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History is Gay

40. Real-Life Xenas: Warrior Women Across the World

History is Gay

Leigh Pfeffer

History, Society & Culture

4.6536 Ratings

🗓️ 22 February 2022

⏱️ 102 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Happy 2022 and welcome to another episode of History is Gay! This time, we're picking up where we left off with Meghan Rose and S.C. Lucier in our discussion of Amazons and real-life warrior women in history! It's not just the Greco-Roman world that marveled at fierce, strong female fighters, but all over the world! This episode, we're visiting Benin, Africa to learn about the real-life dora milaje of Black Panther fame, the gender-bending Dahomey Amazons; badass female samurai defending their homesteads in Japan, and Viking shieldmaidens and mythical Valkyries– who may have been a third gender? Strap-in for a whirlwind worldwide tour of gender transgression and badass real-life Xenas we want to see all the movies about!

You can learn more about our guest hosts Meg and Luce, Xena: Warrior Musical, and more of their forthcoming projects at www.xenawarriormusical.com, @XenatheMusical on Twitter, and @XenaWarriorMusical on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube!  

Outline
0:00 – Introduction
4:27 – Announcements
7:51 – Follow-Up from Last Episode
12:48 – Main Topic: Warrior Women Across the World
13:33 – Word of the Week
18:54 – Amazon-Like Women in Africa: Dahomey Amazons/mino
43:22-44:13 – Content warning: Discussion of slave trade
46:22 – Amazon-Like Women in Japan: onna-bugeisha
1:06:50 – Amazon-Like Women in Scandinavia: the Vikings!
1:30:48 – Pop-Culture Tie-In
1:33:43 – How Gay were They?
1:39:07 – Closing and Where to Find us Online

This episode is sponsored by Surfshark VPN, an awesome app and browser extension that not only protects your privacy online, but changes the virtual location of your phone or computer to anywhere in the world, allowing you access to content geoblocked content. 

Surfshark VPN is offering 83% off and 3 months free for History is Gay listeners. Just head over to https://surfshark.deals/HISTORYISGAY or go to surfshark.com and enter code HISTORYISGAY to redeem this amazing deal! Plus, it comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can try it out risk-free. 

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Hello, and welcome to History is Gay, a podcast that examines the underappreciated and overlooked

0:05.7

queer ladies, gents, and gentle enbies that have always been there in the unexplored

0:09.9

corners of history, because history has never been as straight as you think. Hello, welcome to 2020.

0:33.6

I can't believe that we're already here.

0:36.6

Time is not real. Welcome to year two of the

0:40.6

pandemic, year three. I'm not sure. Everything's crazy. I'm Lee. Hi. And I am joined again by my

0:49.3

lovely guests from our last episode on Amazons of Greek Myth and Scythian warrior women. I've got

0:56.5

S.C. Lucier and Megan Rose here in our virtual podcast studio once again. Hi, y'all. Hello.

1:06.6

Coming in weird bag, coming in weird. Coming in hot and weird.

1:11.3

Hot and weird.

1:12.4

Super excited to be going into a junior year of pandemic.

1:15.9

I'm very excited.

1:17.4

I can't wait for senioritis, though.

1:20.4

As a junior?

1:21.3

You know what?

1:21.9

No, no.

1:22.6

I would like to veto anything that ends with Idisis post 2020 thanks you're right i take it back

1:32.7

take it all back yeah uh i really enjoy the um i do think meg if at some point you write a memoir

1:39.4

it's gonna have to be called coming in hot and weird. Thank you so much.

1:46.0

Yeah.

1:46.6

It's going to be great.

1:47.3

Honestly, what a compliment in Meg's worlds.

...

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