Allow me to introduce you to The Real Housewives of Bohemia, a podcast that Lauren Besser (an Upright Citizens Brigade performer and a Scorpio) and I (a poet-scholar and a Cancer) launched this August. RHB is a (weird) sister project to WEIRD SISTER in that they both involve: witches, feminist field trips, the 90s, girl bands, and me. One major point of difference, however, is that there’s a lot more James Franco discussion on RHB, because although I can never decide whether my fascination with the Franco is sincere or ironic, I’m never gonna pretend it’s feminist. RHB is full of weird jokes about astronomy &vs. astrology and lawyers and honoring-our-sisters that hopefully reward longtime listeners (okay, okay, we only have twelve episodes so far, but they are stacked thick with weird jokes meant to reward longtime listeners, or at least crack ourselves up). We call it a comedy podcast, partly because Lauren is a bona fide comedian, partly because we love to make each other laugh, and partly because we like to trick people into listening to a feminist podcast by calling it “comedy.” The full truth is that we are jouissance-filled feminists, laughing like MFing Medusas in the face of the patriarchy. We care deeply and then we don’t give a fuh, and we swerve from one to the other within seconds sometimes as we perform what it means to try to make sense of the world as women. We’re trying to unearth subjugated knowledges through the art of intense girl talk. For our latest feminist field trip, presented here as part of WEIRD SISTER’s “We Were There” series, Lauren and I attended a conversation about Emma Sulkowicz’s mattress performance at the Brooklyn Museum.
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