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The Challenge of Challenging Gender Norms

Stephanie Solomon
Stephanie Solomon

Stephanie Solomon and I became friends in our early twenties. We talked about everything. Gender was one of those things. The assumptions people carried with them about how men and women should be in the world, or how relationships should work. We saw the problems so clearly. As you do when you’re young. A couple decades later, it turns out it’s not as easy to change it all as we thought.

These days, Solomon works in domestic violence prevention. She still talks and thinks about gender a lot – in her professional and personal life. We sat down a couple months ago to talk about how those revolutionary dreams are playing out for us today.

Credits

Inner States is produced and edited by me, Alex Chambers. Our associate producer, who was instrumental to putting this episode together, is Dom Heyob. Our master of social media is Jillian Blackburn. Our intern is Karl Templeton. We get support from Eoban Binder, Natalie Ingalls, LuAnn Johnson, Sam Schemenauer, Payton Whaley, Lisa Robbin Young and Kayte Young. Our Executive Producer is Eric Bolstridge.

Our theme song is by Amy Oelsner and Justin Vollmar. Thanks to Amy and Justin for the additional music on the episode as well.

Alex Chambers runs WFIU’s arts desk, and produces and hosts WFIU’s Inner States, a weekly podcast and radio show about arts, culture, and ideas from southern Indiana and beyond. He’s the co-creator of How to Survive the Future, a podcast about the present, produced in partnership with Indiana Humanities. He has a PhD in American Studies, with a dissertation called Climate Violence and the Poetics of Refuge, and a book of poems called Bindings: A Preparation, about domestic life and empire. In his spare time, he teaches audio storytelling at the IU Media School. When he’s not in the woods gathering sound, you might see him out for a run on the streets of Bloomington.