00:00:42.000And the leader of this coven is, was, and ever shall be, white feather hunter, and one of the most fascinating people probably that I've ever met in person, I would say.
00:01:51.500Great. So this is a legit academic journal. There is actually a field called Dracula Studies. And it just so happens that they issued a call for a special edition on witches.
00:02:07.280so i will be submitting to that journal their deadline's january 1st so i haven't submitted
00:02:15.300it yet i'm still working on it i'm still working through my ideas and those will be some of the
00:02:20.140ideas that i throw out there tonight for all of the listeners get ready for some dracula adjacent
00:02:26.500ideas now is it is it like a literary journal is it focused on like the novel dracula or like
00:02:32.460the mythology of vampires yeah yeah bram stoker's um i thought i mean the whole gamut and i i found
00:02:42.000it so interesting that they decided to do a special issue on witches but i guess it makes
00:02:46.480sense since you know there's been such a revival of witchiness and yeah popular culture lately
00:02:53.300yes i spoke to uh one woman and i asked her if she was a witch and she sort of thought about it
00:02:58.900for a minute that she said i think i'm more spooky than witchy i think i'm more haunted than witchy
00:03:05.440and i think that's been they're very related haunted spooky witchy they they can be for sure
00:03:14.140and you know there is also a whole field of philosophy called hauntology get into that
00:03:20.740please yeah um i mean it's not a philosophy that i have had the opportunity to dive into
00:03:27.780too much because i've been busy with art philosophy mainly um but yeah it's it's just
00:03:35.960looking at um metaphysical stuff that's maybe disembodied i can't actually give you a definition
00:03:44.040for it because it's not my field of research then how about this do you believe in ghosts
00:03:48.300i've seen ghosts can you tell me about that i have had an experience uh actually it was around
00:03:57.740this time of year um the veil is at its thinnest of course uh i had a fetch appeared to me a ghost
00:04:06.220that is is referred to as a fetch and a fetch comes and appears to let you know that someone
00:04:14.840close to you has died oh yeah yeah and so uh the fetch that appeared to me was at the end of my
00:04:24.140apartment hallway just for a flash of a second there was a woman in a black veil and a black
00:04:29.780dress and it was that split second you see something out of the corner of your eye and you0.99
00:04:34.160go what the fuck was that um yeah and I found out the next day that I had lost a friend to suicide0.89
00:04:41.020oh my goodness yeah so the fetch came to prepare me I guess yeah and it's something that a lot of0.99
00:04:50.720people would have just brushed off and thought that it was a piece of dust in the light in their
00:04:55.360eye or something but the witch sees things I think more for what they are absolutely and just being
00:05:01.740open to the possibility of maybe there was something there yes the great maybe I love
00:05:08.120living inside that great maybe yeah and that that great maybe is something that I'm having a really
00:05:15.360tricky time negotiating right now um in my research because i'm working between witchcraft
00:05:22.780and science you know and yeah science yeah science you know we we have been trained to believe
00:05:31.140has all of the answers or or seeks to have the answers um and sometimes you know in some people's
00:05:41.420minds that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for mystery or uh the uns you know believing in the
00:05:49.280unseen or or what have you when there's sort of an obsession with uh proof so yes yeah some things
00:05:57.480just can't be proven or some things you know we witches don't necessarily need to be proven
00:06:05.540it's a tricky negotiation and how do you navigate that in your own experience well
00:06:12.960i can tell you working in the lab and working with scientific experimentation exclusively
00:06:20.680scientific experimentation there are a lot of things that are extremely abstract
00:06:28.680and become this blanket of data which can be interpreted in different ways
00:06:39.300depending on what you apply to the data.
00:06:42.300And these things get constructed into what is presented as a truth.
00:06:48.520What constitutes proof may sort of be subjective, you know,
00:06:54.680although science hopes to be objective uh it's it's just can't be the case all the time and
00:07:02.380we're human and everything has our human interpretation so yeah i i would always uh
00:07:10.480be a little bit wary of things that are presented as the absolute truth or proven scientifically
00:07:17.720proven because when you're working in the lab it you have to be there has to be a certain level of
00:07:23.520precision because when you're experimenting you need to replicate i mean you can attempt precision
00:07:29.680but when you're working with life uh life's messy and life's unpredictable and you can aim towards
00:07:41.460precision but there are so many different variables that can skew that precision and then
00:07:49.060you just have to work with what you have so yeah you specifically work very much with what you have
00:07:56.640you've worked with your own blood your own tissue can you get into that a little bit
00:08:01.620you really want to go there now let's talk about blood just for a minute are you ready to go there
00:08:10.400Yes. So my science-based practice is in tissue culture and tissue engineering. And for your listeners who aren't familiar with what that is, it's essentially growing mammalian cells in a Petri dish, caring for them in an incubator,
00:08:34.660feeding them nutrient fluid, watching them grow, observing their morphology, which is their shape,
00:08:43.300their characteristics, and often counting cells. And I spend a lot of time counting millions and
00:08:50.720millions and millions of cells to collect data. And this is the specific technique that is used
00:08:58.880to, or which they hope to use, to grow meat, to produce lab-grown meat.
00:09:09.580It's also called clean meat, and it's also called cellular agriculture.
00:09:16.860So tissue culture relies very much on the animal industry still.
00:09:24.160um cells need proteins and other nutrients uh in order to be able to grow that are currently
00:09:34.540derived from a standardized form of fetal calf serum and fetal calf serum is a heart blood from
00:09:46.580the heart of a fetal calf that is extracted while it's still in its mother so it's bled to death
00:09:51.280while it's still nuts mother and the the startup community um that's you know promoting lab grown
00:09:58.820meat they are hoping to gain more investor dollars and uh develop this as an industrially
00:10:07.720scalable product are presenting it within all of these frameworks of you know ecological green
00:10:16.020um cruelty free animal free um even vegan uh quote unquote clean meat and you know when you
00:10:28.960work in tissue culture you know that uh as of yet there's still no way to to culture mammalian cells
00:10:38.300without the fetal calf serum i've been doing some experiments in the lab
00:10:43.640recently where i'm growing cells in human serum instead and this is where we get into the vampire
00:10:52.900studies stuff it's like frank frankenstein meets dragon yeah so human serum uh is available from
00:11:04.440laboratory supply companies. It's interestingly only available from males. So this is something
00:11:14.900that I found really interesting, and I was looking into it a little bit, and it's a problem
00:11:22.180because how can you test for physiologically female-specific diseases using male, human male
00:11:34.100serum it's uh you know it presents all kinds of sort of variables that can skew results and
00:11:43.800and is a great demonstration of how patriarchy has ignored women's and
00:11:51.020yeah yeah so yeah i mean it fits into all of that how is it harvested if it's taken from fetal
00:12:02.560cows for the for the bovine how is it harvested for humans from humans well uh nobody's being
00:12:11.700stabbed in the heart in utero yeah it's i mean it's it would be acquired the same way any blood
00:12:19.460donation would be acquired okay just just just an intravenous yeah i'm confused as to why this
00:12:26.340would be other than just abject patriarchal chauvinism like why do they only use men's
00:12:34.500well i'm just there i'm so confused yeah well i mean there's one argument that um0.91
00:12:43.720male blood uh is a good baseline because females have hormonal fluctuations
00:12:52.520uh so it's more difficult to standardize but we know that men also have hormonal fluctuations
00:13:03.980right um interestingly you know when when blood donations are taken blood is categorized
00:13:11.240differently according to sex or gender. And part of the reason for that is because when you're
00:13:23.320giving a blood transfusion, there is a specific disease that can be fatal if it's blood that was
00:13:35.620taken from a woman who has ever been pregnant um and there are certain antibodies present
00:13:41.800so that can be a problem um but when we're yeah but when we're talking about laboratory experiments
00:13:48.480and you're just growing cells or you know testing for diseases this isn't a concern this is not a
00:13:54.580blood transfusion right you know and i you know i don't profess to have all of the knowledge on
00:14:01.020this issue because i've only started researching this recently and you know i've just been working
00:14:06.900on this research over the last nine months probably um so i'm still discovering things
00:14:12.500and the work the experimentation that i will eventually be doing um when i go back to
00:14:19.700australia yes you spend a lot of time in australia yeah well i'm doing my phd at the
00:14:27.080University of Western Australia. And it's a unique PhD in that it's a cross-enrollment between
00:14:36.080the School of Design and the School of Human Sciences. So it's a little bit like doing two
00:14:42.600PhDs in one. I have to produce a body of artistic work, but I also have to produce some scientific
00:14:50.640data that, you know, could be published in a scientific journal. So the experiments that
00:14:57.120I decided to do that sort of bridge those two worlds, and I'll explain a little bit more how it
00:15:04.500touches into the art world. But I decided, well, what if I grow some mammalian cells
00:15:16.380from my own blood. And what if I can use my own blood that's easier to access, that's
00:15:24.120non-invasive, where I don't have to stick needles into myself? And so I decided to
00:15:29.080see if anyone has ever tried to grow cells in menstrual blood.
00:15:37.840And from what I can see in all of the journal publications that I've looked through,
00:15:43.600nobody ever has and it's i mean i'm surprised that no one has this is a a steady supply
00:15:55.460and as you say not non-invasive is it just because um women have just not been as present
00:16:03.680in labs in the past as they are today that this hasn't happened already i would wager a guess0.99
00:16:10.740that it has something to do with the taboo nature of menstrual blood sure there there's been uh when
00:16:18.360i looked at research that has been done using menstrual blood it's mainly been used as a source
00:16:26.480of multi-potent stem cells so it's full of stem cells and of course this is the most non-invasive
00:16:34.740way that you could get stem cells as well because typically stem cells have to come from umbilical
00:16:40.260cord blood. So there is a little bit of research, just, you know, not a whole lot, but a little bit
00:16:47.280of research looking at sourcing stem cells from menstrual blood. And very, very recently, just
00:16:53.740last year, a scientific paper came out that it was a woman researcher who was working on this
00:17:00.960research. And she and her team discovered that menstrual blood actually will speed up the0.67
00:17:09.200healing process of an open wound so menstrual blood is like a healing elixir and we're so
00:17:18.080divorced from our own bodies that we don't even know this is that what you're telling me white
00:17:22.600feather exactly it's exactly what i'm telling you okay i just like i'm having a a mind explosion i
00:17:31.780mean i recently had my uh a uteral ablation because i was bleeding so heavily that it just
00:17:37.260wasn't worth keeping my uterus going as it was but i wish now i wish i had done some harvesting
00:17:43.460when i had the chance yeah seriously i don't so i don't know if it's the presence of the stem cells
00:17:50.120i would have to read through that study a little bit more closely to see if they
00:17:54.000have actually figured out why it uh speeds up the healing process it may be that it's the stem
00:18:00.580cells that are present i'm not sure it may be that the nutrients that are present in menstrual blood
00:18:05.700feed your own cells what they need to do skin repair? I'm not sure. But the research is there
00:18:15.140that shows that there are living cells in menstrual blood, and it contains nutrients
00:18:23.140that help with skin repair. So, you know, the combination of these two things leads me to
00:18:30.380believe that it could very well support the growth of cells in a petri dish this starts to touch on
00:18:37.920ideas of cannibalism if we're talking about lab-grown meat what if we grow meat using menstrual
00:18:43.900blood it's human meat for sure but what does that mean yeah yeah but is it is it human meat
00:18:53.720i don't know you tell me well if if if we're growing animal muscle tissue
00:18:59.960using menstrual blood is it human meat or is it animal meat
00:19:04.240well listeners what do you think email us at missing which is
00:19:10.200i i mean so this is the project that you're working on how do you what do you imagine
00:19:18.340manifesting as like the the quote-unquote like art project the the product of your this thesis
00:19:25.580so the privilege that i have as an artist is that the scientific research that i do
00:19:33.340will always contain an element of cultural critique and so the cultural critique that
00:19:42.900is inherent in this work is around the materiality of what i'm working with um okay let's let's just
00:19:54.220get one thing straight i'm not planning to propose to make clean meat from menstrual blood
00:20:01.560for the masses to consume this is this is actually a gesture this is a gesture that's
00:20:09.260meant to instigate some cultural conversation around well what actually is in clean meat what
00:20:19.060what's the materiality of cellular agriculture and have people thinking critically and having
00:20:25.420a discussion about this because I think that there's a tendency for you know we're all really
00:20:32.160stressed out about the end of the world and we're all we all feel guilty as humans we're destroying
00:20:40.800the planet and we want solutions and this need to find a solution to save the planet um i think
00:20:53.440makes us a little bit vulnerable to you know being being so hopeful when we see something
00:21:00.820that's presented as a solution, that we don't necessarily think about it critically.
00:21:07.320And one of the things that we need to think about critically is that solutionism right
00:21:14.000now is embedded within a capitalist framework.
00:21:21.660And, you know, I'm thinking back to a previous podcast.
00:21:25.540I think it was where you and Risa were having a conversational, you know, like a chat, just the two of you.1.00
00:21:35.120And I think she just kind of like slipped it in there that as witches, you're anti-capitalist as fuck.0.98
00:21:41.620And I just want to echo that because I think that I've been reading a lot about the history of witchcraft and how it coincides with, you know, the very beginning stages of capitalism.0.99
00:22:01.620And those, you know, those two things are very intricately intertwined.
00:22:07.680yes there's a great book that maybe you've read it's very short called witches midwives and nurses
00:22:12.740by barbara iron right anyway i'll put it in the show notes and deirdre english yeah
00:22:19.060yeah yeah that's that's was sort of one of the texts that i started out with
00:22:26.160um for those of you who are listening it's very accessible again i'll put it in the show notes
00:22:32.100because it's a quick read but it's an important read um yeah anyway sorry carry on yeah
00:22:37.440And, you know, it's sort of, I call it an ovulary text from Second Wave Feminism.
00:22:44.240And I call it an ovulary text because I don't want to say it's a seminal text.
00:22:53.180Okay, because a seminal text refers to semen, and it refers to, you know, an original idea.
00:23:04.480And for me, when you compare semen to ova and the amount of semen compared to the amount of ova, I would tend to think that something, the ova would be more of an original idea.
00:23:40.140I should also mention that two other texts that are really, really important in unpacking the connections between the advent of witchcraft,
00:23:51.720um you know demonological witchcraft and capitalism uh are written by sylvia federici
00:23:59.060for sure absolutely essential reading uh her first text is called caliban and the witch
00:24:06.180yes and this is quite a dense text but she published another one sort of a follow-up or
00:24:14.960an update to that where she revisits a lot of things but it's it's sort of a more easily
00:24:21.300digestible text it's not as dense um and it's called witches witch hunting and women so she's
00:24:29.240she's been informing a lot of what I've been writing about and I feel that she really sort
00:24:35.540of picks up the thread um that Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English laid out there they said okay
00:24:43.880here you go feminists follow this up and she was the one who answered that column followed it up so1.00
00:24:49.000i would say those are essential texts and now you are picking up the thread from there and taking it1.00
00:24:55.260where keep keep going on this journey i'm taking it into technology high tech and biotechnology
00:25:04.740specifically first i want to talk a little bit about deviance
00:25:10.100i'm sorry it's just that um next week uh our listeners are going to hear uh my interview
00:25:20.280with backwash an amazing emcee i know you're also a fan and her her latest record is called
00:25:26.680deviancy so this word has been yes ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing through
00:25:32.620my uh consciousness and my sort of zeitgeist right now so i just needed to mark that moment
00:25:38.000of deviancy and deviance. Please carry on. All right. So I'm going to talk a little bit about
00:25:45.800deviant pathways. And witches gain access to protected spaces through deviant pathways,0.77
00:25:54.320twisted beings that they are believed to be. So I'm asking the question, are they twisted to begin0.96
00:26:00.600with, or have they become distorted through the necessity for such navigational means?
00:26:06.860So deviance is broadly defined as the fact or state of diverging from usual or accepted standards, especially in social or sexual behavior.
00:26:18.740Legally, deviance is nestled within the realms of formal criminal behavior, specifically behavior that destabilizes social structural solidarity.
00:26:30.000And what that means in particular is the solidarity of a capitalist system.
00:26:36.860So these behaviors are seen to violate, you know, what's considered, quote, unquote, objective standards of adequate performance and moral duty of the good and virtuous life of reason.
00:26:53.140Okay, and this is actually an excerpt that I took from a text that was talking about how capitalism is the only moral social structure.
00:27:04.040Yeah. However, sociology theory sees deviance not only as a potential for criminality, but also as very much as an integral part of society where change and innovation intersect.
00:27:20.080And so in this way, deviance is culturally relative and therefore it's mutable over time and it can instigate cultural shifts as well as an adaptive method through acts of rebellion.
00:27:34.040And so this is where I'm interested in the witch and deviants. Within criminology theory, you have a theory called strain theory. And strain theory says that deviant paths make their way in response to obstacles.
00:27:52.620and these obstacles are in the form of societal pressures or strains and so these pressures or
00:28:01.500strains cause us to deviate our path in order to work around them and gain access to whatever
00:28:10.800end point we're trying to get to so you may have heard of another kind of deviant pathway
00:28:17.080that is sort of within landscaping and transportation planning terminology,
00:29:09.180And so I believe that deviance this way can be positioned within sociality and social or public structures as a product of both resistance and desire, specifically with regards to access and limitations.
00:29:31.560Exactly. Did you know that chimneys and houses used to actually be intentionally built with a bend in them, and this is called the witch's crook, so that the witch couldn't get down the chimney and come into the house?
00:31:36.040They provide the specific context of layperson versus professional.
00:31:41.200So this is their critical assessment of how situated knowledges of folk medicine
00:31:45.540that were provided to the poor were historically suppressed
00:31:49.700to promote this newly developing, rarefied, licensed medical service, mainly for the upper class.0.90
00:31:57.540Yes, because, of course, the witch was providing these services.0.69
00:32:01.720There was usually some form of exchange, you know, but it was community care.
00:32:07.280It was, you know, being taken care of in your time of need and taking care in your time of less need
00:32:14.140until, like you say, the difference between the lay person and the professional is the
00:32:19.160professional gets paid. That's the difference, right? And has to go to school, but has to go
00:32:24.580to a certain school and has to apply to that certain school and has to pay to go to that
00:32:28.600school and so on and so on and so on and so on. Exactly. So they explain in their book that a
00:32:35.200gradual takeover unfolded. And this was part of a, quote, political and economic monopolization
00:32:41.940of medicine. And so this monopolization happened through this establishment of the professional
00:32:48.600categorization. And what they're saying is that this layperson designation increasingly and
00:32:55.980predominantly was assigned to the common female healer. And these are the colloquial old wives.
00:33:03.520They were prohibited from entering the fledgling academic institutions because socially it wasn't0.99
00:33:10.900acceptable, but there were also financial obstacles, obviously. And therefore, they're
00:33:16.940denied the license to practice as what was known as regular doctors. And so the contamination
00:33:23.760that they're talking about is the contamination of the layperson. And this is the layperson is
00:33:29.560the autonomous lower class practitioner that was made more disreputable through some suspected
00:33:36.900association with witchcraft. This was what was promoted. And she was left precariously squatting1.00
00:33:43.320at the boundary of what would become conventional authorized medicine. And this is what we take for
00:33:49.680granted now as the absolute truth. That which has been authorized. Exactly. So I was interested
00:33:59.900in, you know, the history of witchcraft as an anti-capitalist resistance. And what Silvia
00:34:06.940Federici gets into is that there were peasant uprisings that happened, you know, as land was
00:34:15.260being taken away, as it was being put towards industrial use, as people were being displaced
00:34:23.860and caused to be homeless, particularly elder women.
00:34:28.280This is all stuff that we already sort of know in the backs of our minds,
00:34:33.760but she gives a really, really precise timeline on that.
00:34:38.460So interestingly, in Federici's new book,
00:34:43.820she just very briefly touches on the topic of biotechnology
00:34:49.300and the relationship of biotechnology to women's bodies.
00:34:53.860And it's it's a summary statement, really.
00:34:58.800And she just states that the attack on women comes above all from capital's need to destroy what it cannot control and degrade what it most needs for its reproduction.
00:35:12.900And throughout her book, she's talking about women's reproductive capacity as, you know, providing new labor for the labor force.
00:35:19.720So that's what she's referring to here, capitalism's need to control reproduction.
00:35:25.880She goes on to say that this is the body of women, for even in the age of super automation, no work and no production would exist except for what is the result of our gestation.
00:35:37.260And I don't necessarily agree with that, but what she says is that test tube babies do not exist.
00:35:45.320This is a discursive formula that we should reject as an expression of a masculine search for procreation outside the female body, which is the one frontier capital has yet to conquer.
00:35:59.860Sylvia Federici is a very well-respected expert and scholar, you know, on the history of witchcraft.
00:36:08.860But it's really interesting to me that she decides to put this one little paragraph at the very end of her book.
00:36:16.800And so for me, that's my prompt. That's my prompt.
00:36:21.940I was about to say, this almost seems like a challenge specifically directed at you, White Feather.0.98
00:36:27.000Yes. Well, what what I don't agree with in her statement is the sort of second wave feminist essentialism.0.99
00:36:38.980Yes. Because women are not just their bodies.1.00
00:36:43.980And I take a much more intersectional, inclusive look at womanhood, femininity, also fertility.
00:37:02.400And I think that, you know, I showed a little bit when I was talking about creating transgender blood by adding estrogen to what is considered or categorized as physiologically male blood, that there's a lot of complexity there and we can't just make such a polemic statement, I guess.
00:37:26.020Yeah. And in terms of biotechnology, you know, biotechnology is, is enabling a lot of wonderfully fuzzy boundaries. And it's, you know, it's allowing us to explore a non-binary reality.
00:37:51.400uh so you know that's I guess that's something that I would address with with what she's saying
00:37:59.060here but I love that she has sort of left this prompt now what I'm interested in looking at in
00:38:08.680terms of contemporary witchcraft and biotechnology is how the old taint still remains yeah and that
00:38:16.400is that is the taint of lay person versus you know so-called professional yes i still have people
00:38:24.940claim to me that the scientist is the opposite of which and uh which is absolutely my best yeah
00:38:32.740i've done my best here people just like i i think you know the witch is the great experimenter
00:38:41.260and so is the scientist that to me there's so much overlap and i would suggest that our listeners if
00:38:46.100you haven't already it's the imbalc special from this year where we first met up with white feather
00:38:52.540and the witches of the lab at concordia so please go back and listen to that episode we get into
00:38:58.060a lot of these issues in that episode too so carry on white feather okay so the old taint
00:39:06.700The non-professional practitioner is now vexing the practices of female or femme and non-binary arts practitioners and activists whose hands-on training and critical applications of these advanced technologies have and continue to be,
00:39:31.120but really drastically have been undervalued and mistrusted and met with very little reward.
00:39:39.560And one example that I can give you of an art project that was attempting to sort of confront this head on is called Kiss My R's.
00:39:54.100kiss my ars addresses the misogyny that has been present in the largest art science and
00:40:07.440technology festival in the world ars electronica so it happens in austria every year in lins
00:40:13.800other than the fact that this was a feminist act of resistance and i'll tell you a little bit more0.96
00:40:20.060about what this project was about in a moment.0.98
00:40:24.840So I'm going to get back into some witch hunt history here for a second.
00:43:19.480of the fact that Silicon Valley is rife with sexism. It may sort of be passing into recent
00:43:30.440history now, but not so much that the art world is also often very male elitist. If you look at
00:43:40.560sort of all of the most well-recognized artists, they're typically male. I mean, that's what the0.99
00:43:46.220Guerrilla Girls were all about. Fabulous Guerrilla Girls. So Ars Electronica is like1.00
00:43:53.540the culmination of sexism in these two worlds. And so Kiss My Ars was a really, I'm not sure
00:44:02.260if it went viral or not, but it was a really strong social media campaign to bring attention
00:44:06.880to this fact and to just, you know, call them out. And I think they were quite successful because
00:44:14.440last year, the Starts Prize, which is one of the prizes that Ars Electronica gives out to projects
00:44:22.460that, again, are presenting some kind of solutionism. But, you know, they're innovative
00:44:30.240projects. They're prize-winning innovative projects. So last year's winning project was
00:44:37.400called future flora and it was a kit to cultivate your own vaginal flora to heal your infections
00:44:48.200oh and that was juliana tomasello was was the artist who designed that future flora kit so
00:45:00.020So as of last year, we do see women's bodies and, you know, women's medical concerns beginning to enter this very masculinist tech art and technology festival.
00:56:20.840So they are very much interested in deliberately rejecting this legacy of European colonization of women's queer and other bodies that's been carried out through legislated and moral suppression.
00:56:38.040So they are they're a little bit my heroes.
00:56:43.500yeah yeah i have them in mind they're very much inspiring my my current research and you know i'm
00:56:50.500working within very similar frameworks with my simple very very simple act of growing cells in
00:56:58.900menstrual blood let's think about that for a minute that it should be a no-brainer right
00:57:04.260mm-hmm non-invasive easy to access i mean the the whole the whole reason menstrual blood exists
00:57:14.100is because it's sort of lines the uterus it's to do what yeah to do what to grow cells yeah so
00:57:24.260i mean there i have heard some arguments being made that the entire apparatus of the biotech
00:57:30.860laboratory is meant to try to replicate a uterus. You have the biosafety cabinet, which is
00:57:40.600essentially the uterus. It's the uterine sac, let's say. The biosafety cabinet is the uterine
00:57:51.580sac. It is a sterile environment, although there's new research that suggests that, of course,
00:57:59.980the uterus is or the the uterine sac is not sterile it's it contains microbes but they're
00:58:08.020beneficial and they're necessary you have incubators within a lab you have antibiotics
00:58:13.760that are used in all tissue culture this is another sort of criticism that i have of the
00:58:20.400promotion of lab grown meat actually is that it's all grown with antibiotics so the antibiotics are
00:58:27.700used because there's no immune system. There are, you know, there are no white blood cells
00:58:33.080in the Petri dish with the tissue that is growing there. So antibiotics are used. There are all of
00:58:40.860these components that attempt to replicate the ideal conditions for growing cells into tissue,
00:58:47.620and that is exactly what a uterus does. So there's a whole discussion that can be had there.
00:58:55.540I'm certainly not against it. I think that biotechnology has fascinating possibilities for all bodies. So that's the beauty of it. But, you know, from a feminist perspective, critiquing capitalist goals, we need to sort of look at how that disembodied pseudo uterus apparatus is being used to support capitalism.
00:59:23.160And how we can help to dismantle that.0.97
00:59:26.220Or at least have critical thought about it, you know, so that when someone says, woohoo, lab grown meat, get in line at the supermarket, everybody, it's coming to a freezer near you and you don't have to kill any more cows.
00:59:42.240you know instead of being so desperate for solutions that are going to save the world
00:59:47.800we need to slow down this accelerationist thing that's going on and think about what all the
00:59:58.140implications are and what are we not being told and do more research and be anti-capitalist
01:00:05.460so that what what other like how can our listeners enact all of this all of your philosophy in their
01:00:16.680daily lives outside the lab and just in the world well i mean technology is also our friend
01:00:23.960we have through the internet access to many scientific papers you can go on google scholar
01:00:35.100You can search any topic. You can find PDFs of scientific papers on various topics. There are many now on lab-grown meat. And do your own research and don't just take at face value what you're being told by a corporate entity.
01:01:00.000And, you know, that's what that's what these startup companies are.
01:01:04.660Essentially, they're now worth billions of dollars.
01:01:08.160It needs to be dissected a little bit.
01:01:11.880I think, you know, there are a lot of vegans who are hoping for a solution to end the cruelty that's in the meat industry.
01:01:25.240And I'm certainly not in support of the meat industry.
01:01:28.460I am in support of sustainable meat production that's on a small scale and that's local, but I am not in support of industrial anything.
01:01:39.380um so i guess you know to if we can for a moment set aside our most uh passionate ideals
01:01:54.840to do the research to really dig very very deep into this topic and look at all of the different
01:02:06.480perspectives that are being presented through the research that's being done,
01:02:11.780we're going to see the problems start to come to the surface.
01:02:15.240And really, I mean, that's the only way that we can go forward in an informed manner
01:02:20.940that will allow us to change our patterns of behavior that are destroying the earth.
01:02:57.480Think about what you're buying into, yeah.
01:02:59.720I mean, there are a lot of people who are interested in conscientious consumption, and that's great.
01:03:09.760It's just that we have been so generationally brainwashed to think that we can't question scientific authority, that an area like new capitalist biotech developments get passed off as truths without being questioned.
01:03:38.240And we've been led to believe that the solution to any given problem is another product. There's a product for that. It's not, like I saw this, I don't know if it was a New Yorker cartoon or whatever, but it was a person who had hung their laundry on a laundry line outside and they were saying to their neighbor, it's the latest in solar and wind power, you know?
01:04:02.760and so you know there are so many there are so many things there are so many examples that we
01:04:09.220could talk about that just the opposite of a new product that's going to save us all right and it's
01:04:16.560not going to be a product it's going to save us all it's going to be community yeah so do you have
01:04:21.640any last messages for our listeners how to go boldly and furiously and creatively as you have
01:04:29.380into the future how to harness their own witch scientist how about how about if i say that
01:04:36.520i really hesitate to uh present myself as the authority on anything because um it goes back to
01:04:48.180authority authorship professionalization and this sort of compartmentalized categorization
01:04:56.460that's dividing up the world and I just wish for everyone to do their own research and make their
01:05:05.960own decisions and be their own authority right I think that that's perfect and completely in line
01:05:14.500with my ethic as a podcaster I really really really am just so fascinated by your work I know
01:05:24.360that you're going to keep us posted on where this project goes and how it manifests and where this
01:05:29.900journey takes you i really really appreciate you taking time out of your jet setting to uh sit down0.95
01:05:36.360and tell me about your project and talk to me about fucking anti-capitalism and smashing patriarchy0.83
01:05:41.940yes let's call it post-capitalism that's that's my my hopeful perspective post-capitalism because0.77
01:05:52.180capitalism is over it's done and so is this episode thank you so much for listening everybody
01:05:59.220so yeah i won't take any more of your time but thank you so much thank you so so so very much
01:06:06.080i'm all about it i'm i think that you know of all of the the witchy sort of information that
01:06:15.160we're now being flooded with this is some of the most thoroughly researched and intelligent
01:06:22.840um and politically astute information that people are getting through the podcast
01:06:30.160i'm serious uh i mean i'm it's so important it's so important because there are so many
01:06:41.780new young witches that are coming onto the scene and are just sort of being sucked into all of the
01:06:50.920objects and identity around what it means to be a witch without um quite having access to all of
01:06:59.820the information about the politics behind it and i think yeah you're just like covering the full
01:07:05.720range it's amazing and i mean uh we've had listeners reach out to us specifically because
01:07:12.300of your invitation to the lab so it's definitely like you know i mean vanessa we didn't even get
01:07:19.720to talk about vanessa but uh yeah she her first uh dm to me was just like 12 exclamation points
01:07:27.360she listened to your episode in the lab it's just a bunch of exclamation points oh my god
01:07:34.660i loved listening to her interview i was just like the whole time i was like yes oh my god yes
01:07:40.460you know yeah she's wonderful and she just i mean it was so magical she just she's living in china
01:07:48.380but is from quebec happened to be in montreal this summer rented a car drove out to the country
01:07:57.280i mean it was it was all super magical and it's all thanks to you and us and what happens when
01:08:02.380we collaborate it's so fucking yeah i love it i love it the alchemy of collaboration is like
01:08:09.000it's turning dust into gold yeah i know i mean that would be another whole podcast in and of0.53
01:08:16.580itself the matter of collaboration yeah we'll have you back next season for sure for our0.91