When academic freedom is under attack, what do we do? Is it enough to fight back from within—especially when the university itself is embedded in larger systems of oppression?

On this episode of Drunk Church, we examine how academia has become a petri dish for racist and transphobic campaigns aimed at eroding our most basic freedoms—a protected environment where these ideologies are cultivated, refined, and strengthened before being released into the body politic. We ask why universities are uniquely positioned as incubators for these movements, and whether the illness we’re witnessing is a contamination from outside, or a symptom of something already rotting within the ivory tower itself.

Is resistance enough if the presence of leftist academics risks shoring up the very institution they critique? If the ivory tower collapses under the weight of its own decay, is that necessarily a bad thing? And are there ways not only to resist this plight, but to refuse it altogether—to stop allowing ourselves to be used as hosts for campaigns that thrive on our engagement and our silence? In what ways can we contain the onslaught of this plague?

This episode marks a first in Drunk Church history: an anonymous interview with a professor who has witnessed firsthand how the university sets instructors up to fail their students. Their testimony offers a cautionary tale of how administrative pressures quietly conscript academics into enforcing bigotry and fascism—and how attempts at institutional “neutrality” allow real, material harm to spread unchecked like a virus through classrooms and across campuses. In the end only you can choose whether it's time to walk away.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’re not like other girls…

Join us for our most recent episode as we offer a critical re-evaluation of the figure of the bimbo and deconstruct societal preconceptions of femininity at large through our own cosima bee concordia’s essay “My Official Bimbo Diagnosis”. With our two remaining brain cells we ponder, why does everyone seem to hate femininity so much, and why it is that femininity is seen as a threat to feminism? We argue (to the degree that bimbos can string ideas together) that femmephobia is in part the result of an aesthetic double bind. This double bind normatively expects us all to perform gender while also punishing or shaming those who perform gender “too much”. The “too much” of gender is dangerous because it wrests us from the pervasive myth that gender is natural. In a patriarchal world where the masculine is the neutral ideal, femininity is always “too much” and thus provides a useful scapegoat to perpetuate misogyny in both men who hate women and feminists alike.

In an effort to challenge these totalizing power dynamics we examine the extent to which it is both possible, and necessary -- albeit not without risk -- to take pleasure in gender even though it is gender that oppresses us. In what ways can we re-purpose the too much of gender? How can the BDSM dungeon as seen through Susan Stryker’s “Dungeon Intimacies” be “a technology for the production of (trans)gendered embodiment”? And finally, could it be that the only gender binary that matters is Gender Minimalism vs. Gender Maximalism?

For discussions on all those questions and more, listen to “Bimbo Theory: A Gender Maximalist Guide to Having It All”

Read "My Official Bimbo Diagnosis" by cosima bee concordia

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Intro and outro song is "Bless You" by the Ink Spots

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.