the cover image for the book approved by the publisher. This striking image from Jeremy Love’s Bayou perfectly captures the concerns of her text. As she puts it, one of the questions she’s asking, again and again, in this book is: “What is this Black creator trying to do” with this representation of a figure—in the case of Bayou, the figure of the gollywog—that has “a specific racist… representational history”? In the coda for The Content of Our Caricature, Wanzo talks about the Marvel film Black Panther and its foundations in the foundational story arc surrounding Killmonger from the comics. She explains how the “transformation” and “rehabilitation” of Black Panther shows us how the history of representation and appropriation really is complex, and stresses that there is never “a homogenous black audience response. Things are not transparently always good and always bad." She argues that we really need to slow the process of interpretation and critical conversation down, and resist the tendency toward immediate condemnation. “Cancel culture,” as we’ve now titled it, is, in her words, “subsuming” so many different things that it’s become a “useless analytic tool.” It’s also a dizzyingly ironic title, given that those that frequently decry so-called cancel culture—namely those on the Right—are at the vanguard of canceling huge parts of culture that they deem threatening. Wanzo explains that, in the contemporary context, what we are seeing is the Right, in the US especially, attacking not only critical race theory, but all of “history” and “any discussion of discrimination.” The dominant form that cancellation is taking today vilifies any media that, from Wanzo’s perspective, “might make white heterosexual children from heteronormative families uncomfortable.” She makes it clear that this push exposes the fact that these groups fundamentally “don’t care about people who are not this ideal child that they’ve decided is American.” We talk about the ways that the mere presence of people who are not cisgendered and white in superhero stories still provokes strong reactions. Wanzo says that this spontaneous reaction to difference is deeply troubling, but it also shows the degree to which “the space of representation is a big battleground, and it matters,” and reveals “all kinds of conflicts that we have culturally and it’s a space under which various politics around inclusion and the nation and political belonging play out.”