For Finnish scholar Kaarina Kailo, the sauna is the medicine we need in these dark and tormented times. “In the sauna you are brought into direct contact with the holy spirit.  It's the alternative to the patriarchal church. It's the space of peace, of equality, of ritual and the sacredness that we have lost and are craving.  It's a multidimensional healing space for the body, the spirit, and the mind.”

A researcher of women’s cultural studies and folklore, Northern women’s culture, goddess mythologies, Indigenous worldview and theory, modern matriarchal studies, the gift economy, and the bear religion, Kaarina has spent many years investigating the very old history of sauna and sweating cultures in Finland, in Old Europe and in Indigenous cultures in North America.

With her new book Sauna Culture, Sweat and Spirituality - Kaarina explores the origins of pre-Christian, pre-patriarchal sauna as a sacred space for healing and rebirth, and how female symbols and the maternally perceived cosmos in past sweating cultures have been transformed.

In this episode we talk about the early religions that didn't require anyone to believe in anything because they were based on mother earth and verifiable material reality. We talk about the patriarchal takeover of sacredness, the great cost of losing our embodiment and connection to the natural world and each other, the power of feminist spirituality to reconnect our broken bonds, and how we embrace the darkness so we can be reborn in the spring.

EPISODE LINKS

Kaarina Kailo’s website

CONTACT US

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email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com

With male violence being an inescapable and world-shaping force, one that undermines democracy, equality and peace - how do we unpack and tease apart the ingredients that go into the making of men and male culture of dominance? How do we shake up and push for a cultural shift away from violent domination?

In this episode Elle talks with world-leading researcher and educator Michael Flood, who has spent his life doing exactly that - researching, writing and discussing men, masculinities, gender, violence against women, and maybe most importantly - violence prevention for men and boys and creating alternative, more positive masculine narratives.

Starting with the question of what makes a subset of men join violent extremists movements, Michael takes us through what the research reveals in his book Masculinity and Violent Extremism (co-authored with Joshua Roose in 2022). We then move into a broader conversation about the overlap between violent extremism and the mainstream conditioning that makes up modern masculinity, and crucially - the unifying role of misogyny. Also, with masculinity on the move and being redefined, how do we seize this moment to move away from entrenched, pro-patriarchal visions of manhood?

EPISODE LINKS

XY Website

Masculinity and Violent Extremism

CONTACT US

Website: subjecttopower.com

Instagram: @subject2power

X: @SubjectToPower

email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com

Poet Usha Akella talks about poems as bridges into worlds, bridges that help to soften borders - and there is nothing we need more at this moment - than a softening of the criss-crossing lines that cut us off from one another. Borders are hardening, honest and patient dialogue is becoming rare, and meeting each other halfway seems more and more difficult - but a poet’s words can offer a bypass, a more direct path from one human heart to another.

Acclaimed poet and author of 11 books, Usha has contributed to over 150 literary anthologies and journals, and is the founder and director of Matwaala, a South Asian diaspora poets’ collective launched in 2015.

Usha's poetry is full of very real world matters and it does not shy away from confronting the ironies and contradictions of living life as a woman on this planet - no matter our cultural belonging. With her x-ray honesty and masterful craft, she writes from the raw emotions of her own life experiences as well as a soaring bird's eye view.

In this episode Usha reads several poems from her book I Will Not Bear You Sons, and shares the stories behind the poems as well as the clash of cultural forces that shaped her as a woman and as a poet. We also talk about the firestorm that erupted around the book in India, the different forms of patriarchal control women endure, Usha's own refusal to be silenced, the cost of writing feminist poetry, and finding sisterhood with fellow women’s writers.

EPISODE LINKS

Matwaala South Asian Diaspora Poets’ Collective

I Will Not Bear You Sons

The POV

CONTACT US

Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/

Instagram: @subject2power

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email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com

Award-winning non-fiction writer and journalist Rachel Hewitt unearths and writes about various corners of women’s history - and the subsequent erasure of that same history - showing us how women are indeed equal participants in all aspects of public life - until we are banned, excluded and erased.

In her latest book, In Her Nature, Rachel looks at women’s accomplishments in sports and the great outdoors from the Victorian era to the present, and chronicles the various ways in which men organized to exclude and ban women from athletics and the outdoors - and more broadly from public spaces and public life.

In her writings, which includes the brilliant Substack Small Revolutions, Every Day, Rachel makes crucial connections between women’s hidden history and how women navigate our current-day climate of rising misogyny. She also writes about feminism, grief, trauma and recovery - and her own experiences as an ultra-runner.

In this episode Elle and Rachel cover a sprawling map of topics, from Rachel’s research and writing about women’s history in sports and outdoors adventure, to how women navigate public spaces - now and then, the constantly changing shape of misogyny and how women weigh being safe against being free. We also talk about Rachel’s own running career, and how immersion in nature can carry you through grief and trauma, and much, much more.

EPISODE LINKS

Rachel’s website

Small Revolutions, Every Day

Family Fortunes by Leonore Davidoff, Catherine Hall

CONTACT US

Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/

Instagram: @subject2power

X: @SubjectToPower

email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com

Parents, teachers and youth workers of all kinds are warily watching how the internet, smartphones and social media is impacting adolescence, and there is no question that we are in uncharted territory - especially as it pertains to boys and young men.

Michael Conroy has spent his career working in personal development and well-being programs for boys and young men in secondary school in the UK, and has had a front row seat to the enormous changes the world-wide web has brought to bear on the developing minds and social lives of boys and young men - in particular, the pornification of the internet and culture more broadly and the rise of the manosphere and related misogyny.

In 2021, feeling like existing programs were not up to the task of supporting and safeguarding the healthy development of boys, Michael founded Men At Work, an innovative training program using dialogue to develop and equip boys and young men with critical thinking skills, sharper curiosity and discernment, as well as greater capacity for empathy and other pro-social modes.

In this wide-ranging conversation Michael talks to Elle about the art of fostering a positive vision for boys and young men, what should and shouldn’t be feared about the big bad internet, Andrew Tate and incels, what the Netflix series Adolescence told us and what it missed, what feminism has got to do with it, and why raising healthy young men matters to all of us.

EPISODE LINKS

Men At Work

CONTACT US

Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/

Instagram: @subject2power

X: @SubjectToPower

email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com

CREDITS

Host: Elle Kamihira

Produced by Elle Kamihira

Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio

Cover Art by Bee Johnson

Music by Beware of Darkness

Conversation and debate regarding transgenderism or gender ideology has been effectively forbidden and shut down for many years, and people who have dared to raise concerns have been hounded and punished in all sorts of ways. Like many outspoken feminists, Laura Lecuona was cancelled and attacked in her native country of Mexico for daring to ask questions about concepts such as ‘born in the wrong body’ and ‘gender affirming care’.

In this episode Elle talks with Laura about her new book Gender Identity: Lies And Dangers; about what sparked the transgender movement, how gender ideology became such a pervasive social phenomenon, what exactly it entails for boys and men and girls and women who become trans identified, as well as the impact of this movement on women and women’s rights.

We also discuss why radical feminists in particular have been sounding the alarm and mounting such an opposition to gender ideology, and why there is such an authoritarian prohibition against debate.

EPISODE LINKS

Gender Identify: Lies And Dangers by Laura Lecuona

The Transexual Empire by Janice Raymond

The Creation of Patriarchy by Gerda Lerner

The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir

CONTACT US

Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/

Instagram: @subject2power

X: @SubjectToPower

email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com

CREDITS

Host: Elle Kamihira

Produced by Elle Kamihira

Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio

Cover Art by Bee Johnson

Music by Beware of Darkness

Like a detective trying to establish a motive for the crime, Aurora Linnea digs deep into our cultural history and Man’s destruction of the living world to find the root causes of what she calls “the world-destroying violence of male dominion”.

In her phenomenally beautiful investigation, the book Man Against Being: Body Horror and The Death of Life, Aurora Linnea comes up with a very coherent - and illuminating - set of theories about why and how Man constructed the patriarchal doctrine that so brutally subjugates all living creatures in the service of masculine world-making.

In this hour we talk about man’s fear of death and life, the fear-to-domination pipeline, women as the eternal scapegoat, man’s revenge against a biology he cannot escape, the unending disaster of splitting the world into warring halves (think female/male, body/mind, nature/science), and how necessary it is that we end male dominion and return to a reintegration of body and mind and living earth.

CONTACT US

Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/

Instagram: @subject2power

X: @SubjectToPower

Email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com

CREDITS

Host: Elle Kamihira

Produced by Elle Kamihira

Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio

Cover Art by Bee Johnson

Music by Beware of Darkness

What drives societies to turn on women in their midst - with accusations, branding, persecution and often violence and death - in the name of witchcraft?

Witch hunting occupied a dark chapter in European and early American history, but variations of this brutal phenomena lives on in many parts of the world today.

Guest on today’s episode, multidisciplinary feminist research scholar Govind Kelkar, wrote a book called Witch Hunts: Culture, Patriarchy and Structural Transformation and in this hour we talk about Govind’s research into modern-day witch hunts in India and around the world - the surprising factors that drive it, how it unfolds in communities, why women are targeted, and what the practice tells us about men, women, and different kinds of power and powerlessness.

Episode Links

GenDev Center for Research and Innovation

Contact Subject To Power

Website: https://www.subjecttopower.com/

Instagram: @subject2power

X: @SubjectToPower

Email us at subjecttopower@gmail.com

Credits

Host: Elle Kamihira

Produced by Elle Kamihira

Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio

Cover Art by Bee Johnson

Music by Beware of Darkness