Collectively, Kaarina and I are bringing you some ~extremely chill vibes~ today. I’m talking about why we need to embrace the radical potential of podcasting as a medium that has yet to be fully absorbed into the mainstream, but I’m lying on my couch while I do it. And Kaarina’s self-care corner features a very special guest star with some important insights on gentleness. It might be my favourite self-care corner yet. And now? Links!

• • Did I mention that you should save the date for the next Vancouver Podcast Festival? Because you should save the date for the next Vancouver Podcast Festival. (It’s November 7-10, that’s the date you should save.)
  • “Born out of the same open publishing technology as blogs, podcasting was once a quirky backwater pond of digital curiosity…” Read up on what Spotify’s $230 million Gimlet deal means for podcasting.
  • “For all its lofty rhetoric, Google is an advertising broker, selling our attention to companies that will pay for it. The longer people stay on YouTube, the more money Google makes.” This is a good piece on how YouTube radicalizes users.

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Follow me @hkpmcgregor, follow Kaarina @kaarinasaurus, and tweet about the podcast using #SecretFeministAgenda.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

This episode is the beginning of a mini-cluster or mini-arc that will conclude season three of Secret Feminist Agenda. The coming episodes will focus on other feminist podcasters and/or public scholars, starting with this week’s incredible guest, Jimanekia Eborn, creator and host of the podcast Trauma Queen. We talk about podcasting, sex education, respecting your guests, paying artists, and a whole lot more. Actually, we mostly talk about the silent meditation retreat Jimanekia was about to go on, which I found completely terrifying. It’s a real emotional journey. And here are some links!

• I refer to a conversation that I was pretty sure I heard on Call Your Girlfriend, and I was right! Specifically this episode, specifically the conversation with Esmé Weijun Wang.
• That part where Jimanekia is talking about Jessamyn and I get really excited? That’s Jessamyn Stanley, iconic body positive yoga activist and educator. You can hear her episode of Trauma Queen here.
• In case you missed it, the conversation I reference about consent-based interviewing styles is from Episode 3.2 Buffy Sainte-Marie and Music Journalism with Andrea Warner
• Finally, the podcasts Jimanekia recommends are The Read, The Dollop, The Quietest Revolution, American Sex, Small Doses with Amanda Seales, and of course Oprah’s SuperSoul Conversations. 

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here.  Jimanekia’s theme song is “Pursuit of Happyness” by Kid Cudi.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

Content warning for discussions of chronic pain and illness, drug addiction, and cancer.

I jokingly tweeted a screenshot of the audio file for this episode with the caption “The telltale shape of a hard-to-record minisode.” I was referring to the long, conspicuous gaps that betray how hard I find it to talk about some topics. Episode 2.3 “On Being Seen” had a similar shape, pre-edit. The hard episodes, for me, are usually the personal ones. And this is a personal one. I’m talking about pain and how it links to trauma; and I’m talking about the incredible work of disability studies scholars and disability justice activists. And because I’m talking about a bunch of really great writing, here are a bunch of links:

• • I recommend everything by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, especially their newest book of poetry, Tonguebreaker
  • I didn’t mention this in the episode, but I also recommend The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison, which thinks in really interesting ways about the difference (or lack of difference) between “real” and “imagined” pain
  • Here are the pieces I read as recommended on Twitter. As usual, if there’s something you want to read but it’s paywalled, just let me know!
    • “Pain Scale” by Eula Bliss
    • An excerpt of Opium Eater: The New Confessions by Carlyn Zwarenstein
    • “Recovering a Cripistemology of Pain: Leaky Bodies, Connective Tissue, and Feeling Discourse” by Alyson Patsavas 
    • “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain”  by Margaret Price
  • And here are the things recommended on Twitter than I haven’t had a chance to read yet:
    • Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain by Abby Norman
    • The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability by Susan Wendell
    • Sick: A Memoir by Porochista Khakpour (but here’s a great review)
    • “Face of Rhythm” by Kim Hyesoon

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Follow me @hkpmcgregor, follow Kaarina @kaarinasaurus, and tweet about the podcast using #SecretFeministAgenda.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

Hold onto your hats it’s a LIVE EPISODE! This one was recorded at the University of Alberta, as part of the Canadian Literature Centre’s Brown Bag Lunch series. I’m talking to the brilliant Chelsea Vowel, aka âpihtawikosisân. The ostensible topic of the conversation is Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (which I co-edited and to which Chelsea contributed), but we also talk about Indigenous futurisms and social media and lawsuits and  how hard it is getting onto high chairs. And here are some links!

• If you haven’t already, you need to read Chelsea’s book, Indigenous Writes, and check out her very excellent podcast, Métis in Space.
• A lot of the points Chelsea makes could be paired with blog posts she’s written, like “Reconciliation in the time of pipelines” and “A little peek at what I’ve been writing” (an example of Métis futurisms) and “A storm of lawsuits.” Oh, and if you want to do something about that lawsuit she’s writing about, here’s the GoFundMe where you can do that.
• If you’d like to learn more about Indigenous futurisms, Lindsay Nixon has a wonderful piece on “Visual Cultures of Indigenous Futurisms”
• For a great summary of how settlers’ expectations of Indigenous literature put authors in an impossible bind, read Alicia Elliott’s “Not Your Noble Savage: On Literary Colonialism and Native Writers”
• For more on what it was like watching the “appropriation prize”  unfold in real time, read Scaachi Koul’s “On Glibness And Diversity In Canadian Media”
• And finally, here’s an article about a former poet laureate of Quebec being accused of plagiarizing Maya Angelou, Dylan Thomas, and Tupac Shakur!

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here.  Chelsea’s theme song is “Back in Black” by ACDC.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

This minisode topic is very close to my heart, not just because part of my job is teaching students how to properly cite their sources, but also because I think sound citational politics are both the cornerstone of what’s good about academia and the potential site of massive transformations in how we do our work. And just in case you think citation is only for academics, I *also* think citational politics have a lot to do with how we unevenly attribute authority to different voices. Don’t believe me? Well good thing I made a whole podcast episode about it! Also, links:

• The foundational text on citational politics, for me, is Sara Ahmed’s “Making Feminist Points”; she also has a lot to say about citation in Living a Feminist Life.
• I also mention an article by Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne, “Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement’”
• I mention in passing how much metrics matter to academic careers, which this opinion piece on racial exclusions in scholarly citations goes into.
• And I sing the praises of Jessica Marie Johnson, whose work you should definitely check out.
• Finally, go learn more about the Cite Black Women collective, listen to their podcast, and maybe even buy a t-shirt!

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Follow me @hkpmcgregor, follow Kaarina @kaarinasaurus, and tweet about the podcast using #SecretFeministAgenda.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

For this episode I sat down with the brilliant and luminous Zena Sharman to talk about her work as an LGBTQ+ health advocate (seriously click on that link and look at that website, it is a testimony to femme web design and I am in love). We talk about thinking strategically, changing systems, editing anthologies, and casting spells, plus what it means to be one small person working on great big problems. Talking to Zena always makes me feel better, and I hope some of that comes through in this episode. Here are some links!

• First, go buy Zena’s books, The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care and Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. Buy two copies and give them away as gifts!
• Zena mentions so many great resources in this episode, and here they are:
  • Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown
  • Histories of the Transgender Child by Julian Gill-Peterson
  • Kelli Dunham‘s ‘zine, You Don’t Have to Love Your Body to Take Care of It
  • Care Work by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
  • The Healing Justice Podcast
  • Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure by Eli Clare
  • Using Story to Change Systems by Ella Saltmarshe
• Also I mentioned some things! One of them was the wonderful blog post “Everything Is Awful and I’m Not Okay: questions to ask before giving up” (which inspired this poem, which I love so so much)
• This is a good piece on Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” 
• And I enthusiastically recommend Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being 

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here.  Zena’s theme song is “We Are Circling” by Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

Oof! This week Kaarina and I are bringing you a minisode with many feelings in it, as we both process difficult aspects of being a human in the world: I’m talking about dealing with criticism, and Kaarina is talking about holding friends accountable when they’ve hurt you. Hopefully these experiences will resonate with some of you, and we’d love to hear your thoughts about dealing with similar circumstances. Also: links!

• For the academics in the crowd, Laura Moss, long-timed editor of the journal Canadian Literature, has written a fantastically useful editorial on how to increase your chances of getting published in an academic journal. It includes advice for processing peer review that is different and yet kind of the same as mine. Check it out!
• All of the articles I could find on dealing with criticism are gross self-help-type things so instead I’m going to recommend that you go watch Kitbull, the new Pixar animated short about a kitten and a pitbull becoming friends. YOU ARE WELCOME.
• Finally, Kaarina would like to enjoy this excellent meme on the theme of her self-care corner!

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Follow me @hkpmcgregor, follow Kaarina @kaarinasaurus, and tweet about the podcast using #SecretFeministAgenda.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

Content warning for discussions of police violence.

This week I’m talking to journalist and totally-not-a-bot Taylor Crumpton. We talk about how Taylor went from grad student to freelance journalist, how Twitter is a platform for both highlighting marginalized voices and exploiting Black women’s labour, and why it might not be a good idea to burn the flag (hint: the reason might surprise you). In fact, we touch on so many topics that I’m anticipating an extra-long list of links. And here it is!

• First off, go read everything Taylor has written and then share it online. If you want a link straight to that piece about a girl fighting off an alligator, here it is.
• Taylor talks about getting her start as a writer through The OpEd Project, which is dedicated to “increas[ing] the range of voices and quality of ideas we hear in the world.”
• Taylor also talks about being told in grade school that she couldn’t write, which reminded me of lawyer, writer, and podcaster Hadiya Rodrigue’s incredible essay “Black on Bay Street,” which recounts similar experiences of being gaslit and discouraged as a student.
• I tried to find you a good piece about Beyonce’s pregnancy photoshoot and the symbolism of the images and the misplaced critique of her fetishizing pregnancy, but everything I found was so absolutely terrible that I’m going to link to Taylor’s piece on Medium instead!
• You probably already know Zoé Samudzi‘s work but just in case, here’s her latest piece on why facial recognition technology doesn’t work on Black people and how that might actually be a good thing.
• I actually didn’t know about Wear Your Voice magazine, which (it turns out) is an incredible platform for intersectional feminist work and I immediately read like five articles so you should go check it out.
• Just in case you aren’t familiar with Black Twitter, here’s a good intro to its importance and influence.
• This article is probably my favourite piece on paying women (i.e. #GiveWomenYourMoney). I couldn’t find the original invoice for emotional labour that I mentioned to Taylor, but while I was looking for it I found this website that will help you calculate how much the patriarchy owes you, and it is very satisfying. It accounts for menstrual products and wage gap!
• Last link! (Told you this list would be long.) This article explains how racism impacts people’s ability to call cabs, and how services like Uber and Lyft improve access to vehicles for people of colour.

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here.  Taylor’s theme song is “Learned from Texas” by Big K.R.I.T. 

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

Content warning for a brief discussion of disordered and restrictive eating.

In this week’s minisode I’m tackling a topic that I’ve been putting off for approximately two and a half seasons of this podcast: veganism. I talk about why I chose to be a vegan fourteen-and-a-half years ago, why it still brings me joy, and why I also think it’s an incredibly fraught identity. Along the way I touch on the different histories of the vegan and so-called “clean eating” movements, the problem with white animal rights activists, and the links between veganism and restrictive eating. But I also talk about joy! And donuts! Plus Kaarina is here to talk to us about setting attainable goals as a way to be kinder to ourselves. Here are some links!

• One of the foundational books of my own veganism was Carol J. Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat. I haven’t read it in over a decade, though, so this is just a fact and not a recommendation. A book I do recommend most wholeheartedly is Timothy Findlay’s Not Wanted On the Voyage. Just to warn you, I’ve read it five times and cried every time. Oh, one more book recommendation, if you like the intersections of philosophy and conversations about the human and the animal and stuff: J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals. Beautiful, complex, challenging stuff. Wildly meta.
• This article by Victorianist Susan Hamilton is a great introduction to Victorian anti-vivisection protests and the way they demonstrated the links between the policing of the animal/human divide and the policing of the gender binary. My favourite book on the links between white women, sentimentality, and imperialism is Christina Klein’s Cold War Orientalism. 
• I don’t usually link to Everyday Feminism because I’m not a huge fan of a listicle, but this piece on how mainstream animal rights movements enact colonialism and other forms of harm is spot on. And speaking of places I usually don’t link to, here’s a Vice article on why so many white supremacists are vegan.
• OH MY GOD THE POST PUNK KITCHEN IS STILL UP YOU CAN WATCH IT HERE!!!!! THOSE ARM WARMERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! If you want a taste of Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s brilliance, start with some of the classics, like her chewy chocolate chip cookies, seitan portobello stroganoff, chickpea cutlets, or her famous mac & shews. This is not fancy vegan fair, folks, this is what you learn to make when you are a dirtbag 22-year-old shopping at Bulk Barn. Enjoy!

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Follow me @hkpmcgregor, follow Kaarina @kaarinasaurus, and tweet about the podcast using #SecretFeministAgenda.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

Two and a half years ago, at a Witch, Please meet-up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I met a rad artist and Harry Potter nerd who offered to tour Marcelle and me around the Wizarding World of Harry Potter if we ever made it down to Florida. A year ago we took her up on it. And this year Julie Frances and I continued our history of border-crossing collaborations by recording a discussion of tattoos, unpaid internships, transforming industries, and making art. Oh, and crystals and energies and the moon and stuff.  Here are some links!

• First up, you should check out Julie’s instagram and also subscribe to her new podcast, Midnight Moonlight
• Here’s a piece about (F)empower and how it’s providing a space for Miami’s queer, femme community, and here’s a bit more about 777 Mall as an art space, and if you’re in or visiting Miami you should definitely check out her newest project, Cafecito Break!
• On the topic of tattoos and healing from trauma, here’s a piece about trauma survivors getting tattooed, and here’s a gorgeous story about a Vancouver tattoo artist who transforms scars into art.
• Want to read more about women and tattooing? There’s a whole freakin’ book about it! 
• Oh yeah, and let’s talk about unpaid internships! They are bad and exploitative. They are barriers to success for students of colour, favour the wealthy, and industries that rely on or require them tend to have real diversity problems.

Download Episode / Transcription To Come

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here.  Julie’s theme song is Kickin’ Back by Mila J.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.