Allusionist 217. Bread and Roses, and Coffee transcript

September 24, 2025 The Allusionist

I was really interested in what were the stakes of calling your restaurant feminist? What were you holding yourself accountable to? What were you trying to signal to potential customers? What were you trying to say to staff and so forth?

HZ: What were the consequences? Because there were a lot of like upsides and downsides to having 'feminist' in the restaurant's name.

ALEX KETCHUM: Yeah, for sure. Some of the upsides were that you were signalling to other likeminded folks or curious folks that this could be a space for them to gather. There was an indication of the politics of the space. So it was an indication of what kind of events you might find, speakers you might find, artwork and music you might see and hear in the space.
There were also ways that people might feel more invested in the space, that they might contribute time or money or energy, or be just interested in visiting. Calling it a feminist space oftentimes was also one of the many code words, during the 1970s and 1980s, to also signal lesbian space or questioning space; or a term we might use today, but would be anachronistic at the time, as kind of like a queer women's space. So, this was a way of marking like, "Hey, you might be welcome here, your sexual orientation might be accepted, you might hear a poet you're interested in hearing," and so forth. So, there were a lot of kind of benefits in building community and interest in the space by indicating the term.
And then the downsides could also be, you know, there's bias against the word 'feminism'. Some people would feel uncomfortable with it or push back on it. There was also a concern from many of the people who founded these spaces that they might be targeted for violence. They might get rocks through the windows and so forth. Generally, that wasn't the case with a few exceptions, but there was also kind of a heightened level of fear in choosing to mark your space so explicitly.

Allusionist 145 Parents transcript

November 8, 2021 The Allusionist

FREDDY McCONNELL: A lot of the time when you hear about trans and non binary inclusion in pregnancy care, the idea is that all of this inclusive stuff is additive. It's not meant to replace language that works for the vast majority of people who are pregnant, which are cis women; it's just this is the language you use if and when you do encounter someone who's trans.

Allusionist 118 Survival: Bequest transcript

July 4, 2020 The Allusionist

ELIZABETH KEREKERE: I'm so convinced that transphobia, biphobia, homophobia are such an integral part of colonisation, I reject that as a colonial construct, I reject it as racist.
As they took our land - tried to take all of our land, tried to take all of our language and suppress our culture, they also took our expressions of sexuality and gender. And that is important to us in a core part of our culture, especially because the way that the institutional racism, the intergenerational trauma that is the legacy of colonisation has impacted on us and the levels of discrimination against people with diverse genders, sexualities and sex characteristics, that we see that all of this, all of this was a massive attempt to cover up what was already there and pretend it never happened.

Allusionist 93. Gossip - transcript

February 6, 2019 The Allusionist

HZ: A thousand or so years ago, the word ‘gossip’ meant something quite different: a family member. The word broke down to ‘god sibb’, like a godsibling, although then the ‘sibb’ wasn’t necessarily a sibling, was more general, could refer to anyone you were related to. And over the next few hundred years, more specifically, gossips were the close female family and friends who would attend to a woman during labour; she would be sequestered and maybe half a dozen gossips would gather in the room to take care of the mother and help deliver the baby and witness the birth for the purposes of the baby’s baptism - at which these gossips, godsibbs, would be the child’s sponsors. And during these confinements, the women would keep each other company and talk. So you can see how the word would evolve to mean the kind of confidential chat you’d have with someone you’re close to, but by the mid-16th century the word had taken on a bit of a disapproving tone, that the talk was trivial and maybe scurrilous - and female. And these associations persist to this day.

LAINEY LUI: One of my goals as a gossip crusader is to end the pejorative way it's presented in culture, that it's a thing that hens do all around, pecking at each other. It's highly feminized, which is why it's not taken as seriously, when in fact the research shows that we all gossip: it's a human way of communicating.