The Guilty Feminist Podcast Live

When I saw The Guilty Feminist podcast was going to do a live show at the Arts Centre I thought ‘that’s interesting, I’ll go’ since most of the time, I feel like a guilty feminist. I’ve never listened to the podcast because as a single mum, I have so many stresses and pressures in my brain I do not have the room to inject any podcasts. If I’m going to unwind, it has to be to something that completely transports me away from my work as a feminist poet, writer and performer. I do follow the host of The Guilty Feminist podcast, Deborah Frances-White, on Instagram, but I am reviewing this show as a standalone show, without any prior knowledge of the podcast.

Adopted as a baby and raised in Brisbane before moving to the UK as an adult, Deborah Frances-White is currently touring her podcast around Australia and New Zealand and this isn’t her first time. Hamer Hall at Melbourne’s Arts Centre, which seats 2500, was three-quarters full, so Deborah has a solid following. She’s won all sorts of awards, she has a book too, and the podcast has had two million downloads. This Melbourne show was her 400^th.

The structure of the show was like a live talk show with couches. It had a running time of two hours with an interval. Deborah was the main host, supported by comedian Celia Pacquola and musician Grace Petrie, who are regulars on her shows. Magda Szubanski was as special guest, and there were two artistic feature sets by local poet Alison J Barton, and disability activist and musician Eliza Hull accompanied by dancer Roya the Destroya. The premise of the podcast is all the insecurities one might feel as a feminist, as well as all the hypocrisies that undermine them. There was a running thread of ‘I am a feminist but…’

The show overall was funny, entertaining, relevant and inspiring. There were some very candid conversations and positive messaging around embracing your kind of feminism whatever that may be, which is what I adopt in my own work. Deborah has definitely cultivated a community. There is a lot of heart in her work. She had a natural interaction with the audience, like we were all just sitting around in her living room having a chat. She even wore a glitter guilty feminist cape which she passed around as she chatted. She asked questions like ‘who has the most feminist job’ and audience members would call out and she’d have a chat to them about the work they do and ask the community to get behind it.

Deborah had a very loose approach to the running order of the show which was clearly evident when it ran nearly an hour overtime to three hours. I was told later that this is common for the podcast. I enjoyed the Indigenous feminist perspective in Alison’s poetry. I have never seen anything like Roya’s dancing. She dances with crutches as she has one leg, and her movement to Eliza’s ‘running under water’ was stunning.

I could relate to Deborah’s commentary around being a Jehovah’s Witness when she was younger as I believe religion can be very repressive to feminism. The comedy by Celia about motherhood was on point, and it was of interest to me when during chats with Deborah she confessed to not currently talking to her father and the pressures to be the sacrificing mother, very common in southern-European communities. Grace played some very funny music on acoustic guitar about the anxieties of loving someone and the awkwardness your friends experience when you don’t stop talking about your ex.

The last hour of the show Magda was interviewed by Deborah and Celia asked a few questions too. Magda talked of her experience as the daughter of Polish migrants who, while living in Poland, risked their lives to protect Jews during the holocaust. Magda spoke of the boys club in the writing world and how feminism was considered a dirty world. Her experience of living in a lesbian separatist commune was interesting as was her activism in the marriage equality debate. She shared personal stories and talked of the importance of considering both sides of an argument and how she learned to stand back and listen instead of get angry.

Things in the room got extremely heated when Magda, through building an argument based on her life experiences, said she refuses to take sides in the current Palestinian – Israeli war and questioned the activism currently playing out and whether it was counterproductive. This resulted in people from the audience calling out ‘genocide’ and stats on Palestinian women and children killed. Deborah stepped in to say that she does believe it is genocide but that as feminists we have to learn to disagree well. She said she was concerned that feminist spaces were not currently able to partake in healthy debate without it ‘blowing up in our faces’. Celia said she was feeling extremely anxious about the conversation and I’m sure she wasn’t the only one in the room.  

I can see Deborah’s intention to have a loose show to allow the conversation to go where it needed to go, but in this case, I felt that it resulted in conversations that needed talking about getting skirted around and then coming to a head at the last minute when the show had run overtime already and the arts centre were sending Deborah cues to end the show. Perhaps with a bit more structure, some important conversations could have been had but in a more careful and thought out way. I don’t blame Deborah though, it’s a product of our times. I agree that we have lost our ability to have conversation, but this has been happening for some time. Many years ago I was blacklisted and I still feel shut out and punished for it years later. Today it’s happening more and more, and I’m kind of glad that people are catching on to it now because I don’t think this behaviour is safe or okay.

It was clear to me as the conversation was getting heated on stage that some people can afford to say certain things while others cannot. If I am blacklisted then that severely hurts my ability to provide as a single mother. Perhaps Magda can afford to say things and still be able to put food on the table. I also felt, as a Cypriot women for example, if they were talking about the division and war in Cyprus on stage instead of Israel and Palestine, I would have felt a little uncomfortable that there were no Cypriots on stage.

The show gave me much food for thought and was overall a positive experience. I especially liked conversation around social media and the algorithm and the pointlessness of doom scrolling and rage without action. However, I left feeling that I would have liked it better if the Eliza, Roya and Alison were also interviewed about their thoughts on feminism rather than just providing ‘entertainment’. There needs to be more space carved out in the feminist space for marginalised voices.

Koraly Dimitriadis

Koraly Dimitriadis is a Cypriot-Australian bestselling poet, writer and performer and the author of Love and F—k Poems, Just Give Me The Pills and She’s Not Normal. Her theatre show “I say the wrong things all the time” premiered at La Mama.