intersectional islands: Recent Episodes
Rodrigo Zorzanelli
How does the world look from intersectional standpoints? Intersectional Islands is an anthology of queer and feminist narratives. Cultural anthropologist Rodrigo Zorzanelli gathers with guest artists, activists and others from marginalised communities around “invisible” topics. In every episode, we start navigating from a new island, which represents the guest’s personal narrative. Here, we expand our perspectives through glimpses in the guests’ stories and agency. The water between islands is fluid, is emotion, is unstable. It has form but it is also shapeless. The sea separates, yet, it connects all the islands.
Poetry is not a luxury, as Audre Lorde has invited us to see it. Based on the experience of Black women, poetry is rather a survival strategy. It brings light into one’s own feeling and reveals new knowledges that are not rational, academic, classist or westernised. It is a call for breaking up with white patriarchal canon because we can write our own poetry.
In this conversation, Yaknel joins me to explore more of the poetics in the politics of our lives. We talk about language as power. Her disruptive relationship with language. Her lover but also her enemy, just like in a telenovela. We also talk about mindfulness, transforming ideas into actions and how Yaknel began her quest towards reading more Latin American women authors.
What we absorb consciously and unconsciously shapes everything we do. What we read, what we see, what we hear, what and who we surround ourselves with… Knowledge is thus not only confined to books. It is also the experience and the background we brings with us.
Is fiction really fiction? Or are the stories we tell also the stories we end up living? Should we consider categories as limitations? Or can be categories openings and new beginnings? How to navigate our lives between intuition and structure? How to find this dance between openness and connection? Where is there a common place to meet?
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Yaknel is a multidisciplinary creator, yoga and meditation instructor, a writer, performer, she laughs, she is breath, un saco de emociones desbordantes. She is passion, energy. She is life. She is magic, baby.
www.yaknel.com
Medium https://yaknel.medium.com/
Instagram @yaknelelorza
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References mentioned in this episode
Audre Lorde: Poetry is not a luxury (1985)
Diana J. Torres: Pucha potens (2020)
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follow us on instagram @intersectionalislands
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podcast by Rodrigo Zorzanelli Cavalcanti
music by Shanti Suki Osman
By being an “inward genre with outwardly skins”, as Omar describes, intimacy enables an interface between very private worlds and very public worlds. Thinking through intimacy opens up ways of understanding ourselves. More than a feeling, intimacy is a gradual form of consciousness, it is a form of knowing. Even when that knowing is still indistinct and imprecise. In the process of its unfolding, intimacy orientates us towards possible becomings, beings, temporalities.
This idea is seen in the queer practice of offering oneself as an archive. It allows to access objects that are either removed from ordinary historical view or they might be remote in terms of time and place. In this episode, Omar shares with us his academic work related to intimacy. We talk about forms of knowing, queer personal archives, autotheory and temporality.
How to think intimacy with and beyond its connection to sex?
What kinds of histories and inheritances are revealed through rituals of intimacy?
What concerns of our futurities can we access in our unfinished present?
How to birth plural possibilities from relating to other social objects or bodies?
How to use the disclosure of the self to get somewhere where we wouldn’t have arrived otherwise?
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Omar Kasmani (he/him) is a Social and Cultural Anthropologist working at the Collaborative Research Center Affective Societies at Freie Universität Berlin. He usually describes himself as Berliner by love, although he grew up in Pakistan.
read Omar’s beautiful work of autothery: thin attachments (2019)
follow him on instagram @the_scene_maker
follow him on academia
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authors mentioned by Omar in this episode:
Lauren Berlant (intimacy build worlds)
Ruth Behar (autotheory)
Christina Sharpe (in the wake)
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follow us on instagram @intersectionalislands
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podcast by Rodrigo Zorzanelli Cavalcanti
music by Shanti Suki Osman
When we actively seek transformation in our lives, where to look for it? In magic? In rituals? In the temporary images we feed ourselves with? In this episode, Dornika and I are interested in exploring transformation as a sort of decision process. A series of serendipitous decisions to break up with the repetition of toxic patterns.
Starting off by questioning the collective inferiority complex that we got projected on us while growing up. Then debating our role and responsibilities as perspectives from the Global South within societies colonized by the Euro-North-American gaze.
We share our experiences with drag as a method for experimenting with transformation. Visible aspects of transformation can happen in a matter of hours through makeup and costume. But what about long term changes? How much of these experiences remain inscribed in our bodies?
How does a quest for identity beyond identity politics might look like? How to find value in our own narratives? How to embrace our own imperfection in face of self criticism? Why perspectives from the Global South matter in a world obsessed with the Euro-North-American standards?
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Dornika Kazerani (she/they) is a multi-disciplinary performer, visual artist, musician, singer, songwriter and vocal coach.
Follow Dornika on soundcloud:
@akinrod
Follow Dornika on instagram:
@manyfacedgodx
@reclaimthegaze
@ownyourvoiceberlin
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Follow us on instagram @intersectionalislands
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Podcast by Rodrigo Zorzanelli Cavalcanti
Music by Shanti Suki Osman
Solitude and seclusion were thrust upon us because of the pandemic. Emotional closeness and physical distance made us globally explore our affective geographies under a new light. Physically far away but suddenly so near, our human craving for connection led us to structure our digital life by scheduling calls with friends and family.
In our globalised interactions, our notions of the near and the far are becoming even blurrier. There is a harmonious dissonance in co-inhabiting a real space in an imaginary location.
By being unable to connect physically with her parents, Aseela brings up memories of family migration when her grandma moved to Pakistan during Partition in 1947. We discuss separation and reflect on the privileges and paradoxes of experiencing the pandemic in Germany from a migrant perspective. Borders are arbitrarily drawn and imagined but they do have physical and real consequences on people’s lives.
What are we learning about the porous or not so porous borders of our thinking and of our nation-states? How does digital life change how we cultivate relationships? What if parts of our hearts are geographically distant from each other? Who have we revealed ourselves to be in the paradox of here and now?
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Aseela Haque (she/her) is a doctoral fellow at Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies. She is currently doing her PhD in human geography on the topic of urban informality in Karachi.
Get in touch with Aseela on twitter @aseelahaque or by sending her an email
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Follow us on instagram @intersectionalislands
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Podcast by Rodrigo Zorzanelli Cavalcanti
Music by Shanti Suki Osman
Listening to one’s own body can be a precious tool in the learning curve of self-care. When we make our well being a priority, simple words such as “I am not feeling great” and “I need space” become a powerful relief for tensions. Usually understood as caring for the essential things, such as taking a shower, cooking a meal and going for a walk, our ideas of self-care are also shaped by elements of capitalist mindset. Constantly keeping oneself busy and productive, and pushing through hard work is praised and rewarded in our societies, even when it comes with the cost of ignoring the needs of our bodies and our minds. In this episode, Kelly shares with us why being the only Black person in the working environment can affect one’s mental health and how she managed to find her way out of this situation. We also talk about the tricky role of social media in relation to self-care when following people who have similar experiences as you.
How do we perceive our needs for self-care as bodily sensations? How to be able to pay your rent and still do things that feel good for you? How to become aware of our boundaries and how to communicate them? Social media: a source of inspiration or an overwhelming experience? If we understand self-care as a learning curve, how can we continue or even begin this journey?
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Originally from Birmingham UK, Kelly (she/her) is a vibrant and charismatic soul singer based in Berlin.
Currently working on her first single“Take Me Back!” which started as a new skill to learn to pass the time during lockdown, but has now fast become a way to use her creative energy and start doing what she has always wanted to do without any limitations!
Follow Kelly on instagram @kellyakakelzz
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Follow us on instagram @intersectionalislands
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Podcast by Rodrigo Zorzanelli Cavalcanti
Music by Shanti Suki Osman
Or representation? In this episode, we juggle between the cultural symbolic and the political dimensions of recognition, debating the role of stereotypes and how people in power function as gatekeeping. Berly shares with us her story of growing up as an immigrant from the Dominican Republic in the USA and her reflections on Black Latina identity.
How does the language we use influence the way we think and see? What strategies can be put in place in order to fight stigma? When in life do we notice how we are being recognised in society? Is representation a blessing or a curse? What responsibilities do we carry for representing our minority communities?
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Berly Cordero (she/her) is a Master student in Global Studies and the founder of the Non-Profit Women’s Worth in Nicaragua.
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Follow us on instagram @intersectionalislands
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Podcast by Rodrigo Zorzanelli Cavalcanti
Music by Shanti Suki Osman
Being vulnerable is easier said than done. Where do we find vulnerability within us? How to allow ourselves to be vulnerable with our selves? How to reveal inner wounds? And why? Is vulnerability a work in collective or an individual process? What does it tell us about the duality of pain and healing?
What happens when those walls that prevent us from being vulnerable fall down? What if vulnerability is more complex than “just showing” the weaknesses? We invite you in this episode to go down into the basement of your humanity and to have a sneak peek on what is hidden in the dark. Bring some courage and a flashlight and let’s go.
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Ana Ornelas (she/her) is a writer, a sex-positive activist and a feminist.
Ana’s website (in Portuguese)
instagram @pimentacitrica
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Follow us on instagram @intersectionalislands
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Podcast by Rodrigo Zorzanelli Cavalcanti
Music by Shanti Suki Osman
This episode zero introduces the podcast's concept and you get to know my intentions for doing it. I share some of my personal journey that led me to create this podcast and I explain key terms and ideas such as "intersectionality" and what these islands mean over here.
Intersectional Islands is an anthology of queer and feminist narratives. Here, we will have conversations speaking from our own intersectional standpoints. We will humanise bodies that tend to be silenced, invisibilised, oppressed, exploited and exoticised by colonial, racist and patriarchal patterns of thought. The topics will be explored through anecdotes of personal experience, giving the guests the opportunity to share their intimate view as experts for their own lives. This way, an “archipelago” of perspectives will be formed and expanded with each new episode. Our worlds will expand together by exercising empathy and by hearing people narrating their own standpoints.
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Follow us on Instagram @intersectionalislands
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Podcast by Rodrigo Zorzanelli Cavalcanti
Music by Shanti Suki Osman
Laia and I gathered around the topic of utopia. We try to bring utopian spaces from the abstract towards the material. How do we create worlds that open up possibilities and bring us to walk new paths in our lives? Can art be a healing process for our scars? Is utopia escapism from reality or a tool for political imagination?
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Laia Ribera Cañenguez (she/they) is a Salvadorian theatre and performance artist, activist and living being based in Berlin.
Laia's website
WAX-en trailer : Laia's performance using wax as material
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Follow us on Instagram @intersectionalislands
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Podcast by Rodrigo Zorzanelli Cavalcanti
Music by Shanti Suki Osman
How does the world look from intersectional standpoints? Intersectional Islands is an anthology of queer and feminist narratives. Cultural anthropologist Rodrigo Zorzanelli gathers with guest artists, activists and others from marginalised communities around “invisible” topics.