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During her MFA, Francophone writer Emilie Moorhouse serendipitously discovered the works of a little-known Surrealist poet, Syrian-Egyptian-English Joyce Mansour, who chose to write exclusively in French. Mansour, a glamourous, married woman who came of age as an artist in 1950s Paris under the wing of André Breton, existed as a kind of glitch in the French literary scene—an upper-class, Arab, apolitical woman who refused to become a sex object while making unapologetically sexual work. Emerald Wounds (City Lights Books) is the result of Moorhouse’s deep dive into the fringes of Francophone literature, translating Mansour’s wide-ranging poetry and asserting her right to be known. In this career-spanning edition, Mansour exists as a writer’s writer, a reluctant feminist, an Arab Jew, and most blatantly as a kind of queer “uber-wife,” pissing in her husband’s drink while flying on the freeway between sex and death.
I recently spoke to Moorhouse on Zoom about the life and work of Joyce Mansour as her Wi-Fi was being changed—the warbling sound of a hole being drilled somewhere above.
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The Rumpus: How, technically, did you find Joyce Mansour?
Emilie Moorhouse: I was taking a translation course—this was in 2017, and the #metoo movement had just exploded and I thought, “I need to translate a woman who is controversial, someone who the literary establishment doesn’t approve of” which, okay, many women have not had the approval of the literary establishment. But I think I was looking for raw emotion, for a woman who could express her sexuality and who could speak her truth whether it fit in with the times or not. So that was kind of the criteria that I set for myself. And I did find quite a few women like this in Francophone literature, but in the Surrealist tradition or practice, a lot of it is stream-of-consciousness writing. And so, what Mansour was writing was naturally uncensored.
Rumpus: Reading Mansour’s origin story as a writer, I found it obviously compelling but also kind of curious, because there’s this story of her being in a state of grief, both from her mother dying when she was fifteen and from her first husband dying when she was eighteen, and the story is that her grief forced her to write. It was either the madhouse or poetry. That’s obviously a very compelling story behind a first book, right? Especially with the title of Screams from a beautiful, foreign, young woman in 1953 arriving on the Parisian literary and art scene. I wonder if there’s anything problematic in this origin story in your opinion. Is it constructed? Or do you think, in an alternate timeline, Mansour could’ve just been a happy housewife with her rich, much older, French-speaking second husband?
Moorhouse: Well, I think she would have been involved in the arts. There is this really strong personality in Mansour. And as much as she was shaped by the events of her youth, she does have such a rich background as well. She was bilingual before she met her second husband, speaking fluent English and Arabic. So, she obviously had this very rich and interesting life, you know, in tandem with these early events. But at the same time, and I’ve never heard it mentioned in any of the interviews, or, in any research that I did, that she was writing poetry, prior to these events. I guess life is life.
Rumpus: So, in sticking a little bit with her biography before getting to the work, when reading about Mansour’s second husband—which sounded like a problematic relationship in that he had lots of affairs—I feel like in a way that Mansour had this despairing, mourning and grieving personality versus a kind of desiring personality, especially desiring of men who she couldn’t really possess. Do you feel that her second husband supported her, especially the notion of the confessional in her work? I wonder if he even read her work?
Moorhouse: Yeah, I also wondered about that. I know that her son read her work and he actually helped correct her grammar, her French mistakes. And I do know that she never discussed her first husband with her second husband but that her second husband sort of swept her off her feet. He kind of gave her life again after the death of her first husband. But her second husband was not someone who was initially very involved in the arts. Apparently, André Breton hated him! Breton did not consent to Mansour’s husband, basically. He came from a very different world than Breton.
Rumpus: I have a lot of questions about the relationship between Mansour and Breton. In Mansour’s poetry, there’s a lot of female rage against the husband or the lover, even as she is taking pleasure in them. It reminds me of the line in one of her poems: “Don’t tell your dreams to the one who doesn’t love you.” I wonder if there’s this irreconcilable split in Mansour’s life between her domestic life and her artistic life. I was thinking a lot about Breton and his mentorship of her in this way. I think it’s interesting in your intro that you state that they were definitely not lovers.
Moorhouse: I was never able to explicitly find any information that Mansour and Breton were sexually involved, and one of her biographies explicitly states they were never lovers. I think Mansour’s artistic side was really nourished through Breton. They went to the flea markets of Paris every afternoon together in search of artwork. And I do think that Mansour’s second husband, through Mansour, started to develop a greater appreciation of artwork. But it wasn’t something that he was involved in initially and so I really don’t know how present he was in her artistic practice.
Rumpus: You label Mansour’s poetry as erotic macabre. Can you break that term open a bit? I am thinking of her work’s relationship to 60s and 70s French feminism (like écriture feminine) but I’m also thinking of the somewhat contrasting pornographic strain in her work, akin to Georges Bataille.
Moorhouse: I do see it as both. I think she gets inspiration from both. Bataille was very erotic macabre, or maybe he’s a little bit more twisted than that even, but this whole idea of la petite morte (death is orgasm), I do see influences from that in her work. But I don’t think Mansour was loyal to any kind of movement. I mean, she was obviously very loyal to the Surrealists, but when she was asked to write for a feminist magazine, she bristled and said, “Feminism, what do you mean?” I think Mansour liked to remain independent and have her creativity be independent from these different movements. She was apolitical. And I think some of that comes from Mansour’s experience in Egypt, being exiled because she was part of this upper-class Egyptian society, her father was imprisoned and most of his property and assets were seized by the government and apparently, he refused to ever own a house again and lived the rest of his life in a hotel. Then you have the Surrealist movement, which Joyce Mansour was a part of, which was more aligned with anarchism. She was kind of caught between two worlds.
Rumpus: It’s interesting, this idea of Mansour being apolitical and having a sort of disconnect from feminism, because it seems to bring up things around the Surrealists having issues with women, with women being objectified or fetishized in their work, this idea of “mad love” trumping all, even abuse. And so, if we just, say, insert Mansour into our present-day politics—and this is a totally speculative question—how do you feel she would fit into our polarizing and gender-fluid times?
Moorhouse: Well, my impression of her work is that it is very gender-fluid, she plays around with gender in her writing quite a bit, so I feel like she absolutely would, in a way, fit into our now. In terms of the political, that’s a good question because, yeah, everything is very polarized and politicized today. Also, I don’t know that she wasn’t necessarily political. I think she obviously sympathized with many progressive movements and that’s clear in her writing. That includes feminism. She was openly mocking articles that appeared in women’s magazines imposing unrealistic housewife-style standards. She mocked beauty standards and even the condescending tone they had when advising women on how to behave “nicely.” So she obviously did have certain strong leanings. But I think outside of her art, Mansour wasn’t necessarily willing to pronounce them. It was more like my art speaks for itself.
Rumpus: I think that’s probably still the best way of being an artist. And also, it’s not really a speculative question, because we will soon see how Mansour’s work is received with a younger, contemporary, potentially genderqueer readership, right?
Moorhouse: Yeah. I’m excited to see how her work will be received. I do feel that much of her writing is, in fact, very contemporary around gender. But she wasn’t intellectualizing it. It came out in her voice, which rejected any gender confines without having to announce that she was doing so.
Rumpus: Did you find as a translator that you had to make some harder choices around some of the more dated language, especially in terms of race? Terms that people don’t use anymore?
Moorhouse: There were certainly some words that gave me pause. The word oriental comes up a few times, and this is obviously a word that is dated, perhaps more so in English than in French. What is interesting for me though, is that when I read it in context, I think she is using that word in a way that acknowledges the history behind it, the colonialism, the fetishizing, the exoticizing. For example, Mansour speaks of “oriental suffering,” or of a “narrative with an Oriental woman.” I don’t think, even though she was writing in the 60s at this point, that she uses this word lightly. The way I read it, she uses it to evoke her own nostalgia, or longing for her life in Egypt. And to clarify, when Mansour uses oriental in French, it refers to the Near East. It refers to her own Syrian and Egyptian roots. She never returned to Egypt, so even though she did experience a lot of suffering there, she is still a woman living in exile. This is definitely a challenge of translating older work, especially with an artist who, I think, does not use these words lightly.
Rumpus: Interesting. Because what’s making headlines right now is this political urge to kind of clean up certain language that was used in literature in the past that is hurtful or flat out racist today. So, I still do wonder if there was this urge at all for you to clean up the language?
Moorhouse: I didn’t want the language to be offensive. I would hope that I’ve succeeded with that. I don’t want any dated language to draw attention to itself because that’s not what the poem is meant to do.
Rumpus: But the French is the same. You never changed anything in the French.
Moorhouse: No, I never changed anything in the French. I don’t think I’m allowed to do that. The French is word-for-word.
Rumpus: I think this speaks to its time. And it also—yet again!—points back to the Surrealist problems with women. I mean, sometimes Mansour’s work is so radical and standout, and there are also moments in it when it does feel a bit retrograde. I’m inserting her relationship with Breton in here again because I wonder if she was one of those women who lived as an artist aligning herself with powerful men?
Moorhouse: Well, I think that she would have definitely been outnumbered in those groups, right? I mean, women to men. I don’t know if she was loud, and what her personality was like surrounded by all those men. It’s hard to know. But she did smoke cigars!
Rumpus: Right. That is a very alluring look. Also, she was a mother. I think that’s kind of a big deal in a very male-centric artist’s space.
Moorhouse: Yes, and she was a very doting and overprotective mother. But, you know, even though Mansour may have aligned herself with Breton and other men, I don’t feel like she would have been one to just do things to appease them. And you can see that in her poetry, how she rejects the male gaze that objectifies her. So we can’t just put her in a box or in a category of militant feminist or someone who just goes with the old boys’ club, right?
Rumpus: Yeah, you’re right. She’s both an individual and of her time. In terms of her being a woman, what do you make of her disappearance in the canon? You talk about this in your introduction, her work being perceived as “too much.” Do you think this quality relates to the forgetting of Joyce Mansour?
Moorhouse: Being very familiar with the French culture, I would say yes. I use the word chauvinistic because I think that certain French literary elite have this very precise idea of what “French” literature is, and what “great” literature is. And mostly, it’s been men, White men, who write “great literature” and historically women were allowed to write for children. I think it’s a shame because there are so many Francophone voices that are just so rich, so different. And I think that some in the literary elite just don’t know what to make of these so-called different voices, so they kind of dismiss them. And it’s too bad, because these voices enrich the literary landscape. French literature has been very France-centric, right? Which, obviously, has its roots in colonialism. So even though Mansour was somewhat respected as a Surrealist, the wider French literary establishment very easily could have dismissed her. When I was working on getting some of the rights from one of her publishers—and it’s really hard to get through to them—when I finally had a conversation with them, even they dismissed her! This man said to me, “You know, Joyce Mansour would be nothing without Breton. Without André Breton, there would be no Joyce Mansour.” So even one of her publishers in this day and age still doesn’t take her seriously.
Rumpus: There is this suspicion that Breton created her?
Moorhouse: Yes, and that she’s only recognized to the limited degree that she is because of her affiliation with him.
Rumpus: It feels that this relationship with Breton is really at the crux of a lot for Mansour. I mean, he clearly was incredibly important to her, he was her mentor and she loved him, and I don’t know—these very close artistic relationships they can be difficult for others in the world to understand. Maybe it’s why #metoo resonates differently in France, to be honest. And now I’m thinking of Maïwenn and Luc Besson, which is totally different, but still. . . . When did André Breton die? Was it 1968?
Moorhouse: I think it was 1966. I’m not sure.
Rumpus: Because it’s interesting, I was thinking of Mansour’s 1960s publication White Squares and her last work from the 1980s, Black Holes. Her later work is really kind of dark. My favorite line from one of her late poems is: “The world is a shitting bird.” I mean, I don’t want to say that Breton had an unnatural or too strong of a hold on her or a shitty hold on her, but maybe he did. Maybe her work matured after Breton’s death. Maybe it got even wilder.
Moorhouse: Yeah, I mean, I definitely do see that difference between her earlier work and her later work. It’s not just that the poems in her earlier works are shorter. The later ones are more macabre and her identity is more explicit—both her Jewish identity and her Egyptian identity. Also, Mansour evokes disease and aging and the history of cancer in her family. She died of cancer, like her mother did, and I don’t know if her battle was a short one or drawn out. There is another collection of her poems—prose poems that we couldn’t publish because of copyright—but there’s one about the hospital, and it sounds like it’s her visiting someone in a hospital and it’s very much about the human body falling apart and this industrialized hospital where all bodies are falling apart together.
Rumpus: Her mixing of the sexual body and the dying body is so powerful. I love Mansour’s use of urine, actually. Sometimes, it is this incredibly liberatory thing, like, pissing in the street. And then it’s poisonous, or it’s hedonistic, she’s drinking it like honey. Piss is this ubiquitous substance and act in her work. I love that.
Moorhouse: It’s almost like the soul, your soul comes out in your urine. What else can I say about that?
Rumpus: Nothing. That’s perfect. Your soul is in your urine.
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Author photo by Selena Phillips Boyle
Even though it's often employed innocently, there's an inherent element of tragedy in the phrase "ahead of their time" when it's associated with unsung or overlooked geniuses in a field. If one is "ahead of their time," odds are they'll never live to see the impact their existence inspired or receive the adulation they so richly deserve. — Read the rest
I first met Gina Chung at a going-away party for a mutual writer friend. In a warm back room, during the final days of summer, I wedged myself into a small circle and caught the final bits of something Chung said. She paused to clue me into their conversation. I was struck by her kindness and easy generosity, the way she openly shared her writing routine and practices with a group of old friends and new acquaintances. Months later, I heard about her debut novel, Sea Change (Vintage). The book sucked me into its effervescent, marbled world and ultimately buoyed my spirit, just like its author had at that summer party.
Sea Change follows Ro, an Asian American woman who is floating into her thirties on her own. Partly struggling, partly aimless, Ro is estranged from her mother, and grieving her father, who disappeared on a sea exhibition a decade earlier. Ro’s only companion is a Giant Pacific octopus, Dolores, the last remaining link to her father. As Dolores is about to be sold to a private investor, Ro has to reframe her understanding of past and present to make sense of her new world. Chung’s prose bubbles with delectable humor and metaphors, burrows into hard truths, and sets out to explore uncharted emotional ranges.
Chung is the recipient of the 2021 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellowship and a number of literary awards, including a 2023 Pushcart Prize. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and the Rumpus, among others. She has a forthcoming short story collection, Green Frog (Vintage, 2024).
I spoke with Chung about Sea Change over Zoom a few weeks before her book launch. We talked about the role of silence and the unsaid in Asian American families, humor’s proximity to grief, subverting conventionality in character tropes, and how to take care of oneself in service of one’s art.
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The Rumpus: I noticed that a lot of your work, Sea Change and a number of your short stories, often features the natural world. What drew you to ocean life and sea creatures as subjects and counterpoints to the characters in your novel?
Gina Chung: I’ve always loved writing about the natural world and thinking about animals that live in different ecosystems than us because it reminds me that we as human beings are also animals. I think we often forget that about ourselves; it’s really easy for us to see ourselves as being somehow apart from or above nature when in actuality we are very much a part of it. Whereas humans can and often do lie about what we need, animals can’t hide or be dishonest about their needs. Thinking about animals and what they need to survive and thrive inspires me as a writer to also try to be more honest on the page.
Rumpus: Within the characters’ environment, money is an oceanic force, capitalism as much a precondition to existence in the novel as it is in current modern life. With our protagonist, Ro, it seems there are few things that she can do in opposition to these forces, but she actively defies, withdraws from, and avoids this system in her own ways. Can withdrawal and avoidance be a form of agency?
Chung: In a lot of ways, withdrawing from or avoiding a decision can seem like a way to surrender one’s agency in a situation, but at the same time—my therapist and I always talk about this—not making a choice is still kind of making a choice as well. For Ro, avoidance is a huge part of how she navigates her day-to-day life because she’s been hurt and carries a lot of pain. That makes her feel afraid to engage directly with things that might hurt her or that she might be in disagreement with. When it comes to the impending sale of Dolores, it is one area where, even if she’s not consciously doing anything to fight back against the sale, she feels a direct kind of no in response. I wanted that to be an inciting incident for the book, too, because it gets her to understand how much this octopus means to her and how much she stands to lose if she were to lose this one point of connection.
Rumpus: This inciting incident also pits her against her best friend, Yoonhee. I was fascinated by their relationship. They grew up together with similar backgrounds but end up in very different positions at the aquarium and have different levels of motivation to rise the ranks. Why was it important for you to juxtapose their ambition and upward mobility?
Chung: I loved the idea of, as you said, pitting them a little bit against each other with this development that happens in their workplace. I wanted Yoonhee to feel like a character who has genuinely been a part of Ro’s life for a long time. They’ve seen each other through different ups and downs and phases of life since childhood. I’m always fascinated by the topic of friendship, in particular, old friendship. What does it mean to have old friends who have been with you for many years and who have been witness to all the different past selves that you’ve inhabited? It’s such a gift, but it can also be such a challenge because when you are friends with someone for that long, you both start to feel a little bit of ownership over past versions of one another. People change and grow over time. Friends can grow apart. They can also come back together.
I wanted Yoonhee to feel a bit like a foil to Ro but be a real person herself, too, as someone who has such a completely different outlook in life. She’s someone who is pretty straightforward, knows what she wants, and doesn’t hesitate to go after it. Just because she tends to be more conventional doesn’t mean that she’s a flat or two-dimensional character. I also wanted to examine what happens in a person’s life when they get to a certain age and feel like, “Oh, my gosh! Everyone is leaving me behind.” Because they’re so close, Ro can’t help but look at Yoonhee and feel, even if she doesn’t necessarily want the same things that Yoonhee wants, that she should want them and that she’s nowhere near getting them.
Rumpus: Craft-wise, how do you write someone who might fall into some of these tropes but also honor their individuality?
Chung: One thing I wanted was to have them interacting and bickering over small things—the way you do with siblings, old friends, or anyone you’ve known for years—and just see the ways in which they are both able to call each other out. That’s what really felt like the core of Yoonhee to me, this person who deeply cares about her friend. Sometimes there’s no other way of expressing it than, “Why are you this way?” in this exasperated but also deeply loving way. I also wanted to show, with the flashback sections of earlier versions of themselves, how vulnerable Yoonhee is. Just because she seems to have her life together doesn’t mean she doesn’t experience pain or doubt or fear.
Rumpus: Through flashbacks, the book alternates a lot between the past and present. How did you kind of conceive of this structure? I felt very taken care of as a reader to get into the story in this way.
Chung: I’m so glad to hear that. I love an alternating structure in a book, and there are so many books that do this amazingly well. One that was particularly close to my heart at the time of writing was Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, which is also a later-in-life coming-of-age story, against a backdrop of family dysfunction that shows how she’s gotten to this point in her life. In that book, those scenes from the main character’s childhood and upbringing really helped me as a reader anchor the choices she was making in the present day. I wanted to do something similar with Ro: give the reader a vivid picture of not only who this person is today and how she is navigating the world but also what has led her to this point, including her parents’ choices. In those past sections, I especially wanted to excavate who Ro’s father was, since he’s not around in the present day of the novel. I wanted to give the reader a chance to get to know who he was and what he meant to Ro.
Rumpus: As you mentioned, the men in Ro’s life, her father and also her ex-boyfriend, are a bit more phantom than flesh. They are bigger figures in her head through her memories than they are in the present. They exist through their absences. What did you want to portray about absences and the stories we conjure about the people who are no longer in our lives?
Chung: You’re so right in saying that a person’s absence, once they’re no longer in our lives, can almost become stronger than their presence was back when they were around. There’s a kind of danger in that, since the person who is mourning might get caught up in imagining that things were better than they actually were with that person. Maybe they think that in losing that person, they’ve lost some irretrievable part of themselves too. With Ro, the book starts off with her having gone through this breakup with her boyfriend, who is leaving her for a privately funded mission to colonize Mars. As anyone who has ever been through a breakup knows, the things that you didn’t quite appreciate about that person when you were together seem to come back in full relief when they’re no longer in your life. That’s what she’s going through, in the process of mourning that relationship, and also the loss of her father, who was hugely influential in how she sees the world. Her father introduced her to this love for animals that they both share, and he encouraged her to be curious about the world. His absence is so clearly felt throughout her later adulthood. I wanted to show just how searing that kind of loss can be and how in the process of mourning someone, whether it’s because you broke up with them or because they’re literally gone and you will never be able to connect with them again, the mourning is never linear. Of course, it’s not that we shouldn’t remember or grieve the ones we’ve lost, but I wanted to explore what can happen if you get too caught up in that mourning.
Rumpus: I feel like silence, too, is more of a presence than an absence, in the way it pervades relationships between family, friends, and romantic partners in the novel. Silence feels particularly pertinent in my own Asian American community, especially in how it persists in the first generation and is continuing to manifest in other ways in future generations. What roles did you hope for silence to inhabit for the characters in the book?
Chung: I feel that so deeply. The silences of ancestors, the silences of our parents and grandparents, as well as the silences that we inherit as children of immigrants. It’s hard to ask folks about the past because there’s a lot of pain within those memories. It’s definitely something that I’ve noticed a lot in my own family. In many Asian and Asian American families, there’s an acute awareness of what it would cost for the other person to relive their story just by telling it. That’s something I’m always thinking about and living with. I don’t want to perpetuate the trope of the silent, sad Asian American family either, but I do think that silence exists for a good reason, and a lot of those reasons are bound up in pain and trauma. With Ro, I think we see it most with her mother because she and her mother have never been able to talk about things like her father’s disappearance. They’ve never really been able to process what they’ve both experienced and been through. In writing Ro, I wanted to investigate what it would be like to grow up with that silence and not even know how to broach it with your mom, your friends, or even yourself. Ro doesn’t have the language to name any of the feelings that she’s grown up experiencing.
Rumpus: One of my favorite passages in the novel is: “I used to wonder if we would take better care of our bodies if our skin was transparent, if every little thing we did and said and ate was observable. If every hurtful or careless thing we ever said to one another manifested itself visually in the body.” It’s interesting how everyone has their own version or perception of self-care, especially when we consider the juxtaposition between what we think we need and what others think we need. Could we talk about your intention with writing about self-care?
Chung: Ro is not very good at taking care of herself throughout most of the book. I think taking care of yourself—and I mean real care, not just the commodified ideas of self-care that we’re all sold nowadays—is actually very difficult, and it’s a practice. As someone who also struggles at times to take care of myself, I wanted to explore a character who has never really learned how to do this, and this is something I feel like I haven’t really seen much of in contemporary literature when it comes to portrayals of Asian American women and women of color. There is a sort of larger cultural moment right now around what I’ve seen some people refer to as “the disaster woman trope,” but I feel like those characters are almost always white women, and their meltdowns are still usually played for laughs. But I wanted to show what it would look like to have a character who is so afraid of everyone leaving her behind that she can’t help but leave herself in all these ways, whether it’s by drinking way too much and driving home afterward or avoiding important conversations with the people in her life that she loves. I wanted to show all the small and big ways that we as humans abandon ourselves when we’ve been abandoned many times before.
At the same time, I did notice throughout the course of writing the novel that whenever I put Ro in the position of having to take care of someone else, she was actually not bad at it, much to her surprise. It’s sometimes hard and uncomfortable for her, but she’s able to stay present in those moments in ways that she can’t always be for herself. I wanted to show how she is able to learn how to do those things and, in time, show up for herself too.
Rumpus: As someone who balances full-time employment with writing, do you have self-care practices that help you continue creating art?
Chung: I’m very used to thinking of myself as a brain in a jar. I don’t always remember to consider my bodily needs, especially when things get really busy or when I’m in the middle of an engrossing project. I’ve had to remind myself over the years to slow down when I need to and to take care of the container through which I experience the world.
My main tip is to listen to your body as much as you can. Take breaks and sleep when you need to. I’m someone who can easily ignore all my body’s warning signs and just keep going until the point of exhaustion. It’s just not worth it most of the time. There’s no need to flagellate yourself in the name of your art, and the wellspring of your creativity can’t be replenished if you don’t rest, no matter how guilty you might feel for not getting down a certain number of words per day. I’m still learning how to be gentle with myself in doing this. Now, whenever I feel like all the creativity is gone and I’ve lost it for good, I’ve at least learned to believe that’s not true. It’s my lizard brain panicking. I know it will come back. The only way you can care for your art is to care for yourself.
Rumpus: I laughed throughout the book, sometimes out loud, but it surprised me because some of my laughter was near moments of strife or grief. To what extent does humor and absurdity color your understanding of grief? How can humor be a tool in explaining grief, if at all?
Chung: Humor is so important to me, both as a writer and as a human being. Humor oftentimes hinges around this element of surprise. There’s this idea that writing about grief or difficult experiences can’t be funny or that it’s one note. So much of life isn’t like that, though. There have been times in my life where I’m going through heavy situations, but that doesn’t mean I don’t laugh if I see something surprising or ridiculous. Even in moments of my own despondency, I sometimes laugh at myself because of how dramatic I know I’m being. I think it’s important to be able to do that because otherwise life can be overwhelmingly difficult, and having those moments where you’re either laughing at yourself or at the situation is healthy and also lifesaving in a way. In terms of writing, I think funny scenes can sharpen the emotional quality of the sad ones, and vice versa. It’s like in cooking, where you have complementary but contrasting flavors, they heighten each other.
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Author photo by S.M. Sukardi
After graduating from college, Stephanie Foo created a podcast called Get Me On This American Life. In an effort to make this dream come true, she borrowed radio equipment and hitchhiked to the world’s largest pornography conference in Texas to find stories. She interned, then became a producer of the radio show Snap Judgement. In 2014, Foo landed her dream job at This American Life—where she remained as a producer for five years and, in the process, won an Emmy. She was a 2019–2020 Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism and has published essays in the New York Times and New York Magazine.
In February 2022, Foo released her memoir, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma (Ballantine Books). It’s the story of her real self, a woman functioning with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), a condition that can develop over the years following prolonged abuse. Foo’s memoir told the story of childhood trauma, parental abandonment, and the way her past continued to threaten her health, relationships, and career. Finding limited resources to help her, Foo set out to heal herself and map her experiences onto the scarce literature about C-PTSD.
We met via Zoom, where we spoke about the paperback release of her book (now a New York Times bestseller), how writing for the page is different from writing for the ear, why childhood trauma is often excused by traditionalists, and what she would tell her younger self if she had the chance.
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The Rumpus: What about journalism appealed to you?
Stephanie Foo: Journalism brought me out of my box, forced me to talk to others. I could have these social interactions that are scripted in a safe way. Everybody knew what their role was. I appreciate it made me a more curious, open person. Brought logic to the chaos. I could bring order to other people’s stories even if I couldn’t bring order to my own. It was satisfying and fun and made it easy to completely throw myself into it and dissociate from other things like trauma.
Rumpus: So after years of telling other people’s stories on This American Life and elsewhere, why did you decide to tell your own?
Foo: Every time I was able to showcase somebody’s story, one that represented a larger group of people, there was always a great response from our audience. I found myself as a potential representative of a larger group, which had no representative. There wasn’t a first-person story about Complex Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, so I thought, “I know how to do this.”
Rumpus: Writing is different from radio, of course, but exactly how different?
Foo: Writing a book is so much more relaxed than making a podcast or a radio show. There’s so much more time to consider the topic, do research, and go over many drafts to shape it into what I think is ultimately my voice rather than chaotically panic and put something out every week.
Rumpus: I read your powerful New York Times Mother’s Day piece. How have you evolved as a writer?
Foo: I think I was always a writer. However, I just didn’t let myself think of myself as one because I hadn’t published much since college. Even though radio producing is just writing—it’s the exact same thing except you read it out loud—I shouldn’t have needed the validation of the book or the New York Times article. It certainly helped, since I don’t have an MFA or anything. I didn’t know if my writing, after so many years of being written for the ear, translated to the page anymore.
When I was writing for radio, especially at This American Life, it wasn’t really my voice. It was my voice through the lens of an entire room of between three and ten people shaping my voice into the ideal of what it could be. But this book was mine, which was both intimidating and fun and freeing.
Rumpus: What kind of book did you set out to write?
Foo: I read a lot of memoirs and science-y books written by clinicians and experts, which I found to be lacking because they didn’t show the healing process. Meanwhile, a lot of trauma memoirs are just descriptions of all the horrible experiences that have happened for like 290 pages, and then in the last thirty, the person gets better. Everything is okay. I thought, “No, I’m sure that journey was a lot more arduous.” I wanted to learn from their journey. It was the same in the clinician books, as well, a long exploration of all the negative effects of C-PTSD on people’s brains and then a very small section in the back about what would actually heal.
My goal was to write a book that would be a resource, to show you’re not alone in what you’re going through, to normalize a lot of the feelings. I provided the basic science and psychology behind complex PTSD, so people can know what they’re up against. I hoped to educate them and provide a lot of the resources I found helpful. I aspired to show it is very much possible to get better. This book would be a roadmap for other people who didn’t know where they might go. I wanted the book to provide hope because I didn’t have it when I was diagnosed. Sometimes trauma memoirs can be so difficult to read, and if there is hope, it’s just a little at the end.
My desire was for the book to come from an optimistic place because having C-PTSD is painful enough. I didn’t want to make the process of reading the book agonizing throughout the whole thing. It was very important to me that only the first fifty pages detailed my abuse.
I wanted it to be the book I wished I’d had when I was first diagnosed, which I feel would have made my healing journey so much shorter.
Rumpus: Why do you think your healing would have been briefer if you had a book like yours when you were diagnosed with C-PTSD?
Foo: I would have felt so much less shame and despair. Mental illness is so pathologized. It’s so isolating. C-PTSD is not in the DSM, and it’s a relatively new diagnosis. I think there is societal prejudice around PTSD. The history of PTSD has been focused on soldiers, men at war. I think there’s a lot of sexism, a sort of racism within. That, and an underappreciation for childhood trauma and its lifelong effects. It’s been normalized. Judith Herman writes a lot about the lasting trauma in people who have experienced sexual assault. This is not to shit on survivors of war, which is very real and terrible, but trauma is much wider. I feel like it’s taken society a long time to catch up to that understanding.
Rumpus: Was it healing to write the book, and was it difficult to write the traumatic scenes?
Foo: Different authors have different processes. For some, writing heals. It was important for me to have the healing come before the writing in order to locate that optimism. There was a lot of casual writing that happened during the healing process, but I didn’t take the organization and the real writing seriously until I felt like I had gone through a year and a half of a very intensive healing journey. And I felt like I was in a really good place, so this made the writing easier. I was able to have a lot of empathy and generosity toward myself at those times instead of feeling the self-loathing I’d felt earlier.
The first fifty pages were the most difficult to write, and I wrote those many, many times. I just had to practice a lot of self-care. Those were tough to relive. I think my dissociation protected me. Dissociation helped me to force out what I could, then go play video games for the rest of the afternoon.
Rumpus: Did your feelings about your parents change over the course of writing the book?
Foo: I don’t know. It hasn’t brought forgiveness, if that’s what you’re wondering. It hasn’t made me less disappointed or angry. I think the healing process, if anything, made me angrier at them because it made me realize what I deserved as a child. Learning to treat myself with kindness has taught me that what I received was criminal and unacceptable. So yeah, I don’t think it’s made me forgive them. I hold them accountable for what they have done.
However, their cultural context was important—they had a lot of their own unresolved and untreated trauma—but instead of making me less angry at them, writing the book made me angrier at some of the societal forces that contributed to my parents’ situation. I’m just sharing and spreading that rage around.
It’s also made me angrier at our health care system in the United States and how it really doesn’t serve. It’s made for white, privileged, educated people. There is just such a distinct lack of culturally responsive care. People like my parents could have gotten the help that they needed if that care was more accessible.
Rumpus: What has been the response from people who have read this book?
Foo: It’s overwhelmingly positive. The book has received over 11,000 five-star Goodreads reviews. I receive a dozen messages a day, for the past year, from people saying, “You’ve changed my life, you saved my life, you’re giving me hope, you make me feel less alone. . . .” It’s exactly what I set out to do with the memoir. The fact that it worked is a great relief and a great honor. I feel very proud, and I hope this opens the door for more narratives like mine. A lot of people have told me my book has inspired them to write. I hope to see those books joining mine out in the world.
Rumpus: How does it feel that therapists and educators have started using your book as a tool?
Foo: It’s so affirming! It’s wonderful to know I’ve had this impact because I have so many complaints against therapists, not therapists in general, but against some of the ways therapists practice and the mental health care system. I just want it to be easier for those who come after me.
Rumpus: Did you feel pressure about representing the Asian American community?
Foo: Yes. I was charting new territory by writing about domestic violence and child abuse in the Asian American community. It’s sort of hinted at but excused in The Joy Luck Club, but the story is always Asian American parents can be difficult, but you must be grateful to them because they have provided so much. I was writing something edgy and dangerous, saying, “Actually, I’m not grateful. This wasn’t unacceptable. This was abuse.” We need to talk about abuse.
Rumpus: Is it strange that trauma has also driven you to become the writer you are?
Foo: Sometimes I feel I have this success because of my PTSD. It informed my drive. Literally, I wouldn’t have written this book if I didn’t have PTSD. I would trade not having so much success for being happier. I would rather have been loved than not have had to write this book.
Rumpus: About healing, how would you describe your current state?
Foo: I am healing. I have done a lot of healing. I wouldn’t say I’m done, but it’s much better than it was before.
Rumpus: What would you recommend to someone who is in a survival mode or being abused?
Foo: I think what I would tell my younger self is this: “You need to know you deserve love. You deserve better. And go chase that love. Run as fast as you can away from those who aren’t going to give it to you. Run as fast as you can toward anyone who knows you deserve love, even though it’s scary and you’re going to be skeptical of them. Run toward the love.”
***
Author photo by Bryan Derballa
“I’m very skeptical about the ability of people in positions of power and privilege—including intellectuals—to name truths about the world.”
The post Don’t Save Yourself, Save the World: A Dialogue with Vincent Lloyd appeared first on Public Books.
An interview with Prof Antonio Diéguez Lucena, professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of Málaga, Spain. Here he speaks of his research into the philosophy of biology and technology.
The new documentary “No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care” criticizes transgender ideology from a self-described “liberal, west coast Democrat” perspective. Despite facing significant resistance from trans activists, it has been making an impact.
The film will be showing in select theaters across the country during a one-day AMC Theatres Special Event on Wednesday, June 21st at 4:30 and 7:30 pm. It will be available online and on DVD starting July 2nd.
Below, Joshua Pauling interviews producer Vera Lindner.
Joshua Pauling (JP): Thanks for taking the time to discuss your new documentary. It really is a powerful depiction of what is happening to people when transgender ideology takes over. I especially found the detransitioners’ stories compelling. The story you tell throughout is decidedly reasonable and anchored to reality. Kudos to you all for producing such a thorough and moving documentary on such an important and controversial topic. And much respect for being willing to say hard but true things in the documentary.
How has the response been to the film thus far?
Vera Lindner (VL): We’ve received tons of gratitude, tears, and donations. The most humbling has been the resonance the film created in suffering parents. I wept many times reading grateful, heartbreaking messages from parents. People are hungry, culturally speaking, and are embracing our film as truth and facts, and a “nuanced, compassionate, deeply researched” project.
JP: That is great to hear, and interesting that there has been an overwhelming response from parents. Parents are frequently the forgotten victims of this ideology.
How has the film been doing when it comes to numbers of views and reach?
VL: Since February 18th, the film has been viewed 40,000 times on Vimeo, after it was shut down in its first week and then reinstated due to publicity and pressure from concerned citizens. Many bootlegged copies have proliferated on Odysee, Rumble, and such, so probably 30,000 more views there as well. After we put it on Vimeo on Demand in mid-April, it’s getting purchased about 50 times a day. Our objective is the widest possible reach.
Since February 18th, the film has been viewed 40,000 times on Vimeo, after it was shut down in its first week and then reinstated due to publicity and pressure from concerned citizens.
JP: Sad to say, I’m not surprised that it was shut down within a few days. Can you explain more about how such a thing happens? In what ways has it been blocked or throttled?
VL: Vimeo blocked it on the third day due to activists’ doing a “blitz” pressure campaign on Vimeo. Then they reinstated it, after news articles and public pressure. Our private screening event in Austin was canceled due to “blitz” pressure on the venue (300 phone calls by activists in two days). These experiences help us refine our marketing strategy.
JP: I guess that shows the power of public pressure, from either side. You know you’ve touched a nerve when the response has been both so positive as to receive countless heartfelt letters from people, and so harsh that activists want it canceled.
What do you see as next steps in turning the tide on this topic as a society? What comes after raising awareness through a documentary like this?
VL: Our objective was to focus on the medical harm and regret of experimental treatments. All studies point to the fact that regret peaks around eight to eleven years later. Yet the message of the activists toward the detransitioners is, “It didn’t work for you, you freak, but other people are happy with their medicalization.”
Our expectation is that conversations about the long-term ramifications of this medical protocol will start. We need to talk not only about how individuals are affected, but the society as a whole. Wrong-sex hormone treatment and puberty blockers lead to serious health complications that could lead to lifelong disability, chronic pain, osteoporosis, cardiac events, worsening mental health. SRSs (sex-reassignment surgeries) cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. These are not just one individual’s personal issues.
The economics of our health insurance will be impacted. The ability of these people to be contributing members of society will be impacted profoundly. The Reuters investigation from November 2022 stated that there are 18,000 U.S. children currently on puberty blockers and 122,000 kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria (and this is only via public insurance data, so likely an undercount). These all are future patients with musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, and mental illnesses for a lifetime. A hysterectomy at twenty-one can lead to early dementia, early menopause, and collapse of the pelvic floor organs.
The economics of our health insurance will be impacted. The ability of these people to be contributing members of society will be impacted profoundly.
I don’t yet see conversations about the long-term health implications of “gender-affirming care,” particularly in relation to how insurance, the labor force, interpersonal relationships, and future offspring will be affected. Everyone wants to be affirmed now and medicalized now. But there are lifelong implications to experimental medicine: autoimmune illnesses, cancers, etc. Sexual dysfunction and anorgasmia have real implications on dating, romantic life, and partnering up. A few people are talking about this on NSFW posts on Reddit.
JP: It’s interesting how speaking out against trans ideology and gender-affirming care creates some unlikely alliances across the political and religious spectrum. What do you see as the potentials and pitfalls of such alliances?
VL: We align with people who are pro-reality, who respect core community values such as truth and honesty, and who see the human being as a whole: body and soul. There is no metaphysical “gendered soul” separate from the body. Teaching body dissociation to kids (“born in the wrong body”) has led to a tidal wave of self-hatred, body dysmorphia, depression, anxiety, and self-harm. We are our bodies, and we are part of the biosphere. We respect nature and the body’s own intricate biochemical mechanism for self-regulation, the endocrine system. We believe that humans cannot and should not try to “play God.” We are students of history and know that radical attempts to re-engineer human society according to someone’s outrageous vision (read Martine Rothblatt’s The Apartheid of Sex) have led to enormous human cataclysms (communism, Chinese cultural revolution).
We are our bodies, and we are part of the biosphere. We respect nature and the body’s own intricate biochemical mechanism for self-regulation, the endocrine system.
JP: Well, then count me a realist, too! Funny you use the term pro-reality. I’ve written similarly about the possibility of realist alliances. While this makes for some improbable pairings, there can be agreement on the importance of fact-based objective reality and the givenness of the human body.
Realists can agree that the world is an objective reality with inherent meaning, in which humans are situated as embodied, contingent beings. Such realists, whether conservative, moderate, or progressive, might have more in common with each other on understanding reality and humanity than some on their “own side” whom I call constructivists: those who see the world as a conglomeration of relative meanings, subjectively experienced by autonomous, self-determining beings, who construct their own truth and identity based on internal feelings.
But I do have a related question on this point—a bit of respectful pushback, if I may.
Your pro-reality position seems to have implications beyond just the transgender question. Can one consistently oppose the extremes of gender-affirming care while upholding the rest of the LGB revolution? If our male and female bodies matter, and their inherent design and ordering toward each other mean something, then doesn’t that raise some questions about the sexual revolution more broadly?
As we see the continued deleterious effects on human flourishing unfold as thousands of years of wisdom and common sense regarding sex and sexuality are jettisoned, there are both religious and non-religious thinkers raising this question, though some go farther than others. I think, for example, of Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex, Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress, and Erika Bachiochi’s “Sex-Realist Feminism.” An enlightening panel discussion with many of these thinkers was co-hosted by Public Discourse earlier this year. When the real human body is considered, its holistic structure as male or female is clearly ordered and designed to unite with its complement.
If our male and female bodies matter, and their inherent design and ordering towards each other mean something, then doesn’t that raise some questions about the sexual revolution more broadly?
How does this reality relate to the rest of the sexual revolution? If one argues that individuals should be able to express themselves sexually and fulfill their desires with no external limits beyond human desire or will, how does one justify saying that transgenderism is off-limits?
VL: I will answer the question, but I need to say that this is my personal opinion. I’m fifty-five and have worked in entertainment for more than thirty years, and in Hollywood for twenty-five years. The entertainment industry attracts LGBT people, so I’ve hired, mentored, befriended, and promoted LGBT and gender-non-conforming people every day of my career. I believe that being gay or lesbian is how these people were born. Some were affected by their circumstances, as well, but in general I believe that homosexuality is innate, inborn, and has existed for millennia. There were a handful of “classic” transsexual women as well. I have three close friends who transitioned in their late forties.
But the explosion we are seeing now is different. A 4,000-percent increase of teenage girls identifying as trans? This is unprecedented. Mostly these are autistic, traumatized, mentally ill teens who seek to belong, who wish to escape their traumatized brains and bodies, who have been bullied relentlessly (“dyke,” “fag,” “freak”) and now seek a “mark of distinction” that will elevate their social status. Instead of being offered therapy, deep understanding, and compassion for their actual traumas, they are being ushered toward testosterone, mastectomies, and hysterectomies. This is not health care. The tidal wave of regret is coming, because these adolescents were never transsexual to begin with. Many of them are lesbians or gay boys who have internalized so much homophobia and bullying that they would rather escape all of it and become someone different than deal with it.
This is what we want to address. Kids explore identities. This is a natural process of discovering who they are. Medicalizing this exploration cements this exploration they were doing when they were teens. Life is long, and one goes through many phases and many “identities.” To be “cemented” for a lifetime in the decision you made as a distressed sixteen-year-old to amputate healthy sex organs does not make sense.
JP: The rise in the rate of transgender identification is indeed stunning, as is the stark increase in the percentage of Gen-Zers who identify as LGBT. What those trends portend is a live question, as are the varied possible causes. And as you say, there is a tidal wave of regret building, from those who have been pushed toward gender transition. We will all need to make special effort to love and care for them.
You’ve been so gracious with your time. As we conclude, are there any other comments you’d like to share with our readers?
VL: Find a theater near you to attend the theatrical one-day premier on June 21st. Then the movie will become available online and via DVD on July 2nd. Watch the documentary and pass it on to all in your circles!
And ask commonsense humanistic questions:
– Can adults make decisions on behalf of kids that will forever change the path of the kids’ lives?
– Is it worth it to ruin one’s health in the name of a belief system?
– Is what you are reading in academic medical research based on evidence, or pseudo-science?
– If humans have been going through puberty for millennia, who are we to mess with that now?
– Is puberty a disease?
JP: Thank you for your work on this vital issue. I hope this documentary continues to make an impact. And realists unite!
After women’s rights campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen was mobbed and assaulted in New Zealand, longtime feminist and socialist Jill Ovens decided she’d had enough. The following week, Jill resigned from the Labour Party and founded the Women’s Rights Party, which states, on their website:
“We want a world that is safe and fair for women and girls
The Women’s Rights Party is a party of women and men who believe in democracy, equality, and biological reality.
Sex is binary
Human beings cannot change sex
Women are adult humans of the female sex”
Jill had been an active member of the Labour Party but had become increasingly angered as women’s voices were not being listened to. Since retiring from the union movement, she has thrown her energy into the Women’s Rights Party, which has set out to recruit 500 members so they can register as a political party and be on the ballot in the New Zealand General Election in October.
The Women’s Rights Party aims to give women an option on the ballot paper who
find themselves politically homeless as mainstream parties have stopped listening to women and their concerns. In addition to contesting Parliamentary and local body elections, they hope to influence cross party policies to promote and uphold the rights and status of women and girls.
In this episode, I speak with Jill about her political history and why she formed the Women’s Rights Party.
The post Jill Ovens resigned from New Zealand’s Labour Party to start the Women’s Rights Party appeared first on Feminist Current.
In recent years, prisons across the Western world have been allowing men who identify as women to be housed alongside female inmates, leading to sexual harassment, sexual assaults, pregnancies, and complaints from women both in prison and among the general public. These complaints have been mostly ignored by governments and those with the power to do something. That said, the policy in the UK was changed in February in response to one high profile case in particular, wherein a rapist name Adam Graham renamed himself “Isla Bryson” and claimed to be a woman in order to be reassigned to a women’s prison in Scotland. The new policy prevents men who “retain male genitalia or have been convicted of a violent or sexual offence” from being moved to women’s prisons.
The US and Canada, though, continue to lag on addressing this issue, and dangerous men remain in women’s prisons across North America.
I spoke with two women who are taking action: Amanda Stulman is the USA director of Keep Prisons Single Sex, and Jennifer Thomas is the founder of Free Speech for Women and runs an action group called “Get Men Out.”
You can listen to this interview on the podcast. This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity.
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Meghan: I would love if you could tell our listeners a little bit about the work that you do and how you came to be involved in this issue.
Amanda: Thanks for having us. I became involved in this issue in particular because I have a background in administrative law and policy, and because the issue of prisons is so distinct in so many different jurisdictions. On top of the 50 states, there’s the federal system and there are over 2000 separate municipal jails.. County… city… Each one can have its own, unique policy or law which applies to it. So I thought I could be useful in breaking down what those policies look like and how they end up applying in the real world.
So I worked with Kate Coleman, who is the founder of Keep Prisons Single Sex. She’s based in the UK and we opened a branch of Keep Prisons Single Sex in the US over two years ago. The goal of Keep Prisons Single Sex is obviously to advocate against mixed sex prisons, and we do that by obtaining data, gathering research, lobbying lawmakers and policymakers, and trying to bring public awareness to the issue.
Meghan: Great. I’m so glad that you’re doing this work. This issue of of men being transferred into women’s prisons is so troubling, and I’ve been extremely frustrated, as I’m sure you both have as well, over the past few years that Governments in North America are really not paying attention to this and really not addressing women’s concerns.
Jennifer, can you tell us a little bit about your work and background and the activism that you are doing?
Jennifer: Well, I’m, I’m sort of an action group. So I focus on all the issues with that affect women, girls, and gender. I love working with Amanda because she’s so knowledgeable with the policies. And this last protest, Get Men Out, that was an action group I started. The first thing I wanted to do was aim at the prison situation because that is so abhorrent, you know, and it’s so obvious that it’s wrong. But I also diirect that towards the bathroom issue and other issues too — Get Men Out, Save Our Spaces… It sort of covers everything. What I like to do is read the temperature of what’s going on and try to anticipate where I will get the most exposure.
So that’s what I do. I don’t solely focus on the prison issue, but as with everything in this issue of the harms of gender ideology, you focus on one and the prison issue will lead you to the ACLU because they’re the ones that sued for that policy to get in there. So I’ll start there and dig deeper just to try to see where I can get more action and more attention focused on that issue. I’ve worked with Amanda a few times, I’ve worked with Beth Steltzer from Save Women Sports, I’ve worked with a Partners for Ethical Care…
When they have an action that I think will really hit the temperature, of where I think America’s at, then I go full force. So that’s what happened with this Get Men Out action. We worked with Amanda and Amy Ichikawa and we had a sense that the population was starting to be willing to see this. This issue is such a violation — we’re talking about women in prison, we’re talking about really some of the most vulnerable women in the country.
Meghan: Same thing in Canada. I interviewed Heather Mason a while back, who’s a really brave advocate and an ex inmate herself. She’s been one of the only ones speaking out in Canada about this issue. We’re talking about women who already have almost no rights, have no voice because they’re in prison, and they’re being housed with not just men, but the worst men — violent offenders, rapists, child molesters, and so on.
Jennifer, you mentioned that the ACLU was heavily involved in pushing for this policy allowing men to be transferred into women’s prisons. Amanda, maybe you can speak to that a little bit — how did that happen?
Amanda: Sure. On top of the usual ire one should feel for the ACLU and their complete betrayal of what their mission is supposed to be and what they’re supposed to stand for, I have some extra ire for it. I, as a young adult in the early 90s, I interned at the ACLU in the exact same program that is now their LGBTQ++AI when it was the Lesbian and Gay Rights and HIV project. And to see them stray so far afield, not just from the substance of this issue in particular in terms of protecting women, but even on some of the ancillary issues. For example, they were the main drivers behind preventing a woman from requesting public records in Washington State. She was trying to learn how many men were in women’s prisons, how recently they’d been moved… People were starting to get wind of the policy change in Washington several years ago, and it was the A C L U who worked with several inmates representing them to fight the disclosure by Washington State Department of Corrections for a public records request.
The enormous irony of this is that this woman learned how to make her public records request from the ACLU’s own website. The ACLU’s mission is transparency, public awareness, obtaining data from the government, you know, the government works for you, etc. And they actively worked to suppress access to data that would allow the public to learn the impact of these policies, and they were so successful.
That they managed to work with the Washington State legislature and actually passed a law modifying their public records law to exclude disclosure of issues related to gender identity and prisoners. So unless you get information directly from women housed there, which you know, is incredibly dangerous and risky for them, there’s no way to do it on paper, publicly, directly because of the ACLU.
But getting back to the primary issue of pushing for this policy, the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is kinda a local version of the ACLU, I believe it originated with them. I haven’t been able to track it back any further, but they’re the ones who have developed the model transgender inmate policy that was enacted in California, that legislatures tried to enact in Maryland. They’re actively trying to enact a version of it in New York state right now, which is even more extreme than the version in California. So, they’re not only rhetorically pushing this issue, they are actively developing model laws. They’re actively pushing for those laws and actively working to prevent the public from learning about this issue.
Meghan: This is so appalling. I mean, for these kinds of organizations to be fighting against the rights of incredibly marginalized people. It’s really mindblowing that this is happening.
Jennifer: They’re acting as a legal agent of the gender industry. We have to expose and fight the ACLU because they are basically a legal firm that is pushing their policy.
It’s not just as simple as just saying, ok only men and women’s prisons. You have to dig deeper. I’m planning a protest in August against the ACLU in Washington DC because, you know, we can at least go after their donors — all the people that think the ACLU is so great because they protected the Nazis and Skokie and they believe in free speech and all that.
The whole narrative behind them that they’ve managed to hide—the new narrative—is still believed by a lot of Democrats. And I think if the Democrats knew what the ACLU have been doing with our civil liberties, they would stop donating.
Would that stop the ACLU? No, because the gender industry would just make up for that money. But you could see then a shift with the populace, you know, a shift of awareness.
Meghan: I’m glad that you brought that up, in terms of the donors, because one of the major obstacles to fighting gender identity ideology is that it’s infiltrated almost every single institution. Certainly every single civil rights organization, reproductive rights organization, LG now BTQ etc organizations. I mean, the reason that they’re doing this is because they’re getting all this funding to do it. Alternatively, you could look at it as they risk losing funding if they don’t push this.
Let’s talk about that. Where do we go to advocate against these policies when we’re dealing with these massive organizations and institutions? And clearly this ideology has infiltrated the Democratic Party. It feels so big and I know that people are getting really angry about it thanks to activism, like what you two are doing, but it feels like a big hill to climb. Have you had any successes? Or do you have suggestions in terms of who might be a productive target?
Amanda: I have found that to be among the most depressing part of working in this area, which is that there is not a single legacy civil rights organization or women’s rights group that understands this issue, or at least, pretends to. Every single one of them has been absolutely ideologically captured. So it really does seem as though either these organizations have to be built anew from the ground up — some other version of them. Or it’s going to take what Jennifer does an enormous amount of, which is on the street campaigning to bring awareness to force media to pay attention to the issue and to bring it to the public. We don’t have the numbers in North America of people advocating on this issue. We certainly don’t have the dollars. The reason that the ACLU changed the name of the program that addresses this is because they received a $15 million gift from John Stryker. That is what led to the change of the name and to their absolute commitment to the “T” all the time and none of the LGB. So I don’t think there’s a good answer to how we deal with the established organizations. I think people and especially women like Jennifer are the ones sort of creating a public groundswell.
Meghan: Right. I mean I’m, I’m verging towards thinking all these organizations need to be defunded and taken apart and started over again so that they’re not so tied up with this money that’s corrupted them so deeply.
Jennifer: The only real solution is the public against this, right? When we see thousands of people in the streets, fighting against this, that’s when we’ll see some change. People have to get mad enough to get out on the streets and this complacency that they’re under.
But inevitably I do think we will see a ground swell and that’s when we’ll regain our power. We won’t feel so helpless because we’ll look around and instead of seeing 20 or 30 people standing next to us, it’s thousands.
That’s how we know about Martin Luther King — because he went to the street. So it’s going to take that and it’s going to take an awareness level where we just have to keep plugging along and hitting these stories.
Now there’s this new media that is hungry for these stories. Tucker just got fired. James O’Keefe got fired. They’re looking for stories, right? Because they’re going to build their own thing. So we do have this interesting time right now where there’s new media that we can tap into that will tell our story. It’s getting out more and more, but it’s going to take work.
Meghan: So I wanna talk a bit about the law. I know that Joe Biden’s administration pushed through a policy allowing men to be transferred into women’s prisons. But I also am under the impression that things differ from state to state.
I know that New York lawmakers are pushing or trying to push through this bill called the Gender Identity Respect, Dignity and Safety Act, which would automatically place male prisoners in women’s facilities if they identify as women. I’m curious to know, first, if you know what’s happening with this bill, and second, if this is something that we actually need to be fighting on a state to state basis or that we can fight on a federal level.
Amanda: So the New York State Bill, as you say, presumptively houses people according to their self-declared gender identity. And there is such an insanely high burden and such a quick turnaround time required to deny that to someone that the bill was clearly drafted in New York with the intent to never, ever, ever deny someone. There are also mechanisms built in for the state to be sued if someone is denied, and to have attorney’s fees and damages paid. So it is so unidirectional a law, it’s a little frightening that that came about after all we’ve heard coming out of California and New Jersey and Canada, to the extent that people hear about it, um, the, the answer more broadly is yes, for right now, this is having to be fought on a state by state basis.
When this administration — the Biden administration — came in on its first day in office, it issued an executive order directing federal agencies to interpret the laws and regulations that they have some control over and that they manage in the various agencies to interpret sex to include gender identity. So with one pen stroke on his first day in office, he directed every federal agency to work through that process for the Bureau of Prisons, which is the only direct mechanism the federal government has. There are some indirect ones, which I’ll mention, but it’s the only direct prison system that the federal government controls, putting aside military.
During the Obama administration’s last month in office, they created a transgender offender manual and literally chucked it in the air and walked out the door and left that for the Trump administration to deal with. It was a very aggressive policy. Again, not a federal law, not a regulation, didn’t go through any voting process, didn’t go through any public comment process.
It was merely an in-house manual that the Federal Bureau of Prisons was expected to follow. It took the Trump administration two years to grapple with that policy and try to modify it, which they did, in kind of half-hearted way.
And then following Biden’s executive order and a few other similar executive orders, the Federal Bureau of Prisons again reissued the transgender offender manual and again leaning much more heavily towards a pathway for men to be moved into the women’s prisons based on self declaration. So that’s what covers the federal prison.
The way that the federal government impacts the state prison system is they have money and there’s a federal regulation called the PREA regulations, and it derives from the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The PREA regulations provide — and those did go through a public comment period, but that was so long before this issue was in the public’s line of vision.. You know, it was over a decade ago, nobody was paying attention to this… Well, some rare people were paying attention, but very few people were paying attention… And through the regulatory process, the Obama Department of Justice issued regulations that contemplated cross-sex housing. The act itself did not. And that’s the first time in the federal legal system there was anything speaking to even the concept of developing cross-sex housing. So what those regulations provide is that in order to maintain full federal funding — and every state receives some in order to maintain that — you get massively dinged until you receive no money. Year after year, you get successively more dinged if you do not adhere to those regulations. So every state has to, at least on paper, consider housing people based on their self-declared trans identity. So for a number of years, most states were like, “okay.” And then went about their business. But some of them took it really seriously.
So now a number of states have either laws or policies that not only implement those regulations of contemplating cross-sex housing, but presumptively housed according to self-declared gender identity.
Jennifer: And this is how the federal government influences states throughout, like the federal government has the right — the president can come in and put out an executive order.
That’s what he did. This crazy executive order that virtually anybody would think was insane, you know, prioritizing gender identity above sex-based rights. They can come in and do that, and then they have this mechanism. The schools are funded federally, so they basically blackmail them into adopting these policies by withholding money.
So you think, well, why would the states go along with this? Well, they wouldn’t get their money. They even threatened the school lunch program at one point with, you know, “if you don’t adopt these policies, your school lunch program is going to be threatened.”
It’s a withholding of money if you don’t do this right. So like the universities that are, there are some laws in there, but they’re just not pursuing them. These executive orders have a lot of control even with Title IX. Amanda could probably speak better to this, but that’s why it’s being messed with, because it’s not, it’s not a law per se?
Amanda: Right. Just to clarify, Title IX is itself a law, but it’s the regulations that they’re kind of messing with right now. And what they’re trying to do is trying to apply what both Jennifer and I have been talking about in terms of the executive orders — redefining sex to mean sex or gender identity. The reason we’ve heard a lot about Title IX is they are going through the formal rulemaking process and putting it out for public comment. They received a record number of comments, which is really heartening, about modifying the language of the regulations, which is where you’ll find all the meaty stuff about what you have to do to get money if you’re a state or a state entity.
Meghan: I want to talk about some specific cases. I believe that there are 27 males currently being housed at Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for women? Which was a central focus of the Get Men Out protest in New Jersey last month. Is that normal throughout the states?
Amanda: Well, woohoo, now there’s only about 10. A number of them managed to behave so poorly they got themselves moved out.
About two years ago, we worked with Women’s Declaration International to do a statewide FOIA project of every state prison to try to see what the numbers were in each location. Many were extremely uncooperative and we were not able to get a completely exhaustive list. But there are states that are in that range… admittedly not many two years ago. I think there’s probably more now, if we were to circle back and do it again. But even in states where you wouldn’t necessarily think of it, there’s a handful.
Virginia had one for decades, even before this recent push. But a number of states have several dozen. Obviously California does now. Washington State is getting up there. Illinois’ numbers are growing and they have neither a policy nor a law. A federal judge keeps putting men in women’s prison in Illinois. So it’s everywhere, though the numbers change. But we’re, we’re only seeing them go up. We’re not seeing them go down much. New Jersey went down just because they had a kind of freak out placement of men in there when they reached the settlement with the ACLU that Jennifer referenced, and then they had another panic in the other direction when it went so badly.
Meghan: And what are some of the cases — like what are we hearing about what’s actually going on in these prisons? I know that when I talk about this issue online, people will respond in these very blase ways. People will say like, “Well, you know, women get raped in prison either way.” Or they say, “If they’re in male prisons, then these males who identify as women are going to get raped.” Or they say, “Well prison is really bad.” And I don’t know, maybe they’re just not able to picture the situation and what’s actually going down and what the danger is when you’re putting men in women’s prisons. Can you talk to some specific cases that have happened?
Jennifer: So when a woman gets convicted of a crime and the judge reads out her sentence, he doesn’t say, “Okay, your sentence is possible rape, possible forced childbirth or an abortion, and then possible abandonment of your child.”
We don’t agree. We don’t have agreed upon laws to cover this. The public is not in agreement on this. Otherwise, that would be the sentence. This apathy around it just upsets me to no end. I also think people think it can’t happen to them.
The fastest growing category of inmates is women. When women get convicted, it’s harsher sentences for lesser crimes.
I think this sort of bleeds into that industrial complex. Like in New Jersey they were making $61,000 per person off of their prisoners. And women are easier to manage than men. Actually, prison reform is working for men and not women. So men are getting shorter sentences for worse crimes and getting out. They can add more to that prison population by adding men. Right now, if Bundy applied, he would get into a woman’s prisons. If Richard Speck, who killed eight nurses in Chicago, took hormones and dressed like a woman when he was in jail he would be in there with them. There’s no distinction of how bad the crime is.
Amanda: I think those are really good points, and I think a lot of it speaks to, aside from the sort of disregard for prisoners in general, it’s just treated as a kind of a throwaway population. But aside from that, I think it is largely a misconception. This is a subset of, at best, men they’re imagining are a particular kind of man or worse, they think there’s some sort of version of a subset of women. But I think most people imagine that it’s non-violent criminals, that it’s men who have had genital surgery, that it’s men who are on hormones, that it’s men who are tiny and pretty and vulnerable. All of those assumptions are out there and obviously, even if somebody is those things and not a violent criminal who is tiny and has had genital surgery and is on hormones, if they’re a man, they still don’t belong in a woman’s prison.
But I think that is what most of the public imagines when they hear these stories, which is one reason that it’s so important for the stories and the names and the visuals and the crimes and all of that to be made really right in people’s faces so they can see the criminal history of these men. They can see what they look like, which I know seems really superficial, That page on Keep Prisons’s Single-Sex’s website that has a sample of men and their crimes who are in women’s prisons, I mean, I’ve peaked people in 30 seconds by showing them that page. Just the, the visual of is sometimes what people need. Like, oh, still has a penis and is massive? That’s crazy.
Meghan: Yeah. And I guess, probably a lot of people — I’m gonna give them the benefit of the doubt — are imagining these men who are identifying as women or trans women as being men who “pass.” So men who “look like women,” probably men who’ve gone through all the surgeries and so on and so forth. So I imagine that what’s happening there when you’re showing them that actually these are the men who are in these women’s facilities: they just look like regular dudes. Like not even trying to look like women.
Amanda: Or they look exactly like men who have literally put their hair in pigtails, which is somehow even more alarming. You know, the superficiality of it.
Jennifer: The women said in their letters at the protest that these men dropped that act right when get into the facility then it’s a million dollar baby game, you know, let’s make a baby.
They’re not acting vulnerable when that’s going on. It’s a complete facade.
Meghan: In the UK they’ve actually had some success and have started to change their policies in order to bar violent offenders, as I understand it, from being transferred to women’s prisons. Do I have that right?
Amanda: I believe that’s right. There’s a certain category where the answer is just “no.”
Meghan: Have you had any success in that regard? In terms of advocating for change in the US or have you managed to have an impact when you talk to politicians, for example?
Amanda: Aside from public awareness, which is kind of hard to measure, but in terms of objective successes, a number of organizations and women, including Keep Prisons Single Sex and me, fought very hard in Maryland to keep a proposed law there from getting out of committee, and that was successful.
A year or two ago, New York State’s law sat in committee the last legislative session, um, through a letter writing campaign from Keep Prisons Single Sex, and I like to think we had something to do with it not making it out of committee. No successes in terms of turning things around necessarily, but like putting a hand up to the train that just keeps going faster.
But the public awareness is huge. That some mainstream media in the New York Post did a story about Jennifer’s action last month… They’re covering it, as Jennifer mentioned, and alternative media is becoming more interested in it. So in terms of public awareness, I think that’s where we’re seeing success.
I can’t say so much elsewhere.
Jennifer: Yeah. And public awareness is a tricky thing because you have to get ’em mad enough to come out. I think there’s a sense of helplessness that can be overcome with just more people on the ground and you know, the more people rally and organize and get together because we have to rebuild almost all our organizations. So we’re going to be needing to mesh with new people, churches that have retained their organization and can relay messages without the dictatorship of social media and tech… We’re going have to come up with alternatives, and alternative ways of networking, and different people to network with to really get the ball rolling. Because it’s too scary alone. I think a lot of people are aware, and we’re at the stage of how do we get them to join us? How do we get them to come and let us ease some of that helplessness they’re feeling about this by joining together. And then lawyers mix in, and then we’re cooking with gas, you know, and we can make change.
We’re behind England. We have different laws here. It’s a totally different landscape here. But I do feel like it’s changed over the past couple of years in America. And there are more people interested in fighting this. So we are at the stage of just kind of weaving that blanket together.
We’re going to get better at this. I have hope for the future.
Meghan: I’m glad to hear that. I think that unfortunately, we — and I’m speaking like for myself, I’m not speaking for you two because I don’t know how long you guys have all been involved in this work — but we, a lot of the radical feminists who were worried about this early on, really didn’t understand how big this was and how deep the issue goes, so probably naively thought, “If we can just get the word out, then we can stop it,” not realizing that this was coming top down from these very wealthy funders. Just letting people know about it may have not been enough. Although, of course, the more people that know, the more people will push back, especially at a government level, and hopefully we can have an impact on things like legislation that way.
Amanda: You had asked about politicians, and I think there’s something relevant on that issue, particularly to contrast how it’s gone in the US and Canada vs the UK and that is that our politicians, you know, the Democratic party — liberal politicians, or I should say lefty politicians — are absolutely committed to holding onto the belief that the only people who could object to these policies are religious conservatives.
You know, I write as a constituent to my own representatives, and I’m in New York, so they’re all Democrats. And every time I do, I get back a form letter that says, “We’re excited to learn about your interest in religious freedom, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You must be concerned about this for religious reasons.” And I write back and I say, that is not my concern. My concern is this. And I get another form letter that’s their like letter two in this letter tree, saying, you know, “Thank you for demonstrating your interest in religious freedom. We’re concerned about that too.”
So some of what’s happened and some of the challenge in the US and perhaps to some extent in Canada too, probably to a slightly lesser degree, is there is this artificial reinforced divide about who’s for these policies and who’s against them and why.
It becomes additionally challenging when much of the media who will cover this is either conservative or religious or both, and bless them. I am so thankful that they do. But all of us who need to be interested and concerned about this issue are just allergic to the arguments because they come out of the gate thinking this is tribal and we’re not in that tribe, so we’re not joining hands with you.
Meghan: Yeah. I mean that’s been the media and the political view from the get-go, which is why it was so difficult for feminists to get their perspectives out in the first place.
In Canada the media would only cover this issue as one of the religious right — which is strange because the religious right in Canada is really pretty marginal — as though it was only a debate between the religious right and everybody else.
Clearly they’ve done the same thing to a larger extent in the US which is frustrating because as you say people kind of just shut down and think, “Well, I guess you must be a religious right, Christian, gay hating jerk.”
Jennifer: And throw abortion on top of that, which they have done, and it’s just division everywhere. But there is this new media and there are so many people who are politically homeless who just want good schools for their kids and don’t want them brainwashed. So I think people are converging on almost every issue in gender. We’re all starting to kind of sing the same message. We want to work together, we can set aside whatever differences we have. This is too important. So I think there’s hope. There’s always hope, right?
We’re basically fighting the one percent. And if everyone could come in on even the free speech issue where, you know, if we don’t have it, we are literally slaves — then they can tell us to say anything and do anything..
Even with Covid, it galvanized people. But we’re fighting a big machine. Like even with Tucker, you know, he was the top — the top host of the top show in America, and they showed us he can be taken off the throne. They want to model behavior of defeat with us. And we have to fight that with modeling behavior of not using pronouns and demanding our autonomy. Individually and then together. And I think we are getting there and more and more people are getting pissed about this.
I have sisters and a lot of them were against me. But after Tucker, a couple of them came around, so the temperature has changed. My sisters are full on Democrats raised in Chicago, but they’re coming around because they’re seeing it affect them. And you know, that’s how it goes with issues. It has to affect you. Your kid has to be in peril. So I think we are going to see game momentum and then it’ll kind of rub off on Canada because we’re so close.
That’s what I’m hoping for. I’m so sorry. That’s all I have to say about Canada.
Meghan: I mean, it’s really, really bad. It’s a really bad situation in Canada and nothing’s really changing and there’s a little bit of pushback here and there, but not nearly enough and nothing comparable to what’s going on in the US, but you’re right that Canada does follow America’s lead, so, I think you might be right on that end.
And I’m glad that you made the point about we’re fighting the one percent because this trans rights movement has done so much work very successfully to present itself as just another grassroots civil rights movement. Like this is just about these marginalized people who don’t have rights, fighting for their lives, fighting back for their rights, fighting back for them, their safety. And that is not how any of this happened. This was fully a top down thing. And those of us fighting back are the ones who have very, very, very little power.
Jennifer: They always say, You don’t want us to exist.” And then they erase the word women. Bizarre. You know, when this mass propaganda machine captured all the young people online, basically they internalized this dialogue with everything they’re doing to us.
That’s why there’s no dialogue with them. I think what they don’t want people to hear is how ridiculous their answers are.
Meghan: Of course. It’s always a reversal. It’s always about the trans activists presenting themselves as these downtrodden, silencenced, everyone’s after them, they’re being threatened and harassed all the time, etc. And we know as women who are trying to speak out on this that it’s the total opposite. And I mean, I think anyone who’s really paying attention to this debate can see what happens to women in particular who speak out and who really has the power in all of this institutionally. And in a lot of cases literally the physical power as well as we’re talking about men.
Before I let you go can you please tell me how to find your work, your organizations, and how to support your work, as well as if you have any upcoming actions that people might be able to support or attend?
Amanda: Sure. So the USA website for Keep Prisons Single Sex is kpssinfo.org. Other than that, we’re most active on Twitter, which is @NoXY_USA. We’re also on Facebook.
Meghan: Awesome. And can people support your work in any way?
Amanda: Yes. Thank you for asking about that. We do have a donate button on our website and just so people are aware, everything gets funded through the UK. So if it is in pounds, don’t be surprised. The UK group will honour requests to direct that towards the USA efforts. That’s what funds all of our work. Everyone is a volunteer. Any expenses we have get paid through fundraisers to the UK Keep Prisons Single Sex.
Jennifer: I’m Jennifer Thomas Rev @RevFemStBeatfem. I run the action group, Get Men Out.
My next event is on June 16th in Pittsburgh at the City Council building at 1PM. I’m aiming to get men out of women’s bathrooms. And of course it’s a Free Speech for Women event, so we’ll invite speakers. The following protest I have on the calendar is for the ACLU and that is Friday, August 11th in Washington, DC on the Supreme Court steps. You can email me at [email protected] for more info and I’ll get back to you. I do fundraising, but I peg it to each protest. So the fundraiser won’t come out for the Pittsburgh event until about a month before. So if you just follow me on Twitter, that’s the best way to find me. Or email me.
Meghan: Okay, perfect. Thank you both so much for speaking with me about this.
I’m really excited about the work that you’re doing, and I’m glad that you both feel hopeful about affecting change and I’m really grateful for your willingness to fight and for all the hard work that you’re doing.
Jennifer: Oh, well thank you Meghan. It’s such a pleasure and you are a woman that I admire, and I thank you so much for the interview.
Amanda: Same. Thank you.
The post Transcript: Why are dangerous men still being housed in women’s prisons? appeared first on Feminist Current.
In recent years, prisons across the Western world have been allowing men who identify as women to be housed alongside female inmates, leading to sexual harassment, sexual assaults, pregnancies, and complaints from women both in prison and among the general public. These complaints have been mostly ignored by governments and those with the power to do something. That said, the policy in the UK was changed in February in response to one high profile case in particular, wherein a rapist name Adam Graham renamed himself “Isla Bryson” and claimed to be a woman in order to be reassigned to a women’s prison in Scotland. The new policy prevents men who “retain male genitalia or have been convicted of a violent or sexual offence” from being moved to women’s prisons.
The US and Canada, though, continue to lag on addressing this issue, and dangerous men remain in women’s prisons across North America.
In this episode, I speak with two women who are taking action: Amanda Stulman is the USA director of Keep Prisons Single Sex, and Jennifer Thomas is the founder of Free Speech for Women and runs an action group called “Get Men Out.”
The post Why are dangerous men still being housed in women’s prisons? appeared first on Feminist Current.
In February 2020, Laila Mickelwait, Exodus Cry’s Director of Abolition at the time, published an op-ed titled, “Time to Shut Pornhub Down,” bringing attention to the fact that Pornhub was hosting child pornography and videos of trafficking victims on the site. This sparked a petition and accompanying campaign, Traffickinghub. Then, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Nicholas Kristof, published a scathing exposé in the New York Times, titled, “The Children of Pornhub,” leading the company to leap to action, deleting 80% of their content overnight — about 10 million videos. Visa, Mastercard, and Discover cut ties with the site. In 2021, Canadian parliament began to investigate the Canadian-based company that owns Pornhub, MindGeek and a number of lawsuits were filed against the company on behalf of survivors. NCOSE — the National Centre on Sexual Exploitation — filed several of these lawsuits, representing victims seeking justice against MindGeek. NCOSE was featured in a documentary released on Netflix last money, purporting to address the scandal, called Money Shot.
I spoke to Haley McNamara, Director of the International Centre on Sexual Exploitation in the UK and a Vice President at the U.S. based National Center on Sexual Exploitation, about the situation at Pornhub, the Netflix documentary, and NCOSE’s efforts to stop exploitation in porn.
The post Pornhub was hosting videos of minors and trafficking victims — what’s next? appeared first on Feminist Current.
What is subject marketing? An interview with Hana Purslow, philosophy marketing manager
In this interview, our marketing manager for philosophy, Hana Purslow, outlines OUP’s approach to subject marketing. She provides examples of campaigns and channels that we use to promote our content and reveals what she enjoys most about her job and how she sees her role evolving in the coming years.
Subject marketing promotes a particular topic or subject to a research community by showcasing relevant content in that area, regardless of format. This can include book chapters, journal papers, or articles from our reference products. By marketing the subject, we showcase key content for academics to use in their teaching or research. Through the dissemination of OUP’s scholarly research in this targeted way, we can have a direct and positive impact within the subject community.
Our focus in subject marketing is building our brand and OUP’s profile in a particular discipline. We concentrate our efforts on building a strong subject community around our content; it is only through researchers reading, sharing, and citing our content that we can be sure of the real-world impact our publishing has. Our job in marketing is to ensure that the academic community is aware of OUP’s high-quality, cutting-edge, and impactful research.
I am responsible for leading our philosophy subject marketing. I take huge enjoyment in working with OUP philosophy content and learning from the greatest minds across all areas of philosophy. I find working with OUP Philosophy Editors Peter Momtchiloff, Peter Ohlin, and Lucy Randall extremely rewarding—their knowledge of philosophy is second to none, and with so many interesting areas within the subject to cover, it’s a marketer’s dream when choosing which topics to highlight!
A good example is the “Philosophy in Focus” campaign I run each month. This is our most successful thematic campaign, where we host a selection of thought-provoking free content around a particular theme. We market each collection through a range of channels including social media, advertising, email, and a dedicated collection web page—always evaluating our results to hone our strategies for increased reach, awareness, and engagement with our OUP philosophy content.
Our first topic was “race,” which we launched during Black History Month in October 2021. Other topics, which often coincide with observance months, include emotions, disability, feminism, technology and AI, and democracy.
“Through subject marketing, academics can discover our new research in an engaging way, with a topic lens.”
Choosing content around important events or areas in philosophy is a team effort between myself in marketing and my colleagues in editorial, ensuring we share key research within the subject and shine a light on topics that matter. This means that academics can discover our new research in an engaging way, with a topic lens beyond individual titles. Sharing content in a way that engages our audience and showcases the OUP Philosophy brand in the best possible light is something I take great pride in. I am grateful to have so many brilliant authors to work with and feel privileged to share their influential work in campaigns like Philosophy in Focus.
The OUPblog—this really helps to increase the discoverability of our content, which is how our books are found on search engines like Google. As we publish across such a broad range of topics, we can get creative when working with authors on blog posts. For instance, in our most read philosophy blog of 2022, Kristin Gjesdal brings a unique viewpoint to the relationship between philosophy and theatre by focusing on the work of playwright Henrik Isben.
Our philosophy blog posts aim to be accessible to non-specialist academics so have a wider reach than our published content itself. We share OUPblog posts widely on social media, particularly through our dedicated philosophy Twitter channel, @OUPPhilosophy.
“We choose channels for promoting our content based on what we want the broader campaign to achieve.”
It’s worth noting that we choose channels for our content based on what we want the broader campaign to achieve, so while not all our campaigns will feature a blog post, this doesn’t make them any less valuable—we align the strategy or channel with the campaign objective.
I have always been passionate about marketing, which led to numerous paths in the events, public, and private sectors before joining the publishing industry, which I soon realized was the place for me! Working in marketing for an academic publisher means that I can give back to the world by helping to advance knowledge and learning.
At OUP, we use digital marketing to share high-quality academic content from thought-leading authors around the world. This is something that really drives me; being a lover of all things digital, targeted marketing allows me to build creative strategies that showcase the breadth of publishing we have to offer at OUP, alongside our vision to grow and maximize the impact of our content.
A large part of my role involves working with authors, which is a real highlight for me. I help authors learn how to promote their books by providing guidance and explaining how they can build their profile to increase long-term engagement with their work. Seeing this come to fruition is so rewarding!
Creating campaigns for conferences—such as American Philosophical Association, Philosophy of Science Association, or The Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association—is another highlight. Whether we’re attending in person or promoting our content digitally, it’s exciting to showcase our cutting-edge publishing with conference delegates and researchers from around the world.
“I help authors learn how to promote their books and build their profile. Seeing this come to fruition is so rewarding!”
Overall, I’m motivated by seeing the impact that marketing can make, from campaign planning right through to the end results. It’s exciting to see how marketing can influence online usage and more, depending on what we’re trying to achieve for that campaign.
Everything evolves, and so does my role and offering as a marketer. This will be based on the challenges and opportunities we face in the market—from open access growth to the way people find research, and the ever-changing digital landscape. There is always more to learn, and I am excited to see what’s coming next.
Americans are obsessed with fame. You could lay the aforementioned claim at any generation's feet, but few generations embody the American fascination with notoriety as potently as millennials and Gen Z. Although the problem was already quite pronounced before the advent of social media, apps like Instagram and Tik Tok have only exacerbated the issue. — Read the rest
“Every success is the tip of an iceberg of failure.”
That’s Roy Sorensen, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, in a highly engaging and entertaining interview at The Workbench, the site for “conversations with academic writers on their craft,” created by Nathan Ballantyne, associate professor of philosophy, cognition, and culture at Arizona State University (previously).
There’s a lot in this interview. The above quote comes from a section in which Sorenson and Ballantyne are discussing publishing advice for graduate students, following some earlier framing of the philosophy job market as “a lottery in which participants can buy more tickets with their research, conference going, contacts, and so on.” Here it is with more context:
Ballantyne: It’s good to inform students that rejection is the norm and also emphasize that rejection doesn’t always happen because a paper is unpublishable. But how do you drum up commitment in view of poor odds and disappointments? Let me put it this way: From an early-career academic’s perspective, you are a Powerball lottery winner, but you’ve bought many tickets, including ones that languish in file folders. Do you have any stories of rejection and perseverance to inspire or console?
Sorensen: I don’t encourage when the discouragement is rational and proportional. I may note that failure is a risk for any ambition. And it is worth thinking about what kind of failure one might become. As a teenager, I had an ambition to become a great chess player. Failing at that is terrible because chess makes you narrow. The hours spent on it do not connect to other questions. It is an encapsulated domain. But philosophy connects with many questions. Failing to become an academic philosopher is a more attractive backup than most other failures.
Ballantyne: How inspiring!
Sorensen: It is an engineering point. One notches beams to ensure they break at the least damaging point. One builds a house that will gracefully deteriorate. One budgets for breakage in construction. Every success is the tip of an iceberg of failure. When complimented on how many books I have written, I invite my listener to consider all the books that I failed to write.
The two discuss various aspects of Sorenson’s writing style, from his predilection for paradoxes to his use of humor to his taste for “stealth philosophy.” Ballantyne asks him about his use of various conceits in his writing. Here’s what follows:
Sorensen: The conceits may stem from my preference for stealth philosophy. Talk about something that does not seem like philosophy and have the audience realize belatedly that they are doing philosophy.
Ballantyne: Who are the great stealth philosophers?
Sorensen: Plato, David Hume, William James, Richard Smullyan, William Lycan. These camouflaged owls of wisdom get past defensive bracketing of philosophical ideas. The brackets get erected after children fail to make progress on questions such as ‘Does time have a beginning?’ and ‘Is there an edge to space?’. More brackets get erected when non-philosophers use ‘philosophy’ as a label for issues that cannot be profitably pursued. Stealth philosophers side-step this conversation blocker. They show the continuity of philosophical beliefs with other beliefs. For instance, the stealth philosopher of perception will just presuppose the visible objects must emit, reflect, or refract light—as if it is just common sense or well-established science. They will then have students count the punched holes of the handout or the shadow cast by that handout. These anomalies make the students say “Hey, wait a minute!” and then dis-inter the presupposition from the common ground of the conversation. The stealth philosopher knows where bodies are buried. After students dig some up, they tread with more geological awareness over the surface of daily life.
Ballantyne: How do you engage in stealth philosophy when the audience is philosophically savvy? They know where the bodies are buried. Can you still catch them off guard?
Sorensen: Yes, because the philosophers still need to presuppose much. They must inhibit default patterns of thinking, such as attributing knowledge (when belief suffices) and attributing intention (when coincidence suffices). Since they cannot always be on their toes, they sometimes fail to notice some camouflaged philosophy. Bertrand Russell once asked G. E. Moore whether he ever lied. Moore said yes and Russell concluded that this was the only lie Moore ever told. Saul Kripke chided Russell for failing to notice this is an instance of the liar paradox. Others pictured Russell as the stealth philosopher, planting the liar paradox in a compliment to Moore. I have sometimes been surprised by a stealthy cross-examiner. During a Q&A period at Oxford, Jonathan Dancy just asked me a sequence of mild, clarificatory questions to set up the main question. There was no main question. For my quick answers constituted enough for a syllogism whose conclusion was the negation of my thesis.
The whole interview is here.
Discussion welcome.
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An interview project “devoted to exploring the philosophical richness of lesser-studied languages from across the world” has published four interviews so far, with more on the way.
The project, “Philosophising In…” is the idea of Jonathan Egid (King’s College London), who says:
Despite recent acknowledgement of the global nature of philosophical thought, an overwhelming majority of work focuses on philosophy written in either classical languages (Greek, Latin, Arabic, Sanskrit, Mandarin) or contemporary European languages (German, French, English etc.). Although covering a hugely diverse body of literary philosophy, this focus nevertheless reflects the thought of only a small portion of humanity. This series aims to rectify this narrowness by examining the philosophical ideas of peoples the world over, especially those expressed in the languages, of Africa, Asia and the Americas.
The aim of these interviews is not only to draw attention to the rich philosophical resources of lesser-studied languages and to promote them as media of philosophy, but also to expand the horizons of contemporary philosophy by paying close attention to how concepts translate across languages—sometimes seamlessly, ‘like birds over borders’, sometimes with great difficulty. Paying attention to the differences and similarities between the philosophical word-concepts across languages allows us to take stock of how much of our philosophy is conditioned by the grammatical peculiarities of a particular language or set of languages, and how much have a wider application. The project thus aims to foster a philosophical multilingualism in the conviction that philosophy can only lose out by narrowing its focus to a single language or language family.
The detailed interviews are with philosophers who are experts in the language under consideration, and cover, among other things, distinctive philosophical ideas of that linguistic culture. At the end of each interview there is a brief lexicon of philosophical terms in the language.
The most recent interviews are with Workineh Kelbessa (Addis Ababa University), emphasizing philosophy in the language of Afaan Oromo, and Yury Arzhanov (Paris Lodron University Salzburg), focusing on philosophy in the language of Syriac.
Egid says he is very open to suggestions for further languages to include.
You can access the interviews here.
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