For women and girls, studying history rarely gives us the answers we seek about how we arrived here. Official history is written by men about men, about male projects, enterprise and progress, and women are all but footnotes.
Elle speaks with author and ...
For women and girls, studying history rarely gives us the answers we seek about how we arrived here. Official history is written by men about men, about male projects, enterprise and progress, and women are all but footnotes.
Elle speaks with author and artist Renée Gerlich, who has had a driving passion since childhood, to uncover what official history was hiding and erasing. Renée builds on a rich tradition of writers, artists, scientists and revolutionaries to re-draw a world history from a female perspective that not only puts women back in the story, but that corrects the distortions and artifice designed to obscure and oppress all that is female - then and now.
This sweeping conversation flies through sexual homonization, the origins of mathematics and human spirituality, the true purpose of religion and law, the establishments of patriarchy, privatization of the commons, and neoliberalism, witch-hunting then and now, the meaning of recent mass movements, or lack thereof, and what you can and cannot talk about today.
Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
Author & Artist
Renée Gerlich is a New Zealand-based writer and the author of Out of the Fog: On Politics, Feminism and Coming Alive, a new book offering a survey of the contemporary political landscape, published by Spinifex Press. In 2021, Renée founded Dragon Cloud Press to publish her Brief Complete Herstory, a female-centered potted history of the world from the Big Bang to neoliberalism. Essays by Renée can be found on Feminist Current, Savage Minds, Uncommon Ground Media, and her blog, reneejg.net.
Renée has a background in art history and education and completed her Masters in Art History at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She was researcher for the 2016 documentary called The HeArt of the Matter, about the development and subsequent rollback of education reforms implemented by New Zealand’s first Labour government, directed and produced by Luit and Jan Bieringa.