In A Dying Colonialism, toward the end of a chapter on the role of radio in the Algerian revolutionary struggle, Fanon speaks of the deconstructive force of the channel The Voice of Fighting Algeria:

In August 1956, the reality of combat and the confusion of the occupier stripped the Arabic language of its sacred character and the French language of its negative connotations. The new language of the nation could then make itself known through multiple meaningful channels. The radio receiver as a technique of disseminating news and the French language as a basis for possible communication became almost simultaneously accepted by the fighting nation.¹

Not only did the radio lose its force as a tool of the oppressor. The French language itself lost its colonizing force. Fanon notes: “The French language lost its accursed character, revealing itself to be capable also of transmitting, for the benefit of the nation, the messages of truth that the latter awaited.”² In the hands of the National Liberation Front (FLN), which was the Algerian resistance, radio became a tool of creating a new language and new meanings for a new nation.

This process of deconstructing dominant cultural concepts and stripping the colonizer’s language “of its negative connotations” necessitates more than interrogation and critique. It demands the production of counter-narratives that displace the dominant ones.³ It involves moving concepts of the oppressed and the colonized from the margins to the center of the public square. A counter-narrative is “a story that resists an oppressive identity and attempts to replace it with one that commands respect.”⁴ Scholars have noted the critical association between counter-narratives and decolonization. For example, according to Antonia Darder, “critical research must be linked to emancipatory efforts to dismantle oppressive theories and practices, in an effort to transform existing conditions. This calls for a research process that can support the creation of intellectual and social spaces where alternative readings of the world can exist in the interest of liberatory practice and social justice.”⁵

Podcasting offers an opportunity for counter-narrative production. Many of our surveyed podcasters explicitly lay claim to the importance of counter-narrative production in their work. Cathy Erway, host of Self Evident: Asian America’s Stories, states her intention of offering counter-narratives for Asian Americans by assessing other hosts’ commitment to “challenges the narratives of where we come from, where we belong, and where we’re going.”⁶ Cristen Conger and Caroline Ervin, hosts of two podcasts, Stuff Mom Never Told You and Unladylike, engage in “contextualizing constructs, debunking body myths, sourcing cultural stereotypes” and intend to produce “inclusive, credible media for women.”⁷ Florence Barkway and Reed Amber, hosts of F***s Given, assert their “mission to break taboos” and to present “genuine thoughts and ideas” about sexuality.⁸ Alix Spiegel and Hanna Rosin of Invisibilia critique the “unseeable forces [that] control human behavior and shape our ideas, beliefs, and assumptions” and corroborate “narrative storytelling with science that will make you see your own life differently.”⁹ Darian Woods of Grid Lines offers similar counter-narratives in order to replace dominant cultural concepts of currency and market relations. Brittany Luse and Eric Eddings of The Nod offer a counter-narrative of the Black experience in America by emphasizing the “genius, the innovation, and the resilience that is [sic] so particular to being Black – in America, and around the world.”¹⁰

Counter-narratives are different from dominant narratives in that they originate in the perspective of those who have been historically marginalized and exploited.¹¹ Significantly, podcasters in this space largely offer counter-narratives from the perspective of identity groups that have been maligned by dominant structures of oppression. For example, rather than looking at the profits or crimes associated with human trafficking, the Chicken & Jollof Rice Show focused on “the psychological impact of trafficking to victims, families, and communities.”¹² Similarly, in 2017, when events in Charlottesville, Virginia led up to an anti-racist’s murder, Latinos Who Lunch, instead of framing the murder as a protest or clash, referred to it as a “terrorist attack,” speaking from the perspective of those injured by those events.¹³ However, our research for Chapter 1 indicated that many podcasters enjoy some privilege in society, and thus it is occasionally unclear whether they are producing a counter-narrative from the perspective of a maligned identity group or as members of that group.

In this chapter we note the existence of several discrete areas of counter-narrative production – areas such as neoliberalism, race, patriarchy, gender binaries, heteronormativity and settler monogamy, ableism, and popular culture – and we evaluate them. The counter-narrative production phase of decolonizing podcasting involves the intentional production of community-based counter-narratives, in an attempt to destabilize and deconstruct dominant cultural assumptions. During this phase, our podcasters contribute to the increase in digital information literacy in their communities and to a significant reappropriation of not only digital technologies but also the very language and discursivity of dominant thought. In almost all cases, counter-narrative production centers storytelling as a means of presenting alternatives. Podcasters in this space largely prioritize empathy and understanding, creatively circumscribing data and statistics within narrative appeals.

Counter-narratives of Popular Culture

One of the recurring themes we found was that of decolonial podcasts using popular culture as a mechanism for offering counter-narratives. Popular culture reflects the tastes of the majority of a population through mass media, rather than representing select identity groups.¹⁴ Many of the counter-narratives in the podcasting space are produced in response to popular cultural media representations. Although popular culture is not in and of itself an ideology, the institutions that produce it represent a significant power structure that creates and enforces meaning. Scholars have long recognized the interest of marginalized communities in decolonizing popular culture,¹⁵ and podcasts in this space rely upon personal stories to act as counter-narratives to the stereotypical and simplified representations of various identity groups in popular culture.

Among the more notable examples of podcasts in this category is Jemele Hill Is Unbothered. Hill, a former Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) sports anchor and commentator, was removed from her position through a corporate buyout of her contract, as a result of her anti-Trump tweets.

As if things weren’t difficult enough for Hill, she found herself in a firestorm that resulted in White House press secretary Sarah Sanders calling for her to be fired after Hill had tweeted that “Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself with other white supremacists.” Then she subsequently added yet another tweet for good measure: “Trump is the most ignorant, offensive president of my lifetime. He is a direct result of white supremacy. Period.”¹⁶

Hill uses her platform to talk about race and gender within the context of sports and popular culture. She goes far beyond critique and interrogation and offers ways of rethinking the role of race and gender in sports and popular cultural entertainment. In this sense, Hill’s podcast must properly be considered a counter-narrative project. Representative show titles are “Method Man’s Thoughts on Wu Tang: An American Saga,” “Snoop Dogg Shares Thoughts on Death Row Movie: Relationship to Tupac,” “Ice Cube Shares His Contract with Black America,” and “Gretchen Whitmer Says White House Is the Biggest Obstacle in COVID Response.”¹⁷

Although her podcast is consistently centered around popular culture, Hill frequently challenges the false notion of the separation between popular culture and sports and race on the one hand, and politics on the other. She often accomplishes this in a type of monologue that occurs at the end of her broadcasts called “Fuck It, I’m Bothered.” A review of her podcast from Good Life Detroit, a lifestyle ezine from Jemele’s native Detroit, explains: “At the end of the podcast, Jemele does a short segment called ‘Fuck It, I’m Bothered’ where she discusses a topic that has been on her mind. She keeps it real and doesn’t hold back. It’s unfiltered and straightforward. To be real– she probably says exactly what we are thinking about the issues she discusses!”¹⁸ Emblematic of these monologues is a featured broadcast on Hill’s website entitled “The People Responsible for the Capitol Insurrection/Stick to Sports,” where Hill challenges white America on its embrace of racial hate and lays the responsibility for the Capitol insurrection at the feet of Trump supporters and enablers:

Dear America, if you think I’m about to deliver a message of encouragement or hope, if you think I’m about to tell you that we’re better than this, that yesterday is not who we are then, let me be absolutely clear: You got me all the way fucked up instead. Let me give you the real. The people responsible for yesterday’s shameful insurrection, besides the lawless domestic terrorists, are Donald Trump, people who voted for Donald Trump, lawmakers like Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham, who coddled, enabled and kissed Donald Trump’s ass, the media who refused to treat his lies like actual lies, the networks that built huge audiences around pushing his propaganda and inciting people’s worst instincts, and the social media platforms who refused to regulate his racist bigoted words and helped him push a dangerous agenda that deeply radicalized and divided people. Your Frankenstein got somebody killed. If we’re going to get through this, we need to stop lying to ourselves. Who we are in this moment is a broken racist nation that is overrun by white supremacy. It’s time to get our together America. Oh, and by America, I mean white people. And that’s straight up no chaser.¹⁹

In an episode entitled “Janelle Monae on Antebellum and the Struggles of a Black Woman,” Hill and the actor, musician, and Afrofuturist icon Janelle Monae use their discussion about the film Antebellum as a springboard for fully contextualizing the Black Lives Matter movement and create a powerful counter-narrative that links contemporary African American civil rights movements and predatory policing with the history of American slavery. Monae explains:

Antebellum is a film that follows a successful author who is trapped in this horrifying reality that forces her to confront the past, the present, and the future before it’s too late. The reason why I said yes to this project was because I thought that it effectively connected the dots – the dots between the past, the present, and the future. When we’re screaming “Black Lives Matter,” when we’re screaming and talking about white supremacy, talking about systemic racism systemic oppression, we can’t talk about those things without talking about chattel slavery, America’s first sin. And knowing that I’m here and you’re here, not because we’ve asked to be here, but because our ancestors were forced to be here to work, is something that people need to be reminded of. People need to know that the past is not dead. The past is not the past, and when we’re talking about police, we’re talking about police brutality as it pertains to right now, we have to always remember that in the south during the Civil War the earliest stages of policing and the earliest police institution was the slave patrol, meant to kill, meant to destroy those who didn’t obey those who were forming or wanting to start a revolt, or those who had run away. They were meant to track down our enslaved ancestors. And this is a system that is inherently built on racist policy, right, and that’s what we’re trying to change, racist policies. And when we’re screaming “Defund the Police,” and when we’re screaming “Abolish the Police,” we know what we’re talking about. We know that we are trying to get rid of a system that was built on racist policy to traumatize us, to kill us. So, this movie connects those dots.²⁰

Black Girl Songbook is an equally popular podcast, hosted by former Vibe magazine editor-in-chief Danyel Smith: “Join author and former Vibe editor-in-chief Danyel Smith as she celebrates and uplifts the talents of Black women in the music industry. Tune in for in-depth discussions with your favorite songwriters, producers, and artists, as well as anecdotes from Danyel. Plus, you’ll hear the songs of Black women who changed the landscape of American music forever.”²¹ Smith’s podcast provides counter-narratives about the importance of Black female composers and musicians in American culture and politics. Her elevation of Black female artists serves to challenge dominant patriarchal narratives in the music industry and in the role that the art of Black Americans has played in civil rights and social justice struggles.

Another example of podcasts that produce counter-narratives to popular culture is Ahmed Ali Akbar’s podcast See Something, Say Something, which analyzed the Amazon series Jack Ryan for its select depiction of “a Black American ‘good Muslim’ character, and many of the tropes that have been around since Homeland and 24.”²² In subsequent programs, Akbar offered counter-narratives to these depictions and tropes, noting that they served colonial purposes by treating value judgments as objective and by further marginalizing people of color and Muslims. Similarly, deconstructing the colonization of women, Kae Grossman and Brittny Walker’s Mansplaining interprets the narrow forms of masculinity and femininity depicted in films such as Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Braveheart, Road House, Over the Top, Demolition Man, Highlander, and Con Air.²³ Their analyses transition into substantive dialogue about counter-narratives of gender and sexuality. For example, rather than depicting Braveheart as a cinematic narrative about freedom and liberation, as it is often considered in the dominant culture, the hosts argue that it is a narrative about misogyny.

Counter-narratives not only reframe popular culture narratives, but draw attention to the ways in which the contributions of identity groups have been dismissed and erased in popular culture. For example, when it comes to race, an episode of Stephanie Kuo and Juan Diego Ramirez’s Racist Sandwich explored the erasure of people of color from barbecuing narratives. They argued that the contribution of people of color to barbecuing is downplayed, if not outright erased in dominant culture.²⁴ Their analysis concluded that dominant culture is “largely ignoring the regional diversity of barbecue in Texas (and across the South) and ultimately erasing the Black and Brown folks who created it and built its legacy.” Cathy Erway’s Self Evident: Asian America’s Stories challenged dominant narratives that marginalize and ultimately erase Asian American identity; and it did so by introducing three stories from their listeners to “explore the ways ‘Asian American’ reflects both representation and exclusion, empowerment, and stereotyping, under the diverse umbrella of Asian American identity.”²⁵ In the second episode of this podcast, Sharmin Hossain, a member of New York’s Bangladeshi Feminist Collective, used personal experiences to help reinterpret “the roles of class, colorism, and cultural education within the broader conversation about Asian representation in America.” Within the counter-narratives of decolonial podcasts, there is a recurring pattern of ideologies that the programs seek to deconstruct.

Counter-narratives of Neoliberalism

We discovered the the podcasters we surveyed utilized a limited set of discursive concepts and practices to critique and interrogate dominant ideologies. There appears to be an implicit recognition that these dominant ideologies hinder progressive policies for under-represented and colonized people. Among the most important of these broader ideological constructs is neoliberalism, which colonized people see as defining elite consensus in the United States. The decolonizing podcaster’s mission to provide counter-narratives for neoliberalism often represents an attempt to dismantle and replace modern capitalism’s acceptance of cutthroat competition and the production of inequality with alternative, community-based, cooperative ideologies and practices that prioritize equity and inclusion.

Neoliberal ideology purports to support objective meritocracies, which are allegedly colorblind in their outcome and analysis. However, there have been numerous studies highlighting the ways in which meritocratic subjectivity maintains power relations, objectivity claims, or colorblindness persist from neoliberal ideologues.²⁶ In fact, the podcasters routinely offer counter-narratives about the feigned objectivity of neoliberalism. For example, Inner Hoe Uprising deconstructed data from commissions that were investigating women’s health to reveal that intervention for women was determined based on their race not the data.²⁷ The hosts grounded their findings in the long history of racism in medical research such as the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century field of eugenics, which attempted to justify racial and ethnic inequities under the auspices of objective scientific analysis.

Decolonial podcasters view neoliberalism not as being objective but rather as perpetuating class inequities, white supremacy, and patriarchy under the veneer of neutral, inclusive, and representative attitudes. On a December 2020 episode of Bad Faith, the hosts, Briahna Joy Gray and Virgil Texas, entered into dialogue with an academic – Cornel West – and a scholar and public speaker – Trisha Rose – about how the class antagonism of neoliberalism had contributed to the further decay of living conditions for poor people of color.²⁸

WEST: I think part of it is, as the system becomes more corrupt, it generates its own forms of decadence and cowardliness, and the Black middle class accommodation to that system reflects the decadence and the cowardliness in the Black bourgeoisie itself among the Black elites themselves. And they become the most highly visible, when in fact they’re driven by careerism, they are driven by opportunism, they’re not driven by focusing on the least of these they’re not they’re not driven by willingness to sacrifice, and struggle, and that’s a human thing, that’s just not racial. But it gets articulated under white supremacist conditions, so you end up with a Black middle-class leadership that does not put at the center Black poor people. It doesn’t put at the center of Black working people. If there were a mass incarceration system with Black middle class kids going to jail and prison the same rate for black poor, then all of a sudden among congress you’d get prison reform in a second … the class issue becomes so crucial even as we continue to highlight the white supremacy and the male supremacy and homophobia, transphobia.

GRAY: So, isn’t that then why if the Black middle class is captured in the ways that, I agree, with, isn’t that why there’s so much onus on those who aren’t participating in that, but do have a platform people like yourself people like Cardi B?

WEST: Absolutely!

GRAY: It seems to me that there’s an enormous potential given how Black culture in particular is put on a pedestal is so prominent in America as cool, and we’re taste makers, and music and sports and all these arenas. And, we have that independence that if those people were to feel empowered, and like there was a movement that they could belong to whether it’s the people’s movement or P. Diddy’s charter or whatever else it is that that would be a real force to contend with in terms of extracting concessions but whenever any of these people [Black progressive activists] sticks their heads up suddenly all the Black you know media elite come down and, say, oh Ice Cube you you’re just cooning, and every other kind of thing, I, you know, I’m not legitimately Black, all of these kinds of things.

ROSE: Yeah

GRAY: The fact that there’s such a forceful pushback against those efforts suggests to me that there’s a lot of power there.

ROSE: Yeah yeah that’s a good point that’s a good point and that’s why you know they’re operating in bad faith right.

GRAY: Right [Laughter]

Similarly, on the November 2020 episode of Bad Faith, Gray hosted the activist and artist Killer Mike in order to discuss the ways in which the racial inclusiveness promised by neoliberals’ colorblind approach to policy belies the perpetuation of racist structures and patterns that serve to solidify rather than chip away at racism in the United States:

GRAY: Well, I want to ask you about that hopelessness. Because I think the lesson that I think some progressives took away from 2016 and then 2020 was, you know this is an insurmountable hill, “why can’t we get a bigger percentage of Black voters?” You know and I don’t necessarily see it that way, I think that there’s definitely better and more outreach that could be done, but what do you think is the obstacle there and what do you make of some of the role of other kinds of Black figureheads?

KILLER MIKE: I talked about it on the ShowTime show “The Circus,” last week. The obstacle isn’t Black people, the obstacle much like Dave Chappelle alluded to an SNL, is god bless your souls, white people you’ve let us down so much. And that isn’t the average working, hard-working below standard, barely making it himself white person in rural Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, North Florida. No, no, no, we’re talking about the white proclaimed progressives that have been progressives for 50 years. The ivy towers you guys have not done a good job of holding your party accountable to give us what we’re owed after the Civil War became Reconstruction, and after the great compromise the cousins that were from the north and the south compromised our ass right out of a deal, they compromised us right now out of the Geechee and Gullah islands, they’ve compromised our farmers out of land ownership, they co-opted the drug war used it against us, after they came to a compromise together about how to legalize marijuana, they compromised our ass out of those opportunities. So, like Baldwin said, how much longer must we wait? So what progressives are going to have to start fighting for beyond fighting for everyone to progress, is to specifically deal with the issues of abandonment that we have from a party we have given over 90 percent of loyalty to for the last 57 years.29

Killer Mike went on to note that the neoliberals in the Democratic Party “woke wash” their agenda by feigning praise for women of color who delivered the party’s electoral victory in 2020, but then they ignore these women when it comes to actual power and legislation:

In all the talk right now about how Black women have been instrumental in building all of these movements that have benefited the democratic party, where is Nina Turner’s name? Well, that’s what’s so frustrating is that there’s all of this conversation when some folks have said the democratic party owes Black people more rights there’s a weird pushback against some of the figures that have done that.³⁰

Collectively, conversations on Bad Faith and other decolonial podcasts create a more sophisticated narrative than the dominant one, which would champion the Democratic Party as the party of working people, women, and people of color. Instead, decolonial podcasters view it as part of continued colonial practices that marginalize and ostracize those communities. Their discourse offers a counter-narrative to dominant ideologies, which posit that adherence to neoliberal ideology will eradicate racial inequities through colorblind legislation.

Decolonial podcasters also used counter-narratives to undermine the market fundamentalism of neoliberal ideology. For example, they critiqued neoliberal economists’ measurement of economic growth on the grounds that it does not account for, or include, the wages lost by women through the unpaid labor that they perform. A July 2020 episode of Grid Lines covered this topic; the aim was to offer a counter-narrative to economic growth that shows that national growth is conflated with economic growth for men.³¹ Similarly, with the help of economist Joseph Stiglitz, a May 2020 episode of Pitchfork Economics challenged the neoliberal narrative that markets are self-correcting.³² The podcast offered a different line, according to which the COVID-19 pandemic “clearly demonstrates” that “the markets aren’t the efficient adapters that classic economists believe them to be,” as they are far from “respond[ing] quickly and efficiently to changes in demand.”³³

Podcasters offer space for narratives that counter the economic dogma of neoliberal economic ideology. In June 2020, the hosts of Pitchfork Economics interviewed economist Stephanie Kelton, who argued that obsessive and restrictive legislation based on fears of deficit are misguided, because deficits are a myth.³⁴ Kelton pointed out that dominant neoliberal narratives incorrectly compare the US federal government to a household that needs to control spending for the revenue it collects. She offered the following counter-narrative: the government prints money, so when it collects less than it prints the missing part is actually a national surplus, because that money still goes to the general economy. Furthermore, she claims that this is how economies grow, and not by cutting spending, as neoliberal narratives assert. Kelton’s assessment is known as the modern monetary theory (MMT), and it rarely makes its way into dominant media discourses. However, podcasters offer a space for these narratives of economics to be heard. In fact, the MMT counter-narrative was summed up in the guiding question of an episode of Eat the Rich: “Is money real? The answer may SHOCK you.” ³⁵ The hosts used economist Gabriel Mathy’s expertise to present a counter-narrative to the neoliberal ideology about the state of the US economy, unemployment, the myth of government spending, the causes of inflation, and recessions.³⁶ Lastly, Eat the Rich offers programming that counters the neoliberal narrative of capitalism growing global with one that depicts the global economy in “late-stage capitalism, and the millionaires, billionaires, and multinational corporations hell-bent on staving off its death rattle.”³⁷

The podcasting space even challenges neoliberal narratives about individuals and groups that oppose neoliberalism. Scholars have noted the neoliberal impulse to dismiss non-expert opinions. As a result, neoliberal narratives frame agitators and critics of elite culture as less informed citizens rather than as legitimate critics. An August 2020 episode of Parallax Views hosted Thomas Frank to discuss his latest book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism.³⁸ Frank argued there that the neoliberal narrative and its subsequent critique of populism incorrectly categorized the latter as racist and right-leaning. Frank also noted that this narrative emerged from Richard Hofstadter’s discredited mid-twentieth-century works, which sought to justify Hofstadter’s position as an expert. In this way neoliberalism depends upon committees of experts to address societal concerns effectively.³⁹ But Labor Radio-Podcast Weekly countered the neoliberal narrative with one that depicts the National Labor Relations Board’s experts as a body that “hates” rather than serving “workers.”⁴⁰

Frank was also a guest on Krystal Kyle & Friends, where the hosts, Krystal Ball and Kyle Kulinski, interviewed him about populism and elites. Their dialogue generated a counter-narrative about neoliberals’ obsession with accountability. Scholars have noted that neoliberal ideology is fixated on accountability as a means of promoting efficiency. As a result, structures based on data collection, analysis, and management are used to identify inefficiencies by holding individuals and organizations accountable. However, Krystal Kyle & Friends revealed that this accountability is limited to the most vulnerable in society, while the elites are privileged in that they are not accountable to anyone.

FRANK: Experts make mistakes … I do have to point this out, again, again, and again … every time I get a chance, I tell whoever I am talking too about this. We are living in a time of incredible, cascading, elite failures.

KRYSTAL: That’s right.

FRANK: One after another, after another, after another. Uh, depending on when you want to start. You want to start with Iraq War? You want to start with the financial crisis. You know, you can list them. And these are failures by credentialed authorities, by professionals, by people at the very top, bailing each other out, never holding each other accountable, getting us into stupid wars, mismanaging Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This one always makes me chuckle because she was advised by the very smartest people in American politics, and they lost to a guy that has never run for office before. Whose campaign was managed by Steven Bannon, who had never managed a campaign before, and they lost to this guy… it goes on, and on, and on, elite failure, on top of elite failure. There is no one saying we need to do anything about our elites, and the way they keep screwing up. There is no program of study for that or handy term for denouncing these people. … This is the last five years both in America and in Europe all of these intellectuals crying and gnashing their teeth, and tearing their hair, because the people don’t trust them anymore.

KRYSTAL: The experts?

FRANK: Yeah, people have lost faith in the experts. They talk about this all the time, constantly; it is in the newspaper every single day in Washington.

KRYSTAL: Yes.

FRANK: But one answer is off limits to them. It can never be explored, can never be discussed, can never be acknowledged. That is the possibility of elite failure… No, that cannot be the answer.

KRYSTAL: [laughing] it’s gotta be the Russian Facebook ads.

Kyle: Russia. Always Russia.

FRANK: How would a scientist approach this? “What’s the simplest answer for why people hate elites?”

Kyle: Accums razor?

FRANK: Because elites keep fucking up. They won’t use that answer, it has to be this really convoluted thing about how everybody is diluted, everybody has been tricked.

KRYSTAL: Trump has been an amazing excuse… It’s all his fault, he just popped out the ether and he magically made everything horrible, nothing was horrible before. It was all going great.⁴¹

This conversation offered a counter-narrative that characterizes neoliberal elites as using notions of accountability and meritocracy as a cudgel, in order to maintain power relations. Neoliberals are not an objectively neutral governing force, but an ideological class of elites who are so successful at conflating their ideology with objectivity itself that even those who suffer as a result of these practices have internalized neoliberal colonial mentalities.

Finally, these podcasts open visionary perspectives, reimagining in a significant way a future beyond neoliberalism and capitalism. For example, in an episode titled “Reading the Future: Anarchists on the Moon!,” the Eat the Rich hosts envisioned a more egalitarian future society. They did this through a sci-fi novel that proposed how “social & labor relations might work in a truly communist society” and disclosed “some of the anarchist theories that influenced the work.”⁴² An episode of Pitchfork Economics described what a federal jobs guarantee would look like, explaining that, “if you want a job and you can’t find one anywhere else in the economy, you can walk in without a job and walk out with a job.”⁴³ Although much of the discussion in these decolonial excerpts is devoted to the perpetuation of racism and sexism through neoliberalism, many podcasts dedicated time and space to offering counter-narratives solely focused on race.

Counter-narratives of Race

We have found that, as a foundational ideology, race is rarely taken up as a discrete item; it is more often discussed in its relationship with other forms of oppression. For instance, in an episode titled “A Tortilla is Not a Blank Slate,” The Racist Sandwich used food as a point of entry, looking at the expansion of Mexican cuisine as a microcosm of the commodification and exploitation of Latinx culture through gentrification.⁴⁴ The episode discussed “what makes for the perfect taco, the gentrification of tacos in the United States as well as the cost and labor behind them – which is why they deserve all the respect.⁴⁵ ”Podcasters have also used counter-narratives of race to broaden the audience’s understanding of xenophobia. For example, Long Distance Radio, hosted by “Phil Yu (Angry Asian Man) and Devin Cabanilla (Filipino American National Historical Society, Seattle),” “have discussed the disturbing rise of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia.”⁴⁶ Podcasters have also introduced personal stories in order to offer counter-narratives about dominant interpretations of what freedom means for various ethnic minorities. Where law and order are often introduced as mechanisms for safeguarding freedom in dominant culture, Self Evident used the personal story of a daughter of Vietnamese refugees to demonstrate that immigration law and deportation orders were actually at odds with the efforts of Southeast Asian Americans to promote freedom and stop deportation. In all these examples, race is presented in tandem with other intersectionalities and issues.⁴⁷

One of the most fascinating examples came in an episode of the Katie Halper Show. The first part of the show saw a panel debate on the accuracy of using “fascism” to describe Trump and those who stormed the US capital on January 6, 2021. The panel consisted of a philosopher, Jason Stanley, a political scientist, Jodi Dean, a journalist, Eugene Puryear, and two historians, Daniel Bessner and Sam Moyn. In the second part Jodie Dean joined the panel and illustrated the transformative power of decolonial podcasting. When she entered the conversation, she did not renew the scholarly dispute about the accuracy of fascism as a term. Dean instead interrogated the colonial structures that framed the audience’s understanding of this term and she argued that American fascism is in fact rooted in white supremacy. Dean explained:

Sam’s argument’s like “well you know if you call it fascism that’s not a hegemonic use of fascism, the diagnosis that comes out of the knowledge of the Jim Crow South isn’t one that’s widely shared it’s kind of marginalized or something like that.” We gotta ask well why was that diagnosis marginalized that was itself because of anti-communism in the United States. It’s because of the fascist tendencies under McCarthyism that made that diagnosis not take hold. That’s part of the symptoms. I want to go back on the on the question of the depth of the diagnosis that America, and that particularly the south under Jim Crow, and the the structure of the southern state through white supremacy. That diagnosis as fascist goes back way before the World War II… so this is a there’s a powerful argument here that is deeply embedded in US history that needs to be brought out.⁴⁸

The other panelists ultimately agreed with Dean’s argument. In their discourse, they seemed to agree that grounding fascism in American racial ideology and practices was a counter-narrative that had been dismissed and marginalized by white supremacist power structures.

The single most important contribution of podcasts that present counter-narratives of race is their focus on transcending race, together with the presentation of a racially egalitarian world. In many senses, these podcasters are visionaries who imagine a post-racial universe and the destruction of race as a false ideological construct. For example, in response to racial protests against racist police violence and murder in 2020, Pitchfork Economics hosted an episode titled “Re-imagining Public Safety” whose goal was to delineate public safety from policing as a means of shaping future legislation.⁴⁹ Brilliant Idiots’ hosts, Charlamagne Tha God and Andrew Schulz, questioned the use of “defund the police” as a slogan, but spoke about it in glowing language, as an inspirational project, which holds out hopes for deconstructing the mechanisms that perpetuate racism.

SHULTZ: What’s your whole take on defund the police? Maybe we should get into that talk about that, explain that?

CHARLAMAGNE: Um, I think it’s, I don’t want to say positively because it’s not positively brilliant. Messaging matters, and in messaging, you know every word has to count. So when people hear defunding the police, they think defund the police, take all the money out of the police department? I don’t know why some people thought, I don’t know why he’s even talking about disbanding and abolishing cuz that never crossed my mind. When I heard defund the police, I was like okay take all the money from the police officers. But when you read what the fund the police means is they want to take money out of these bloated police budget[s], and put them [sic] into communities that need them. Which makes absolute sense, because why does New York City have a six billion dollar police budget? Take a couple of those billions, and put them into the hoods in the city that need them, put them into the schools, give people better housing, create drop job training programs, create mother fucking STEM programs, you know put more money in social services so people can have better mental health services at their disposal. Like once you do that, then what happens is the hood has opportunities now.

SHULTZ: They say that crime is a result of relative poverty and not just poverty.

CHARLAMAGNE: Yes!…

ANDREW: it’s like a crime is a function of relative poverty that’s what they say, where it’s like, there a lot of crime in places where there’s poor people living right next to really rich people. But if everybody’s poor there’s not that much crime because it’s like well yeah that’s his life right?

CHARLAMAGNE: yes

SHULTZ: So, I guess what they’re saying is take some of that money and invest it in things that would reduce the poverty. If the poverty is the thing that causes the crime.

CHARLAMAGNE: it’s so fucking simple

SHULTZ: state jobs, other things other opportunities that people can do not just similarly giving people money put in their pockets but giving the place that they could potentially work.

CHARLAMAGNE: you fix the schools up better education you fix the housing up people have a better place to live so they’re waking up and they feeling better about their life right. Put the money in the social services so you can have mental health care for these people in the hood, job training programs!!!!!!, teach people how to work, trade school, STEM, prepare them for the 21st century, What the fuck?

SHULTZ: So I will say this, calling it defunding the police is quite possibly the worst marketing ever done in the history of humankind.

CHARLAMAGNE: Yeah.50

Their dialogue contains the critique and interrogation of the phrase “defund the police,” which we examined in the last chapter, but it builds upon that critique through an inspiring, detailed, and sophisticated counter-narrative about what defunding the police means and what it could achieve if implemented. This is a far cry from dominant discourses, which portray “defund the police” as an attack on law enforcement rather than as an inspirational set of policy measures designed to dismantle racist structures. Decolonial podcasters sought to offer counter-narratives to race just as they hosted dialogue that intended to reframe their audiences’ understanding of gender.

Counter-narratives of Patriarchy

Podcasters also offered counter-narratives of patriarchy and masculinity as colonizing forces. Those who seek to decolonize patriarchal structures spend a great deal of time redefining language. Their discourses are reminiscent of Fanon’s critiques about the ways in which dominant narratives persist through language. The podcast Gender Blender notes the centrality of gender in an episode of May 2019 titled “Language, Intersectionality, and Being a Gender Ally.”⁵¹ Meanwhile, podcasts such as TransPanTastic and Unladylike have given us counter-narratives as to the definition and purpose of labels such as “creepy guy” and “ladylike.”⁵² The Guilty Feminist offered a counter-narrative about communication expectations in dominant society, arguing that they are a reflection of men’s preferences and abilities, as well as of their work to marginalize women.⁵³ An episode of Divided States of Women from March 1, 2018 investigated how

Women are admonished for “talking like a woman,” but then they are also judged for talking or acting “like a man.” This creates an impossible circumstance for women: if you talk too much like a stereotypical girl, you are often taken less seriously. And if you talk too much like a stereotypical man, you can be considered a bitch, aggressive, or difficult.⁵⁴

This episode’s counter-narrative challenges the gendering of communication and the way that patriarchy frames expectations for how a woman should speak. In so doing, these podcasters suggest the rejection of patriarchal norms for speech and communication as an often overlook but vital area for decolonization.

An episode of Tai Jacob’s Gender Blender Podcast – “A podcast featuring trans, Two Spirit, nonbinary, and (a)gender creative folks exploring the multiple ways that we relate to gender, our bodies, social movements, and community spaces”⁵⁵ – sought to redefine what it means to be a man by critiquing the validity and usefulness of narrow definitions of manliness and “dude culture.”⁵⁶ Similarly, on an episode of Ikhlas Saleem and Makkah Ali’s Identity Politics, their guest Aymann Ismail, the host of Slate’s Man Up podcast, led a discussion about how what it means to be a man has changed in today’s world. The trio referred to this changed concept of masculinity as “positive masculinity.”⁵⁷ Ismail explained that there has recently been an increase in the number of groups of men who explore masculinity and patriarchy.

ISMAIL: I think that 2019 is really an awesome time to be this vulnerable guy who is admittingly not perfect. I think like what you were describing is true, that there is, at least I can speak for myself, there is something within me that wants to project this perfection, and a lot of it comes from ego. I have always thought that if I am not putting on the best version of myself, my weaknesses will be exposed… you want to be perfect so that they can think you’re perfect. When I am with my guy friends, we all kind of do that with each other. We all try to project this version of ourselves that is infallible, that’s funny, that’s smart, that is charming, and dealing with, accepting the fact that you might not be hard, for some of us that is the first time we have ever had too. Being a guy in America, pretty much everywhere, is a very privileged status to have. Because you are rarely challenged by a child, and as a teenager, and a lot of people as an adult, it becomes twice as hard to challenge yourself.

HOST: So in thinking about challenging yourself, I am just going to be real. Something that I know is frustrating for me, I feel like the conversations that women have and the ways in which we are required to develop emotionally is not the same thing that is demanded of men. I have found that, specific[ally] in the context of romantic relationships, women are doing a lot of that emotional labor to get guys caught up. SO my question is what role do you think your marriage played in pushing you to ask yourself deeper questions and challenge yourself to think about what it means to be a man

ISMAIL: Whooo!! Damn!! How do you just know the questions to ask?

HOSTS: [laughing]

ISMAIL: [laughing] I got to shout out to my beautiful perfect wife. When I talk about perfection

HOST: perfect answer… you are earning so many points right now.⁵⁸

He went on to credit his wife for making him work for the relationship and that work of introspection led to his being open and generous. He said that he made him “want to be a better man.”⁵⁹ This dialogue reveals a counter-narrative about what it means to be a man: it defines masculinity as concealing weaknesses rather than as being a symbol of strength.

Podcasters also offered counter-narratives to terms and phrases in the American lexicon that are conceptually neutral but patriarchal in their use. For example, some podcasts looked at how “hygiene” has been co-opted to create patriarchal expectations around women’s health practices. Divided States of Women questioned whether the $32-billion-worth feminine hygiene industry is based on serving not women’s health, but rather the demands of men. They explained that the “products for menstruation, a chunk also goes to products that help women keep their vaginas clean: douches, deodorants, and sprays … coupled with other treatments such as waxing, vajazzling, or even labiaplasty, gives vagina-havers around the world one message: Keep your vagina clean, pretty, and odor-free.”⁶⁰ By contrast, the program sought to offer a counter-narrative to this message by doubting “whether vaginas need all these products to ‘stay clean’” and by asking: “Why are there no similar products to keep penises clean?”

By exploring the fluidity of gender, the podcast space also created a counter-narrative to the binary notion of gender codified in the dominant patriarchal ideology. One good example in this area is TransPanTastic, a podcast that analyzes a much content through the lens of individuals who have changed or are in the process of changing their gender identity, in other words of transitioning from one gender identity to another; as they put it, they “talk about transition, parenting, transition, working in the public sector, transition, relationships, and did we mention transition?”⁶¹ Much of the show focuses on the host, George. In one episode, the podcast explored the different treatment that George has received since undergoing his transition. TransPanTastic is hardly the only podcast to offer counter-narratives to gender binaries. For example, Gender Rebels explores genital reassignment surgery (GRS) in episodes that discuss the process of vaginoplasty, a practice whereby a vagina is surgically created, and how it influences and transforms patients’ lives.⁶²

Counter-narratives about gender were often built on personal stories. For example, the view that Hollywood is “woke” and inclusive was challenged by Phoebe, one of the co-hosts of 2 Dope Queens, in a presentation of her personal experience of being a tokenist in Hollywood.⁶³ A July 2019 episode of QUEERY with Cameron Esposito explored patriarchal establishments such as the military and aeronautics by interviewing Anne McClain about her time in the military and the six months she had spent in space as an astronaut.⁶⁴ In a September 2019 episode, Gender Blender interviewed Theo, a non-binary trans person living and working in Vancouver, Canada, about the realities of “passing, fitting in, pronouns, and navigating the medical system.”⁶⁵ The goal was, similarly, to explore the dominance of transphobic narratives through a personal story and to propose an alternative.

Podcasters also presented counter-narratives to how we analyze or think about gender inequities. Divided States of Women pointed out that a great deal of attention is rightfully given to the absence of women in job fields dominated by men.⁶⁶ The hosts remarked that, “over the past few decades, women have entered male-dominated fields in record numbers. And while women may face unequal pay or workplace discrimination, they currently occupy 20% of jobs that were historically considered only appropriate for men.” But they also offered a counter-narrative about what stops men from entering so-called pink-collar jobs – that is, industries that are dominated by women such as nursing, teaching, and secretarial staff. In these spaces there has been less of an advance “in terms of gender parity: Only 10% are occupied by men. What stops men from taking jobs historically dominated by women?” Their counter-narrative emphasized the limits of defining equality one-sidedly, in terms of getting women into men’s spaces. In fact the complementary process should be part of this goal: men should get into women’s spaces as well. This narrative asserts that, if equality is defined narrowly, by the presence of women in spaces dominated by men but not by the complementary presence of men in spaces dominated by women, the message that goes out is one a dismissal and disparagement of the value of fields with a preponderance of women and of women’s contributions in those fields.

Counter-narratives in this podcasting space explore complex and sophisticated nuances that the notion of gender identity takes in groups that are often ignored or simplified by legacy news media. For example, legacy media would assume that Donald Trump’s sexism makes him unappealing to women. This analysis treats women as monolithic voters. But the podcasting space illustrates that women voters are more complex in their approach to politics, as they examine factors beyond the sexist attitudes and behaviors of a candidate. Rather than just focus on the way men perpetuate gender inequities, the hosts of various podcasts explore how women may contribute as well. For example, on a November 2019 episode of The Gender Knot Podcast, author Elizabeth Plank explained: “We often talk about all the stuff men do to uphold this stuff. But, we kind of need to look at how women need to not let the men in their lives off the hook.”⁶⁷ In the podcast, Plank shared her research on female pro-Trump voters and on their role in upholding masculinity. The conversation offers a counter-narrative to many of the common views regarding sex, politics, and gender in popular culture. In fact many decolonial podcasters view their programs as serving precisely to create such a thing: a powerful and much needed counter-narrative on sexual practices.

Counter-narratives of Heteronormativity and Settler Colonial Monogamous Sexual Practice

Podcasters with counter-narratives on sexual relationships and practices overwhelmingly place non-monogamous alternatives center stage. The most common themes that occur in this space relate to ethical non-monogamy, polyamory polyfidelity, swinging, open relationships, monogamism, and the like. Wyoh Lee’s Sex Stories podcast offers an interesting community format, where listeners share everything, from audio and video stories to video stripteases, nudes, and written stories.⁶⁸ As a host, Wyoh Lee makes these stories the centerpiece of her podcast. Many of them are community stories from guests, and they present counter-narratives that challenge monogamy and gender binaries. Among the more notable episodes are “Crossdressing Fantasies and So Many Kinks,” “Unwitting Genius, Magnet of Threesomes &…,” “First Time, First Threesome, First Kink,” and “Lunch Break Foursomes & Fire Escape BJ’s.” Lee’s ability to laugh at herself and to open up about her own sexual history and experimentation, together with her soft voice and easy demeanor, creates an environment of acceptance. Her reading of listener stories represents a positive affirmation of non-normative sexual diversity. Amy Baldwin and April Lampert’s podcast Shameless Sex frequently appeals to guests from the adult entertainment industry as well as to professional sex educators in order to normalize alternative sexual practices. Topics have ranged from navigating jealousy in non-monogamy to cuckolding, what it means to have a “conscious cock,” and unleashing your inner feminine dominance. Guests have included Dr. Nan Wise, author of Why Good Sex Matters; male porn stars Erik Everhard and Davey Wavey; Kitty Chambliss, author of Jealousy Survival Guide; Kink educator Midori; and innovative sex toy designer Ti Chang.

Black porn stars King Noire and Jet Setting Jasmine offer more than critiques of racism in the pornographic industry and within fetish communities on the Royal Fetish Radio podcast. Their work contains counter-narratives that deconstruct common stereotypes about Black sexuality; an example of such a counter-narrative is the critique of Black sexual conservatism. King Noire and Jet Setting Jasmine speak to the presence of African Americans in kink and in ethical non-monogamous lifestyles, and frequently link their presentation of counter-narratives of Black sexuality with American politics and racism. Representative episodes of the podcast Royal Fetish Radio are “Porn and Politics: The Race of Spades,” “Sex in the Motherland,” and “Decolonizing Sex.” In this last one King Noire and Jet Setting Jasmine create a counter-narrative of bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, and sadomasochism (BDSM) sexuality, disconnecting it from the history of slavery and Black trauma:

KING NOIRE: We also have challenged certain things as well.

JET SETTING JASMINE: We challenge people too.

KING NOIRE: Challenging people, challenge companies, challenge old, crusty ass ideas, yeah. You know i think about like the first time when we really started like getting on stage and doing flogging and working with dragon tails and things like that and there is a certain amount of trauma for our people that is uh associated with some BDSM type tools, you know. Like for example like the pillory where you have your head and they close the thing on top of your head or whatever. You know, that was not just used during slavery, that was used, you know, going back to like Spanish Inquisition and in Europe and things like that, but it was also used here as a way to publicly humiliate and shame people. Or people would get public floggings and lashing and have floggers with metal on them to rip up people’s backs and things like that. But there is a part of impact play that can be pleasurable and it was very important for us to involve ourselves in the pleasure part and test some of the parts for ourselves that had trauma. You know like I have trauma wrapped around handcuffs from getting beat by police, you know, so what other kind of ways can I enjoy restraints that aren’t associated with trauma, you know. So, you were like hey, let’s try putting some rope on your chest just to feel some, some pressure, but not have your arms. You know, like just thinking outside of that little box gave me an opportunity to try something that I probably wouldn’t have tried otherwise. So, all of these things, like okay, you don’t want this type of whip and I could understand why, we’re just gonna do hands or we have floggers made of feathers, you know what I’m saying? Do we find other ways that then we can take steps to have associations with things that aren’t only with trauma.

JET SETTING JASMINE: Well, that that is so important and that’s like the re-defining and putting things in new context and reframing it for us is so important, because we miss out on exploring our sex and sexuality because of those traumatic experiences, the generational trauma. We don’t see that all those different types of people have been put in that public humiliation public punishment. You know, you really do have to dig for it, but when you look at our history, it starts there for us, you know what I mean? So I think we’ve had as a people to try so hard to figure out bits and pieces of our history beyond slavery or prior to slavery, that we don’t even have the privilege and time to look at the history of a pillory or a flogging and those type of things, or even study the science of pleasure. So, I appreciate that kind of work, and seeing people’s eyes light up, and like I could try this and do it in a new way, or I can do it without thinking of someone doing this to me, because they hate me.⁶⁹

King Noire and Jet Setting Jasmine offer this redefinition of kinky sexuality as a means of liberating Black pleasure from the constraints of Black trauma. Resonating the imperatives of contemporary scholar and activist Adrienne Maree Brown, they seek to give pleasure a central role and to transcend trauma so as to reach a healing, liberated, and decolonized sense of Black sexuality. Kiki Said and Medinah Monroe of Cocktales: Dirty Discussions offer thoughtful and humorous commentaries on the practicalities of non-monogamy from the perspective of people of color.⁷⁰ Said and Monroe not only discuss counter-heteronormative narratives of relationships; they also live and share them. In fact their program presents them as two single women “looking for something a little different in their love lives. The women give uncensored accounts about their sex and dating lives, relationships, and what it’s really like to navigate the sea of love in Atlanta.” They promote a sex-positive and Black woman-centered sense of sexual freedom; and they share feelings of being content without a man or outside monogamous relationships – feelings that run counter to heteronormative narratives of women and relationships. In episode 170, “I Wanna Watch,” they recount a personal experience of engaging in a threesome. “A threesome” refers to three people engaging in sexual activity. In the podcast episode, the hosts discussed a threesome made up of two females and one male (FFM), where the second woman requests voyeurism rather than physical engagement. Kiki Said added:

I was having sex with someone one time, and it was me, a guy, and a girl. I thought we were having a threesome but the girl was like “I just wanna watch y’all fuck,” and she got out of the bed, sat on the chair, and was like… and then she started playing with herself and then came and joined in later but for a while she really was watching and she enjoyed it and I was kinda nervous and I was wondering, do you just wanna watch or are you trying to get me in a vulnerable position… because this was her nigga, not mine!⁷¹

Said and Monroe also remain cognizant of ethical constraints and of the need for communication. For example, with respect to the concept of having sexually open relationships and the need for rules, they argued that without rules “you’re gonna be violating on all types of levels.”

Other notable podcasts in this genre that explore ethical non-monogamy and hotwife and cuckolding lifestyles are Normalizing Non-monogamy,⁷² Making Polyamory Work,⁷³ Multiamory Podcast,⁷⁴ American Sex, which “looks at unconventional sexual expression in the United States,”⁷⁵ The Cuckening,⁷⁶ Relationship Anarchy,⁷⁷ The Keys and Anklets,⁷⁸ Holly’s HotWifeLife,⁷⁹ Millennial Sex True Stories, hosted by Professor XX,⁸⁰ Front Porch Swingers,⁸¹ Loving without Boundaries,⁸² The Priory Society: A Podcast for Swingers,⁸³ and Venus Cuckoldress.⁸⁴ Finally, critiquing the inability of heteronormative analysis to understand non-heterosexual relations, these podcasters propose a future where heterosexual couples turn to same-sex couples for advice. For example, a November 2019 episode of The Gender Knot Podcast saw Dan Savage, sex and relationship advice columnist and host of the Savage LoveCast, discuss what straight couples could learn from same-sex couples.⁸⁵

Interestingly, there are several voices of women and people of color in this space. Notable podcasts include Latina Hotwife Adventures: An Ethical Non-Monogamy Podcast, where an anonymous Latinx ethical non-monogamist shares fifteen years of her personal experiences, including advice on safety and on navigating jealousy.⁸⁶ In episode 7, titled “Guys 12–16,” she speaks frankly of having sex with four different men in a row on one day, communicating with her husband after each lover, and fearing pregnancy after a mishap. Jhen and Sham, the hosts of Monogam-ish, explore polyamory through a Caribbean lens;⁸⁷ and Kim Tallbear’s The Critical Polyamorist focuses on indigenous racial and cultural politics related to polyamory.⁸⁸ Jhavia Nicole’s Black Radical Queer podcast “explores the intersection of blackness and queerness. Your favorite lesbian is polyamorous… but her wife isn’t! In this episode, Jhavia and her partner answer questions from listeners about how polyamory factors into their relationship.”⁸⁹

Podcasters also use their space to present general counter-narratives of love and intimacy. Jasmine Danielle, a.k.a. Podcast Bae, host of The Black Girl Experience, questioned the conflation of love and sex in an episode that argued that being “connected with somebody on all levels, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, sexually” is love regardless of sexual compatibility.⁹⁰ A Food 4 Thot in February 2020 argued that dominant discourses on love miss the subtleties of what love means to different identity groups.⁹¹ It contended that, despite similarities, queer love is “both different and unique” by comparison with other types of love. The podcasters also use their space to offer alternative narratives about sexuality and its relationship to love. A Food 4 Thot episode of April 2020 investigated and critiqued intimacy. The hosts – Tommy “Teebs” Pico, Fran Tirado, Dennis Norris, and Joe Osmundson – asked:

What did intimacy mean to you in the past, and what does it mean now? How do you find, or achieve intimacy, and how do you avoid it? And when things get a little too intimate, do we lean in, or lean out? We curl your toes with another deliciously curious edition of SRSL, we for here give our trashiest advice yet, and for dessert we introduce you to the new king of our hearts.⁹²

Podcasts about sexuality take audiences to spaces that do not exist in legacy media and thus, just by making themselves available or creating those spaces exist, act as a counter-narrative to how Americans understand sexual discourse in America. The best example of this is Why Are People into That?!, which purposefully examines sexual preferences and behavior rarely if ever discussed by any significant proportion of the populace. For example, the podcast has an episode titled “Sex and Fascism” that explored the

sex appeal of fascism: the desire to be violated. To be cut through like butter and spread … Fascism is sexy because it’s dangerous, confident, and… leather! It’s scary and comforting at the same time because you don’t have to make any decisions. We’re afraid of it because our power is taken away, and we want it because we want our power to be taken away.⁹³

The episode’s content warning (CW) reads: “two Jewish anti-fascist leftist queers in Brooklyn talking about the history, esthetics, and complicated erotic allegories of fascism.⁹⁴ ”Any individual preference or desire can be portrayed as an outlier of the dominant culture, but the podcasting space brings them together, allowing us to see that dominant ideas about sex and sexuality are less common than they are portrayed in those spaces. Sex Nerd Sandra hosted an episode that countered the idea that an HIV infection ends all sexual practices by arguing that a sexual relationship can be maintained as long as both parties take proper precautions.⁹⁵ Similarly, on an episode of Gender Knot, Nas and Dan argued that, rather than be shielded from discussions about sex, children should be introduced to concepts such as attaining consent while they are young.

But, while there is a vast and rich amount of material regarding sexual mores in the decolonial podcasting space, counter-narratives regarding ableism are sorely absent.⁹⁶

Counter-narratives of Ableism

Although the podcasting space contains a few counter-narratives of the dominant ableist ideology, our survey did not reveal any podcasts that operate in this space (let alone a substantive number of them). However, on All Things Equal, host Kate Supron noted that ableist ideology assumes that any non-able or challenged schoolboy would prefer to be “with his own kind.”⁹⁷ Supron invited Sunshine to the program to discuss her fight against ableist structures in education in order to get access for her son Israel, who was born with Down syndrome. In the same way, Divided States of Women noted that discourses about the minimum wage are ableist because they project an ideal amount that ignores the experience of the disabled. The hosts argued that “subminimum wages are less than the minimum wage and given to people based on certain criteria. According to the Fair Labor Standards Act, these can include student learners, people in certain service industries, and people with disabilities. Yes, you read that right: Employers are legally allowed to pay people with disabilities less money.” ⁹⁸ The episode offered a counter-narrative in which minimum wage discourse maintains the exploitation of those challenged in point of ability. But, not surprisingly, just as our research found little interrogation and critique of ableist mentalities, it found few counter-narratives, too. If this space grows, we assume that decolonial podcasts will offer more substantive and frequent programs to provide hopeful visions for non-able people – just as they have for race, gender, class, and sexuality.

Conclusion

Indeed, counter-narrative podcasting is a space for visionaries who can imagine a future beyond the constraints of dominant ideological constructs. These podcasters offer inspired perspectives that come from identity groups that have been maligned by dominant structures of oppression. Podcasters in this space also generally offer optimism about what the future has in store, and they use their space to reimagine the ways in which communities should be imagined. Here ethical considerations and empathy are affirmatively placed at the core, and podcasters reject the narrow nihilism of dominant ideologies. Those who offer counter-narratives of sexuality and non-monogamy consistently focus on communication, power sharing, and ethics, in a hopeful projection of achieving the potential of what it means to be a loving and empathetic human being. Podcasters in the spaces of race, gender, and ableism consistently reach for a faraway horizon in which the structures of domination can be overcome and transcended.

Our research from Chapter 1 indicated that many podcasters benefit from privilege; thus it is not always clear whether they produce a counter-narrative from the perspective of maligned identity groups or as members of those groups. However, because counter-narrative production relies heavily upon existing narrative and storytelling, podcasters are more likely to be representatives of the groups and issues they are concerned with. Truth and veracity, in these instances, are determined through personal storytelling rather than through data and statistics, and hosts must generally be anchored in the communities they address in order to be believed.