Writing Feminist Life Together: Recent Episodes
Kimberly B. George
Writing Feminist Life Together is a collection of 30 feminist teachings that remind us that feminism gives us the invitation to slow down, connect with our body, and nourish our imagination. We combine feminist and ethnic studies research, contemplative writing, and other mindfulness practices, in order to connect our inner life to a world needing healing (r)evolutions. Grab a writing journal and join your host, Dr. Kimberly B. George. See her online courses on feminism, education, and contemplative practice at www.FeminismSchool.com.
This episode offers my PhD research at the intersections of neuroscience, therapy, and feminist writing practices to talk about what the processes of recognition—and non recognition—do to us. I especially highlight Black feminist thinkers at this nexus of ideas.
Neuroscience tells us recognition is important for how our brains grow. What parts of yourself do you need to name and recognize? What parts of yourself would you like to ask others to recognize? How is recognition part of growth and healing and flourishing into all the aspects of who we are and why we are here?
How can feminist writing practices help us get closer to the knowledge inside ourself that is both powerful and entwined within deep grief labor? And how do we learn to hold that process as it unfolds? What changes in ourselves and our relationships along the way?
Self-care is useful as a coping mechanism, but it's also an attempt at an individual solution to a problem that has deep, systemic roots. i talk about identifying our needs and deprivations, as well as the abundant resources of various kinds that we have to circulate to others as feminist practice.
One of the reasons people fear change in the feminist journey is because challenging patriarchy usually is not profitable! I talk in this episode about what it means to build alternative community structures that support the change of the feminist journey.
Often, we unconsciously block our next steps of healing because we fear the ripple effects of our changing. But the feminist journey is about change—so it is important to be able to consider and name our fears of change and breathe into those places inside ourself and our relationships. This episode gives some context for thinking about change at the intersection of personal and social-cultural systems.
This podcast engages across trauma studies to consider Gloria Anzaldua's writing on healing: "You don't heal the wound. The wound heals you." I also discuss mind-body connection and the deep anxiety many people have to be/dwell consciously within the sensations and feelings of their own bodies.
This episode furthers the discussion in my July 16 blog post (see kimberlybgeorge.com) that identifies a specific and very common interpersonal power dynamic of patriarchy connected to projection and manipulation.
What comes into view when we think about feminism as fundamentally a practice of memory work, and one that facilitates healing through re-membering and integrations of all kinds? And what if the next step of this journey is as simple and complex as listening to the wind today? This episode continues the idea that spiritual feminist practices are about all the ways we come to presence and integration.
How we hold our grief and allow our grief to connect us to greater transformation is a very difficult part of the feminist journey. I discuss why I believe grief needs a creative process that can help us access the knowledge within us we have been systematically cut off from knowing—including our knowledge of interconnection with all beings, all life, all wonder.
Educator A.J. Hostak and I discuss his feminist journey as it relates to masculinity, vulnerability, and building coalitions. We talk about how the 10 year gap in our ages is relevant for the cultural change underway, too, as more younger men are ready to join feminist labor.
I interviewed educator and teaching artist Joshua Lewis about his journey of engaging feminist learning as a white cis man. We talk about tears, hierarchies of masculinity, and the theft of the self that patriarchy inflicts on little boys.
I dialogue with one of my clients about his journey as a white man learning to engage in feminist reflection and labor. We talk about vulnerability, why the work is hard, and how it is that feminism is about love and how love is a spiritual practice.
I had an important conversation with Stephanie Drury, trauma specialist and the brilliant host of the forum Stuff Christian Culture Likes. Listen to us talk about abortion, cis men's defense mechanisms, grief, Christian practices vs. Christian theocracy, and where we find our hope amidst the rise of white Christian nationalism.
Part of traumatic experience, as connected to structural violence, is the ways in which our knowledge of the world is gaslight, denied, and minimized. How do we reclaim that knowledge? How does mind-body connection help us access and speak our knowledge?
In the beginning of this series on trauma, we will ask questions like: What is the relationship between patriarchy and refusing our own felt experience of vulnerability? How does patriarchy interrupt our own natural healing mechanisms, such as grief? And what kind of knowledge of the world does traumatic experience help us access?
What happens when defense mechanisms are protecting power and privilege? What are ways through this impasse in our relationships? And why is connecting with our body so important as we move through impasse and grow and change?
Part 1 in a series explaining how enacting defense mechanisms are part of learning what feminist psychoanalyst Deborah Britzman calls "difficult knowledge." This episode hones in on the defense mechanisms often embedded in heterosexual relationships—including what often happens when women speak up to men about patriarchal dynamics in their relationship (such as unequal household labor being exported onto women). I also introduce the new coaching service for couples I will be launching soon.
What moment in your life, perhaps your childhood, best reminds you of your innate capacity to resist social scripts of conformity that never made sense to you? Why are adults sleeping as global warming heads toward us and why are so many kids waking up and demanding change? And what is the connection between our unconscious, our creativity, and finding ways to build better worlds together? I ask these questions and meditate on the dearly beloved feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa.
How would you describe how spiritual awakening connects to 1) our own capacity to do our true work in the world and 2) our own capacity to help others do their true work in the world? This episode is a 20-minute meditation on these questions, which for me are at the heart of living into our creative life, feminist life, and spiritual life together.
This is the first pod done just to assist graduate and university students on the pressures of writing within institutionalized education. It is based on my Wellness Writing Workshops (see kimberlybgeorge.com for more information). We will talk about what it means to reconnect to the affective meanings of your work, the purposes and communities you are writing for/with, and why writing amidst relations of power is such a challenge.
Feminist bell hooks believes that spirituality is the practice of our interconnection to all life. (See her marvelous book, All About Love). I meditate on that concept, and in particular in the context of the hard questions about difference and change that arise in feminist classrooms. I ask how contemplative practices that teach us a felt sense of interconnection can offer tools for being in deep learning processes together.
This episode is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Tamara O’Neal. I discuss some of my approaches to teaching men feminism, including the emotional and psychological processes that are part of the journey. I ask men to consider how their own healing from patriarchy is connected to collective healing and how their own feminist journey and labor are needed to end male violence toward women.
Continuing with questions raised for me by controversies in the national Women's March, I turn to The Coming of Lilith by feminist theologian Judith Plaskow. I follow her invitation to wrestle with how the evil we see in the world is in us, not something we can just project onto "others." I ask how a mindset of interconnection helps us through impasse, & I discuss psychic processes like narcissism, self-shaming, and rigid defense mechanisms that show up in this work of changing the world and ourselves.
This episode weaves discussion of the Combahee River Collective's understanding of "interlocked systems," Kimberle Crenshaw's work on intersectionality, and the recent controversies of the national Women's March at the intersections of antisemitism and racism. I discuss the gaps between complex experiences and the language to name experiences and why those persistent gaps are so dizzying. I close by offering a contemplative exercises to listen to your body's knowledge of the stories you carry.
This episode reflects on a key idea from Virginia Woolf's 1929 feminist text, A Room of Own's Own. I define the words intra-subjective and inter-subjective. I ask you to think about how we internalized systems of abusive power, like patriarchy. I ask you to contemplate how these systems have disconnected you from what you know within yourself.
This episode is less intellectually/textually rigorous and more so an invitation to hear the quiet knowledge and power within your own inner life. How do we make more space to listen? How do we treat our bodies as a sacred text?
I talk about why I hope your feminist education isn't just about listening to my expertise, but tuning into yourself more. I discuss some of the reasons it can be hard to become more attuned to ourselves, especially for women who are mothers, and I suggest some practices for this healing of the disconnection from the self.
In this episode, I discuss:
* Making writing journals with your kids and teaching them about trusting their inner life!
* Inviting men to learn feminist theory and integrate their mind and their body.
* Why Descartes didn't trust his body or his senses.
* Why living with chronic pain can teach us to dissociate as a form of survival; and how we start trusting again our body's messages about what is inflaming us.
* How the mind-body binary sneaks in a hierarchy.
*How that hierarchy gets mapped onto social relations.
In this opening podcast, I talk about what is this thing called feminist theory, and well as what is this thing I call contemplative feminism. I am a writing teacher, so I also offer you a writing prompt at the end—to listen and read your body as a sacred text and to journal about that experience.