Sourdough

George Vasey, the co-curator of the Wellcome Collection exhibition 'Misbehaving Bodies' talks about how bringing illness to light is a rebellious act. Disease and illness have become taboo in today's society. More than that, certain diseases are considered worth discussing while others aren't, and the values we attach to them often align with class, race and gender hierarchies. How we behave in medical institutions, how we respond to our diagnoses, says a lot about our place in the world. We focus on the work of Jo Spence, who used photography to document her experience of breast cancer. She shows us how illness can be a creative part of life, and that it needs to made visible for us to respond to it in the best interest of patients.

Writer, producer and filmmaker Cat Davies (https://kittycointreau.wordpress.com/...) talks to me about horror in her films. Her award-winning shorts like 'Connie', Keen-wah' and 'Blood shed' all satirise horror conventions in surprising ways. We explore horror and feminism as we discuss the artistic process. What do our fears say us as a society? What does society fear about feminism? What do we fear as artists? What does a feminist retelling of a horror story look like? How does horror help spread a feminist message?

Dancer 'Roxy' talks about how she got into stripping to pay her way through university. She now continues to do it to pay the bills. In light of the rhetoric of mainstream feminism that emphasises a woman's ownership of her own body, stripping is sometimes cast as an act of defiance against the objectification of the female body in society. Roxy sees this differently. Stripping isn't always 'empowering', she says, nor is it necessarily feminist.

I talked to the successful model Ariana Diamant about the pressures placed on models with an online following to serve as role models. She explains that models' online presence presents new opportunities for challenging industry beauty standards, but that it also presents expectations that they take on a much more public role than ever before. She challenges the assumption that any woman in the public eye should necessarily be a feminist.

'Gaming is creating a kind of person who is good at something....we're still trying to figure out what that is.' Samantha Beauvillain (@sambvlln) reveals new dimensions to the feminist struggle in the online world. Gaming as a woman isn't just about dealing with a male-dominated environment, it's about revealing new possibilities and new ways of interacting online. Not only is Sam an avid gamer, she also works for the first ever luxury gaming brand, 'Buddah Tek'. This brand is about changing the culture around gaming. There's a lot of positive potential for cognitive development and new ways of interacting in the gaming world, she argues, and a feminist critique can help reveal what that might look like.

Ben Hurst is an ambassador for the 'Good Lad Initiative'. Good Lad runs workshops at schools and businesses in order to help men and boys identify positive models of masculinity. Ben argues that masculinity has fallen into disrepute, partly as a result of feminist critique, and that this demands that men themselves rework what it means to be masculine. Masculinity is a feminist issue, Ben says, but it isn't feminists' job to figure out what it means.

Sandor Katz calls himself a 'fermentation revivalist'. He writes and teaches people about fermentation to help connect them to the origins of their food. The products delicious - from sourdough, to kombucha and sauerkraut - but what does fermentation have to do with feminism? Sandor sees fermentation as an engine for social change. Fermentation is accessible to all and can be used to challenge who we entrust with our food, who we suppose to hold the authority on cooking, gendered divisions of labour when it comes to food, and more.

A feminist critique of the fashion industry is about much more than just body positivity. In this episode, I talk to longtime fashion model, Nimue Smit, about the fashion industry and what about it has to change. Nimue talks about the work she's doing to raise environmentalist concerns, the groundbreaking initiative she helped spearhead, the 'Model Mafia', where she worked alongside prominent models like Cameron Russell to raise industry standards and to support others in their activism. She also talks about the 'Models' Health Pledge' and the work that still needs to be done to ensure models can lead fulfilling careers. We ask why the fashion industry is so far behind other industries in responding to social movements.