Overthink

Bottom, rump, booty, fanny, tush, and derriere! In episode 171 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk about butts. Why do humans have bigger rear ends than other animals? Why are butts often seen as a site of aversion? And is anal sex a metaphor for the universe? They discuss the evolutionary history of butts, how the music industry helped normalize bigger butts, and how the exploitation of Sara Baartman in the 19th century is part of a larger story about the sexualization of black women. In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts talk about Marquis de Sade’s discussion of anal sex and appeals to nature in justifications of human sexual practices.

Works Discussed:
Georges Bataille, “The Solar Anus”
Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”
Janell Hobson, “Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture”
Dinah Holtzman, “Ass You Lick It: Bey and Jay Eat Cake”
Sadiah Qureshi, “Displaying Sara Baartman, the ‘Hottentot Venus’.”
Heather Radke, Butts: A Backstory
Christopher Wallner et al, “Interethnic Influencing Factors Regarding Buttocks Body Image in Women from Nigeria, Germany, USA and Japan”

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The discourse around today's crisis of care responds to the shredding of America's social safety net, but leaves out the most vulnerable almost entirely. In episode 170 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss how this works with Premilla Nadasen, author of Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. They discuss how gender fits into the care industry, the harms of associating care work with emotion, and how the practice of care has been commodified. How is it that we deny the most basic care from those who need it most? What are the harms of framing care workers as family members? And how has racial capitalism produced the explosion of the care economy that we're seeing today? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts think about the distinction between the practice of care and care itself and how labor workers can learn from care workers in their modes of organizing.

Works Discussed:
Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart
Premilla Nadasen, Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

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Join our Substack for ad-free versions of both audio and video episodes, extended episodes, exclusive live chats, and more: https://overthinkpod.substack.com/
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With the rise of hustle culture, the grind, and capitalist productivity, we often associate discipline with toxicity. But is there still value in disciplining oneself? In episode 169 of Overthink, Ellie and David take a disciplined approach to this question and more! They discuss modern culture’s rejection of discipline and how this manifests on the left vs the right, the association between discipline and punishment, and Michel Foucault’s seminal ideas on disciplinary power. How can we discipline children without resorting to punishment? And are there models of self-discipline that aren’t rooted in punishment of the self? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts discuss Sandra Bartky’s argument that gender norms are a modern form of disciplinary power.

Works Discussed:
Joan E. Durrant and Ashley Stewart-Tufescu. “What is “Discipline” in the Age of Children’s Rights?.”
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality
Adekunle A. Ibrahim and Philomena A. Ojomo. “Discipline and Punishment in Schools: A Philosophical Appraisal.”

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Why do we seek to escape from ourselves? In episode 168 of Overthink, Ellie and David take a closer look at Emmanuel Levinas’s article “On Escape.” They discuss Levinas’s claim that escape is central to the human condition and explore what exactly we try to escape from and escape to. They explain how this aspect of human existence is crystallized by our experiences of need, pleasure, and even nausea. Are we condemned to being needy beings? How does Levinas’s view of shame put him at a distance from Sartre? And is Levinas right that to be a human is to never be at peace with oneself? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts discuss why escape is the condition of our time and critique Levinas’s reading of idealism.

Works Discussed:
Emmanuel Levinas, “On Escape”
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

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Are some people born evil, or are we all capable of evil acts? In episode 167 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk about all things evil. They think through the characterization of evil in Disney films, Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds theory, the conflation of evil with badness, and Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. How does Manichaeism attempt to resolve the problem of evil? Is evil simply the lack of good in the world? And does the concept of evil still have relevance in an age of secular ethics or is the concept too weighed down by its own theological past? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts discuss evil people and how we might categorize them.

Works Discussed:
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Hannah Arendt, “Nightmare and Flight”
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Paul Formosa, “The Problems with Evil”
Paul Formosa, “A Conception of Evil”
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy
Gavin Rae, Evil in the Western Philosophical Tradition

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Join our Substack for ad-free versions of both audio and video episodes, extended episodes, exclusive live chats, and more: https://overthinkpod.substack.com/
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.