Episodes
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Hello everyone! I have been away longer than usual between episodes due to circumstances, and I appreciate you all coming back to listen. As a kind of compensation, this is a long one today—I got to talk to one of my favorite people to get into it with, Conner Habib. We had recorded a conversation along with Dean Spade in the approach to the election in order to reorient people’s thoughts and attention towards politics beyond the state—and so we decided to reconvene, the two of us, post-election, to discuss the relationship of feeling to thinking and doing. There was of course an intensity of feeling after the election, with many claims about how people should respond and act. Instead of going that route, Conner and I try to explore ways of not giving up our feelings and power to the spectacle of politics and everything it demands from us. In doing this, we aim to expand the possibilities of action, and to reconceive our relationship to the political in a way that develops a new language or a new grammar that no long constrains us. Along the way, we talk about nottaking materialism as the only basis for politics, which gets us into both religious forms of power and the consideration of a spiritual relationship to the self and the world. As I say at the end, Conner’s podcast, Against Everyone /w Conner Habib, is an incredible resource that dives into many of these ideas through discussion and thinking. Conner references a recent series of episodes he published as a guide to engaging in a spiritual life. That might be a great place to start if you have not already listened to his podcast. He also wrote the intense novel, Hawk Mountain, which I also highly recommend. Subscribe to Conner’s Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/ConnerHabib), and find Hawk Mountain here.
Remember, as always, we have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at (917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation! Our letters episodes are a recurring feature on the show, and we find that our writers appreciate the ways we help think of these situations, so keep writing us!
If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon https://www.patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project!
The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. CZN brings together a slew of amazing audio projects, so check them out at https://channelzeronetwork.com/
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In today’s episode, River and I return to a conversation about Gaza, focusing on the discourse surrounding it, the function of antisemitism in the colonial creation of Israel, the state of resistance and the state of Israel’s genocide, as well as decolonization and the way whiteness and identification with institutions hampers leftist’s solidarity with decolonial movements. Perhaps a fitting epigraph for this episode would be a line from Aimé Césaire that River quotes in our conversation: “Europe is indefensible.” The end of Israel is not enough, we need the end of Europe and the end of the United States. One facet of our discussion is trying to get at the way we can find true solidarity with and inspiration from the resistance in Palestine. How do we bring the decolonial force from the colony to the heart of empire? In thinking about this, we touch on what stops people from having solidarity, or what trips up white leftists in their conceptions of decolonization. We also talk a bit about knowledge production in the academy and writing and thinking during this endless series of horrors surrounding us and escalating every day. But don’t worry, it’s not just doom and gloom: we find hope in the ways that Palestinians and others are teaching us life independent from the state.
Remember, as always, we have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at (917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation! Our letters episodes are a recurring feature on the show, and we find that our writers appreciate the ways we help think of these situations, so keep writing us!
If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project!
The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. CZN brings together a slew of amazing audio projects, so check them out at https://channelzeronetwork.com/
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Episodes manquant?
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CW - the last part of this episode contains mention and some details around sexual assault
We’re back with another entry in our letters episodes! In this conversation, Caroline and I discuss three different dilemmas presented to us by listeners. In the first we address the problems that come with queer longing and the difficulty of living single amidst the horrors of the world and social arrangements for couples. The second letter raises issues of ethics in relation to friendships: do you break up with a friend whose job you have a moral objection to? Are you obligated to tell them? Remember, as the endless merch says, all cops are bastards! And finally, the third letter comes from a haunted house, where the writer is battling ghosts and a very specific and terrible situation with an abusive ex, while still harboring an expansive dream of liberation for all. I want to give a content warning here, the letter discusses sexual assault, with some upsetting details, so if you are not up for that, turn the episode off after the second letter.
I really love the chance to discuss your issues, so I am very grateful for everyone who sends them in. I hope that our conversations prove helpful to you, as we look at things from multiple angles: these issues are so often, despite particular details, shared experiences and common struggles. And like with everything else, there are not many places to untangle the conjunction of relationships and our desires for liberation and anarchy, to step out of self-help into collective struggle.
We have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at (917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation!
If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon https://patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project!
The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. CZN brings together a slew of amazing audio projects, so check them out at https://channelzeronetwork.com/
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On today’s episode, I got a chance to talk with Solomon Brager, the artist and author of the recently published graphic memoir, Heavyweight. Solomon Brager is a cartoonist and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. They are a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artists Fellow, a member of the Pinko magazine editorial collective and the director of community engagement at Jewish Currents magazine. Heavyweight deals with Solomon’s own search through the archives to learn the story of their German Jewish family fleeing the Nazis and escaping the Holocaust, specifically through Solomon’s elective affinity for a great grandfather, Erich, who was a boxer (and punched Nazis). The book is careful to tell the story of the Holocaust within a larger context of European colonial genocide, so that we see the eventual targeting of Jews, Roma, Sinti, and others as a continuation of German policies in Africa, for example. In this light, as Sol and I discuss, we can also view the eventual statehood of Israel as a culmination of this history of colonialism and violence. Though the book’s focus isn’t on Israel, we do spend time in this conversation analyzing the dynamics of Zionism in relation to the stories and teaching of the Holocaust to American Jews, and the idea of Jewish exceptionalism. One of the things I loved, and that we discuss also, is the way Sol represents in the book their own ambivalence about the this history, both in terms of family relations and scholarly practice, an ambivalence that Sol discusses as an ethical relationship to the past, an openness to being wrong. In this light, I also love the way this book depicts a kind of trans choosing of history and ancestors, as Sol finds a link to a Jewish masculinity in their great-grandfather: this is another ethical ambivalence, one that I think shows us we can tell stories of the past that don’t determine our future as inevitable, while still honoring the complexities of the dead. I highly recommend this book, it is honest, vulnerable, and thoughtful.
You can find Solomon Brager at https://solomonbrager.com, or on Instagram @jbbrager. I also am linking a comic that Sol did for Jewish Currents debunking claims to Jewish indigeneity, “When Settlers Become Native”—they mention it in our talk, and it’s a text I have also called on in my own writing. I also recommend checking out Pinko and Jewish Currents.
As always, We have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at (917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation!
If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project!
The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. Check out this link to find many other important and fun projects, like my buddies, The Final Straw Radio.
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On today’s episode, I talk with Ariel Ajeno, who recently published an essay in the latest issue of Pinko, called “After Consent”: What is the role of consent in a revolution? Ariel Ajeno is a writer, dancer, and independent scholar based in Chicago, IL. The beautiful essay mixes personal experience with theoretical and practical analysis of the benefits and limits of consent and how that relates to the work of transforming the world beyond the principles of oppression that contain us now. Our conversation digs down into some nitty gritty questions about sexual consent, its difference from bodily autonomy, its parallels with revolutionary or resistant actions and organizing, and prefigurative aspects of how we might relate to one another, including experiences with cruising. As Ariel says towards the end of the conversation, There is going to be sex at the barricades, there is going to be sex at the encampment. So we should be honest about how we want to deal with the overlapping of revolutionary and sexual desires. I think that desire or pleasure is often left out of the overly serious conversation of destroying this world and forming other ways of relating, both as a legacy of masculinist authoritarian Marxist party organizations, and in reaction to the failures of gay liberation and radical feminism. But we can’t just dismiss the ways that these earlier militants engaged with these questions, nor the obstacles they faced and created. Having sex at the barricades means we need to be able to step in to difficult, complicated, messy relations that we can’t control or predict—in other words, an anarchist vision of action and change. Assessing the end of the radical gay movement, only a year after it started, Guy Hocquenghem said that they had radically changed the homosexual geography of Paris, where their general assemblies became giant cruising sites, with the police threat removed. And that in itself is not so bad. Thinking after consent really asks us to confront our desire for control and our willingness to experiment and fail, in other words how we must engage with our own power in between us. Ariel’s analysis in the essay and the conversation feels very thorough and generative, and I’m excited to share it.
I will link to the essay and to the wonderful Pinko collective in the show notes. You can also find Ariel on Twitter @generoajeno and on Instagram @ariel_ajeno
As always, We have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at (917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation!
If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project!
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On today’s episode, I am presenting the talk that Cindy Barukh Milstein and I did at the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair, which we called An Anarchism of Despair. When we planned to collaborate for the talk, we checked in on where we were mentally, emotionally, and politically in relation to the specific moment, filled with frustrations around anarchists’ involvement in movements, and the walls that we run into time and time again. We wanted to lean into the despair, to look it in the face, and to learn from it how we might consider acting from this position. This is the description we wrote for the talk:
After October 7, the upswell of Palestinian solidarity has been heartening. But in the mechanics of the movement itself, we have found ourselves stuck in outdated forms of protest, marching in circles, making demands that will never be heeded. It feels like each iteration of rebellion meets its end at the blatancy of power: we are shown again that those who govern won’t help us. And all this while watching a genocide in real time, feeling desperate and powerless. We have the energy and will, but not the means. What can we do, then, with this spike of liberatory urges? This discussion will interrogate anarchism at this particular moment from the position of despair. Where does it meet its limits? Where does it show up to keep the energy going? Are we endlessly hitting our heads against the wall ? Or does our effort need to be seen in the long view? When faced with the impossibility of liberation and action, where do we go?
We organize the talk around three central provocations, which essentially point to the ways our political actions, ideas, and horizons are circumscribed and therefore commit us to walking in circles. We then offer some thoughts about what anarchists actually do well and how we can use those practices to try to leave behind the useless forms of protest. I have included comments from two comrades who attended, Bonn and Jubilee V Debs, who made important contributions to the ideas.
I keep coming down to anarchism as something that creates the possibility of action: it doesn’t guarantee the consequences, but drives us to the edge where we can do something, rather than nothing. We turn away when there are no guarantees, stuck in our miserable comforts in this world, whether through the tired tropes of resistance or individual consumption as solace for work. While the state looks at us as if we are already dead, we can instead find a way to act like we are living, in the bursting of a moment that cannot be contained.
If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project!
As always, We have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at (917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation!
The Breakup Theory is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. CZN brings together a slew of amazing audio projects, so check them out at https://channelzeronetwork.com/
And now for some despair . . .
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In today’s episode, Caroline and I respond to a couple of listener’s letters. As I was editing the episode, I thought about the common theme, and came to this idea of getting over things. The first letter asks about how much work we are supposed to put into our relationships and ourselves, and what are the ethics of leaving someone in a crisis. The second letter asks for support around a relationship from years ago that is still able to wound, especially based on the ex’s perceived success. Before the letters, I talk a bit about where my thoughts are currently in terms of how we deal with our wounds and where our power might lie. I apologize for some segments of noisy audio!
As always, please rate and follow us on your podcasting things, share our show with your friends and exes, and subscribe to the patreon (https://www.patreon.com/thebreakuptheory)—nothing is paywalled and you’ll get notified of all the different things I’m putting out there. You can also add some financial support if you wish!
Finally,i f you want to submit your own question or breakup story, write us at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories or call (917) 426-6548
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In this episode, I talk with a student from the New School about the encampments there and what we can learn from the experience. Students at the New School set up their encampment in the lobby of the University Center in April a few days after the encampment was established at Columbia University and over 100 students were arrested. The New School student encampment last for over two weeks and eventually took the Parsons Building across the street, before President Donna Shalala had the students arrested early one morning. A few days later, faculty at the New Schools set up another encampment at the University that also lasted a couple weeks and eventually took the Welcome Center, holding it a few days before disbanding on the promise of a vote on divestment (which has not been delivered). In this conversation, we talk about the way the university administration dealt with the encampment, using less brute force than many of the other schools, and how this altered the organization of the encampment. In going through the whole experience, we discuss how our groups start mirroring bureaucracies, the use of divestment as a goal, the changing experience of study of revolutionary texts in the context of an encampment as opposed to the classroom, and more. Ultimately, we don’t know where the energy that was invigorated by the encampments will turn up next in resistance to genocide and control. But it is important to look at our actions and name their consequences.
If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon https://www.patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project!
As always, We have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at (917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation!
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On this episode, Caroline and I respond to a listener letter that really gets at the heart of the breakup experience: A fundamental question of how do you survive a devastating break up, and how to relate to yourself afterwards. We take the opportunity to look at this situation from all the angles. The main issue is coming to accept that you live with ghosts. And then we turn to a new a new segment where we discuss what we are currently breaking up with. Here we talk about the pressures of individualism both in the sense of therapeutic advice and career or professional expectations and the questions of joining things or letting yourself off the hook while the world is falling apart. There is a real pleasure in doing nothing!
Thank you to everyone who shares their stories and let us consider them. Please keep writing and calling us! As always, we have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at (917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, we can’t wait to hear from you!
And finally, you can support the project and my other work by subscribing at patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have some extra money, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing is paywalled. On the Patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for the people supporting me and this project! I’m developing extra things for subscribers, like real time discussion sessions or reading groups. You can also rate and follow us wherever you get your podcasts, and of course share with your friends and exes.
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On this episode Shuli talked to Aidan Khamis, a Palestinian student at Indiana University Bloomington, about the student encampment established on the campus in solidarity with Gaza (and still existent as of the recording of this episode). Aidan gives a rundown of the initial stages of setting the camp up, the waves of violent repression from the administration and police, as well as the positive experiences of worldbuilding, collective study, and solidarity they experienced. The conversation continues with a deep and wide-ranging discussion about the tactic of encampment, the parallel of police repression and the apartheid state in occupied Palestine, the left’s colonial reservations about resistance, the different fronts of decolonial struggle, and the possibilities of solidarity in the heart of empire. Aidan shares brilliant insights and makes really beautiful connections. This solidarity movement is now in a turning point as most encampments have been packed up or evicted and we move into summer, where life on campus slows down. There is much to learn from the experiences that students and faculty had together, and we don’t know yet how the seeds planted in these experiences will sprout in further forms of resistance to genocide, empire, capital, and the police state. Hopefully this conversation will help spark more fires!
CW: mention of violence and sexual assault
Aidan shared two forms of possible support:
A GoFundMe for Aidan's close friends and family:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-my-family-and-i-evacuate-out-of-gaza
A friend’s epoetry site that he’s using to help evacuate his family:
https://mizna.org/product/a-gaza-of-siege-and-genocide/
Please share and send material support!
If you like this show, please share with your friends and rate and follow us wherever you get podcasts. You can also support the project and my writing by subscribing to my patreon patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have any extra cash, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing there is paywalled. On my patreon, I regularly post both short and long written pieces, along with episodes, and other conversations I’m having. I am so grateful for all of you supporting me and this project!
As always, We have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/storiesand a phone line at (917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, to share your break up stories, your questions about ending things, and your hopes for liberation!
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This episode was slightly delayed by the amazing work students around the world have been doing in the encampments! In today’s episode, Caroline and Shuli hit the mailbag again to respond to listener’s relationship problems! They talk about three situations: the first deals with breaking up with Christianity, Mormonism in particular, and what spiritual remains we can hold on to. The second is about having a rich girlfriend who isn’t out to her family. And the last is a return to the triad situation from the last agony letters episode. The listener responded with more details and raised a new question about being in a relationship with someone who is just starting to explore their queerness. What do the straights owe us? What do we owe them?
Thank you to everyone who shared their stories. We really love doing these episodes, so please keep writing in. As always, we have an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at (917) 426-6548. Please write and call us, we can’t wait to hear from you!
And finally, you can support the project and Shuli's other work by subscribing at https://www.patreon.com/thebreakuptheory. If you have some extra money, you can sign up for $5/month, though nothing is paywalled. On the patreon, Shuli regularly posts both short and long written pieces, along with episodes and other audio. You can also rate and follow us wherever you get your podcasts, and of courses share with your friends and exes.
And now for your letters!
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Content warning: we talk about sexual assault and rape, though not in detail.
On today’s show, I talk with my dear friend Girl Cock about the breaking up of Femboys Against Fascism. We had previously spoken about the group on an episode of The Final Straw Radio in May of 2023. The group was formed to counter anti-migrant rallies taking place in Liverpool. However, the group decided that it was better to end itself than to continue just for the sake of it, allowing the former members to pursue new actions. We use this breakup to get into deeper conversation, including the continuity of fascism into transphobia and assault and groups protecting themselves over listening to victims or holding anyone accountable. We talk about failures of the left, trans separatism and self defense, the use of violence, and the respectability politics marginalized or oppressed people are asked to do. At the end we discuss adult supremacy as well. I think this conversation is provocative and generative. Girl Cock is eloquent and speaks of her own experiences organizing, and she has a keen sense of autonomy and contributes a great deal to our understanding of breaking up. I hope you like it! At the end of the episode, I’ve included two Femboys Against Fascism songs as a treat!
Remember we have set up an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at (917) 426-6548, for you to share your break up stories. We will record regular episodes discussing your situation and sharing our political and personal perspectives. Our first episode got a lot of great feedback, so I’m excited to keep growing this project.
You can support this podcast and my writing at https://www.patreon.com/thebreakuptheory
I really appreciate the support! Also feel free to share and rate and follow us on any podcast platform.
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Welcome to the Breakup Theory Agony Letters. This is our first episode where we respond to listener submissions over phone and through our online form. We talk through four submissions in today’s episode, all dealing with different issues. The first letter deals with a relationship going long distance and poly at the same time. That starts at 3:44. The second call deals with a confusing break up in a triad. You can jump there at 24:00. The third submission asks about breaking up with organizing groups and movements and embracing despair. That starts at 46:45. And a content warning for the final submission, there is mention of stalking and sexual assault and childhood sexual assault. This was a delicate submission, dealing with a classmate who is pushing boundaries and our listener’s attempts to navigate how to feel and be safe. That response begins at 1:04:10.
In all of our discussions, we try to approach each situation through different angles to imagine all the different permutations of response and feeling. We always want to validate our listeners’ feelings and experience foremost, while trying to offer perspectives that might help you in the process of breaking up. We hope the people who submitted their stories find these reflections helpful—and feel free to update us and continue the conversation. I also hope this will be generative for other listeners in their own situations, since these stories touch on conflicts and experiences that many of us share.
We plan for this to be a regular series of our podcast, so please submit your stories! Our phone lines are open at (917) 426-6548, our encrypted submission form is still live at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories! Can’t wait to hear from you. Now enjoy the show!
As always you can support us and follow us at https://www.patreon.com/thebreakuptheory
You can also rate us and follow us on any podcasting app, and tell your friends.
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On today’s show, I talk with one of my favorite people, Jamie Theophilos, a dear friend and comrade. Jamie teaches and studies the politics of digital technology and is a long time organizer, anarchist, as well as video editor/videographer, graphic designer, and motion graphics artist. Jamie also has an essay, “Ways of Seeing: Radical Queerness,” in the book I co-edited, Surviving the Future: Abolitionist Queer Strategies with PM Press.
Jamie and I planned today’s conversation around an essay that Jamie shared with me called, “Rethinking Repair,” by Steven J. Jackson, coming from the academic field of science and technology studies. Jamie knew that I had been working on a project around anarchism and breaking up, and this essay proposes a theory of relation (specifically to technology) through the idea of breakdown, which emphasizes care and repair. Our conversation tries uses this perspective to interrogate our relationship to the technology that plays a large role in our lives, and which can seem so totalizing and nefarious. How do we relate to the tools we have to create spaces for our flourishing and solidarity right now? We try to avoid any kind of purism or binary thinking, to address what we have in front of us, and what we can do with it.
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In this episode, Shuli talks with the wonderful carla joy bergman, a transdisciplinary artist who collaborates with humans and more than human friends. she co-wrote Joyful Militancy and edited Trust Kids! She formerly made the podcast Grounded Futures with her son Uilliam, as well as the On Belonging audio series with Jamie-leigh Gonzalez.
The conversation ranges through the beginning and ending of groups and projects, the necessity of intergenerational organizing, the joys and pains of breaking up with family and loved ones, how we create space together, and the relationship between anarchism, nihilism, and the leftist movements.
To check out more of carla’s work you can go to their website joyculcarla.com
Carla has a new podcast project about to launch, which you can find at https://walkingwithchange.captivate.fm/
Special announcement!!!
The Breakup Theory is launching a new project, where we ask you, our listeners, to share your stories of breaking up, conflict with friends and lovers, and any other relationship trouble that you’d like feedback on. One of the main ideas of this podcast was to create a space where queers and anarchists and abolitionists can talk about how their politics and their personal lives entwine. We have set up an online submission form at https://form.jotform.com/thebreakuptheory/stories and a phone line at (917) 426-6548. We will keep the submissions anonymous and won’t use any information you don’t want to share. You can leave a message or write in, and Caroline, River and Shuli will share your story on the podcast along with a discussion about the issues you raise. We are excited to hear what’s going on in your world and help you all break up with what’s limiting you!
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In this episode, Shuli talks with Conner Habib, author of the novel Hawk Mountain and host of the podcast Against Everyone with Conner Habib. The discussion goes into many different places, with certan themes about the connection between relationships and politics running throughout. We start this discussion talking about “breaking up with the state,” an idea Conner discussed on a couple of his podcast episodes and that was influential in Shuli's thinking about the crossover of relationships and politics. The conversation uses both personal and political perspectives to think about the dynamics of the failing state, its fascist grasps at power, what protest can do, how we respond to harm and conflict, and more. Hope you like it!
You can find Conner and his podcast at: patreon.com/connerhabib
You can buy Hawk Mountain here: https://bookshop.org/a/4714/9781324064862 -
In this conversation Shuli talks with Sebastian Merrill, whose debut collection GHOST :: SEEDS was selected by Kimiko Hahn as the winner of the 2022 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and published by Texas Review Press in November 2023. GHOST :: SEEDS was recently named a winner of 2024 Stonewall Honor Book - Barbara Gittings Literature Award from the American Library Association and was selected by Ellen Doré Watson as the winner of the 2022 Levis Prize for Poetry from Friends of Writers. Sebastian is also a yoga instructor and happens to be a dear friend!
In this conversation, Shuli and Sebastian use his book as a frame to think about transition, the narratives we carry along and try to break with, relating with our ghosts and our grief, the absurdity of gender, and what liberation even means.
Content warning: mention of sexual assault, but with no specific details
You can find out more about Sebastian and buy his book at his website:
https://www.sebastianmerrill.com/
You can also find him on Instagram @seb.merrill
If you like our podcast, please rate and follow us on your podcast app. You can also support us on our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thebreakuptheory
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This episode has two segments: in the first, Caroline, River, and Shuli address the escalated genocide in Gaza in the wake of October 7, giving more context to some of the references in the previous discussion. In the second, River and Shuli grapple with feelings of despair and hope as an astonishing worldwide, massive solidarity movement rises up and those who govern could care less. We delve into the way these movements create conflicts and opportunities both for our existing relationships and for new comrades and accomplices.
Feel free to rate this podcast and follow us anywhere or on https://www.patreon.com/thebreakuptheory
Links mentioned in the episode:
https://boycotteurovision.uk/index.html (watch the fun videos too, like this: https://youtu.be/pA_fliOVSPg?si=rhpryzFmkcpSqesC!)
12 Rules For What 91 Far Right Mobs on Armistice Day https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/12-rules-for-what/id1453687129?i=1000635261267
And follow @wizard_bisan1 on Instagram!
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In this episode, Shuli, River, and Caroline discuss the breakup theory, borrowing lessons from anarchism to think about how to engage in our relationships for mutual liberation. We aim for collective liberation and mutual autonomy. Anarchism can teach us how to end things. But how do we get over ourselves? Here you multiverse of hosts set up the way this podcast will mix theories of liberation with everyday life and love. Follow and support us at https://www.patreon.com/thebreakuptheory/
