Feminist Frequency Radio

Terminator: Dark Fate is the 6th entry in the wibbly-wobbley timey-wimey cinematic universe originally brought to life by James Cameron in 1984. The franchise has taken a lot of detours over the past 35 years — some more successful than others — but the supporting infrastructure of the story has never really changed: sometime in “the future,” “the machines” turn on us and wage an all-out war that leaves billions dead and the planet a devastated wasteland...

With another Hallowe’en behind us we wanted to dive into horror movies. It seems movie-goers have very strong options about horror — love or hate. Horror can also be a contentious genre when viewed through a feminist lens so we decided to bring on our good friend and amazing photographer Jessica Zollman to chat with us about the topic. Jessica is a huge horror fan and spends every october watching one horror movie a day.

This week, Anita, Caro, and Ebony don some cool DIY vigilante masks and go dispense some of that sweet feminist street justice. We run these mean media streets! Episode 101 of FFR is all about HBO's new series, Watchmen. Tune in to hear us discuss the intricate world-building; the incomparable Regina King; the seductive allure of vigilantism; and the racial mapping of this alternate universe.

On this week’s episode, Ebony and Carolyn revisit the sci-fi horror classic Alien, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Our conversation attempts to examine some of the film’s many layers—its focus on working-class characters and their concerns, the ways in which H.R. Giger’s design for the alien taps into some of our most primal fears—while also acknowledging the filmmaking elements that help to make it such an enduring landmark of sci-fi cinema.

This week on FFR, we’re joined by science YouTuber Trace Dominguez to talk about the new sci-fi film Ad Astra! Our conversation covers whether or not the movie is any good (and whether or not Brad Pitt is any good in it), what it's really all about, frustration with the fact that the stand-in for humanity in stories striving to be about universal experiences is so often a white man, the film’s depiction of the moon as a place where capitalism runs rampant, and the accuracy (or lack thereof) in...

We live in an era of oppression, in which powerful tyrants are silencing the voices and crushing the careers of brave men who dare to engage in true creative freedom. Or maybe, people long accustomed to operating with impunity are now sometimes finding that there are consequences for their actions, and they don’t like it. This week, we're talking about the much-decried "cancel culture" we're apparently living in right now...

Based on true events, the new Netflix series Unbelievable begins with a teenager named Marie Adler in Washington state reporting a rape to the police. The police launch their investigation, but soon, because of Marie’s erratic behavior and an almost complete absence of forensic evidence, they begin to suspect that she made up the attack in a desperate bid for attention. They pressure her to retract her story, and to “confess” that she made the whole thing up...

In December of 2015, an article was published in New York Magazine that told an amazing story. In the wake of the 2008 Wall Street collapse, a group of women who worked at the New York strip club Scores saw the men and the money stop coming in, so they devised a risky, unconventional, and illegal way to make the money come in. Now the true story of these women and their criminal endeavor is the subject of the new film Hustlers...

This week, we shift away from our usual format for a special bonus episode. Join Anita and Carolyn for a conversation about recent events in the gaming industry that have lead to what many are calling gaming’s #MeToo moment...

On this week’s FFR, Ebony and Carolyn continue our conversation about Life Is Strange 2 by diving into the recently released fourth episode, Faith. We talk about a particularly challenging scene in which Sean encounters a pair of racists, the different ways in which we approach the game as players, and the way the game continues to give its characters a surprising level of emotional complexity, and to view them through a compassionate lens.