280: Nurturance culture with Nora Samaran

Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra

tl;dr Nurturance culture, rape culture, accountability, and boundaries with Nora Samaran.

Don't miss the October cohort of Power in Pleasure, my 5-week online course dedicated to exploring your pleasure. Details are at dawnserra.com/pleasurecourse. Enrollment closes soon!

This week, I'm joined by Nora Samaran, author of the essay, "The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture" and the recently published book, Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture, out by AK Press. Grab the book here.

Nora and I spent three hours chatting the day we recorded this episode, so needless to say there was a lot for us to unpack and explore.

In the main episode for the show, we talk about nurturance culture, rape culture, raising the bar for the relationships we have and what it means to have relational responsibility, how our brains are wired for interdependence, attachment styles and how culturally we value avoidant attachment styles while vilifying anxious attachment styles.

We dive into why there's so much heartbreak in swimming against the current of neoliberalism and capitalism when we prioritize interdependence, but also the richness available there.

What does mutuality look like? What does care in our communities look like?

Nora offers some beautiful examples of what it means for communities to protect people facing harm while honoring the humanity of the person or people causing the harm, and how we can be more accountable in ways that nurture us all. She calls it the 'double move' and it all starts with meeting the need without centering our own shame and guilt.

Then, for Patreon, our bonus conversation is all about gaslighting. It's fantastic. Nora shares how the culture we live in lies to itself and creates fictions, why we are all so disconnected and dissociated, why when we're addressing patterns of gaslighting and harm it's not a "meet in the middle" thing, the neurology of gaslighting, and trauma bonding. If you want to hear it, it's for folks who support at $3 per month and above, and you can hear it at patreon.com/sgrpodcast.

Have questions of your own you'd like featured on the show? Send me a note using the contact form in the navigation above!

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About Nora Samaran:

Nora Samaran is a white settler from a working class immigrant background. She was a member of the No One is Illegal-Vancouver collective from 2005-2008, and the Media Democracy Day-Vancouver collective from 2008-2010. Her essay ‘The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture’ went viral in February 2016 and has grown into a book, Turn This World Inside Out, out with AK Press in June 2019. She teaches at Douglas College in Coast Salish Territories, also known as Vancouver, British Columbia.

Check out Nora's interview on the Healing Justice podcast.

If you join the Healing Justice podcast bookclub, there is a live webinar coming up, plus you can save 30% on the book!

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Episode Transcript

Episode transcripts are available at dawnserra.com/sexgetsrealpod