Feminist Professor

In this final episode, we will turn again to Audre Lorde for a way to reframe and reconstitute our relationship to the erotic. Rather than see the erotic as a synonym for the sexual, we will explore how the erotic—as a register of our deepest feeling and intensity—can and should animate so many of our life endeavors. What would it mean to define your life as an erotic project? What if we believed...

In this episode, we will focus our attention on amatonormativity, or the cultural expectation that we seek romantic coupling (and, ultimately, marriage and monogamy). This demand that we find the highest fulfillment in romantic relationship exists in tandem with the demand that we experience ourselves as sexual subjects. We will also listen to Vee, a person who identifies as both asexual and aroma...

In this episode, we will extend the previous conversation on compulsory sexuality and consider more carefully the difference between sexual and romantic orientation. We will also listen to Julia, a person who identifies as both asexual and aromantic, as they describe the complexities of their lived experience.

S2, E 10: On Compulsory Sexuality In this episode, we are going to turn our attention to the social system of compulsory sexuality that mandates that we must experience sexual attraction and the desire for sexual activity. Compulsory sexuality is a set of both assumptions and demands that impact all people, regardless of how they define their relationship to sexuality. We will also begin to discus...

In this episode, we will consider the rising interest in civility discourse and norms. An increasing number of colleges and universities—as well as political culture more generally-are striving to help us disagree in more constructive ways and extend mutual respect as we do. It sounds benign enough, but we look at what civility often conceals: the demand for those who are already harmed to placate...

S2 E8 On Complaint DESCRIPTION In this episode, we will explore complaint: as a response to an unacceptable and unwanted situation as well as a means of remedy when one has been harmed. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on complaint, we will think about why institutions and systems often work to block complaint, why we are made anxious by the act of complaining, and why it is important that we guarante...

In this episode, hope is not read as ‘naïve hope’ that wishes only for a better future; hope here is a more radical version, sometimes called ‘educated hope,’ because we must learn how to hope in ways that do not deny the intolerability of the present or the necessity of striving for a different future. We talk about the role of hopelessness and despair as partners for hope as well as make the cas...

In this episode, we will consider the rise of the ‘angry white man,’ the man who experiences aggrieved entitlement because he has not been delivered the social power, authority, and resources promised by patriarchy. The angry white man—who may resent downward economic mobility as much as feminist challenges to gender hierarchy—has been recruited as a voter, protestor, and warrior in the fight for...

In this episode, we are rejoined by Dr. Suzanne Ashworth for a conversation about the rise and rules of ‘bro culture.’ She will discuss the shaping force of ‘guyland’ for white, college bound or college educated young men as well as the ways in which the extended adolescence offered to men generates entitlement, requires silence, and affords protection. She will also discuss the ‘killing paradox’...

In this episode, we will launch the first of three conversations on masculinities with Dr. Suzanne Ashworth. We will discuss why masculinities should be understood as plural even though our culture seems to ignore all but the most dominant and idealized version of it. We will also discuss boyhood and the ways in which mainstream culture begins to ‘boy’ our boys in the direction of emotional indiff...

DESCRIPTION In this episode, we will complete our discussion of selected policy objectives in Project 2025. This week, the focus is on LGBTQ equity and personhood. Project 2025 is consistently invested in diminishing or denying the personhood of LGBTQ individuals, and it details the legal, political, and economic levers that will help normalize this. We discuss the loss of legal protections as wel...

In this episode, we will continue our close look at the key objectives of Project 2025. This time, we will focus on the plan to restrict and deny access to both contraception and emergency contraception. More contraceptive forms (i.e. hormonal birth control, IUDs) have been reframed as abortifacients, or drugs and devices designed to terminate pregnancy. They do not terminate pregnancy; they preve...

DESCRIPTION As the second season of Feminist Professor launches, we begin a multi-episode and closer examination of Project 2025. In this first episode, we focus on the larger plan to regulate, obstruct, and ultimately end the provision of abortion services in the United States. SHOW NOTES You can find a PDF of the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership at https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025...

As the second season of Feminist Professor launches, we begin a multi-episode and closer examination of Project 2025. In this first episode, we focus on the larger plan to regulate, obstruct, and ultimately end the provision of abortion services in the United States.

In this episode, we discuss the important political and personal necessity of rest. Because we live in a grind culture that insists on incessant productivity and normalizes exhaustion, we have lost the capacity to define and defend rest. Thanks to Tricia Hersey’s work in Rest is Resistance, this episode describes how we are damaged by the ‘cult of urgency and busyness’ and how we might begin to re...

Podcast Available On: Apple Spotify Featuring: Dr. Tammy Birk Show Notes: In this episode, we are going to examine the shortcomings and liabilities of resilience. We will discuss the ways in which resilience—as a social expectation and psychological ideal—can obscure the need for structural change and block larger forms of resistance. Resilience can easily become […]

In this week’s episode, I was fortunate to sit down for a longer discussion about trans athletes and gender in sport with Dr. Kristy McCray, a sports sociologist and Professor in Otterbein’s Health and Sport Sciences Department. This episode is twice as long as my solo episodes, but it is well worth the time (even […]

This week’s episode looks more closely at the increasingly normalized ‘fear of gender’ and the many ways that it is leveraged to reinforce the ‘biological reality of sex.’ The fear of gender, in many ways, is the fear of gender self-determination, or the right of a person to decide their own gender identity rather than […]

We will continue exploring the assumptions that underlie ‘woke gender ideology.’ This particular episode will focus on the purported ‘biological reality of sex’ as defined by the Trump administration’s Executive Order ‘Defending Women from Gender Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.’ More specifically, we will explore how a scientifically inaccurate understanding of...

In this episode, we begin to discuss the new rhetoric of ‘woke gender ideology’ and the way that it is weaponized in the current political climate. We pay special attention to the concepts of ‘wokeness’ and ‘ideology’ this week; next week, we will focus entirely on the vilification of gender.  This episode also discusses how to allow for despair without falling into paralysis and what active hope...

This episode continues the conversation of last week, Preparing for Trump 2.0.  In it, eighteen speakers from the larger podcast community share brief and powerful insights into what they are doing differently or refusing to do in this volatile political climate.  

In this episode, we consider how we might differently approach the second presidency of Donald Trump. How can we guard against overwhelm and dysregulation? How can we direct our energy and attention to meaningful projects rather than fall into another extended outrage cycle?

In this episode, we discuss the rise in trans panic, or the cultivation of widespread anxiety and fear at the very fact of trans existence. We talk about the ways in which trans panic serves particular political ends as well as underscores the phantasmatic nature of gender. Using gender affirming care as an example, we consider how much trans panic relies on fictitious stories about gender and ign...

In this episode, we discuss the shifting gender and sexual identities and practices of Generation Z. At least one in five members of Gen Z identify as LGBTQ, so they are the largest demographic of LGBTQ persons in the United States. We hear from various Gen Z voices in this episode and consider what their […]

In this episode, we will discuss different ways of understanding the motives of misogyny, or what is more commonly understood as the hatred of women, as well as examine the upsurge in misogynist rhetoric in the 2024 Presidential election.