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Woman's Hour

Susan Sontag, Feminist economics, Waad-al-Kateab

Woman's Hour

BBC

Society & Culture

4.13K Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2019

⏱️ 45 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Susan Sontag, the American essayist, novelist and critic rose to fame in the 1960s. She became an iconic cultural figure and during her life she was linked with figures like Andy Warhol and Annie Leibovitz. Fifteen years after her death, Benjamin Moser has written a new biography about her which digs beneath her public image. He discusses her life, her work and how her life charts the changes in women's lives over the last 60 years. It’s 30 years since the concept of intersectionality was introduced by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. The Women’s Budget Group, who are also marking their 30th anniversary, thought it apt to address the way feminist economics has embraced the idea that there is no single universal experience of inequality shared by all women. Next week, the Director of the group Dr Mary-Ann Stephenson will chair a panel on Intersectionality in Feminist Economics. She joins Jenni along with Dr Zubaida Haque from the Runnymede Trust and Angela Matthews from the Business Disability Forum to discuss why a one size fits all policy doesn’t work. Waad al-Kateab has documented her life on camera in war torn Aleppo, Syria. While conflict, violence, death and cruelty raged around her, she fell in love, got married and had a baby daughter. She captures stories of loss, laughter, sacrifice and survival. She joins Jenni to discuss her film, ‘For Sama’, a love letter from a young mother to her daughter. And, listener Val Dawson talks about the photograph that captures her best day.

Presenter: Jenni Murray Producer: Ruth Watts

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts Hello, Jenny Murray,

0:07.2

welcoming you to the Woman's Hour podcast for Thursday 12 September.

0:13.4

A film called for Sama has been described as one of the most affecting

0:18.8

war documentaries. Wild Elketeer filmed death destruction and hope

0:24.1

from 2012 to 2016 in her home city of Aleppo in Syria.

0:29.7

Her work is dedicated to the daughter to whom she gave birth

0:33.6

as the war raged around her. Thirty years since the term

0:38.4

intersectionality was introduced, how is it applied to economics?

0:43.0

Why does a one-size economic policy not fit all?

0:47.2

And how might it be improved? And another in our series My Best Day,

0:51.5

Fowl Dawson sent a picture of herself as a child in the Second World War.

0:57.3

Susan Zontag rose to prominence in the early 60s to become one of New York's

1:02.6

most revered intellectuals. She was closely linked to Andy Warhol,

1:07.8

popularized the use of the word camp, famously had a hairstyle of long black

1:12.4

locks with a prominent grey streak at the front, and she wrote influential

1:16.6

novels and essays, perhaps the most famous of which was

1:19.6

illness as metaphor, which she wrote after she was first diagnosed with

1:23.4

breast cancer in 1975. In one of her last interviews in 2002,

1:29.2

she spoke on Radio 3 and discussed the difference between an essay

1:34.9

and a novel. The fiction comes from a deeper place

1:38.7

and a broader place. I have access to much more of myself

1:44.3

in my fiction than I do in my essays. I mean I feel my essays

...

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