The Feminist Present

Greeetings! It's been a while! But we're back and one of us (Laura!) has A BOOK! It's called Pitchcraft: The Writer's Guide to Getting Agented, Published, and Paid, and it's out next week. So this is a short introduction to that book, to the writing life and to how Laura came to write it. We also have important announcements about the future of the podcast -- no worries, we're not going anywhere! But we're making some changes! Tune in and find out more!

When Chloé Caldwell began writing Trying, she imagined it being about her fertility journey. That was, until a betraying truth was revealed about her marriage. This week, Chloe joins the podcast to talk about the freedom she found in writing about her life right as it fell apart. Chloé Caldwell is a national bestselling author and writing teacher. She has authored five books including a 2024 national bestseller, Women. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, Bon Appétit, The Cut, Vice, The Rumpus, and half a dozen anthologies. Her new memoir, Trying, is available today.

In this episode, Caro De Robertis joins Laura to discuss their new book, So Many Stars: an Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color. Caro and Laura take a deep look into the queer medicine found within the stories of Queer and Trans elders who fought to create space for their full selves in the world.Caro De Robertis is an Uruguayan–American author and professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. They are the author of six novels and a nonfiction book, and the editor of an award-winning anthology. De Robertis' work has won the Stonewall Book Award, a New York Times Editors' Choice, and the Golden Poppy Octavia E. Butler Award. Their books have been translated into seventeen languages and have received numerous other honors, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, which they were the first openly nonbinary person to receive.

Melissa Febos joins Laura and Adrian to discuss her new book, The Dry Season: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex. Together, the trio dives deep into histories of horny nuns and Melissa’s experience of self discovery and feminist transformation during her period of abstinence.Melissa Febos is the critically acclaimed author of 5 books including Whip Smart and GIRLHOOD, books that weave personal narrative with feminist thought and sharp lyricism. She is a recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for her book GIRLHOOD. Among many other recognitions, her book, BODY WORK, has been acclaimed as a national bestseller and an LA Times Bestseller. Her newest book, The Dry Season, is available now.

In this episode, Cat Bohannon joins Laura and Adrian to discuss her most recent book, Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution, where she reframes the stories we tell about human evolution with women at the center.Cat Bohannon’s is a poet, academic, and scientist. She completed her PhD in 2022 at Columbia University, where she studied the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her work has appeared in Science, The Atlantic, Scientific American, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Georgia Review, and Poets Against the War.

This week, we have the incredible Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs on the show. Her newest work Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde is a biography that offers a new understanding of the life and work of Audre Lorde. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the first researcher to explore the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives and this work illuminates a new perspective on the enduring impact of Lorde and her work. Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist. She is a poet, writer, scholar and activist based in Durham, North Carolina. Her writings have appeared in key movement periodicals like Make/Shift, Left Turn, The Abolitionist, Ms. Magazine, and the collections Pleasure Activism, Abolition Now, The Revolution Starts at Home, Dear Sister and the Transformative Justice Reader.

Join Laura for a discussion with Samhita Mukhopadhyay exploring her newest book, The Myth of Making It. The former executive editor of Teen Vogue brings to this conversation her experiences of workplace reckoning to help us reimagine what work can be when we are tired, searching for justice, and longing to be liberated from the oppressive grip of hustle culture. Samhita Mukhopadhyay is is the former executive editor of Teen Vogue and Feministing and the current editorial director at the Meteor. Her writing has appeared in The Cut, Vanity Fair, Vogue, The Atlantic, and The Nation.

Join Laura and Adrian as they talk with Vanessa Angélica Villarreal about her newest book, Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders. In this conversation, the crew discusses topics like the queered pop culture icons of the 90's, exploring gender expression as a racialized teenager, and the work of remembering after erasure.Come join Vanessa Angélica Villarreal and our very own Laura Goode for an event on August 7th, 7:00pm at 9th Ave Green Apple Books!Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is a is a poet, essayist, and first-generation Mexican immigrant born in the Rio Grande Valley and raised in Houston, Texas. An accoladed writer, Vanessa is a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters.

Sarah Manguso joins Laura to talk about her newest book, Liars. Telling the blistering story of a marriage as it burns to the ground, Liars depicts the slow and normalized forms of abuse and misogyny baked into marriage. Pre-order liars now, for release on July 23rd.Sarah Manguso's book tour comes to San Francisco on Wednesday, July 24, 2024 at 7:00pm @ The Booksmith! Details and RSVP here.Sarah Manguso is a poet and author of nine books. Her poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Magazine. Her work has been recognized by an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her writing has been translated into twelve languages.

Jessica Calarco joins Laura and Adrian to unpack her newly released book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net. They discuss the histories and the sociological interviews central to Calarco's book, painting a picture of the women who are tasked with holding society together with their labor.Dr. Jessica Calarco is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on education, families, and health decision-making. Her award-winning research reveals how structures power and privilege maintain socioeconomic, racial/ethnic, and gender inequalities in these settings. She is the author of Negotiating Opportunities, A Field Guide to Grad School, and most recently Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net.

Author and self-described "soccer mom Simone de Beauvoir" Lyz Lenz makes a triumphant return to the pod to discuss her new book THIS AMERICAN EX-WIFE with Laura and Adrian. (Please refer to TFP Episode 7 from December 2020 for Lyz's first mid-derecho podcast appearance!) Her third book in five years, THIS AMERICAN EX-WIFE brings Lenz's characteristic blend of incisive sociological research and searing personal commentary to a highly relevant post-pandemic issue: divorce. Discussion topics include how Laura and Lyz just missed each other in the early-2000s Twin Cities, why the movie Fargo is the Beetlejuice of the Midwest, and what we really talk about when we talk about women and divorce. 

After a stunning revelation about a life-changing moment THE Dr. Roxane Gay offered Laura, Adrian and Laura join acclaimed memoirist Nicole Chung to discuss her second book, A Living Remedy. Following the contours of A Living Remedy, this discussion travels through the national tragedy of American healthcare, what an elite education and successful writing career can and can't do for class mobility, and much more.

Laura interviews novelist Lydia Kiesling about her second novel Mobility. Related discussion topics also include the astrology of The Sopranos (Laura and Lydia are both Christopher suns, Mobility's protagonist Bunny Glenn is more of a Meadow rising), the '90s in girlhood, the time Lydia joined a panel Laura organized at Stanford with a newborn on her chest, how mothers write whole books in stolen moments, and what we really talk about when we talk about girlbosses in the oil and gas industry.

Laura and Adrian embark on their new series: feminism and the horror genre. We dedicate the first episode of this series to two favorites of ours: Hollywood treasure Sigourney Weaver and slimy aliens with acid for blood. A discussion of 1986’s Aliens, horror and motherhood, and dueling queens.

This episode is basically a PSA: if you’re not watching the Australian feminist crime show Deadloch, then Laura, Adrian and guest Moira Donegan have one question for you: why not? Depressed industrial towns, toxic masculinity, lesbians, a four-hour movie called ‘Poseidon’s Uterus’: this show has everything, and we’re here for all of it.

Midge Decter (1927-2022) has often been called the "grandmother of neoconservatism" -- hers was in some ways a pretty classic trajectory, from New Deal liberalism to profound unease with the social movements of the 1960s, to the center of the conservative movement and Republican politics. But unlike most of her fellow neocons, Midge Decter always framed her trajectory quite openly in terms of gender: repulsion from a certain kind of women's liberation, and attraction to a certain kind of masculinity. In this episode, Moira and Adrian delve into the weird, cantankerous world of Midge Decter with the co-hosts of Know Your Enemy, Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell.

Join us for the first episode of the all-new show In Bed With The Right. For their inaugural episode, Moira and Adrian delve into right-wing (ahem) contributions to the gay marriage debate. Ten years ago the Supreme Court decided Windsor v. US and Hollingsworth v. Perry, which together spelled the beginning of the end of the gay marriage debate (gay marriage would be established nationwide in Obergefell v. Hodges two years later). But did the issue really go away? How did the terms of the debate back then on the right influence today's moral panics, how do they motivate a far-right Supreme Court? Follow the show to hear more!

Get a sneak peek at the upcoming, all-new show In Bed With the Right hosted by Moira Donegan and TFP's very own Adrian Daub.

After a few months of absence, your trusty co-hosts return to tell you about new projects, new episodes, and new friends of the pod! Live from cyberspace, it's ... a guestless update spectacular!

Join us for the glorious return of friend of the pod Dr. Anthony C. Ocampo as we talk about his fantastic new book Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons.Anthony Christian Ocampo, Ph.D. is Professor of Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is the author of Brown and Gay in LA: The Lives of Immigrant Sons and The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race, which has been featured on NPR, NBC News, Literary Hub, and in the Los Angeles Times. He is an Academic Director of the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity and the co-host of the podcast Professor-ing. His writing has appeared in GQ, Catapult, BuzzFeed, Los Angeles Review of Books, Colorlines, Gravy, Life & Thyme, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. Raised in Northeast Los Angeles, he earned his BA in comparative studies in race and ethnicity and MA in modern thought and literature from Stanford University and his MA and PhD in sociology from UCLA.

Judith Butler joins Laura and Adrian for the final episode in our series on moral panic. Judith Butler is a renowned philosopher and gender theorist, and the author of numerous books including Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter. Their first non-academic press book, Who's Afraid of Gender?, is forthcoming from FSG in 2023. Their piece in The Guardian mentioned in the episode can be found here. They currently serve as the the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Join Laura and Adrian as they talk to journalist and author Melissa Gira Grant in the latest installment of our series on the trans moral panic. Melissa is a staff writer at The New Republic (her articles mentioned in the episode include "'Libs of Tiktok' and the Right's Embrace of Anti-LGBTQ Violence" and "A Pizzagate in Every City"); the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso); and the co-director of They Won't Call It Murder. She has reported on violence against massage workers in Flushing; attacks on trans rights across Texas; resistance to police killings in Columbus, and the global movement for sex workers' rights. Her forthcoming book is titled A Woman Is Against the Law: Sex, Race, and the Limits of Justice of America (Little, Brown and Company).

Laura and Adrian are joined by Liat Kaplan, who in the early 2010s as a teenager started the popular Tumblr page "Your Fave is Problematic." She stayed anonymous as its founder until last year, but the blog has been often cited in the meantime as one of the origin points of cancel culture as we know it today. Liat discusses its intentions, impact, and, for the first time, the full personal history that led her to start the blog originally.

Join us as we continue mythbusting through moral panics with our fantastic guest Jules Gill-Peterson. Adrian, Laura, and Jules discuss how cancel culture has its roots deep in transphobia and the misinformation surrounding the moral panic about transgender kids.Jules Gill-Peterson is Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. Jules is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), the first book to shatter the widespread myth that transgender children are a brand new generation in the twenty-first century. Jules has been published widely - you can read a recent New Republic piece of hers here and subscribe to her wonderful newsletter, Sad Brown Girl, here.

Join Adrian and friend of the pod Michael Hobbes for the second half of their conversation on Moral Panic Mythbusting.Michael Hobbes is a journalist and co-host of the podcast Maintenance Phase. He previously was a reporter at The Huffington Post and co-host of the podcast You're Wrong About.

Join Adrian and friend of the pod Michael Hobbes in part one of Moral Panic Mythbusting.Michael Hobbes is a journalist and co-host of the podcast Maintenance Phase. He previously was a reporter at The Huffington Post and co-host of the podcast You're Wrong About.

Vauhini Vara joins TFP to discuss her debut novel The Immortal King Rao. Vauhini was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, as the daughter of Indian immigrants, and grew up there and in Oklahoma and the Seattle suburbs. She reported at The Wall Street Journal for nine years, with writing also appearing in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Wired, The New Republic, Businessweek, Fortune, and elsewhere.

Angela Garbes is the author of Like a Mother, an NPR Best Book of the Year and finalist for the Washington State Book Award in Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Cut, New York, Bon Appétit, and featured on NPR's Fresh Air. On this week's episode, she and Laura laugh and cry as they discuss her new book Essential Labor, which explores care work and mothering as social change.

Nell McShane Wulfhart is a frequent contributor to the New York Times travel section and wrote the column “Carry On” from 2016-2019. She has written for Travel + Leisure, Bon Appétit, Condé Nast Traveler, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, and T Magazine. She is the author of the Audible Original Off Menu. She joins Laura to discuss her new book "The Great Stewardess Rebellion" and the untold feminist history behind flight attendants in America.

Ry Russo-Young is an award-winning film director whose work includes the movies Before I Fall and The Sun is Also a Star. Ry joins us this week as we discuss her newest work, the three-part HBO docuseries Nuclear Family, which investigates the prolonged impact on Ry’s family of the four-year legal battle between her lesbian mothers and the sperm donor who sued them for parental rights. We talk about everything from the craft complexities of telling your family's story to the importance of honoring our queer elders.

Melissa Febos is the critically acclaimed author of Whipsmart, Abandon Me, and Girlhood. She joins Laura and Adrian for a candid and captivating conversation on her newest book Body Work (out 3/16). They explore the craft and complexity of writing truthfully about our lives and loved ones.

Taylor Harris is the author of the affecting memoir This Boy We Made, which details her family’s journey through the American medical system in search of a diagnosis and treatment for her son Tophs. In this discussion, we explore the function of faith, anxiety, parenthood, medical mysteries, and institutional racism. Harris’s essays have appeared in TIME, Catapult, The Washington Post, and many other publications. She teaches writing at Penn State University.

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of the award-winning book The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir. Alex joins TFP this week to discuss the historically controversial lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness: is it really a lesbian novel, or perhaps more of a trans novel? Have we moved beyond the tragic queer love story? And how has our interpretation of this classic text changed in the last 100 years?

Friend of the podcast Moira Donegan is an opinion columnist for Guardian US who longtime TFP fans will remember from our first season. Moira makes a glorious return to discuss her recent deep dive into Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.

Jeanette Winterson CBE is the author of 27 influential feminist texts, including Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, Sexing The Cherry, Gut Symmetries, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?, and most recently, 12 BYTES: Where We Might Go Next. In a special event partnering with the independent bookstores Politics & Prose and Books & Books, Jeanette joined Laura and Adrian to talk about how 12 BYTES engages feminist history in its probing consideration of artificial intelligence.

Sarah Marshall and Alex Steed are the hosts of the podcast YOU ARE GOOD (formerly WHY ARE DADS), the film podcast unafraid of feelings. With Laura and Adrian, they dive into the odd complexity of REVERSAL OF FORTUNE, the 1990 film adapted from law professor Alan Dershowitz’s 1985 book.

Meera Menon is the director of two feature films: EQUITY (2016), starring Anna Gunn as a high-powered Wall Street broker, and FARAH GOES BANG (2013), which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and won the inaugural Nora Ephron Prize from Tribeca and Vogue (and which Meera co-wrote with one of your loyal hosts). She’s also a sought-after director in episodic television, with directing credits on Dirty John, You, The Walking Dead, The Man in High Castle, Queen of the South, Halt and Catch Fire, Snowfall, and the upcoming Ms. Marvel. Adrian and Laura made a trip down memory lane to revisit the iconic NOW AND THEN (1995) with Meera, which helped to inspire FARAH GOES BANG.

Merve Emre is associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America 2017), The Ferrante Letters (2019), and The Personality Brokers (2018). She is the editor of Once and Future Feminist (2018), The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (2021), and The Norton Modern Library Mrs. Dalloway (2021). Merve chatted with Adrian and Laura about the troubled masterwork that is BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA (1992).

The wildly talented Terry Castle, Walter A. Hass Professor in the Humanities, has taught literature at Stanford for almost 40 years. She was once described by Susan Sontag as “the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today”, and detailed her friendship with Sontag in the classic essay “Desperately Seeking Susan.” Her many books include The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology From Ariosto to Stonewall and The Professor and Other Writings. Laura and Adrian splashed around in Terry’s deep well of Patricia Highsmith knowledge for this rousing discussion of class, race, and the queer gaze in THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (1999).

Annalee Newitz is pretty much nerd royalty. They are the author of the novels The Future of Another Timeline and Autonomous, which won the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, their work appears regularly in the New York Times and New Scientist, as well as in The Washington Post, Slate, Popular Science, Ars Technica, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. They co-host the Hugo Award-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, founded io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo. Annalee joined Adrian and Laura to dish about their most recent book, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age: how its archaeological interpretations hearken back to their Ph.D work in literature, what lessons present cities might learn from ancient ones, and their “polyamorous” approach to working on multiple projects simultaneously.

Inkoo Kang, recently announced as the Washington Post’s newest TV critic, was also named the best critic of 2021 by the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards for her work at The Hollywood Reporter. Inkoo co-hosts the All About Almodovar podcast, and has previously written about film, TV, and culture for Slate, MTV News, Los Angeles Times, Atlantic, and many other places. Laura and Adrian had a blast watching and discussing the 2013 Swedish teen film WE ARE THE BEST! with Inkoo, veering into productive detours about benign neglect in parenting, canonical hairstyle changes, what we binge-watched as nerdy teens, and much more.

Susan Stryker is an author, professor, filmmaker, and heroine of the trans and queer rights movement. Her extensive bibliography includes two editions of The Transgender Studies Reader and Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area; her documentary films include Christine in the Cutting Room, an experimental short film about Christine Jorgensen, and most recently, The Lady and the Dale, released in early 2021 by HBO. Adrian and Laura talked to Susan about performances of gender in the triumph of cinema that is MISS CONGENIALITY (2000), focusing on its constructions of drag, queer fictive kinship, the metrosexual of the 90s-00s, and the beauty-industrial complex. Also, Laura makes a shocking confession about a secret from her past.

Laura and Adrian joyfully reunite in part 2 of this guestless double-wide kickoff to The Feminist Present’s third season. And we have a new, cinematic theme! In addition to the book nerd chatter you’ve come to count on from us in the present, for this season we’re also reflecting on the past: we’ve invited a bunch of brilliant feminists to talk about ‘90s-’00s “chick flicks” with us, allowing them to define that term however they wish. We begin here with a crucial two-part deep dive into the era’s complex representations of gender: a retrospective of Leonardo DiCaprio’s iconic and iconoclastic career from 1993-1997. We journey through the eight films DiCaprio made during this groundshifting period: in part 1 we discuss This Boy’s Life, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Basketball Diaries, The Quick and The Dead, and in part 2 we cover Total Eclipse, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, and finally, of course, Titanic.

Laura and Adrian joyfully reunite in this guestless double-wide kickoff to The Feminist Present’s third season. And we have a new, cinematic theme! In addition to the book nerd chatter you’ve come to count on from us in the present, for this season we’re also reflecting on the past: we’ve invited a bunch of brilliant feminists to talk about ‘90s-’00s “chick flicks” with us, allowing them to define that term however they wish. We begin here with a crucial two-part deep dive into the era’s complex representations of gender: a retrospective of Leonardo DiCaprio’s iconic and iconoclastic career from 1993-1997. We journey through the eight films DiCaprio made during this groundshifting period: in part 1 we discuss This Boy’s Life, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Basketball Diaries, The Quick and The Dead, and in part 2 we cover Total Eclipse, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, and finally, of course, Titanic.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling memoir Wild, the New York Times bestsellers Tiny Beautiful Things and Brave Enough, and the novel Torch. She’s also Laura’s favorite living author. Laura barely kept her shit together talking with Cheryl about unconditional positive regard as a feminist value, the writer as teacher, and how breadwinners can’t afford to have writers’ block.

Lyz Lenz is the author of two books, the latter of which, Belabored: A Vindication on the Rights of Pregnant Women, was released while she was fleeing an Iowa derecho mid-pandemic with her two young children. She was, until very recently, a columnist for the Cedar Rapids Gazette; her work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, and in her popular newsletter, “Men Yell at Me.” Lyz talked to Adrian and Laura about releasing Belabored amidst multiple disasters, the hardcore survival instincts of Midwestern women, and becoming a writer on the internet.

Sister Roma, the “most photographed nun in the world,” has been an influential member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence since 1987. The Sisters are an Order of queer and trans nuns that debuted in San Francisco on Easter Sunday 1979; originally formed to draw money and attention to the AIDS crisis, the Sisters have spent over four decades in radically compassionate service to, in their words, “those on the edges.” Laura and Adrian got super emotional talking to Roma about the political value of drag, how the COVID-19 pandemic recalls that of HIV/AIDS, the Sisters’ tireless support for feminist causes, and real-life Sister encounters in San Francisco.

Nick Mitchell is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He received, and returned, UCSC’s Chancellor’s Award for Diversity in early 2020, and has been a vocal proponent of the Cops Off Campus movement throughout and beyond the University of California system. Adrian and Laura talked to Nick about his essay “Summertime Selves” and about the intersectional layers of Nick and Laura’s shared, gossip-rich history as students working in the service industry.

Farai Chideya has covered every American presidential election since 1996. She’s the author of six books, as well as a journalist and commentator whose work has been featured on NPR, CNN, ABC News, Newsweek, FiveThirtyEight, Oxygen, and many other outlets. After the 2016 election, she became a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, blending quantitative and qualitative research on race and gender diversity in the media. Laura and Adrian talked to Farai about America’s nail-biter of a presidential election during the profound uncertainty of November 5, 2020.

Imran Siddiquee is a filmmaker, writer and activist, whose articles have appeared in The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Bitch and Salon. They are also an active filmmaker and organize the BlackStar Film Festival. Laura and Adrian talk with Imran about masculinity, pop culture, and race, about being from a place called Springfield and about the complexities of white feminism.