Subject To Power

The Great Overwelm

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.

The Mothers Of Invention

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.

Back From The Brink

Even in this period of perpetual war between men across the world - at no time in history did the contest for world domination reach as dangerous a moment as it did during the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.
Male leaders in what was then The USSR - and America, were trying to outdo one another in amassing the most threatening pile of nuclear weapons capable of the greatest mass death and planetary destruction.
In 1980, at the height of the arms race, Ann Pettitt was a young mother and vegetable farmer in rural Wales and found herself in much closer proximity to the nuclear threat than most - and in this episode Ann is going to tell the story of how she became a leader of the largest all-women peace action of all time - The Greenham Women's Peace Camp - which lasted 20 years and helped end the Cold War.

No Country For Women

For most of us who end up in feminism, who end up actively fighting for women’s rights - the consciousness that brought us here - came at a steep price.
Some of us got shocked into it, some of us went through a series of painful awakenings that forced us to search for an explanation, a framework by which to analyze the violations we had been subjected to or witnessed.
Our guest on this episode, Brazilian journalist Andreia Nobre, tells the story of her own harrowing awakenings, starting at the age of 8, that put her on a lifelong quest to make sense of the lack of safety, autonomy, and dignity she experienced as a girl, as a young woman, as a mother - in Brazil, in Portugal, and in the UK.
A passionate journalist and researcher, Andreia channeled her journey from silenced victim to outspoken survivor to wide awake activist, to report on the very dire reality women of the world still face - in the West, in so-called developing countries, and around the globe.

Old Tricks, New Tricks & The Same Tricks

There is no issue where the distance between the idea - and the lived reality - is as far apart as in prostitution. The discourse about prostitution often takes place miles away from the thing itself, and is had by people far removed from the violence and trauma of prostitution.  The voices of survivors of prostitution are rarely heard because their lives are inevitably impacted by the violence and trauma of prostitution.
Our guest Cherry Smiley, an Indigenous feminist researcher, activist and author wanted to bridge this gap, and set out on an academic research project on the subject of prostitution - in the hopes that by shedding light on the lived realities of Indigenous women and girls in prostitution, she would shift people’s thinking about what prostitution actually is. She then wrote a book about her arduous PhD journey and her evolving insights called Not Sacred, Not Squaws: Indigenous Feminism Redefined.
In this episode we talk to Cherry about putting her whole academic career on the line taking on the ‘sex work is work’ creed, the courage it took to bring her life experience as an Indigenous feminist woman to bear on her research project, and the cost of speaking up against the things manstitutions hold sacred.

Summer Thoughts

A huge thank you to everyone who is listening, subscribing, sharing and engaging with Subject To Power. We are 20 episodes in and wrapping up Season 1 with immense gratitude and a few reflections by host Elle Kamihira, as well as a bit about what we have planned for Season 2 and forward.
 
Subject To Power Website
Subject To Power Twitter
Subject To Power Instagram

Third Wave Riptide

If patriarchy is our default system - radical feminism is the only system of thinking and action that challenges the status quo of male domination. The only analysis that looks at our current world from women’s point of view and with women's interest in mind. 
And radical feminists - the women who speak, write and shape feminist thought, who are public and loud, are by definition brave people, because they are going against a powerful world order that definitely doesn't want to have its power challenged. A world order that punishes women who make too much noise.
If those radical feminists are deliberately silenced, chased out of their jobs and institutions, de-platformed, even chased out of their countries, or threatened with violence - like this episode’s guest, founder of Feminist Current, Meghan Murphy was - we are silencing the only people who can explain to the rest of us what patriarchy is up to.  

Our Living Energies

When we talk about rights and freedoms it is often in political, economic, and gender-less human rights terms. The conversation is often dualistic - taking place on the right/left divide or the black/white divide, or the rich/poor divide - and much that is crucial to women, gets missed. Or obscured.
New Zealand author Renée Gerlich grapples with all of what is missed when we do not take women, half of humanity, into account, in her new book Out Of The Fog. In this important book she sidesteps the distracting and false choices we often entertain, and instead challenges the incredible contradictions embedded in our modern liberation movements. 
In this episode we talk about Renée’s own quest to fully understand all of what is at stake for women and men, to excavate the forces that distort our connection to eros, the life force, that stunt and disfigure our living energies - and how we can cultivate freedom in an unfree world.

Porn Is A Battlefield

For many of us, pornography seems like an inevitable fact of life. Internet porn use is so widespread, so normalized, so uncontroversial - that it’s controversial to be critical of pornography.
But, as Dr. Gail Dines says, questioning what IS - is in her job description - as a feminist, and as a sociologist and world-leading expert on pornography.
Gail is the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality and founding president and CEO of Culture Reframed, an organization that provides educational tools for parents and teachers to cope with the impact pornography is having on young people.
Gail Dines reframes pornography to show how ‘the industrialization of sex’ has groomed and captured Western culture in the last 70 years, and in this episode she takes us through the key moments in the evolution of porn - from Hugh Hefner to Girls Gone Wild to OnlyFans. We also talk about what today’s global sex industry does to women, what consuming it does to men across the world, and how we build resistance to the pornification of our lives.

Who To Believe!

Is our justice system in the business of determining what is true or false? Do our courts really determine who is guilty or innocent? Does our criminal justice system punish those who violate, and protect and restore the rights of the violated?
As a former prosecutor and now professor of law, Deborah Tuerkheimer has spent her career studying how law and culture interact, and is a leading legal authority on violence against women, domestic violence, and sex crimes. 
In her recent book Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers she examines how our cultural values shape how law is written and executed, and also how our laws determine why we believe some and not others - and why we care so much about some, and so very little about others. 
In this episode Deborah breaks down how the “credibility complex” not only dictates how justice is meted out, but how the justice system, just like our culture, orients to the pain of the powerful, and disregards the pain of the powerless. And how, in a world where women as a class are subject to the greater power of men as a class, ‘justice’ becomes a tenuous matter.

The Peacebuilders

Many scholars who study the evolution of humanity - sociologists, anthropologists, biologists - have come to the conclusion that we, all of us, would not have survived, let alone have evolved into the complex, resilient and innovative species that we are - without millennia of stability and peace.
This episode’s guest, Heide Goettner-Abendroth, established the formal study of this peaceful past - and present - known as Matriarchal Studies. Through the institute she founded, International Academia Hagia of Modern Matriarchal Studies, she has spent nearly 40 years researching and disseminating a vast repository of knowledge about matriarchal societies around the world - their politics, economics, social practices and spirituality.
In this episode we barely scratch the surface of what there is to know, but for those of us who worry about our violent and unequal present, where only a few humans at the top of the hierarchy are getting their needs met, and great masses of our human family suffer - it feels like a key to a different world, a different humanity.
www.goettner-abendroth.de
www.hagia.de

Finding Our Goddesses

Every major religion in the world today features a male deity. Or as Miriam Robbins Dexter puts it: “Man was created in God's image and woman wasn't.” 
How does it affect women of the world - that we have no major religious symbols that reflect the female? That most religions greatly devalue women? That most religions have taboos against the female body and its life cycles?
These are questions Miriam has spent her extraordinary career grappling with, and also what drove her to look into prehistory - our pre-patriarchal history - on a search for female deities and past religions that may have offered women affirmation of female power, the female body, and the female will - rather than shame and denigration.
In this episode, Miriam, a hugely accomplished research scholar in ancient Indo-European languages, archaeology, and mythology, talks about uncovering the female aspects of prehistoric belief systems, unearthing the roots of Indo-European patriarchy, and how she and famed archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (and many others) formed the contested theories about the matriarchal societies of the neolithic.