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.”
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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For The Wild is a slow media organization dedicated to land-based protection, co-liberation, and intersectional storytelling. We are rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth, and consumerism. As we dream towards a world of grounded justice and reciprocity, our work highlights impactful stories and deeply-felt meaning making as balms for these times.