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.
Samuel Catlin (University at Buffalo) joins Moira and Adrian to talk about "The Campus" -- about the peculiar mental image Americans seem to have, how little it comports with reality, and the uncanny power of that it nevertheless exercises. You can read Samuel's essay "The Campus Does Not Exist" over at Parapraxis magazine: https://www.parapraxismagazine.com/articles/the-campus-does-not-exist You can read Moira Weigel's article "Hating Theory" (which we refer to in the episode) here: https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/21427 And you can pre-order Adrian's book "The Cancel Culture Panic" (which he's heavily cribbing from in this ep) here: https://www.amazon.com/Cancel-Culture-Panic-American-Obsession/dp/1503640841/
Moira guides Adrian through the strange, troubling world of tradwifery -- the latest trend in butter-churning, vaguely religious gender conservatism that's taken over your Instagram feed. Come for Adrian's immediate discomfort, stay for Moira's grand unifying theory that links Phyllis Schlafly, the #Girlbosses of the 2010s and unnervingly peppy women currently hand-weaving their childrens' sweaters for social media clout!
Adrian takes Moira into the wild, wildly misogynist and deeply depressing world of Otto Weininger (1880-1903). A posterchild for all manner of fin-de-siècle neuroses, to say nothing for massive quantities of self-hatred, Weininger may be a footnote today -- but he was deeply and weirdly influential in his own time.
