ALEXIS SHOTWELL on Resisting Purity Culture /298

Photo by Paul Siewert of jagged, moss covered pillars of rock framing a foaming, white river at the precipice of falling.

This week we are joined by guest Alexis Shotwell to discuss how we might turn from the purity politics that govern many of our lives and this hurting world toward collective struggles for transformation and liberatory futurisms. Rather than forfeiting our complicity and implication in a world with mounting problems, we learn of a helpful heuristic for transforming inaction or the urge to be the perfect activist to a ground where we might be better- equipped to stick around for the long hall in struggles for social justice.  According to Alexis, this practice calls for admitting our mistakes and centering repair. Where we might have folded to calculated individual efforts to affect change, we are encouraged to investigate which communities are already taking on the issues we care for and how we might join in those struggles alongside others, imperfectly and with reciprocal care. 

In this episode, we dive into the relationship between purity culture and white supremacism, our complicit locations and implications in violence, and the importance of showing up to repair our broken and harmed relations inherited or otherwise. Alexis elucidates that it is only through the messy process of owning up to these broken relations throughout time and seeing how we might participate in and take on culturally appropriate relations of repair, responsibility, friendship, and comradeship in the struggles for liberation that we can survive these times. We hope this episode inspires your curiosity and (re)activates your commitments to this world.

“If we’re trying to be perfect in our politics, the only thing that we’ll do is never do anything. Because as soon as we do anything, we’re going to make mistakes.”

— Alexis Shotwell / Episode 298

Photo of Alexis Shotwell by Fangliang Xu

Alexis Shotwell’s work focuses on complexity, complicity, and collective transformation. A professor at Carleton University, on unceded Algonquin land, she is the co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project, and the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times.

♫ Music featured in this episode is  “The Gray Whale Song” by Anne Carol Mitchel and “Plums and Smoke” and “Come Back to the Garden” by Daniel Cherniske.

References and Recommendations

To learn more about Alexis Shotwell’s work, visit alexisshotwell.com

Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science by Kim Tallbear

Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-first Century by Circe Sturm

Repair: The Impulse to Restore in a Fragile World by Elizabeth Spelman

Alexis Shotwell’s essay, “Claiming Bad Kin: Solidarity from Complicit Locations,”

Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times by Alexis Shotwell

Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding by Alexis Shotwell

Alexis Shotwell’s forthcoming book, Collecting Our People.

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