Living While Feminist
Jen Thorpe
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Living While Feminist is a podcast in celebration of living a feminist life. Each week it features feminists from South Africa and the world to hear about and to draw from their experiences to embolden our own.
Hosted by feminist author, writer, and researcher, Jen Thorpe.
Available episodes
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4 days ago
S2, E3: Zangose Tembo - The power of reimagining feminist futures so we can be more human
Today on the podcast I’m talking with Zangose Tembo.
Zangose works in the field of social justice. For the past seven years she’s worked and volunteered for notable social justice/impact organizations including One Young World, Population Council and the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy (CFFP).
In 2016, she founded The Best of Africa an online media platform that promotes freedom of speech through written and visual content on Africa. The platform has published content 400+ stories from over 150 individuals from 20 countries in Africa and the diaspora. For her work at The Best of Africa, she received recognition through the Young African Leaders Initiative in 2017 and the Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurship Programme in 2018.
Zangose is a regular contributor on The Best of Africa, and now work independently as a development consultant. She’s exploring new platforms and opportunities to grow as a founder, storyteller and development expert.
Zangose’s piece in Living While Feminist is called Human, and in that piece she says:
“Everyone’s experience is different, but I know that many can relate to being ‘othered’ on a daily basis, based on biological attributes. Through comment and actions that call attention to our skin, body, hair and more, the world reminds us of our race and gender, while questioning our ability to get work done."
So today I’m going to be talking with Zangose about what it means to be human, and who we have to convince that this should be a position we can all occupy.
Jan 10, 2021
S2, E2: Juanita De Villiers - Neurodiversity, food justice, the power of queerness, and gothic fiction
Today on the podcast I talk to Juanita De Villiers. Juanita is a collector of hobbies and special interests, and a Masters candidate at the University of Cape Town where her thesis focuses on contemporary gothic literature. Juanita is a massive horror enthusiast, in the process of starting a horror podcast and has a horror Instagram account already. She is currently working on a chapter about autism, folklore and horror cinema.
Juanita describes herself as a ‘queer cat mom cliché’ and as passionate about animal rights and food justice.
She is also a vegan and passionate about animal rights and food justice.
Juanita’s piece in Living While Feminist is called ‘Finding the Average: Neurodivergence, Queerness and ‘Fitting In’. In that piece she says:
“I am a confluence of things that would not fit in. It’s why I hold the label ‘queer’ so dear. I am queer, I am odd. I am out of place no matter where I go. My body will not shrink to fit, and it will not grow to the size that allows me to claim ‘fat’ as a title of honour. I was an outcast at school, quirky as a young adult. I couldn’t curtail myself properly.”
So today I talk with Juanita about body projects, body comfort, and neurodivergence.
Jan 4, 2021
SEASON 2 - EPISODE 1 - Relebone Rirhandzu eAfrika - The importance of sisterhood and writing our stories
Today on the podcast I’m talking to Relebone Rirhandzu eAfrika. Relebone is a who is a Tzaneen-born, Makhanda-bred, Joburg-buttered writer. She describes herself as the awkward girl who brings a book to a party but dreams of opening the dance circle.
Relebone won the Blackbird Books / Casa Lorde residency in 2019. She was the social media manager for the Abantu Book festival in 2018, and works as a copywriter and proof-reader.
Her piece in Living While Feminist is called ‘A Salute to Sisterhood: On the Substance of Black Women’s Silent Revolution’ and explores the language, solidarity, the influence of our mothers, and the importance of building a community that understands you. In her piece she says:
“The centre of women’s organising, the whole point of it, is to lift a sister up. To create and escape. To further society … In the workplace and in less professional spaces, sisterhood carries us all through.”
So today I’ll talking with Relebone about all of these topics, and about her journey to becoming a feminist. Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/Relebone_
Dec 14, 2020
S1 BONUS! - Manage Your Money Like a Fucking Feminist with Sam Beckbessinger
Today on the podcast I’m talking with Sam Beckbessinger.
Sam is the bestselling author of Manage Your Money Like a Fucking Grownup – a guide to help you take control of your money so you can take control of your life.
As her website says “You’re going to earn plenty of money over your lifetime. Are you going to waste it on stupid crap that doesn’t make you happy, or let it buy your freedom and your most audacious dreams?”
In 2020, Sam produced a second version of the book – Manage your Money Like a Grownup – a guide for teens.
But writing about money is not the only writing that Sam does.
She was one of the writers on Serial Box’s and Marvel’s Jessica Jones: Playing With Fire serialized novel. She's also written several episodes for animated kids’ TV show, Team Jay, commissioned by the Juventus Soccer Club and produced and animated by Sunrise Productions, and the family-friendly comedy series Jungle Beat, which has been broadcast in over 180 countries on channels including Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon.
She is co-writing Magpies, a mystery-suspense novel about missing girls who come back, changed, together with Dale Halvorsen (who listeners may know as the extremely talented designer – Joey Hifi).
Sam was a Mandela Washington Fellow for Young African Leaders at Yale University in 2014, and is a partner and co-founder of two financial technology businesses. She also helps people learn to adult better via her website – LikeaFuckingGrownUp.com
In the intro to Manage Your Money Like A Fucking Grownup Sam says:
“We never get an instruction manual about how money work. We never have to pass a test to get our Money License before we can take a new credit card for a drive. Most of what we learn about money comes from advertising or from other people who know as little as we do. No wonder we make such basic mistakes. No wonder we feel disempowered and scared. No wonder so many of us just decide to stick our heads in the damn sand and never deal with it….
You gain control by being more conscious of your choices …Being in control of your money is about making those choices more deliberately because, if you don’t, you’ll end up spending it all on the advertisers’ ideas about what makes a good life.”
Nov 12, 2020
S1, E10: Helen Moffett - Investigating feminist silences around infertility.
Today on the podcast I talk to Helen Moffett about reproductive justice, medical misogyny, and reimagining stories.
Helen Moffett is an author, editor, academic and activist. Her publications include university textbooks, a treasury of landscape writings (Lovely Beyond Any Singing), a cricket book (with Tim Noakes and the late Bob Woolmer), an animal charity anthology (Stray, with Diane Awerbuck) and the Girl Walks In erotica series (with Sarah Lotz and Paige Nick). She has also published two poetry collections – Strange Fruit (Modjaji Books) and Prunings (uHlanga Press), with the latter winning the 2017 SALA prize for poetry. She has edited the last three Short Story Day Africa anthologies, Migrations, ID and Hotel Africa. She has written a memoir of Rape Crisis, and two green handbooks: 101 Water-wise Ways and Wise About Waste: 150+ ways to help the planet. Her first novel, Charlotte (a Pride & Prejudice sequel), was published by Bonnier in the UK in 2020.
Helen’s piece in Living While Feminist, it titled Crones and Witches: This Invisible Body and it focuses on how the discovery of feminist language assisted her in understanding her experiences with the sexual and reproductive health medical community and how feminist silences around infertility and early menopause still remain. She says in her piece:
"Feminism gave me a way through the mess, on every level … all through my twenties, it provided a lifejacket, a Kevlar vest, weapons and warm blankets as I battled sexual violence, career-altering workplace sexual harassment, overt discrimination and sexism in medical settings. It legitimised my anger, gave me words and energy, fuelled me…Feminism did not just give me a map for my life; it saved my life, too."
Nov 5, 2020
S1, E9: Owethu Makhathini - Anger, Intimate Justice, and Womanisms
Today on the podcast I’m talking with Owethu Makhathini. Owethu is an entrepreneur, writer and womanist.
As a social media specialist, strategist and trend forecaster in the advertising industry her work has helped to build digital literacy in that field. Part of this was achieved by founding her creative consultancy - Makhathini Media. Owethu is also a freelance writer and public speaker – in other words, an all-round creative entrepreneur.
Owethu’s writing has featured in both Feminism Is and Living While Feminist. In her piece in Living While Feminist called Ikhaye Elihle – For when I get home – she says
“If one’s practice of feminism is motivated by cheap sloganisms and is used to further the agendas of those already swimming in privilege then we have another problem.”
And in her piece in Feminism Is, called ‘A lot to be mad about: Advocating for the legitimacy of Black women’s anger’ Owethu says,
“My politics and existence are a resistance of respectability and a full embrace of fluidity.”
So today I’m going to speak to Owethu about a range of things, not least, anger and intimate justice.
Oct 29, 2020
S1, E8: Professor Srila Roy - Feminist movements and reimagining power.
Srila Roy is associate professor of sociology and heads development studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.
She is the author of the book, Remembering Revolution: Gender, Violence and Subjectivity in India’s Naxalbari Movement (Oxford, 2012), editor of New South Asian Feminisms (Zed, 2012) and co-editor of New Subaltern Politics: Reconceptualising Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India (Oxford 2015).
She is currently writing a book on feminist and queer politics in India, and co-editing a volume of essays on #MeToo in India and South Africa. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, she leads a five year collaborative project between India and Southern Africa called Governing Intimacies.
Srila is also the editor of a number of academic journals and a regular contributor to a variety of media outlets on issues of gender and sexuality in the global south, with her work featuring on Al Jazeera, OpenDemocracy, the Wire and Dissent.
Srila’s piece in Living While Feminist is called Challenging Sexual Harassment in the University: Disarming Feminism and it examines the way that we tell stories about sexual harassment in a university setting, what gets talked about, and what gets silenced. In that piece, Srila writes,
What would it mean to tell a different story of tackling sexual harassment on campus? A story of institutional resources and commitment; of independent offices to deal with complaints alone, to counsel and care; and of feminist leadership. Where it would be obvious that intervention must mean transformation … this could be a story of feminist success. But feminist success is invariably its failure. In the garnering of actual institutional capacity and power lies the undoing of feminist resistance and its promise of an alternative future.
So today I’ll be talking to Srila about that piece, feminism in institutions and many other topics.
Oct 22, 2020
S1, E7: Aaisha Dadi Patel - Muslim feminism and redefining self worth
Today on the podcast I’m talking to Aaisha Dadi Patel.
Aaisha holds an MA in media studies from Wits, where she also lectures part-time. She began her career as a journalist at just twenty years old with the Daily Vox, and has made a mark on the South African media landscape covering everything from politics to polar bears. She is currently on the Wall Street Journal’s Africa desk, covering current affairs and economics updates from the continent.
Her piece in Living While Feminist is called – Feminism Is Muslim Women Talking Back –In that piece she says:
“In any intersectional context, the main thing to remember is that your struggles certainly do not have to be validated. Your anger is justified. You have the right to speak up for yourself against your own oppression, and voice your opinion on your own struggle, just as you are allowed to be an ally in another struggled. You are the one responsible for controlling your own narrative."
The piece explores how western feminism and islamophobia have contributed to the silencing of muslim women and muslim feminists, and the ways in which muslim feminists have challenged these two world views.
Since the collection came out in 2018 Aaisha has continued to challenge stereotypes and to tell stories about economic equality and current affairs. Listen to the episode to find out more about how she does it.
Oct 16, 2020
S1, E6: Karin Schimke - Changing bodies, changing rules
Today's episode features award-winning poet, an award-winning translator, an editor and a narrative non-fiction writer-at-large for Daily Maverick – Karin Schimke.
Karin has worked trained as a journalist and worked as a political writer. She has been a freelancer for the past two decades. Her features and news features have appeared in more than two dozen print publications and she currently writes features for the Daily Maverick and for Spotlight on issues from ventilators to food waste, hunger to domestic violence.
In 2013 she was the winner of the Sylt Foundation’s Writer Retreat, and a finalist in the South African Literary Awards for poetry. Karin was awarded the Ingrid Jonker Award for poetry for her debut poetry collection, Bare and Breaking, in 2014 and her second collection, Navigate was published in 2017. Karin has translated five books, edited seven more, authored another six, and contributed to six collections and anthologies. She won the South African Literary Awards Translation Award in 2016 and the Sol Plaatjie Translation award in 2019, both for the translation of Flame in the Snow – the Love Letters of Ingrid Jonker and Andre Brink.
In her acceptance speech she said:
“Translation is the rendering of meaning from one language into another. Translation is conversion. It is movement. A translator is able to change a reader’s understanding of the world, or, at the very least, supplement it. In the process of presenting the experiences of one language group to another, the essential literary by-product of imagination is switched on, and – as so much research over the years has shown – imagination is the route to empathy, and empathy the route to social change. Translation is a political act.”
I was lucky enough to include Karin’s writing in Living While Feminist titled. In her piece, Change, I think she did a fantastic job of translating the experiences of a changing body so that every reader would have been able to empathise and learn. She's just published her latest book - The Karen Book of Rules with Karen Jeynes.
Oct 8, 2020
S1, E5: Desiree-Anne Martin - Busting myths about motherhood and speaking your truth
Today I’m speaking to Desiree-Anne Martin. Desiree-Anne is a published author, poet and general word junkie – her writing can be found in anthologies, online, and in the Living While Feminist collection – the piece we’ll be talking about today.
In 2018, she published a poetry collection called Believe More Deeply, and a short story called ‘Orange, White and Blue’ in the Life Righting Collective anthology, This Is How It Is, published by Jacana. That same year she published her memoir – We Don’t Talk About it. Ever – which was described as ‘searing, brutal, and breathtaking’. In July 2020 Desire won the national arts24/ Kwela Books Corona Fiction Competition, with her story of a young girl from the Cape Flats dealing with her father’s alcoholism during Lockdown called ‘Delirium’, beating out over 1200 entrants. She is hard at work on a short story anthology and her a second book.
Besides being a prolific and successful writer, she is many more things too – an addictions and general counsellor in private practice, a director of two companies, a lecturer, a postgraduate student at the University of Cape Town, a wife, full-time mother to an 11-year-old and a three-year-old, and a part-time warrior-woman. She is a recovering addict with 16 years of sobriety, dabbles in her own unpredictable mood disorder and is a vocal advocate for mental health issues as well as the destigmatization of this and other taboo issues.
In her piece in Living While Feminist, Desiree-Anne explores many of these parts of herself and her relationship to feminism. She says:
“I’ll be honest: I didn’t know what it meant to be a feminist for a long time. Not truly. It was a word I feared, influenced by those around me. However, like any words that are feared, they have power … I didn’t know I was a feminist until long after I had actually been one for a while. Because no one told me what feminism was or that I had a right to hold those sacred beliefs and ideologies.”
Indeed, Desiree-Anne’s words have power, she is a full-blown rights holder to feminism, as we all are, and it is her powerful writing and work that we’ll be exploring more of today. So welcome Desiree-Anne
Oct 1, 2020
S1, E4: Shari Maluleke - Understanding yourself as a gateway to freedom
Today on the podcast I talk with Shari Maluleke. Shari is a feminist writer who is committed to dismantling the patriarchy and fighting for the rights of black womxn and queer people.
Activism and writing are two things she is most passionate about, and she considers herself lucky to do both at the same time. Shari is 20 years old and is currently studying towards a Bachelor of Arts at Wits university. Taking things step by step, Shari hopes to not only leave a mark but change a few lives, even if it is just her own.
Shari’s piece in Living While Feminist is called ‘Understanding Myself’. In that piece she says:
Binaries felt more restrictive than eye-opening, for a long time in my life. Binaries made me feel like I must ask myself ‘who should I be’ rather than ‘who am I?’ Gender was always a matter of energies to me – masculine energy today and feminine energy tomorrow. I choose who I want to be today and I choose who I want to be tomorrow.
Today I’m going to be…
Sep 24, 2020
S1, E3: Kerry Hammerton - A writing feminist's journey
This week I'm talking to Kerry Hammerton about making your own way, and the power of poetry and feminist choices.
Kerry Hammerton is a Cape Town based writer who has published prose and poetry in various South African and international literary journals and anthologies. Kerry has an MA in creative writing and is a lecturer and supervisor for the Masters in Creative Writing at Rhodes University. She is also a PhD candidate at the University of the Western Cape.
Kerry has read her work at many literary festivals, and her prose work has recently appeared in The Looking Glass Anthology: Through the Single Gal’s Lens and Living While Feminist, which we’ll talk more about today. She has published three poetry collections - the Secret Keeper (2018), the Weather Report (2014), and These are the Lies I told You (2010). During the COVID-19 lockdown Imphepho press featured her as one of 21 poets for 21 days, and you can see a few of her poems in a creative mixed media format on her YouTube…
Sep 17, 2020
S1, E2: Carla Watson - Representation, Anger, Love and Excellence
Feminist, Activator and Strategic Rockstar. Carla Watson thrives in collaborative spaces to strategically shape the future for the marginalised and often overlooked.
She was recognised as one of the Top 200 South Africans for her contribution in Education (2019) and at just 31 years old she has just been recognised as one of 50 Most Powerful Women in the country by Mail and Guardian.
She is the Head of the Jakes Gerwel Graduate Teaching Fellowship which is focused on supporting and nurturing young people into high-impact high school teachers. Education and inclusivity are the pillars of her life’s work and vision and she strategically connects with individuals and organisations which resonate.
She is the founder of foryouandyours, an organisation focused on increasing visibility of LGBTIQ+ community and people of colour through greeting cards.
When she is not rocking a boat of social change, she is convincing her cat Thunder to become a lapcat.
Her piece in Living While Femi…
Sep 11, 2020
SEASON 1, EPISODE 1: Tiffany Kagure Mugo - The Quirky Quick Guide to Cancel Culture and Having Great Sex
Welcome to the Living While Feminist podcast! How exciting!
Today I speak to Tiffany Kagure Mugo about many things, but mostly about Call Out Culture, Good Sex, and Feminist Kindness.
Tiffany is so many wonderful things it feels difficult to describe her but I’ll do my best. She is the (self-described) ‘intoxicatingly scary’ gatekeeper and co-founder of HOLAAfrica, a Pan African queer womanist digital community dealing with sex and sexuality. She is a TED and TEDX speaker with Siphumeze Khundayi, podcast, host, and Board Member of the FRIDA Fund.
Tiffany is a prolific writer of opinion pieces and useful blogs. She is the author of the book Quirky Quick Guide To Having Great Sex, launched in 2020, which sold out in many bookstores in the weekend it was published.
She's a media consultant and freelance journalist who tackles sex, politics and a huge range of other topics for the Mail and Guardian, the Huffington Post, the Citizen, This is Africa and others. In 2014 she attended…
Sep 4, 2020
Intro - Welcome to Living While Feminist!
Living While Feminist is a weekly podcast where I speak to feminists about the ups and downs, ins and outs, and the emotional rollercoaster ride of living a feminist life.
I'm your host, feminist writer, researcher and author Jen Thorpe. Find out more about me here https://jen-thorpe.com/
Launching, mid-September 2020.