Episode 41: Goodbye, from Lady Science
Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg
Producer: Leila McNeill
Music: Fall asleep under a million stars by Springtide
In this episode, the hosts say goodbye and share some of their favorite moments from the podcast. Thank you to everyone who has tuned in at any point during our podcast run. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did!
Show notes
So long, farewell by Leila McNeill and Anna Reser
Bonus: Talking Trans History with Susan Stryker
Episode 34: Women and the National Parks
Episode 32: No, they weren’t just ‘roomates’!
Bonus: Talking Science Journalism in the Midst of COVID-19 with Wendy Zuckerman
Episode 12: Gender in the American Space Program
Transcript
Transcription by Julia Pass
Rebecca: Welcome to the final episode of the Lady Science Podcast. Surprise! But for real, most of you probably know, but this is the final episode of the Lady Science Podcast. But as always, I am Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor.
Anna: I'm Anna Reser.
Leila: Wow. Former co-founder and co-editor in chief.
Rebecca: You will be the co-founder forever, I mean.
Anna: I'm Anna. You know me.
Leila: I'm Leila, the other one.
Rebecca: We're so bad at this.
Leila: Yeah. Coming into this last final episode with some really weird energy.
Rebecca: I know. Yeah, but that's also typical of us. I think it's worth having some weird energy.
Anna: I think the whole podcast has just been weird energy. We've discovered new depths and gradations and textures of weird energy to explore together and share with you.
Rebecca: It's true. Thankfully I do think that there were a good number of you guys out there who enjoyed our weird energy and even shared our weird energy with your students, which thumbs up for that.
Leila: It's just perpetually surprising to me.
Rebecca: Yes. Shocking and appalling but also genuinely delightful jokes aside, it was always great when we heard, "Oh, yeah, an assignment for my History of Science intro class was to listen to an episode." Then we'd find out the students really liked it, and that was really awesome.
Anna: Terrifying but awesome.
Leila: Well, and since maybe not everyone who's listening knows what's going on, we are ending operations on Lady Science at the end of this month. We announced it back in October on our seventh anniversary. We've just gotten to the point to where we're big enough to expand and need more staff, but the nature of crowdfunding does not supply the funds that we need to be able to do that, so we have just reached a point in the journey where it's just time to say goodbye. So our last pieces in the magazine will come out right before Christmas, and this is our last podcast episode.
Anna: Yeah. We thought we would just, I don't know, say goodbye and maybe talk a little bit about our favorite episodes or parts of the podcast we really enjoyed, and then maybe that could be your end of the podcast roundup, and you can go listen to episodes you might have missed or relisten to classics.
Leila: Yeah. This is just the greatest hits mixtape. Rebecca, you go first. What was your favorite episode?
Rebecca: Oh, thanks. Before I jump into that, I also wanna say, as that implies, we're gonna keep the website up, including all of the podcast episodes and all of the writing, so you will get to continue to enjoy it if you are sad and need more Lady Science in your life or like to, I don't know, listen to this on trips. Echo. Anyway. I just I have a thought, and then I finish the thought, and then I keep talking.
Rebecca: Yeah. But so yeah. We're talking about our greatest hits. Something that definitely popped into my mind in thinking about my favorite podcast episodes and thinking about the interviews we've done. And it's been great to be able to interview some really fabulous rock stars in the field.
Rebecca: And something that I come back to again and again is a very early interview that we did very early on in the podcast with historian Susan Stryker. And she was at the time, I think, working on a book. And she read a little bit from a draft of her book, where she talked about essentially the nature of doing history and documenting the history of marginalized people. We've had a few people who have said brilliant things on that topic for us, and she was one of them. And I have literally quoted this interview in multiple talks, papers, essays, things I have done. And I think I will continue to because it was really great. If I remember correctly, she made Anna—no, Anna, you weren't there for it.
Anna: I wasn't.
Rebecca: She made Leila and I cry. Straight-up made us cry.
Leila: Yep. She absolutely did.
Rebecca: And it was fabulous. And it's also cool to remember that as much as we make fun of academia as a whole, there have been some really fabulous people who are amazing academics who have been doing this work more deeply and for much longer than we have, and they were willing to come and talk to us because we asked them nicely.
[Start Clip from Earlier Episode]
S. Stryker: Making our identities real is what we trans people do, and we bring our worlds along with us. This is our talent, our burden, our necessity, our gift. This is what transpires now. New realities, emergent trans realities, flowing across the gap that separates actuality from desire, flowing from what is to what will be.
S. Stryker: History is not the past. History is a story that we tell in the present, one that reaches back to conjoin what can be known of what has already transpired to our vision of whatever yet may come. History is not a fact but a promise. It is the assurance that the future will be as different from the current moment as the current moment has become from all that has come before. History is a witness that bears testimony to the inescapability of difference and the inevitability of change.
S. Stryker: To write history can be more than stringing one brute fact after another to fill up the emptiness of time. It can be more than constructing a monument to the violence of the great and powerful, more than the satisfaction of the craving among the people for the sweet comfort of nostalgia at the end of a bitter day. To write history, for those of us who need another world, is to catch sight elsewhere of a radical possibility made physical by the light of a current calamity.
S. Stryker: History transpires in the here and now. It is the story that makes real pasts that are unremembered and actions now unimagined in anticipation of futures that must be summoned forth from a present that demands our daily effort to shatter and transform it.
[End Clip from Earlier Episode]
Leila: I mean, that's one of my favorites, too, that I still think about. And when she was quoting from the book that wasn't published yet; she was still in the process of writing it, I believe.
Rebecca: Yeah.
Leila: And we had asked her what does scholarship activism look like for her. It was also coming off of a really bad—I mean, this was pretty soon after the 2016 election, and it was a really bad week when the immigration stuff at the Texas border was getting increasingly horrific. And so it came off of a really bad week, a really bad election cycle.
Leila: And for her to read that with such clarity at a time when it just didn't feel like there was much clarity to be had in anything, I think that's what made me really choked up listening to it. It's still surprising to me that there can be people that live through moments like this and just have this clear-eyed hope and optimism. And she was one of those, it seemed like, at least in that moment.
Leila: Do you have a favorite interview or episode, Anna?
Anna: No. I have a lot.
Leila: Well, pick one. Close your eyes and—
Anna: I hate this and you. Why are you makin' me do this?
Anna: In terms of just a thing that was really fun to make, I had an incredible time doing the national parks Smokey Bear episode in part because it was just hilarious from start to finish and there were some iconic things that happened in that episode.
[Start Clip from Earlier Episode]
Anna: I just wanna bring up one thing that lives in my head rent free, and that is the shredded Smokey the Bear. Why is he so ripped?
Rebecca: Oh, God.
Anna: Just as you were talking, the image was swimming into my mind, and I couldn't get it to go away. And I just have to exorcise that demon. Why is Smokey so ripped now? I don't like it.
[End Clip from Earlier Episode]
Anna: It just reminded me that the pleasure of doing something like a podcast, it's like what you were saying, Rebecca, that you get to spend time with people you might not otherwise get to talk to and you get to learn about their interests and their work. And we've met a lot of amazing people doing the podcast, and some of those things have bloomed into long-term friendships.
Anna: And I don't know. It's just really nice to make something that is substantive. We did write a substantive episode about the national parks, and there's a lot of good information and thinking in there, but there's also just a lot of silliness and fun.
Anna: And like you said, Rebecca, as much as we like to make fun of the academy, one of the things that I really appreciated about Lady Science, for myself and for other people who have been part of it, is just, I don't know, being joyful about doing scholarship and about thinking about the world and investigating and learning. And just in that very simple sense, that that's something that I like to do, and sometimes it's hard to reach that joyful place, but that is something that often happened on the podcast. And also I produced that episode, and I'm very proud of it 'cause Leila was on vacation.
Leila: I wouldn't have called why I wasn't there vacation.
Anna: Oh, that's right. No. You were on medical leave, basically. Family medical leave.
Leila: I think one of my favorite interviews was the one we did with Wendy Zukerman from Science Vs, in which she told us about some of the men that she's had to interview, including one who tried to urinate while on the phone doing a professional interview.
[Start Clip from Earlier Episode]
W. Zukerman: Recently was interviewing a scientist for this coronavirus series, and he started peeing in the middle of the interview. Yes. Yes, he did. And I was like, "What's that sound?" And then he said, "Don't worry about it."
Rebecca: Can you believe that?
Leila: Well, I mean, I hate to break it to y'all. I've been peeing this entire time.
[End Clip from Earlier Episode]
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of people who can talk about really substantive, serious things while just laughing hysterically and bring both those things across, I feel like, yeah, there is this great community of, well, scholars and writers and communicators who get that, get you can both be very—this can be a serious thing, and that's a serious, awful thing, but it's also really funny. And we have to laugh at the awful stuff sometimes. Yeah.
Leila: Yeah. Yeah, no. She was great. She was hilarious and irreverent in the way that we all fit in very well together, I think.
Rebecca: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Leila: One of my favorite regular episodes is one of the ones that we did for Pride Month where we talked about the polyamorous relationship between Sara Josephine Baker and Louise Pearce and Ida Wylie.
[Start Clip from Earlier Episode]
Rebecca: Most sources say that Baker and Wylie were the main couple and Pearce was merely their roommate. But I think that there is room to say that this was a polyamorous relationship. When we look at queer relationships in the past, it's important that we don't look at them just through a nuclear family lens, and it's important to recognize that queer people weren't just trying to have relationships that mirrored traditionally heteronormative family structures. There were and are many ways that queer people lived their relationships and built their families.
[End Clip from Earlier Episode]
Leila: Whenever we do those episodes on women who have relationships with other women, is going back through and looking at what other historians have written to where they just tie themselves into pretzels trying to come up with reasons why these women had the friendship that they had and behaved the way that they had without actually saying that they're gay. Whatever it takes to avoid actually saying that these people were gay.
Rebecca: I think that one's fun because it is one where it becomes so obvious how these pretzels are based on whatever the assumptions of the historian are because there were, I think, some sources that we talked about where they were very happy to say that two of these women were a couple, but they really were uncomfortable with the idea that maybe they were in a polyamorous triad of some kind. And they twist themselves in knots in that same way that people previously had twisted themselves in knots to not say that this was two women in a relationship. And, yeah, it's an interesting example of how, innocently and not so innocently, we put our own assumptions about what relationships are on other people.
Leila: Mm-hmm. One of the things, looking back on the entirety of our podcast run, which it feels like we've been doing it for 100 years and we haven't. I don't think we even hit 50 episodes. Well, maybe we did if we include the bonus episodes in with the regular episodes. But the just sheer amount of ground that we covered. We did history of recipes. We did anatomical Venus. We did history of sex research. We did menopause. We covered a lot of ground during the run of the podcast, and I'm pretty proud of that.
Anna: Yeah. Oh, I wanna give a special shout-out to the only man to ever appear on the Lady Science Podcast, Jordan Bimm, on our gender and spaceflight episode. That was a really good interview. I was just thinking about that.
Leila: That was a really good interview. Well, we also had Stephen McGann.
Rebecca: That's true.
Anna: But he wasn't a guest.
Leila: We didn't have him on the show.
Rebecca: Which is one of our greatest failings. Let's be real.
Leila: He was a celebrity cameo.
Anna: Yeah. Oh, he's my favorite. He's so nice. Friend of the show Stephen McGann.
Leila: Yeah. Well, and also speaking of the wide range of things that we covered, we actually did a Dungeons and Dragons Lady Science-themed series. So, yeah, we did cover a lot of ground, and we got Stephen McGann to participate in that. So I think that might be the most successful thing we've done over the past seven years.
Rebecca: It was pretty great. It's a highlight. Yeah. Yeah.
Leila: And all it took was Anna DMing him on Twitter. That was the extent of it.
Rebecca: Because speaking of people who have—
Anna: Sliding into his DMs. "Hey, Dr. Turner."
Leila: Yeah. Speaking of white dudes that we'll allow to live after we take over, Stephen McGann and Jordan Bimm.
Rebecca: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. I do wanna also shout out Jordan. His discussion and the information he shared about his research, I think, is one of them that it's become my trivia that I share at a cocktail party, kind of "Did you know?" I know you know about the monkeys that went to space, but did you know that they were both female and that they had this whole weird-ass domestic play that they made these poor apes play for the rest of their lives?
[Start Clip from Earlier Episode]
J. Bimm: So to actually have animals back alive after the experiment was a big deal because you could do things with them. You could subject them to further experiments, but then you could also parade them around for public relations purposes, which is exactly what NASA did with Able and Baker. They had a giant press conference for them at NASA headquarters. They appeared on the cover of Life magazine together. And they had these very long and interesting afterlives as these unwilling representatives promoting space flight.
J. Bimm: And the most interesting thing about Able and Baker is that both of them were female monkeys, but afterwards they were gendered in this binary where Able was crafted as the stereotypical astronaut Cold Warrior and assumed to be male and is referred to as "he" whenever it appears in movies. Whereas Baker was fitted into the image of the suburban housewife, and she was confined to an enclosure they called Baker's Bungalow. They even found another male monkey that they called her monkey husband, and they expected her to reproduce. So the focus there was on her reproduction capacity and the study of her offspring.
J. Bimm: And so anyways, it's a fascinating story. It shows how masculinity in the space program was under construction even before the first humans even flew in space, these ideas were already there and there was already this really important shoring-up around spaceflight that it comes out even in the case of monkeys.
[End Clip from Earlier Episode]
Rebecca: So weird. It's so weird. Yeah. There are many strange things I have learned from people doing this podcast, and that's a fun one to share.
Anna: Yeah. Oh, and this is just a call-out pod now, but a special thanks to Rebecca Onion for coming on. She's one of the first people that I ever talked to about what Lady Science could be because she was doing such an amazing job with her blogging work for Slate at the time, and she agreed to talk to me at a conference just so I could literally pick her brain about what is it like being a person—a scholar.
Leila: A person. "What's it like being a person? Please tell me."
Anna: "Please help me." It was like that, too, if I remember correctly. But I just really appreciated that she took the time to talk to me about that stuff, and I have taken a lot of her advice to heart. And it was nice to get to talk to her about her work on the podcast. It's just it's such a cool opportunity to have a podcast and be like, "Hey, I really like your work. Do you wanna come talk to us?"
Leila: We have had some pretty cool guests. We had Rebecca Onion. We had Safiya Noble. We had Susan Stryker. We had Emily Graslie. We had the fantastic ladies from Dope Labs. We've had a pretty good lineup of guests, I think.
Anna: Yeah. And I think our interviews are a good who's who of who's doing really incredible scholarship in the history of science right now. You just make yourself a book list.
Leila: Yeah. Well, and I did a little three-episode series talking with current working women and scientists all from various fields about how they integrate feminism into the science that they do. And so we talked with an anthropologist, an astrophysicist, a sociologist. So there's a lot of variety in there of how current working women in STEM use feminism in their everyday life and work. And that's pretty interesting to listen to as well. Since we do usually focus on the historical aspect of things, it was cool to get a present working perspective of those things.
Anna: Yeah. We did a lotta cool stuff. I do wanna come back to the Dungeons and Dragons episode just really quickly because that was such a massive undertaking and the recording was six hours. And Leila, I was afraid she was literally going to die while we were recording because she was super sick.
Leila: Yeah.
Rebecca: Yeah.
Leila: But and yeah. It was fun to—I think me and Anna just had four beers over Zoom one night and came up with the story. And then that was super fun. Anna put a lot of work into creating the campaign, and it was really fun doing the sound and mixing the music for that. And it was Rebecca's very first time playing Dungeons and Dragons, so it was a lotta fun making that. Yeah. And I wish we had been able to do another one.
Anna: Yeah. I wish we had been able to re-record the second half 'cause everybody was passing into the shadow realm by that point.
Rebecca: It's true. Yeah.
Leila: Yeah. And I was literally laying my head on the desk still trying to stay in character and play.
Anna: But it was super fun and it was super joyous. And like Leila said, sitting down and breaking the story for the campaign was another instance in which doing this kind of work reminded me that I actually do love the history of science and I am interested in it. And all the goofy story beats we came up with, we were able to do those and pun them and make them funny.
Leila: Well, we thought they were funny.
Rebecca: They were. They were funny. I mean, I feel like there are all these moments where it's like, "Oh, this is women's history of science fan service, and I'm here for it."
Leila: That's all we know how to do. What are you talking about?
Rebecca: Exactly. Exactly. There was like, "Surprise!" It's how in cheesy historical fiction, suddenly Forrest Gump meets everyone famous from that era. And that kind of thing is such a cliché in historical fiction, but you know what? There's a reason we do it. And it's great when we're able to do that with some of our favorite historical characters and to move through it. And get to see the surprise and not know what was coming was just a delight.
Leila: Yeah. It was. And I hope that when people go back and listen to the podcast, or as they have listened to it with us going along, is that I hope people do get a feel of how much we do love history. We might not have loved making the podcast all the time because there was a technical difficulty nearly every single time.
Leila: But I think that that's one thing that does come across in the episode, is not just how much we love history of science, but how, in the ways that we just get worked up about everything, just also how much we feel about historical work as a social justice practice and something that we're gonna keep doing, I think, in our own lives even if we're not doing it on the podcast or in the magazine anymore. Does anyone have anything else to say, or are we good to say our goodbyes?
Rebecca: Well, I do wanna also shout out to Leila for basically learning how to produce podcasts.
Leila: Might not have done it very well, but I did learn how to do it.
Anna: No, you did.
Rebecca: Which I think you learned how to do it excellently, and that's just awesome. I feel like more and more people know this as more and more people have podcasts, but I feel like there's always this thing where someone in a podcast, group of people doing a podcast, is like, "Oh, shit. I have to learn how to edit sound now. That's something I have literally never thought about before." And I am very grateful that that person in our group was Leila.
Leila: Aw, thanks, you guys.
Anna: Yeah. I mean, it's definitely like you can't just start a podcast. There's a lot of shit you have to learn how to do and things that need to be set up and maintained. And it's a lot of work and, like Leila said, something literally went wrong every single time we sat down to record. But we woulda been really up a creek if you hadn't figured all that stuff out and become such an excellent producer.
Leila: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Anna: So yeah. I guess I just wanted to say, by way of closing, thank you to everybody who has listened to the podcast and enjoyed it. Thank you to people who have used it in their classes. I don't know why you would do that, but good job. And this is the end of one thing, but it's not the end of everything. So who knows what lies on the horizon?
Rebecca: It's true. I have no doubt that we're gonna all keep doing cool stuff. And certainly all of the people we've mentioned on this episode are gonna keep doing cool stuff and, yeah, continuing to bring all their feelings to talking about history. Which is, I think, what we have done best.
Leila: Yeah. Well, and thank you guys. It was always fun doing this with y'all. It was just like sitting down and having a conversation, and that's always fun 'cause I like talking to you guys. But, yeah, if you liked this episode, I don't care if you didn't. We're not gonna be back next time, so that's the end bumper this time.
