Today I have the honor and the pleasure of speaking with legal scholar Mary Anne Franks, about her book, Fearless Speech: Breaking Free from the First Amendment.  As the title of the book indicates, this is a fearless and iconoclastic critique of the ways that the First Amendment has been interpreted and mobilized in ways that protect and extend racism, misogyny, religious fundamentalism, and corporate self-interest. Among other topics, we talk about Amber Heard case and the limitations of groups like the ACLU and the misleading ways “cancel culture” is portrayed, along with the efforts to stifle speech that documents the promotion of misinformation, and the federal government’s extortion of media conglomerates to censor and remove satirists like Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel.  This promulgation of what Franks calls “reckless speech” does not have to persist. Franks calls on us to foster and practice “fearless speech” and to multiply counter-publics that take inspiration from the historical cases she presents. This is an especially timely and important episode of Speaking Out of Place.

Dr. Mary Anne Franks is the Eugene L. and Barbara A. Bernard Professor in Intellectual Property, Technology, and Civil Rights Law at George Washington Law School. An internationally recognized expert on the intersection of civil rights, free speech, and technology, Dr. Franks also serves as the President and Legislative & Tech Policy Director of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, the leading U.S.-based nonprofit organization focused on image-based sexual abuse. Her model legislation on the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images (NDII, sometimes referred to as “revenge porn”) has served as the template for multiple state and federal laws, and she regularly advises lawmakers and tech companies on privacy, free expression, and safety issues. She is the author of two books: Fearless Speech (Bold Type Books, 2024) and The Cult of the Constitution (Stanford Press, 2019). She holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School as well as a doctorate and a master’s degree from Oxford University, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. She is an Affiliate Fellow of the Yale Law School Information Society Project and is admitted to practice in the U.S. Supreme Court and the District of Columbia.

Today I talk with poet Maya Salameh about her poetry collection, How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave, which won the prestigious Etal Adnan Poetry Prize in 2022. The judges remarked, “Maya Salameh’s poetry stood out for its inventiveness in cracking the code of life ‘between system and culture’…The turns and swerves the poems make are astonishing; the expectations they upend are remarkable… It’s a testament to the aesthetic boundaries and intellectual revolt poets of Arab heritage are pushing, breaking, and reinventing.” We talk about what led her to both technology and poetry, language and story-telling, and the challenges and joys of representing life in the diaspora. In a time of war and genocide, Salameh’s poetry shows how patterns of life and reproduction and desire persist. In her readings and discussions of three poems, we find a new lexicon and a new grammar.

Maya Salameh is the author of Mermaid Theory (Haymarket Books, 2026), How to Make an Algorithm in the Microwave (University of Arkansas Press, 2022), winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, and the chapbook rooh (Paper Nautilus Press, 2020). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and the President’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities, and served as a National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets. Her work has appeared in The Offing, Poetry, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, AGNI, Mizna, and the LA Times, among others. She can be found @mayaslmh or mayasalameh.com.

Today I talk with M. E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi about their dazzling and challenging book, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052 to 2072. They imagine a world haunted by genocide, ecocide, disease, fascism, and viral capitalism, but rather than writing a dystopian novel, O’Brien and Abdelhadi create a complex mosaic of oral histories, in which they each play the part of interviewer. The result is a story that far exceeds New York, and the twenty years noted in the title.  The histories cover generations across the globe, and reach into the deep sources of trauma, and the kinds of mutual care we will need to not only survive, but also to thrive in these frightening times.

Eman Abdelhadi is an academic, organizer and writer based in Chicago. She is co-author of “Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072,” a revolutionary sci-fi novel published in 2022 with Common Notions Press. She is an assistant professor and sociologist at the University of Chicago, where she researches American Muslim communities, and she is a columnist at In These Times magazine where she writes on the Palestine Liberation movement and American politics. Eman organizes with the Salon Kawakib collective, Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine at the University of Chicago, Scholars for Social Justice and other formations.

M. E. O’Brien writes and speaks on gender freedom and capitalism. She has written two books: Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto Press, 2023) and a co-authored speculative novel, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022). She is a member of the editorial collective of Pinko, a magazine of gay communism. Her work on family abolition has been translated into Chinese, German, Greek, French, Spanish, Catalan, and Turkish.

Previously, she coordinated the New York City Trans Oral History Project, and worked in HIV and AIDS activism and services. She completed a PhD at NYU, where she wrote on how capitalism shaped New York City LGBTQ social movements.

She currently works a psychotherapist in private practice and is a psychoanalyst in formation.

Worries about the so-called “pussification of Silicon Valley” are not at all new.  Becca Lewis’ work reaches far back in American history to trace the nexus of gender, technology, and entrepreneurship, such that what we find today seems a foregone conclusion. In today’s wide-ranging discussion we talk about the central figure in this history—George Gilder, whose first book, Sexual Suicide, and subsequent forays into technology, conservative politics, and capitalism included much of what we see today in things like the echo chambers of misinformation of Fox News and the alienated “freedom” of Elon Musk’s SpaceX City. Who are these men, who Becca says, “leave behind the messy physical flows of women’s bodies in favor of the streamlined capitalism of male genius”?

Becca Lewis is a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford University Department of Communication and an incoming assistant professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Her work examines the rise of reactionary politics in Silicon Valley and online. In September 2024, she received her PhD in Communication from Stanford University. She previously worked as a researcher at the Data & Society Research Institute, where she published flagship reports on far-right online broadcasting, media manipulation, and disinformation. Her work has been published in academic journals including New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, and American Behavioral Scientist, and in news outlets such as The Guardian and Business Insider. In 2022, she served as an expert witness in the defamation lawsuit brought against Alex Jones by the parents of a Sandy Hook shooting victim.

Today on Speaking Out of Place I have the honor of talking with Professor Christen A Smith on a new book she has co-edited entitled, The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento. Smith explains that “Beatriz Nascimento was a critical figure in Brazil’s Black Movement until her untimely death in 1995. Although she published only a handful of articles before she died and left only a few other recorded thoughts, her ideas about the symbolic relationship between quilombos (Afro-Brazilian maroon societies) and black subjectivity encourage us to re-imagine the meaning of Black liberation from a transnational, Black feminist perspective.”  Our conversation delves into Nascimento’s rich and complex cultural and intellectual productions, and talk about everything from her films and essays to her student papers, which Smith and her co-editors include in their volume. Nascimento was also a poet, and we are grateful that Christen graces us with reading two poems in Portuguese and then in English translation.

Christen A. Smith is Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at Yale University. She is the author of the book, Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence and Performance in Brazil  (University of Illinois Press, 2016), co-author of the book The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento (Princeton University Press, 2023) and co-editor of Black Feminist Constellations: Black Women in Dialogue and Translation (University of Texas Press, 2023). In 2017, she started Cite Black Women—a transnational initiative that she began in 2017 that draws attention to Black women’s intellectual contributions as well as the race and gender inequalities of citational politics.

Today we talk with Sara Ahmed about her new book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook. How and why is it that complaining about sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of bigotry, is considered impolite?  How is civility uncivil, and the mandate to be “happy” a tool for silencing grievances? Sara Ahmed tackles all those questions, and gives us strength and courage to keep on killingjoy and speaking truth.

Sara Ahmed is an independent queer feminist scholar of colour. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. Her first trade book, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook is coming out with Seal Press next month. Previous books (all published by Duke University Press) include Complaint! (2021), What’s The Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Queer Phenomenology: Objects, Orientations, Others (2006). She is currently writing A Complainer’s Handbook: A Guide to Building Less Hostile Institutions and has begun a new project on common sense. She blogs at feministkilljoy.com

Today we talk with Manijeh Moradian about her book, This Flame within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, which documents the formation of Iranian student activists in the US in the 1970s, and their impact on the Iranian revolution.

This Flame Within is not only a book about history, but also a book about memory and the importance of retrieving these memories of anti-imperialist pasts against the backdrop of a thoroughly imperial present for the possibilities of building anti-imperial futures.

Among many of the things we discuss is the cross-pollination between these groups and groups based in the US working toward Third World Liberation, supporting Palestinian rights, and protesting the Vietnam war. We also connect all these topics to today’s situation in Iran, and the Iranian diaspora.

Manijeh Moradian is assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her book, This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States, was published by Duke University Press in December 2022.  She has published widely including in American Quarterly, Journal of Asian American Studies, Scholar & Feminist online, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. She is a founding member of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and on the editorial board of the Jadaliyya.com Iran Page.

In today’s episode of Speaking Out of Place we speak with Dr Jennifer Gomez about her new book, The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women and Girls: A Black Feminist Approach to Healing from Sexual Abuse, which takes on the particular difficulty of centering the voices and experiences of Black women and girls when confronting sexual violence in the Black community.

In her foreword the book, Thema Bryant, President of the American Psychological Association writes, This important work … is a love song to the survival of black sis and trans women and girls. For love to be liberating it must see and affirm survivors holistically. Gomez calls psychologists and other mental health providers to adopt courageous compassion, which means sharing concern and outrage at the realities of sexual violence as well as concern and outrage for the injustices that contextualize the trauma and recovery process for black women and girls. 

In our conversation Dr. Gomez explains how she fought to reconcile the need for solidarity in the Black community with the demand that the abuse of Black women and girls be confronted and healed. Alongside this struggle was her effort to change the ways psychologists and others silence these traumas.

Jennifer M. Gómez is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work and a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Innovation in Social Work & Health at Boston University, and a Board Member and Chair of the Research Advisory Committee at the Center for Institutional Courage. Her primary research focus is cultural betrayal trauma theory (CBTT), which she created as a framework for understanding the mental, behavioral, cultural, and physical health impact of violence on Black and other marginalized youth, young adults, and elders within the context of inequality.

Written while she was a 2021-22 Fellow at the Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), her book, “The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women & Girls: A Black Feminist Approach to Healing from Sexual Abuse” (American Psychological Association; 2023), provides individual, interpersonal, and structural strategies for healing. Website: https://jmgomez.org ; Book Website: https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/cultural-betrayal/; Twitter: @JenniferMGmez1

Today Professor Jennifer Freyd speaks out against institutional betrayal, specifically about issues of sexual harassment and violence. We talk about what happens when institutions of higher education, which are supposed to be nurturing young people, teaching them to be better citizens and contributors to society, end up betraying them when they are mistreated.  We talk in particular about the effects this has on students who enter universities hoping to become professors themselves, only to be betrayed by their own departments. Jennifer helps us understand why both individuals and departments deny betrayal, and she makes a forceful argument for changing that state of things. She ends by talking about hope and the future, and the work of her non-profit Institute for Institutional Courage.

Jennifer J. Freyd, PhD, is a researcher, author, educator, and speaker.  Freyd is the Founder and President of the Center for Institutional Courage, Professor Emerit of Psychology at the University of Oregon, and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in the School of Medicine, Affiliated Faculty at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, and Affiliated Faculty, Women’s Leadership Lab, Stanford University. She is also a Member of the Advisory Committee, 2019-2023, for the Action Collaborative on Preventing Sexual Harassment in Higher Education, National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. Freyd was in 1989-90 and again in 2018-19 a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Freyd currently serves as the Editor of The Journal of Trauma & Dissociation.

Freyd is a widely published and renowned scholar known for her theories of betrayal trauma, institutional betrayal, institutional courage, and DARVO. She received her PhD in Psychology from Stanford University. The author or coauthor of over 200 articles and op-eds, Freyd is also the author of the Harvard Press award-winning book Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Her most recent book Blind to Betrayal, co-authored with Pamela J. Birrell, was published by John Wiley, with seven additional translations. In 2014, Freyd was invited two times to the U.S. White House due to her research on sexual assault and institutional betrayal. In 2021 Freyd and the University of Oregon settled Freyd’s precedent-setting equal pay lawsuit.

Freyd has received numerous awards including being named a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, an Erskine Fellow at The University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In April 2016, Freyd was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Trauma & Dissociation.  Freyd was selected for the 2021 Christine Blasey Ford Woman of Courage Award by the Association for Women in Psychology.

An in-depth interview with scholar, activist, and poet Dr. Persis Karim, director of the Center for Iranian Diaspora Studies at San Francisco State University. Karim provides indispensable background information reaching back to 1979, explains the long history of gender apartheid in Iran and why today there has been an explosion of mass protests led by young women joined by tens of thousands of others, including rappers, educators, human rights workers, ethnic minorities, artists, children, and others. She also explains the tremendous gaps in Western media coverage and fills in missing information.  She ends with a reading from her own poetry, and a plea to link these protests to all protests against authoritarian regimes.

Karim’s pioneering work in the emerging field of Iranian Diaspora Studies, primarily in literature, has helped to galvanize a wider engagement with transnational and interdisciplinary approaches, as well as to foster the work of younger scholars. She is the editor/co-editor of three anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature: A World Between: Poems, Short Stories and Essays by Iranian-Americans (1999); Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (2006); and, Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian-American Writers (2013). She is currently completing a documentary film project: “The Dawn is Too Far: Stories of Iranian-American Life,” which will be released in spring 2023. Her poetry has appeared in a number of national publications including Calalloo, Reed Magazine,The New York Times, the Raven’s Perch, and Green Linden Press.