Faculty Spotlight: Sophie Lewis on Second Wave Feminism, Incipient Queerness, Auto-Analysis, and the Life of the Critic (ft. Paige Sweet)

In episode seven of Faculty Spotlight, Mark and Lauren sit down to chat with two BISR faculty whose interests, scholarly and otherwise, dovetail in fascinating ways—Sophie Lewis, writer, critic, and leading scholar of family abolition and the politics of reproduction; and Paige Sweet, writer, practicing psychoanalyst, and founder of the experimental writing project Infinite Text Collective. Following Sophie’s personal reflections on her early experiences of the injustices in-built into middle-class heteropatriarchal institutions like the family and formal schooling (“nothing is apolitical”), the four of them discuss: what previously overlooked insights one might still unearth from so-called second wave feminists like Silvia Federici (is the witch a figure of incipient queerness?); how fecund and fungible was the time of transition from feudalism to capitalism, not least for thinking with gender; the “unruly undertows” of popular and “low” entertainment (Chicken Run as exemplary Marxist-feminist cinema!); autotheory, autofiction, autoanalysis, and the affordances of writing from the self; why children’s liberation is to everyone’s benefit; and the erstwhile pin-up career of Barnacle the cat—with much else in between and besides. 

You can download the episode by right-clicking here and selecting “save as.” Or, look us up on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

This episode of the Podcast for Social Research was produced by William R. Clark. If you like what you’ve heard, consider subscribing to Brooklyn Institute’s Patreon page, where you can enjoy access to all past and future episodes of the podcast.