Episodes
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As new wars emerge across the world, wars that ended decades ago are still destroying the societies that waged them.
Guest on today’s episode, Olivera Simić, came of age in the intrastate war that broke apart her country of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and has spent her life researching, documenting, bearing witness to, and articulating the uncontainable trauma that continue to ripple through her homeland 30 years later.
In her autobiography Surviving Peace, Olivera writes about how those experiences shaped her life, and in the newly published Lola’s War: Rape Without Punishment, as well as a number of academic articles, Olivera draws on twenty plus years of in-depth conversation and documentation of the experiences of victims, perpetrators and everyone in between - from all sides of the war.
In this hour we talk about the long-term impact of war, particularly on women, in her home country of Bosnia Herzegovina, as well as the limits of institutions - law, medicine, social welfare, education - to remedy the horrific crimes and atrocious violence committed by neighbor against neighbor, countryman against countrywoman.
Episode Links
Olivera’s website: https://oliverasimic.com/
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Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
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The institution of prostitution has received a re-branding in recent times, appropriating terms from labor and the corporate world such as “sex work”, “full-service”, “clients”, “sex workers” “doing bookings” arranged by “managers” - presumably in order to de-stigmatize women who sell sex, to make the practice safer for sex sellers, and to make the sex industry mainstream.
But has the nature of the practice - of men buying women for sexual use - really changed?
In this episode, Elle talks to author and activist Andrea Heinz, who spent time in the sex industry in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where prostitution is regulated under the Equality Model, where the city of Edmonton issues licenses for brothels, and where the “sex work is work” model is fully embraced.
In this hour we talk about what Andrea learned through her experiences in prostitution and how it changed her, about her awakening and exit, and how she is now channeling those years of trauma into speaking and writing about the realities of working in the sex industry.
We discuss the belief systems underpinning the “sex work is work” creed and try to answer questions like - if sex is a service that women provide to men, then what is sex for women? What are the actual risks and impacts of having unwanted sex with many strange men all day, every day? Has the “sex work” makeover de-stigmatized sex sellers as promised and made prostitution safer?
Episode Links:
Red Light Exposé
When Men Buy Sex: Who Really Pays?
CEASE
Edmonton John School
Andrea Heinz’s academic paper A Mule For The Patriarchy
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Instagram: @subject2power
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Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
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Episodes manquant?
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In the midst of The Enlightenment, when men in the West hailed reason and rationalism, and aspired towards lofty ideals such as liberty, equality and religious tolerance - another darker social phenomenon was taking place. Over a period of more than 200 years, thousands of women (and some men) across Europe were thrown in jail, tortured, hanged and burned - accused and tried for witchcraft.
In this episode Elle talks to Marianne Hester, a world-leading researcher in gender-based violence, with expertise in domestic and sexual abuse and violence, coercive control, sexual exploitation, and forced marriage.
In her book Lewd Women and Wicked Witches, Marianne looks at male violence and domination through a historical lens, locating the “witch hunts” - the violent persecution of women - in a period of massive restructuring of society, within which a male-female conflict over resources and power was raging. In this hour we talk about how and why women became targets of the “witch craze”, what the “witch hunts” accomplished for the patriarchs, and how those historical events shaped the gendered ideology we still live with today.
Episode Links:
Marianne Hester
Journal of Gender-Based Violence
Lewd Women and Wicked Witches
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Instagram: @subject2power
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Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
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Motherhood, in our Western culture, is full of contradictions. On the one hand, mothers perform an essential task: creating and nurturing new human life. On the other, the status of mothers is that of general servitude to the nuclear family, with no significant public voice or power.
Western culture, adopted across the world, is still largely structured in the mold that the male Greek philosophers created millennia ago. Roughly divided into a public sphere that is inhabited and controlled by men, and the family sphere which is inhabited by women and children; a “private world” that is under constant surveillance and control by the public sphere.
While feminism continually challenges this patriarchal social order, and women as a class have made enormous gains in the public sphere, motherhood is still an arena where patriarchal interests come into direct conflict with human needs and women’s humanity.
In this episode Elle talks to political scientist and author Mariam Tazi-Preve, whose research fields are politics and reproduction, motherhood, fatherhood, family and population policies, European welfare state, gender and political theory, and theory of civilization.
Mariam has written extensively about the history of motherhood in Western patriarchy, about the invention of marriage, and the development of the nuclear family. In this hour we will talk about these social structures and the impact they have had on women, men and children throughout our history.
Episode Links
Mariam Tazi-Preve website
Motherhood In Patriarchy
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Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/
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Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
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Science and technology is a synonym for progress. It is always considered a step forward, an improvement of our lives, a promise of new possibilities. A promise of a future that will necessarily contain more and better science and technology to make our lives ever more convenient, ever more automated, ever more under our control.
For women, many of us are conditioned to welcome scientific and technological advancements as a form of liberation from our sexed bodies and its processes. Medicine, machines and technicians preside over our whole reproductive lives - and we don’t always consider who or what drives the science, who benefits from these advancements, and what might be lost - as tech invades the most intimate parts of our human selves.
In this episode Elle is joined by Mary Lou Singleton, a life-long women’s health activist, midwife and public speaker, who has spent her career observing the very heady evolution of the reproductive industry and gauging where humanity is headed within the realm of conception, pregnancy, birth and motherhood.
Episode Links
Enchanted Family Medicine
When Abortion Was a Crime by Leslie Reagan
Natural Liberty by The Sage-Femme Collective
Contact Us
Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/
Instagram: @subject2power
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Email us at [email protected]
Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
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The prevalence of murder of women by men, across the world, is beyond dispute. The phenomenon - the murder of women because they are women - has become such a fixture of human life that it has acquired a name: femicide, or feminicide.
While criminal justice systems are kept busy processing feminicide; whole media genres are dedicated to telling the stories of feminicide; untold governmental agencies and NGOs report on the general state of feminicide - the fact remains that no government, no country in the world actually keeps statistics on feminicide.
In this episode, Elle speaks with data analyst, author and director of the Data+Feminism Lab at MIT, Catherine D’Ignazio about her new book Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action. Catherine’s book tells the story of the people, mostly across the Americas, who decided to pick up the job of counting women killed, independently and unpaid, and how they have turned this work into a powerful activist movement.
We talk about revolutionizing data science, examining and challenging power through data activism, why governments are willfully blind to femicide, what can be learned from anti-femicide movements in Latin and South America, understanding feminicide as a large-scale pattern beyond the “isolated incident” model, and how women’s risk of murder is connected to the devalued status of women.
Episode Links
Join free book club for Counting Feminicide from now thru Aug 31, 2024.
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Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/
Instagram: @subject2power
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Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
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Our economic institutions - capitalism, trade, money, the market - are based on one fundamental principle: Quid Pro Quo. Something For Something.
It is said that these systems sprung out of the age-old human tradition of trade, of exchange. That humans, from the dawn of time, have exchanged with each other for our needs - goods, services, emotions, care, language - that our very nature is transactional.
Our guest on this episode, independent researcher Genevieve Vaughan, has spent her life theorizing and proving the very opposite - that Quid Pro Quo, or “the exchange economy” is completely incompatible with human life and human needs.
That in fact, it is the basic interaction of unilateral giving and receiving, “the gift economy”, that is the hidden blueprint of human life, and that the “exchange economy” is indeed a parasitic system - an economy that rests on a sea of unseen and unacknowledged gifts.
In this episode we talk about the maternal roots of the gift economy, the gendered division of these opposing economies, how “the exchange economy” destroys mutuality, empathy and human connection, and why we need to find our way back to our original gift-based economies. And that “when we base our economy on giving and receiving rather than exchange, we create completely different human relations.”
Genevieve Vaughan's Links:
gift-economy.com
maternalgifteconomymovement.org
Gift Economy on YouTube
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Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/
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Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
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“Men don’t fall from trees - they subscribe to societal messages, they follow rules,” says Dr. Shahieda Jansen, clinical psychologist, scholar in masculinities, and author of Masculinity Meets Humanity: An Adapted Model of Masculinized Psychotherapy.
In this episode Shahieda takes us through her own journey of research, practice and discovery, devising all-male group therapy that would re-integrate, re-contextualize, and pull back together elements that Western style psychology has compartmentalized, distorted and split apart.
Working from the creed that “the minute something is out of sync with its context, you're busy with lunacy”, Shahieda weaves together belief systems rooted in the cultures, histories and identities of the men with whom she works. She draws on ancient and vibrant African relational ethical philosophies and understanding of the self, combines it with the latest science from around the globe, and builds bridges across the divides we all are shaped by - ancient from modern, culture from science, thinking from feeling, men from women - self from others.
In this sweeping conversation we talk about Ubuntu, African identity and morality, Afro Eastern model of the self, Umoya, the ravages of colonization, the centrality of emotion, how “belonging is not recognized in the healing professions for the radicalness that it is”, and how Shahieda uses her wholeness approach to tend to the men in her all-male therapy groups.
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Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
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No status puts a woman at greater vulnerability than that of being a migrant or refugee.
Anna Zobnina is a Strategy and Executive Director at European Network of Migrant Women, and she knows first-hand the realities and complex challenges that migrant and refugee women face in Europe. With over 15 years of experience in feminist analysis of male violence & discrimination against women and girls, sexual and reproductive exploitation, and international human rights policy work, Anna and her organization are at the forefront of the women’s rights policy-battles currently raging in Europe.
Fundamental issues of equality between men and women are on the table, being hotly debated between EU governmental bodies, big international NGOs, the UN, and all the moneyed interests trying to influence them - and no one stands to lose more than migrant and refugee women, most of whom have fled men’s wars, violence and poverty and are trying to survive in a new land.
In this super-sized episode we talk about every variety of men’s violence, sexual exploitation, surrogacy, forced marriage - and the literal gauntlet of violations, both personal and institutional, women endure to survive - in their country of origin, on their journey to Europe, and as migrant women living in Europe.
Links
European Parliament September 14, 2023 resolution on the regulation of prostitution in the EU
Contact Us
Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/
Instagram: @subject2power
Twitter: @SubjectToPower
Email us at [email protected]
Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
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If we think of patriarchy as a living, breathing, constantly evolving strategy that finds its expression at all levels of society - socially, economically, politically - its job number one is to control women - and thereby reproduction.
Patriarchal strategies look different in different parts of the world - in some places it is embedded, disguised, and covert - in other cultures it is outspoken, brutal and overt.
In this episode Elle talks to scholar, journalist and author of Leftover Women and Betraying Big Brother Leta Hong Fincher, who has spent many years studying and writing about how women in China are finding themselves on the receiving end of both old and new patriarchal strategies in their country. But also about how women in today’s China are resisting, and fighting against domination - both in the private sphere and the public arena.
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Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
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In many ways, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves in myths, religion, and history - are blueprints for our human lives. But the converse is also true - how we see ourselves, our attitudes, behaviors, and who holds power - in turn shape our stories. In Western culture, there is no story as powerfully influential as that of Greeks.
Historical researcher Max Dashu has spent decades looking for the women in our stories, across the timespan of human history. Collecting visual evidence of women’s lives from cultures all over the globe, she has amassed a vast visual archive of female iconography and scholarship.
In this episode we talk about Dashu’s most recent research project, Women in Greek Mythography - a deep dive into the major female figures of Greek myth, their surprising pre-Greek origin stories, and what the highly patriarchal Greek myths, art and history reveal about how Greek women of the times may have lived, and how it affects all of us today.
As Dashu reflects, “when you think about these stories being told and sung and acted out in dramas, and through all the arts, pottery, weaving, architecture and sculpture, everywhere you look you have an enactment of this culture of domination. What kind of effect does that have on a female psyche?”
#Patriarchy #History #GreekMyth
Max Dashu’s work
Suppressed Histories Archives
Suppressed Histories Archive YouTube Channel
Suppressed Histories Archives stream-on-demand videos
Veleda Press
Contact Us
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Leave a review: https://www.subjecttopower.com/reviews/new/
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In her new book Body Shell Girl, poet and sex trade survivor Rose Hunter brings us into the strange theater that takes place between sex buyers and prostitutes when money is exchanged for various sex acts. Describing the everyday reality of her ten years in massage parlors, brothels and hotel rooms of Toronto and Vancouver, Hunter says of prostitution, “it’s really nothing to do with sex, it's this other odd category, with its own bizarre rules, a very strange sphere unto itself.”
In this episode we talk about what Hunter brilliantly captures about this “strange sphere” in Body Shell Girl (that which is often missed in the so-called prostitution debate): the million minute ways that ‘being for sale’ breaks down every aspect of your life, the survival behaviors and language you must cultivate to avoid male rage and violence, the impact of losing connection to your body when it no longer belongs to you, but also - what it is like - to be on the receiving end of stark-naked male entitlement, to be an unwilling actor in rote and porn-fed male fantasies, and to never ever being able to say no.
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How did patriarchy first begin? The answers to that question are many and varied, and most often tries to explain it by one single factor - Agriculture! Private property! Men are stronger!
But - the history of patriarchal development is a lot more complex and interesting than one single answer - and very few people have decoded what the evidence tells us about how patriarchal patterns arose and evolved in ancient Europe and Asia Minor - as deeply as research scholar Heide Goettner-Abendroth.
In past episodes we have covered Heide’s work on modern matriarchies (Ep 16:The Peacebuilders) as well as the history of matriarchal societies in ancient Europe and West Asia (Ep 25: The Mothers of Invention). Well, strap in - because in this third installment we are talking about how those ancient matriarchal cultures came to their dramatic ends. About how the first small cells of patriarchy began and then grew and took hold in different parts of the ancient world, how it spread and destroyed former matriarchal cultures. How matriarchal societies waged resistance and fought against their oppressors to protect their egalitarian way of life, but how in the end those brutal forefathers prevailed and shaped the world we live in today.
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We may believe that violent patriarchy is an inevitable reality, that our current world culture simply is a result of our immutable human nature. A human nature that is in a constant and brutal competition for limited resources, in which only the most ruthless of us survive and thrive.
But there is much evidence - in our history, in our bodies and brains, in our nature - that tells a very different story. A story of peace, cooperation and sophisticated organization. A story in which mothers play a central role.
In this episode Elle talks to sociologist Andrea Fleckinger, who studies and lectures on modern matriarchal societies. While we can find matriarchal cultures in our history, there are in existence today - societies all around the globe that have preserved and now maintain their traditions of egalitarian matriarchy - and Andrea breaks down exactly what it means to be a matriarchy - the social structures, values and practices that sets them apart from patriarchal cultures, and what we can learn from them.
Matriforum
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In her recent book Femicide in War and Peace, Israeli anthropologist and femicide expert Shalva Weil says that “the dividing line between femicide in wartime and peacetime is very thin.” Trigger warning: that fact is the subject of this episode.
While the term femicide, the murder of a woman because she is a woman, was created in 1973, it did not gain popularity until the 2000s, and Shalva was instrumental in putting the phenomena of femicide into our collective consciousness.
In this episode we discuss Shalva’s groundbreaking research and her work pioneering femicide observatories, the many obstacles to keeping track of dead women, and the question of why feminist organizations of the world, including UN Women, refused to condemn Hamas’ rape and murder of approximately 300 women in Israel on October 7, 2023 - as femicide.
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In trying to explain inequality between the sexes - we often arrive at the idea that women inhabit the emotional realm, and that men inhabit the thinking realm - and in the hierarchy of realms, thinking is considered superior.
In this episode, trauma and dissociation specialist Christine Forner crushes the “feelings versus thought hierarchy” and breaks down how absurd - and harmful - this fictional concept is. She also takes Elle on a deep dive into what human emotion, or the affective circuitry - as she calls it - actually is and how it works.
You will never again think of emotions as a trait reserved for certain groups, or something to control, or separate your thinking from - but rather something every human being on the planet depends on to be a human being. Also included: Taylor Swift’s feminism, how to process your trauma by competing in Iron Man races, and some very good ideas about how we can cure patriarchy.
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The sexual exploitation industries have been extremely successful in penetrating (pun intended) every layer of society - and like Gail Dines calls it - “pornifying our culture”.
But amid full decriminalization of prostitution, the rise of OnlyFans and Pornhub, pervasive global sex trafficking, and social media providing exploiters and predators free and open access to vulnerable populations - the liberal myth of sexual self-empowerment is cracking.
This in part because survivors of the sex trade are finally talking, being heard, weighing in in the debate and getting politically active - in numbers. Defying the shame and the stigma, women are writing books, appearing in media and waging political campaigns - and insisting that we listen to their accounts of what sexual exploitation really looks and feels like on the receiving end.
In this episode, psychotherapist and author Mia Döring talks to Elle about her new book Any Girl: A Memoir of Sexual Exploitation and Recovery about her experiences in the Dublin sex trade, the damage it wrought, and the importance of truth-telling to our collective healing.
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Since it was published in 1987, Riane Eisler’s groundbreaking international bestseller The Chalice And The Blade has launched a full frontal challenge to the conventional story of our cultural origins - and has given us a brand new way to think about our ancient past, our present and how we shape our future. It upended the major religions we take for granted, the idea of eternal patriarchy and eternal war, and brought into focus the historical events that turned our human cultures from peaceful partnership systems that held women in respectful regard - to that of brutal, exploitative dominator cultures that venerate men and violence.
More than 30 years hence, Riane reflects on the impact of Chalice, which is often compared to that of Darwin’s Origin of Species - and her body of work that followed - works like The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics; the award-winning Tomorrow's Children and her latest work Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives & Future.
A celebrated cultural historian and evolutionary theorist, as well as founder of Center for Partnership Studies, Riane’s research has influenced fields including history, philosophy, economics, psychology, sociology, education, human rights, social and political science, and healthcare. Now in her 90s, Riane is still honing her super-power: synthesizing wildly disparate disciplines and weaving them all into a cohesive worldview full of hope and useful instructions for a better future.
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Our language - profane, sublime and everything in between - holds hidden truths about our cultural heritage, our current reality, and who determines it. Etymology, the study of the origins of words, can unlock this knowledge.
Jane Caputi has spent her career unearthing the history and meaning of words, our language, cultural beliefs, and how we know what we know - with a particular focus on sex, violence and the destruction of our natural environment.
In this episode we talk about Jane’s new book, Call Your Mutha’: A Deliberately Dirty-Minded Manifesto for the Earth Mother in the Anthropocene, in which she critically reimagines The Anthropocene, The Age of Man, from an eco-feminist perspective. Not for the tender-eared, in this sweeping conversation Jane breaks down the origins of the term motherf***er, explains why Mother Earth is not a metaphor, spells out the difference between omnipotence and cunctipotence, and much more.
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With a steady stream of new research coming to light, it is becoming clear that the version of Western history we are taught in school - has a thick layer of patriarchal myth-making.
Heide Goettner-Abendroth has spent her whole life studying what this patriarchal overlay is hiding, and in her new book Matriarchal Societies of the Past and the Rise of Patriarchy in Europe and West Asia, using a new matriarchal paradigm, she reveals evidence of an ancient past that looks very different from the official history of “civilization” that our Western history promotes.
In this episode, Heide talks through the evidence that points to millennia of peaceful development taking place in mother-centered cultures, throughout the Neolithic and before that the Paleolithic. Human societies with well-developed social structures, whose creativity and inventions laid the foundation for life as we know it.
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