Artist, performer, and host Helga Davis brings a soulful curiosity and love of people to the podcast Helga, where she talks about the intimate lives of creative people as they share the steps they’ve taken along their path. She draws listeners into these discussions with cultural change-makers, whether already famous or rising talents, whose sensibilities expand our imaginations as we explore what we think we know about each other. The new season of Helga is a co-production of WNYC Studios and the Brown Arts Institute at Brown University. WNYC Studios is a listener-supported producer of other leading podcasts including Radiolab, On the Media, and Death, Sex & Money. The Brown Arts Institute at Brown University is a new university-wide research enterprise and catalyst for the arts at Brown that creates new work and supports, amplifies, and adds new dimensions to the creative practices of Brown’s arts departments, faculty, students, and community.
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Artist, performer, and host Helga Davis brings a soulful curiosity and love of people to the podcast Helga, where she talks about the intimate lives of creative people as they share the steps they’ve taken along their path. She draws listeners into these discussions with cultural change-makers, whether already famous or rising talents, whose sensibilities expand our imaginations as we explore what we think we know about each other. The new season of Helga is a co-production of WNYC Studios and the Brown Arts Institute at Brown University. WNYC Studios is a listener-supported producer of other leading podcasts including Radiolab, On the Media, and Death, Sex & Money. The Brown Arts Institute at Brown University is a new university-wide research enterprise and catalyst for the arts at Brown that creates new work and supports, amplifies, and adds new dimensions to the creative practices of Brown’s arts departments, faculty, students, and community.
Writer Macarena Gómez-Barris on finding beauty in ambiguity
Helga
52 minutes 51 seconds
2 years ago
Writer Macarena Gómez-Barris on finding beauty in ambiguity
This [term] 'femme' becomes more possible to me as a figure for not just embodiment, but for thought, action, engagement, connection.
Macarena Goméz-Barris is Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, founder of the Global South Center at Pratt Institute, an organization which supports artists, activists, and scholars in their efforts to decolonialize local and global communities.
In this episode, Goméz-Barris talks about how one can and must find beauty in the most ambiguous of places, how she uses the word “femme” to escape the embattled histories of the word “female," and how she has—and hasn’t—moved on from a traumatic early swimming lesson with her father.
References:
Constantine Petrou Cavafy
Waiting for the Barbarians
Audre Lorde
Uses of the Erotic, The Erotic is Power
Saidiya Hartman
Octavia E. Butler
Parable of the Talents
Helga
Artist, performer, and host Helga Davis brings a soulful curiosity and love of people to the podcast Helga, where she talks about the intimate lives of creative people as they share the steps they’ve taken along their path. She draws listeners into these discussions with cultural change-makers, whether already famous or rising talents, whose sensibilities expand our imaginations as we explore what we think we know about each other. The new season of Helga is a co-production of WNYC Studios and the Brown Arts Institute at Brown University. WNYC Studios is a listener-supported producer of other leading podcasts including Radiolab, On the Media, and Death, Sex & Money. The Brown Arts Institute at Brown University is a new university-wide research enterprise and catalyst for the arts at Brown that creates new work and supports, amplifies, and adds new dimensions to the creative practices of Brown’s arts departments, faculty, students, and community.