On counter-narratives and writing the books we want to read w/Kathryn Belle
Show notes
In this season finale, Élaina interviews Kathryn Belle, founder of the Collegium of Black Women Philosophers, associate professor at Penn State University, and owner and director of La Belle Vie Coaching. They discuss Prof Belle’s work on philosophy of race and engaging with black feminist philosophical scholarship on Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex”.
You can find Kathryn’s teaching and research interests here: https://www.kathrynsophiabelle.com/
And you can find out more about La Belle Vie Coaching here: http://www.kathrynbelle.com/
Article mentioned in this episode:
Book chapter mentioned in this episode:
Books mentioned in this episode:
“Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question”, by Kathryn T. Gines
“Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy”, eds. Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano
“The Second Sex”, by Simone de Beauvoir
“Alice Walker: A Life”, by Evelyn C. White
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Philosophy Casting Call is hosted, edited, and produced by Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril
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Transcript
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 0:19
Hello, and welcome to Philosophy Casting Call, the podcast that features underrepresented philosophical talent. My name is Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril and I'm your host and resident casting director. We have come now at the end of the line, I can't believe it. This is the last episode of season one. After this, I'll be taking a hiatus in order to focus on writing my grant applications applying for my postdoc and all that fun stuff. But I definitely will be back later in the fall winter and fear not I have already started recording interviews so you will still have philosophy casting call in your life. Just go back and listen to the other episodes. share them with your friends discuss them. Write to me thoughtful emails at philosophycastingcallpod@gmail.com. I really want to give a shout out to a review that the podcast got: jpopblast titled it "Philosophy for all". They said: "I listened to the best door in episode I'll definitely share." Yes! This is exactly what we want. We want people to share it; this is philosophy for all, please leave a review. This really helps the algorithm and we live in a world dominated by the algorithm. So thank you very much jpopblast; keep them coming!
Before we close the curtain and we say goodbye. I want to share my interview with the one and only Kathryn Sophia Belle. Yes, she is the founding director of Collegium of Black Women Philosophers, she's an associate professor at Penn State University, and she's the founding director and owner of La Belle Vie Coaching. She is amazing and I couldn't think of anyone better to round off this first season of Philosophy Casting Call. In this episode, we discuss some of the books that Kathryn has published and will publish and as usual, I will link everything in the show notes. And all of the available books are also part of my affiliate bookshop.org link. So one way to support the pod is to click on that link and to purchase Sophia's book or any other book that has been mentioned this entire season. I do want to make it clear that articles and books that Kathryn published before 2017 are under the name "Kathryn T. Gines", but everything since then has been published and will be published under Kathryn Sophia Belle. So that's just a clarificatory note. So without further ado, please welcome my guest, Kathryn Belle.
Welcome Kathryn, thank you for being here.
Kathryn Belle 3:30
Thank you.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 3:32
So would you mind introducing yourself to the listeners?
Kathryn Belle 3:36
Sure. My name is Kathryn Sophia Belle, I am founder and owner of La Belle Vie Coaching where I live and write and coach at the intersections of High Achievers, Happily Unmarried, and Erotic Empowerment. I am also an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 3:52
Wonderful. So I always ask my guests when we begin, what drew you to philosophy? Why did you decide to integrate that in your practice something you wanted to study?
Kathryn Belle 4:02
Yes. So I went to Spelman College as an undergraduate on Spelman College is a historically black women's college small liberal arts college in Atlanta, Georgia. When I went to Spelman, I started out as a biology pre med and pre law major and my intentions were to do a JD MD when I finished I wanted to go to medical school and law school and then practice law dealing with medical research ethics, but I found going to my classes, I would be dragging myself along to my biology classes and biology labs, but I'll be kind of skipping along go into my humanities classes. So I thought, okay, maybe biology is not the major for me. So I reached out to different departments, you know, as a small liberal arts college, so it wasn't hard to talk to the different chairs of the different departments and I said, Listen, you know, when I finished I want to do a JD MD, how can your major helped me with that goal, and of course, the philosophy department had the strongest argument for how philosophy could help me both with medical school as well as with law school. So I changed my major to philosophy. I really enjoyed philosophy a lot and up until My senior year, I was still thinking about I had dropped the medical school altogether, I knew I didn't have a passion for biology at that point or sustainable interest in it. So medical school was no longer part of the equation. I was still thinking about law school or maybe International Studies. And then I found out my senior year, this was in the late 90s, there were only 16 black women in the US with a PhD in philosophy at that time. So I felt a moral and personal obligation to increase our representation in the discipline of philosophy. So that's how I got into philosophy and decided to go to grad school and philosophy.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 5:32
And has that motivation evolved or changed over the years.
Kathryn Belle 5:36
It has, I think, I know I definitely had a love of learning a love of philosophy, love of critical thinking. But being a philosophy major and historically black woman's college meant that philosophy whether we were reading Plato or Audre Lorde, we were always going to look at what were the implications for constructions, a phrase for constructing from class, gender, sexual orientation and things like that. So that was just the way we were oriented toward philosophy at Spelman College. So I really had a very different sense of what philosophy was as an undergraduate versus what it is, as a professor, professional or professional professor, though going from a historically black, small liberal arts women's college to a predominately white institution where there were all these mental gymnastics that were done to avoid talking about race, class and gender in the philosophy classroom. It was really striking to me just the difference with the approaches to doing philosophy. And I went to the University of Memphis, where a lot of students actually did focus on it's a pluralistic programme. So they had both the analytic and continental traditions, but a lot of students were focusing on what we now call critical philosophy of race, Africana philosophy, feminist philosophy. So that was a space where you could do those things. But, but even in that space, you know, there was still some resistance by some faculty members to engage in those questions, you know, in certain kind of philosophy courses. So my perception of what professional philosophy look like I think shifted a little bit over time, but my love of philosophy hasn't shifted, I found that with starting the coaching business, I was able to take my initial love and passion for philosophy and apply that to coaching, right. And so I do continue to love reading and writing and publishing and philosophy. I love working with graduate students in philosophy. I don't love things like faculty meetings. But the things that I love about philosophy, I'm able to really be intentional about focusing on those things in my professional life as a professor, but also incorporate those things into the coaching work that I do. So that is one way that has shifted, like I was able to kind of fall back in love with philosophy through coaching and some interesting ways.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 7:33
Can you speak more on that? I'm really interested.
Kathryn Belle 7:35
Sure. So when you think about something like so my coaching approach, I tend to focus on existentialism. So we're looking at the big questions like Who am I was my sense of purpose, you know, one of my deepest desires? How do I think about my freedom, choice and responsibility, right? And so those questions can be posed in a certain kind of way in the classroom with undergraduates. But a lot of times the undergraduate students are concerned about like, you know, how can I get more points on this paper or, you know, it's just a different orientation toward the work when you have concern about your grades and trying to go to graduate school or professional school. But when I'm working with coaching clients, they really are thinking through their life's work or their life's purpose, right? So there's just a different kind of investment and those kinds of questions, when you're a little bit older, and really thinking through important turning points in your life, then, as a student, where you know, a lot of times the orientation is to gain more toward grades, or, you know, how's this class, you're going to help me or hinder me and getting whatever GPA for whatever internship or other programmes students are applying?
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 8:33
So, yeah, that's really interesting, because when I read your book, "Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question", and in the introduction, you say, you wrote this book, because this is what you wish you had access to when you were introduced to Hannah Arendt. And that really struck a chord with me, because I had never seen anyone say it so explicitly. You know, people talk about like, adding to the discipline or advancing the scholarship. And we're kind of like, you know, let me engage with this thinker and say, Okay, what is it that we're missing? What is slipping through the cracks when we're having these narratives about this specific author? And I thought that was, that was a very bold and I found it very refreshing choice that you position yourself. So clearly being like, Hey, I'm, I'm here to say, there are things that we can learn from Hannah Arendt in philosophy of race that she herself has not noticed, and other things that are also deeply problematic that we're not discussing.
Kathryn Belle 9:37
Yes, yes. So that was inspired in part by Toni Morrison. And I believe Alice Walker said another version of this. So Toni Morrison talks about, you know, if there's a book that I really want to read that hasn't been written, then you know, I have to write it. And then I think Alice Walker added to that, you know, not only do I need to write the book that hasn't been written that I want to read, but like no one else can write it in a way that I can write like, there's a particular thing that I need to read that I get Voice two that other people could not give voice to. So how can I bring my unique voice to whatever the subject matter is? And of course, they were more essays, novelists, poets, but I think it also applies to philosophy for sure. So that was my approach, like, what is it about how to read and how she's been taken up, that is not really working for me, and what is not being said that, that needs to be seen of things that I expected to be said, that didn't come up in some seminars or didn't come up in some articles. And so then, of course, there are some people who have kind of critiqued her along similar lines as me and essays. But this was the first book length manuscript I kind of assessing her writings along the lines of this, you know, the so called Negro questions. So it was a project that I enjoyed doing just and working out my own issues with her in that text.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 10:44
And it was a very interesting book also in the sense that you really provide the historical context of not only what on earth is talking about, but the historical dialogues that she was or was not in, and what was happening, kind of in race theory and activism at the time. So again, I don't know I I've never read a philosophy book quite like it, it was, it was very special in that sense.
Kathryn Belle 11:12
Well, thank you for saying that. I appreciate that. I do. So philosophers are notoriously bad historians. We're not historians, I know, actual historians, you know, and typically, historians, they need like 1010 documents to back up any one claim they're making with philosophy, it really is all about the argument, if you can sustain the argument, you know, who cares about the, you know, the sources of, you know, the archives and things like that. And so I wanted to be really intentional about offering, you know, not what a historian would consider history, but a kind of intellectual history of what's going on, because none of these arguments ever emerge in a vacuum, right? Like people are always already in conversation with other people or pushing against, you know, dominant narratives at the time. And so I really didn't want to capture what was going on, not only in terms of who aren't centerline hitters were but other people who were having these debates, again, people with whom she was familiar and other people's home, she may not have been, and how do we get a different perspective of these arguments or these claims when you have that full picture, and you don't have just this, you know, neatly packaged argument in a vacuum.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 12:10
Because then you're also able to draw a meta narrative of saying like, okay, now when we're having discourse, and we're like, building concepts and doing activism, what are the intersections of certain people? What, what is our responsibility, I felt like, by saying, you know, Hannah Arendt was aware of other people like Ellison and things, and she chose not to engage. I felt like that was a comment and argument that, you know, she, her writing on, on race and on education was irresponsible, in a way. And so I think that's something that we can take away as a reader now and being like, Okay, if we exist in intellectual world, like, what is our responsibility?
Kathryn Belle 12:55
Yeah, I think it is good to think of our responsibilities. I'm also thinking about even the importance of lived experience, right. And so part of a lot of the work that I do, whether it's this book on how to orient or the book that I just finished on some on the book, or it's coming out of me, having a particular lived experience that does not align with an experience that's being articulated as this universal experience, and it's just like, well, that's not my experience. So like, even in the preface, and the dedication of the RN book, my mother worked as an attorney and I learned about Brown v board and desegregation stuff, you know, before High School and certainly in high school. So when I was reading Hannah Arendt on the issue of desegregation and education, I already knew both from my lived experience and just from my upbringing, that that's not how things were going, you know, this is not how black families were thinking about integration, right? It was not about trying to get closer, close proximity to whiteness, right? So for our rent to articulate this kind of narrative, in that way, just didn't align with my lived experience and a counter narrative that I already knew. And in a similar way, with Simone de Beauvoir, like there's a section where she's talking about and this is a small section in the second sex, but she's talking about abolitionists suffrage in the US and basically repeats this narrative of like, Okay, well, you had these white women that worked as abolitionists, and then black men turning their back on white women when it came to the issue of suffrage. And it's like, that's not quite how that went down.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 14:09
And then you read Angela Davis, you're like, "No!"
Kathryn Belle 14:12
Exactly! What exactly and of course, like in being at Spelman College, like I was reading Angela Davis, and bell hooks and all of these other people. So, you know, if you if you have a certain kind of upbringing, or you've had access to, you know, certain experiences or certain kinds of texts and different kind of scholarship, then when you come against this, when you read this scholarship, you see, okay, there's something wrong here that needs to be corrected. But if you've not had access to a counter narrative than a lot of people accept as accurate. The stories that many philosophers tell. And so for me, it was like bringing more accuracy and bringing a counter narrative to a dominant narrative that was coming out of a rant. And a writ to me is particularly interesting because she often gets represented as you know, even for people who acknowledge like, okay, there's racism, there's sexism, there's heterosexism there all these issues with the Western philosophical canon for a lot of people who would even ignore There are plenty of people who don't acknowledge that for but even for the people who do acknowledge that had our rent tends to get held up as an exception to that rule, like she's the philosopher of pluralism, you know, she got it right. You know, she talks about politics. This is what we mean by politics or the political. And it's like, No, she actually didn't get it, right. Like she may be less problematic than some of these other figures. But there's still some issues here that we need to reckon with, and what does that look like?
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 15:24
Particularly her division between the social and the political will has always bothered me, and I've been in countless arguments with people. And then you said, it's so plainly when you explain it. When she says, like, Oh, well, education somehow isn't political. And you're like, Okay, I know what's wrong now?
Kathryn Belle 15:43
Well, and that I like the way you're describing it. Because a lot of people who appreciate my work are people who come to a text and they're like, there's something off here, I can't quite articulate what it is. And they often have professors who are telling them, they don't understand the text, or they're getting it wrong. And they come to my work. And my work helps them give them voice in words to what they felt was wrong, but couldn't maybe cannot articulate at the time. And so I appreciate that my work has functioned in that way for a lot of readers.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 16:08
And I come at it having been completely educated in philosophy in majority white institutions. So Angela Davis was not on my curriculum, Bell Hooks was not on my curriculum. And that's partly why I wanted to start this podcast because I'm like, there are people studying these counter narratives, reading them working on them that exist, I just wasn't exposed to them as a student. So now as a grown up, I can seek them out for myself and do that. And it's interesting that you, I mean, I guess the better way to formulate this question is, why did you choose to look to Simone de Beauvoir after errant because when we think about a classical canon of like 20th century philosophy, they are the two main women that appear How did that play anything? Or was it your interest in existentialism?
Kathryn Belle 17:02
Yeah, it didn't play a role actually, from me, a lot of times, the writing comes out of a frustration with something that's going on me needing to kind of write through my frustration about it. So my dissertation was on how to arrange john Paul Sartre in France funnel, and I was looking at how they took a recent revolutionary violence. And then when I was looking at writing my first books, I ended up kind of extracting the rent from the Sartre funnel, and even though they still make cameo appearances in the red book, and I was thinking the next book was going to be like a phenomenal book or a starter book, but I kept getting well I ended up writing this was like, actually, before the art book came out, I did an edited collection called convergences like feminism and continental philosophy which I co edited with Donna Del Mar canto and Guadalupe Davison Medina, Guadalupe, Guadalupe Davidson. And so and one of the contributions that I made to that edited volume was a chapter on the race gender analogy, as it appears in Sartre was respectful prostitute and Beauvoir's the second sex.
And so it was one of the things that again, and this was around a time of like the elections in the United States presidential elections in the United States that were primaries in the Democratic Party between the two had them, you know, kind of for runners were Obama and Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Gloria Steinem had come out with a statement that, you know, well, if Obama, or basically this idea that, you know, Obama by virtue of his maleness had some privileged views of the Hillary Clinton by virtue of her femaleness, which did not account for Clinton's privilege by virtue of her whiteness, right? And so there was this, and this also comes back to even the comment I was just making about suffrage right, there was also this comment of like, Okay, well, men had access to voting before women did. And it's like, okay, Yes, they did. But that narrative does not account for even when black women legally could vote, the various structures that were put in place to prevent them from voting, from violence, to poll taxes to literacy tests, and things like that. And so there's an oversimplification of these narratives sometimes that, you know, need more nuance. So anyway, that was kind of happening in the world and in politics, and I felt like that race, gender and analysis or analogy, rather, what's kind of playing out in Steinem's comment. And so and then I was tracing it back to how that analogy works in text, like the second sex and how its operating in, in the Respectful Prostitute.
So that's the first time I published anything on Simone. Before at that point, and then I ended up just continuing to come back to like, the more I was working on other projects, I had a graduate student who was working on Simone de Beauvoir and, and start trying to funnel and you know, so she just kept coming up and I and again, I was pressed in a similar way that I was with Hannah Arendt book, right there's this there are these narratives that are out there around the second sex and have transformative a textbook. And this is not to deny that it is an important and transformative text. You know, my argument is never we should stop reading this video or that you're or throw this text or that text out the window. It's what do we learn? What can we How can we complicate this text with other kinds of texts that were written around the same time or even before that text was written, right? Because a lot of times the assumption is again, if it's in the western philosophical canon, somehow it existed and there were no other women or people of colour or anybody else on the planet who was thinking about these issues happening, Europeans, and it's like, that's not what was going on.
So anyway, I kept coming back to the Second Sex, but I really wanted to read it through the lens of how black women and other women of colour have engaged that text or have engaged issues that come up in that text, right. And so the first chapter of that book is looking at Lorraine Hansberry who wrote one of the first reviews of the second sex even though it was not published at the time she wrote it. So she wrote the book review in 1957. It wasn't made available publicly or in published form until Beverly got chef dolls Anthology, words of fire an anthology of African American feminist writings, but that was 1995 so I'm like, okay, even people before 1995 who weren't citing Hansberry, on Beauvoir after 1995. I mean, we've had what is it almost 25 years now since then to be able to cite that text. So why aren't we citing Hans Barry's reading of the second sex, which was actually a very positive reading, even though she has some critiques. So that's a long, this is a long way of saying I came to the wall project, um, you know, I just kept kind of running up against her and into her in different ways. And I thought, Okay, what would be a productive engagement with the second sex and for me, the most productive way to engage that text was through black woman and other women of colour who have engaged it. So there's like Lorraine Hansberry is my first chapter, Claudia Jones as my second chapter, she wrote an essay called an end to the neglect of problems of Negro women in 1949, which is the same year that the second sex was published. It's like an 18 page essay that does more than 18 pages around what we today will call intersectionality. And before is able to do and almost 1000 pages in two volumes, right. And so it's interesting to look at those two texts next to each other, and indirectly, so she didn't publish directly on the second sex, Claudia Jones didn't, but Claudia Jones was helpful in blocking a negative review of that book in a socialist journal. And she was also integral and getting published a positive review of that book in a socialist journal in the United States. So that's like a history of the war studies that a lot of people who work on Beauvoir don't engage or acknowledge or you know, or even know, but, you know, they will now that the book comes out when it comes out anyway.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 22:21
Yeah, well, please let me know. And then I'll be able to post about it when it comes out. I've read your your papers on Simone de Beauvoir, and you mentioned the disanalogy of race and gender. Could you explain a bit more what you mean by that?
Kathryn Belle 22:37
Sure. So a lot of times we're in again, before isn't that isn't that this is not unique to her. There are a lot of white feminists historically that have taken on this ration or analogy, which is basically this idea that racial oppression is analogous to or similar to gender oppression. And so the problem with that, or the dis analogy, that Africa actually, well, the problem with it, and let me start there is that it takes for granted that race is going to be black men, right? And gender is going to be white women, right? So if you're drawing an analogy between the oppression of black men and white women, again, there are this analogies there as well. But when you're focused on that analogy, don't include women of colour who are at the intersections of race and gender, right, and who are experiencing racism and sexism simultaneously. And these that are different from either experiencing one or the other, you know, on their own. And so what I'm looking at is historically how that analogy has been used, what's probably you know, how it falls short and fails, and how it actually does not capture, you know, like racial oppression is not the same as gender oppression and right, even if they and the thing is they're not mutually exclusive. They're neither the same nor mutually exclusive. They're co constitutive, right. They're systems of oppression that have been built to keep different people in society in particular kinds of places. And if you look at them either as the same or as completely different, then you're going to miss how they're, you know, what the common you've ever collective called interlocking systems of oppression, right? They co construct constitutive and they work in tandem with one another.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 24:00
Yeah, that's a I feel that's a very fruitful concept. Because I come at it from a perspective of philosophy of disability where, again, there is a dis analogy, like ableism is not sexism is not racism, but they all kind of are concatenated. And they all overlap in some ways. But so like, how helpful are analogous discourses? How unhelpful or harmful they are sometimes, and yeah, so I'll probably look into that a bit more the concept of this analogy?
Kathryn Belle 24:31
Yeah, for me, I mean, I've definitely been pushed on the analogy thing for some people. For some reason. Some people really love analogies. I think analogies can be helpful and productive as a first step, but it can't be the final analysis, right? So if it helps, if it helps someone who completely does not understand the concept, to kind of learn and become familiar with a project through analogy, I think that can be helpful for a step. But again, you have it's important to also dig deeper beyond the analogy to again, like where are the similarities, but where are their important differences that need to be Um, you know, attended to.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 25:02
And so now that you've pretty much wrapped up the Beauvoir book, what are you working on at the moment?
Kathryn Belle 25:08
Well, I am working on an edited collection, which is a companion to that book. So again because I complain so bitterly about or just critique, I will say complain bitterly. You know, I'm very critical of the secondary literature on the second sex that does not acknowledge that black women and other women of colour who have historically engaged as tech text over decades, so I'm doing an edited collection where I'm basically pulling together all of the black women and other women of colour that I cite in my book are going to be together and edit the collection so that there will be no excuses for why you did not know that Lorraine Hansberry wrote a review, or Claudia Jones had this essay that came out in the same year, or that Audrey Lorde, the Masters tools whenever dismantle the Masters house was actually delivered at a commemorative conference on the publication of the second second, like the 30th anniversary conference on the publication of the second sex and 79. So I'm pulling all of those materials together in an edited collection. So right now I'm working on the introduction and the kind of, you know, brief synopsis of each of those chapters.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 26:03
Oh, that's wonderful. I feel like that also will be helpful for teaching purposes and things. So it really go hand in hand. And it's kind of like you're making a playlist of all the songs.
Kathryn Belle 26:16
Yes, yeah, that's exactly I love that. Actually. Speaking of analogies, I do like that analogy of the anthology as a playlist of like, the people think, ah, this text that needs to be acknowledged more insight in more.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 26:29
And it's the soundtrack of your book if it were made into a movie.
Kathryn Belle 26:32
Yeah, I'm actually really loving this. So thank you for that.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 26:39
And so as we wrap up, I always ask people, what are you reading right now in philosophy or not? that's giving you joy that you'd like to share?
Kathryn Belle 26:48
Oh, my goodness, Alice Walker. And I actually have the book right here. I'm reading a biography of Alice Walker called "Alice Walker: a Life" by Evelyn White. And so I've always loved Walker like, and actually, I don't know if you can see. So these images behind me the top one is Octavia Butler. Definitely you need to read Octavia Butler in the parable series. It's like the blueprint for surviving what's happening ever right?
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 27:10
I read it recently. And I was like, oh, okay, so she basically imagined the present.
Kathryn Belle 27:16
Exactly, exactly. It's so I mean, I was actually teaching a seminar on the second sex last spring, when everything kind of shut down with the pandemic. And I was like, You know what, the Second Sex is not gonna save you, but parable of the sower will will be your blueprint for surviving this. So we switch gears and we read Octavia Butler the second half of this month ago. But these are all images from the movie, the colour purple, and one of my favourite books is Alice Walker's book, the colour purple, which is also an elf right there. So I've always loved all that to say, I've always loved Alice Walker. And I've recently actually just submitted an essay on black woman's writings writing groups of power and pleasure black woman's writing groups. And so there's an image I don't know if you've ever seen it, but it's like a black and white photo, it has like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and all of these other people's like, has to be the one of the best writing groups ever is from like 1977. And the group was called the sisterhood. It was co founded by Alice Walker in June, Jordan. And so I started out with this photograph and description of this photograph and this writing group called the sisterhood and then I talked about different writing groups that I have been a part of, or that I have created. And so in researching the sisterhood, I came to Alice Walker's biography To find out more about you know, what, what inspired her to start that writing group and what they did and things like that. So So Alice Walker has given me a lot of life talking about not only founding the sisterhood talking about the work that she does, I mean, I love the way she describes her work and her calling and her sense of purpose in terms of working for the ancestor she's like, you know, I don't write for critics. I don't write for people out there. I write, you know, whatever spirit guides come to me and guide whatever projects I'm working on, like I'm working for the ancestors and what other people think about it is like that. She's like I said, what I said here is like, it's none of my business. I don't care what you think about it. And so there's just this kind of radical agency and honesty and Alice Walker that I really love and is given me life right now. So I'm all in on Alice Walker these days. That's wonderful. I'll have to check it out.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 29:14
So where can people find you your coaching and your philosophy works online?
Kathryn Belle 29:20
Yes, so I have a professor website which is my full name so it's www.kathrynsophiabelle.com. And then my teaching in that the professor website has like list of courses that I've taught publications on different events and things like that. And then my coaching website is kathrynbelle.com. And there I give a description of my approach to coaching which I call embodied existentialism. I'm also a registered yoga teacher. So that mind-body connection is also important to me. As scholars and philosophers a lot of times we're in our heads and not in our bodies. So I often talk about how I could theorise black woman's embodiment, but was like very disconnected to my actual physical body. And so I really was able to connect to my physical body in a profound way through yoga. So that mind body connection is important to me in my approach to, to coaching and to clients. So yeah, there's plenty of stuff on my coaching methodology, my areas of focus, they are high achievers, happily married and erotic empowerment. And I'll say really quickly, the erotic empowerment connection is all inspired by Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler, because she was definitely about that too. But Audre Lord uses of the erotic, the erotic as power and thinking about the erotic not only in sexual terms, although she includes that, but also in terms of our sense of purpose, our work, our creativity, and how we've been taught to distrust those aspects of ourselves that are actually what you know what, when we trust ourselves that we can step into our power and step into our sense of purpose. And so that's what she's talking about with the erotic is power. So, so that inspires that, that offering that I have in terms of my coaching,
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 31:08
That's wonderful. I could, I could keep talking forever. But we're gonna wrap this up. And I'm, I'm going to link to all of your, all of the articles and the books that we've discussed today. So people will be able to find them quickly. I want to thank you again, for doing this with me. And I hope that we can speak in the future. Maybe I'll hire you for coaching.
Kathryn Belle 31:35
It has been a pleasure talking to you. And I'm sending you positive energy for the rest of the week in the summer.
Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril 31:41
Thank you. Bye!
And that's a wrap on the very first season of philosophy casting call. I've had so much fun meeting amazing philosophers and sharing our conversations with all of you. I really look forward to season two, but I also look forward to a break. But in the meantime, you can follow Philosophy Casting Call on all of your podcast apps, you can find me on Instagram @philoccpod and the same name on Twitter, come and engage! You can write to me at philosophycastingcallpod@gmail.com. And I have a few guests lined up but I'm always looking for new ones. So if you are interested in being on the podcast, if you know someone who would be great on the podcast, send them my way. If you want me to come on your podcast write to me. You can also become a monthly supporter on my ko-fi.com. So find philoccpod there as well. And you can choose the amount you want to donate monthly. So it's really up to you and everything helps me continue this labour of love. So normally, I would say until two weeks but who knows, just stay posted, share the podcast. And if you want more of my voice, you can tune into my other podcasts that I co host with my friend Sophia Basaldua-Sun, which is called Bookshelf Remix. And we read pop fiction by historically underrepresented or marginalised authors, and we get super nerdy about it. Sophia is a comparative literature scholar, and we somehow always find a way to discuss colonialism and we laugh and we have a lot of fun. So if you need something to tide you over, I recommend you check out Bookshelf Remix. It's time to sign out, so bye!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai