During Season One of this podcast, we lay the groundwork for understanding Patriarchal systems and how they’ve functioned in Western Civilization, mostly focused on Europe and the United States. Our curriculum is organized chronologically – think of it like a survey course on the History of Civilization in college, but with these guiding questions: How did patriarchy develop? How did it function at each particular time in history? Who has challenged patriarchy, and what are their arguments? Each week a different reading partner joins Amy to record a discussion including both an academic and personal perspective.
Our reading partners are of different ages, races, religions, socioeconomic backgrounds, education levels, career paths, and sexual orientations because we wanted as many different points of view as possible to inform my learning and to bring unique wisdom to the texts. All these readers are smart, insightful, generous-hearted readers, and we have been awed by their intelligence and insight.
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Season Two is about speaking. It’s about stories. In contrast to Season One, which mostly followed a chronological timeline and was anchored in academic texts and legislation, Season Two features a wide variety of topics, all of them demonstrating aspects of patriarchy that the speakers have witnessed in their own lives. We hear stories of women on construction sites, in engineering fields, in war zones, in chess tournaments, and marching in the streets. We learn about the divine feminine and sacred rage, fashion and feminism in Saudi Arabia, the fight for equality in Iceland, 5th-century Irish saints, and even go behind the scenes in Hollywood boardrooms. We listen to coming-of-age struggles and feminist awakenings, to poetry and to science, to deeply personal confessions and astonishing research and dozens upon dozens of unique voices – men, women, and nonbinary voices – some well-known, some not well-known, some anonymous, all of whom have spoken their truth bravely, and have come together to help us create this incredible new season.
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In Season Three the podcast expands its perspective, exploring patriarchy internationally. Each week, Amy reads a book on a different topic in global gender studies and discusses it with a guest who has also read – or, in many cases written – the book being discussed. The season begins with a focus on the African continent, touching down in several different countries to discuss essential topics in the history of patriarchy and gender studies. From here the season progresses across geographic regions including the Middle East, Asia, Pacific Islands, Latin America, and finally concludes with a handful of European countries.
Each guest participating this season has ancestry from the country they discuss in their episode, and in many cases they are longtime residents of that country, allowing them to bring firsthand local experience to the discussion.
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