Here are a few recommendations of some of the podcasts I’ve been listening to lately
Bad Gays
“Bad Gays is a podcast about evil and complicated queers in history. From Alexander the Great to J. Edgar Hoover, our history is littered with them. Unlike the easy heroes, however — people like Oscar Wilde, Audre Lorde or Alan Turing — we rarely remember them as queer, or as gay.”
The hosts of this podcast are Huw Lemmey, an artist, critic and writer living in Barcelona, Spain (he’s the Northern voice) and Ben Miller, a writer, archivist and researcher who resides in Berlin (he’s the American voice.) Huw and Ben profile gay historical figures but rather than highlighting the heroes, they focus on the villains, the “bad gays.”
Memory Wars
“Through a year of in-depth reporting featuring a wide range of characters, Noe-Payne reveals the struggles it takes for a society to change its narrative, face up to an uncomfortable past and pave the way for atonement.“
This podcast is a five part series hosted by Mallory Noe-Payne and Michael Paul Williams, they look at how Germany have confronted the part they played in WW2 and question whether America can do the same thing.
Nicole’s Greys Anatomy
“Each week Nicole invites a special guest onto the show to “scrub in” (fun surgery joke) and discuss a character, relationship, episode, theme or Grey’s experience”
If you’re as big a Greys Anatomy fan as me, you will LOVE this podcast. There’s episodes exploring individual characters from the tv show which are great but my personal favourite episodes are the ones that look at specific themes like, “Gays Anatomy” or “Complicated Parent Relationships.” My favourite episode explores “Religion and Spirituality.” Sadly this podcast was only a year long experiment and isn’t ongoing but they’re are still 37 brilliant episodes to work your way through.
Witch Please
Hannah McGregor and Marcelle Kosman are the Canadian lady-scholars behind the Witch Please podcast, with the help of a multitude of guests, they dissect the Harry Potter books from beginning to end looking at them through the lens of a variety of themes. I love this podcast because it is takes really big philosophical ideas and makes them accessible by applying them to Harry Potter. One of my favourite episodes is, “Werewolves: A Metaphor” which explores how JK Rowling stated that the character Remus Lupin’s, lycanthropy (werewolf-ism) is a metaphor for AIDS. Hannah and Marcelle delve into the way that, ‘metaphors of illness circulate ideologies about those who are ill – implying certain truths about their worthiness, deviance, and threat to society’ and look specifically at, ‘the history of AIDS and its metaphors, and examine how reading Lupin as a character with AIDS reinforces rather than challenges dangerous narratives about queer and disabled folks.’
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