Feminism, Women’s Stories: The Creative Process: Empowering Stories, Inspiring Women, Gender Equality, Women's Rights & Emp The Creative Process

“I grew up with folktales and fairytales from the Indonesian archipelago, from the Nusantara. And of course I grew up with the stories from the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen and actually I like them better than the Disney version because they're more bloody and gory. I guessed that also shaped my preferences for more dark and gothic stories as I grew up. I did English literature at the University of Indonesia. I wrote a BA thesis on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And my mother was a very imaginative person. She loved making her own stories, so I think I inherit that from her. But she never had the chance to explore her creative side—there were certain expectations for women at that time to get married. She was harsh. But I know why I considered her monstrous when she was younger. She was trying to reject society's expectations in her own way, but we didn't understand her. And so I became really interested in the so-called bad women or monstrous women, in a way that these women allow me to ask questions around the structures that create them. Her whole presence taught me to really appreciate the knowledge that was created by generations of women before me. Part of the work I do now is work with a feminist collective to actually question knowledge production, who is excluded from it, who is being marginalized because of it, and my mother played a great role in steering me in that direction.”

How are writing and travel vehicles for understanding? How can we expand the literary canon to include other voices, other cultures, other experiences of the world?

Intan Paramaditha is a writer and an academic. Her novel The Wandering (Harvill Secker/ Penguin Random House UK), translated from the Indonesian language by Stephen J. Epstein, was nominated for the Stella Prize in Australia and awarded the Tempo Best Literary Fiction in Indonesia, English PEN Translates Award, and PEN/ Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America. She is the author of the short story collection Apple and Knife, the editor of Deviant Disciples: Indonesian Women Poets, part of the Translating Feminisms series of Tilted Axis Press and the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (forthcoming 2024). Her essay, “On the Complicated Questions Around Writing About Travel,” was selected for The Best American Travel Writing 2021. She holds a Ph.D. from New York University and teaches media and film studies at Macquarie University, Sydney.

In this episode on Speaking Out of Place podcast Professor David Palumbo-Liu and Azeezah Kanji talk we talk with Camilla Hawthorne about her recent edited collection, The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity, and its relation to her prior monograph, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean. She explains and elaborates on how Blackness is not singular, but involved in “taking place” in imaginative, resistant, and across many different political terrains, whether it be citizenship, the right to the city, the imagining of futures after environmental collapse, and diverse linguistic, cultural, and musical affiliations across diasporic communities.

"It's been a very organic journey and one that still surprises me and I feel I'm so grateful for the journey that life has taken me on and subsequently the creation of this work. I was a dancer and then a musical theatre performer, professionally trained as an actor, and then did the MA in Movement Studies at Central and worked as a movement teacher and a movement director. During that time, I was exploring my own theatre work, and put on my own play called April's Fool, and then was looking at taking that work further and exploring the dynamic of the perpetrator and the victim."

How can intimate scenes be brought to the screen in ways that respect the emotional well-being and privacy of the artists themselves? How do we make sure that we can create a story about abuse without anyone being abused in the process?

Ita O’Brien is the UK’s leading Intimacy Coordinator, founder of Intimacy on Set (and author of the Intimacy On Set Guidelines). Her company, set up in 2018 provides services to TV, film, and theatre when dealing with intimacy, and is a SAG-Aftra accredited training provider of Intimacy Practitioners. Intimacy on Set has supported numerous high-profile film and TV productions including Normal People & Conversations With Friends (BBC3/Hulu), Sex Education 1&2 (Netflix), I May Destroy You (BBC/HBO), It’s A Sin (Channel 4), (Neal Street Prods / Searchlight Pictures).

"I mean, your mother, your concept of God, all of this I feel for our Earth. More than if Earth were a person. And I grew up Christian, I grew up Methodist, and I still pray and read the Bible. If you believe that there is any Creator, what better thing can you do with your life than honor the creation? And if you don't believe in that, but you understand the facts of evolution – which I also understand – again, what better use of a life than to honor the Big Life with a capital L? And what better way to enjoy it? There's so much that we can each do, and it is a joy for me.
I think that animals certainly don't have all these widgets demanding their attention like we do. Their spirits are just not as atomized as ours are. We have so many little things flickering at the edge of our consciousness. When we pay attention to anything, we're not paying that deep attention, but animals are. And they have senses that we do not. I mean, they're aware of chemical cues that we completely miss. They can hear sounds we don't hear. They see colors and kinds of light we can't perceive, etc. But we all share a common ancestor. We share 90 percent of our genetic material with all placental mammals. So we really are all family. So, seeing how animals do things, I think we have more access to that kind of consciousness than we allow ourselves to understand."