Podcast: In Bed with the Right

In bed with the right

Welcome to In Bed With the Right, the new podcast from the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

Hosts Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub welcome a range of scholars and critics to analyze right wing ideas about gender, sex and sexuality – and to plumb the ways in which these ideas persist in and shape our present moment. Please join us as we take deep dives into some old ideas that are unfortunately upending lives right now.

 

Hosts

Moira Donegan

Moira Donegan is writer in residence for the Clayman Institute, where she plans to participate in the intellectual life of the Institute, host its artist salon series, teach a class in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, and mentor students, while continuing her own projects and writing. Her criticism, essays, and commentary, which cover the intersection of gender, politics, and the law, have appeared in places such as the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and Bookforum. Donegan has been an editor at the New Republic and n+1, and currently she writes a column on gender in America for The Guardian. Her first book, Gone Too Far: #MeToo and the Future of Feminist Politics, is forthcoming from Scribner. 

Adrian Daub

Adrian Daub

Adrian Daub

In fall 2019, Daub became the Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Clayman Institute. A Stanford professor of comparative literature and German studies in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Daub was Stanford’s director of the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from 2016 to 2020. 

Producer

Megan Calfas

Megan Calfas

Megan Calfas is a playwright, journalist, and podcast producer. She recently directed a sold-out run of the live storytelling show Crushing in New York City and is in the process of developing an original musical about youth climate activists in the Bay Area. Previously, she reported on the environment for the Los Angeles Times, investigated maternal mortality in Zanzibar, and once convinced Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne to perform in a musical alongside personified, dancing peanuts. 

New episodes in 2023

Episode 7: "The Transsexual Empire" with Susan Stryker

Often considered the ur-text of trans-exclusionary feminism, Janice Raymond’s “The Transsexual Empire” came out in 1979, but rehearses a bunch of tropes you could just as well get off JK Rowling’s Twitter feed. In their conversation with historian Susan Stryker, Moira and Adrian explore the very specific milieu from which Raymond and her book emerged — a radical lesbian feminist theology deeply disappointed with the Catholic Church.

Listen now:

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Episode 6: Perverts, Creeps and Priests!

It's Moira and Adrian's version of a classic Cher song: Perverts, Creeps and Priests! This episode takes deep dives into three texts that illuminate contemporary "crisis-of-masculinity" debates: those that invoke the Bible, those that invoke science, and those that invoke only their own proudly flaunted neuroses. Where are these right-wing discourses about masculinity in agreement, where are they in conflict? Everyone agrees men are in crisis -- who gets to decide what exactly the crisis is?

Listen now:

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Episode 5: Crisis of masculinity

Moira leads Adrian through the endless discourse about the "crisis of masculinity" -- where it comes from, what has motivated it in the past, and why we're having it again. Together, the two of them take a long tour de dudes: from Silicon Valley to Mike Pence's bedroom, from the Old West to Jordan Peterson's couch. What is the unique state of emergency that men find themselves in? Is it real? And why is it -- once again -- supposed to be feminism's fault?

Listen now:

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Episode 4: Fag hags with Moira and Adrian

Ever since the 1960s, the figure of the “fag hag” — a (mostly) straight woman hanging around gay men — has been a mainstay in and around queer spaces. As a woman who refused heterosexuality she aroused the ire of social conservatives, but also critiques from within the community. In this episode, Moira and Adrian investigate: why did conservatives hate the hag? How radical was this figure really? And is she still a thing?

Listen now:

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Episode 3: Susan Sontag with Merve Emre

Susan Sontag (1933- 2004) was a writer, critic and activist, one who isn’t thought of (and didn’t think of herself) as conservative. In this episode, your hosts talk with Prof. Merve Emre to think through Sontag’s writing on gender and on the women’s movement. How do Sontag’s leeriness about identity and identification, her ambivalent attitudes to bodies, sex and beauty, and her elitism land in today’s political climate and landscape?

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Apple Podcasts Spotify

Episode 2: Midge Decter with Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell

Midge Decter (1927-2022) has often been called the "grandmother of neoconservatism" -- hers was in some ways a pretty classic trajectory, from New Deal liberalism to profound unease with the social movements of the 1960s, to the center of the conservative movement and Republican politics. But unlike most of her fellow neocons, Midge Decter always framed her trajectory quite openly in terms of gender: repulsion from a certain kind of women's liberation, and attraction to a certain kind of masculinity. In this episode, Moira and Adrian delve into the weird, cantankerous world of Midge Decter with the co-hosts of Know Your Enemy, Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell.

Listen now:

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Episode 1: Gay marriage with Moira and Adrian

Join us for the first episode of the all-new show In Bed With The Right. For their inaugural episode, Moira and Adrian delve into right-wing (ahem) contributions to the gay marriage debate. Ten years ago the Supreme Court decided Windsor v. US and Hollingsworth v. Perry, which together spelled the beginning of the end of the gay marriage debate (gay marriage would be established nationwide in Obergefell v. Hodges two years later). But did the issue really go away? How did the terms of the debate back then on the right influence today's moral panics, and how do they motivate a far-right Supreme Court?

Apple Podcasts Spotify

In Bed with the Right - Trailer

Get a sneak peek at the upcoming, all-new show In Bed With the Right hosted by Moira Donegan and TFP's very own Adrian Daub.

Listen now:

Apple Podcasts Spotify

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