{Audio presented during KPFA Fund Drives is not posted. Please support our work by pledging securely by phone -- 510-848-5732 or 1-800-439-5732 -- or online during any Against the Grain program.}
{Audio presented during KPFA Fund Drives is not posted. Please support our work by pledging securely by phone -- 510-848-5732 or 1-800-439-5732 -- or online during any Against the Grain program.}
The fact of glaring inequalities in income and wealth has been placed front and center by the Occupy movement. But where, in this country, does poverty reside? Margaret Weir describes the dramatically shifting geography of inequality and poverty in metropolitan areas. She highlights the suburbanization of poverty as well as the strong anti-poor bias built into local policymaking. (Encore broadcast.)
It's incredibly bloody -- and incredibly misunderstood. What has come to be known as the Mexican drug war, but would be better viewed as the US-Mexico drug trade, has claimed nearly 50,000 lives since 2006, including those of many journalists. Mexico-based writer John Gibler talks about the politics and economics of an industry that involves enormous sums of money, territorial violence, mega-profits, and the collusion of governments and banks. (Encore broadcast.)
"Radically Gay: The Life of Harry Hay" at the San Francisco Public Library April 21-July 29
Harry Hay, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder Beacon, 1996
The father of gay liberation was a communist and labor organizer, as well as avant garde actor, musicologist, and theoretician. One hundred years after his birth, Harry Hay may finally be getting his due, in an exhibition curated by Joey Cain. Cain reflects on Hay's involvement in the San Francisco General Strike, the folk music revival, the Communist Party, and the movements of the 1960s and 70s. He discusses Hay's founding of the groundbreaking Mattachine Society in 1948, which inspired other gay men to resist police entrapment and find radical brotherhood.
In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, much of the political debate in this US is about, strangely enough, contraception. Nancy Cohen situates the present within the history of what she calls the sexual counterrevolution -- the backlash against the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s. She suggests that the forces of reaction are trying to achieve what they can before being entirely marginalized by shifting demographics and changed social attitudes.
differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
Dudziak & Volpp, eds., Legal Borderlands: Law and the Construction of American Borders Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2006
Those strange people's culture is to blame, we're told, when wife-battering or other interpersonal violence occurs in the households of immigrants from certain parts of the world. But does culture determine violent or misogynist behavior? And are non-Western cultures in fact regressive, as they're so often represented to be? Leti Volpp talks about double standards and the perilous politics of culture.