Relationscapes: Exploring Identity and Belonging
Your life is shaped by relationships, gender, sexuality, race, and more—yet you're expected to navigate them without a map. On Relationscapes, today’s most insightful writers and thinkers join award-winning journalist Blair Hodges to chart how we relate, love, and belong. Each episode offers fresh perspectives, helpful cultural context, and practical ideas you can actually use—to understand yourself, deepen your relationships, and help build a more humane world.
Episodes
We grow up swimming in gender stereotypes: men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Men are rational and women are emotional. The binary cliches are everywhere, but are they true?
Daphna Joel is a neuroscientist who wanted to know what the science actually says. When she looked at real brains she discovered that each person carries a unique mix of traits, a true mosaic that defies the old binary.
The Bible remains one of the world's most influential books, impacting believers and non-believers alike. As Christian nationalists gain more power over American politics right now, it's as important as ever to understand how the Bible is used to justify laws about abortion, gay marriage, child abuse, and more. Luckily, Bible scholar Dan McClellan is here to give us the data. He's become wildly famous on TikTok unpacking what the...
The Department of Education is being dismantled before our eyes. Why does it matter, and can it be rescued? Reporter Laura Pappano joins us with updates on these things, and her latest visit to the Moms for Liberty conference in Florida, where a new tactic is emerging.
Full transcript is available here at relationscapes.org.
Show Notes- "Moms for quote-unquote 'Liberty,' (with Laura Pappano)," Relationscapes (September 2, 2...
Shen Yang broke the law simply by being born. It was the 1980s in China, and according to the One Child Policy, her parents weren't allowed to have her. They sent her away with relatives, and what followed were years of cruelty and neglect, but also defiance and the will to thrive.
It's hard to find stories directly from excess children. Shen Yang's book is a rare gem. It's called More Than One Child: Memoirs of an Illegal Daught...
Chelsey Goodan says that for too long, teenage girls have been undervalued and overlooked. As a longtime tutor and mentor to hundreds of girls from many different backgrounds, Chelsey realized why so many were anxious and hurting. Because too many people treat teenage girls as problems to be controlled or solved. Chelsey says they have much to offer on topics like perfectionism, friendship, identity, shame, power, and more.
Whet...
What does real support for trans kids look like in this fraught political moment? Ben V. Greene audaciously but persuasively suggests we try a joy-centered approach.
Greene explains what parents and other loved ones can do when they’re uncertain about how to be there for trans kids, and why curiosity and compassion—not being perfect—makes all the difference.
Green also explores what affirming therapy really is (and isn’t), how be...
He was told he was broken. He was promised a cure. It was all a lie.
Lucas Wilson, author of Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors' Stories of Conversion Therapy, takes us inside the real experiences of queer people forced to try and change their so-called "same-sex attraction."
Lucas shares both his own story and those of survivors, revealing the psychological, moral, and spiritual harms of conversion therapy. He also explains why st...
Here's a frightening statistic: More young women age 18 to 29 voted for Donald Trump in 2024 than in 2016 or 2020. Why? Jess Britvich argues that TikTok and Instagram have been moving some young women rightward, without making it obvious.
Trends like clean beauty, natural living, tradwife aesthetics, or even yoga and wellness communities might look harmless on the surface—but many of them are pipelines to right-wing pol...
Who would choose to bring children into today’s world? Between climate change, economic strain, political conflict, and growing uncertainty about the future, more people today say they feel uncertain about parenthood, especially progressive people.
Philosophers Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman—authors of What Are Children For?—explore the personal, political, and philosophical stakes of having kids. From the tedium and ...
Fatphobia is everywhere. It affects how we judge ourselves and each other. In this episode, philosopher Kate Manne exposes the social, ethical, and health-based consequences of anti-fat bias.
Drawing on personal experience and sharp cultural analysis, Manne challenges dieting myths, weight-loss fads, and societal pressure to be thin. She invites us to practice “body reflexivity,” the radical idea that our bodies exist fo...
Like a lot of American women, Aubrey Hirsch grew up trying to channel her own rage into other emotions. Maybe she wasn't mad, she was really jealous. Maybe she wasn't pissed off, she was actually sad. Eventually, Aubrey realized she had been suppressing something vital. Sometimes being angry is the main thing she should be. Instead of always running from her outrage, now she channels it into informative, funny, sometimes...
Are men “naturally” violent? Are they hardwired to provide and protect? Does their DNA demand they stray? These questions persist in debates about masculinity, but they’re often answered with lazy biology.
In this episode, anthropologist Matthew Gutmann dismantles biologically grounded gender essentialist myths.
Drawing on decades of research—from fatherhood in Mexico to gender shifts in China—Gutmann shows how culture, ...
What does it mean to parent in a world that wasn’t built for you? Writer and disabled parent Eliza Hull joins us to talk about her groundbreaking anthology We’ve Got This: Essays by Disabled Parents.
These essays challenge ableist assumptions, confront stigma, and spotlight the resilience and pride of disabled parents. Their stories aren't about about pity or inspirational “overcoming”—they are about identity, ingenuity,...
Happy 50th Episode! To celebrate, I invited Lauren Passell, a podcast hero of mine, to revisit a Relationscapes episode she recommended on her excellent Podcast The Newsletter.
As a newly adoptive white mom of a child who is Black, Lauren was thrilled about Angela Tucker's interview. Tucker is an incredible advocate for transracial adoptees. Lauren opens up about the joys and challenges of raising a child in an open ad...
For decades, public schools have been a cornerstone of American learning and civic life. But far-right groups have worked for years to turn these institutions into battlegrounds, pushing to control curricula, ban books, and restrict the rights of marginalized students, while whitewashing history and steamrolling over accessibility. The battle is reaching fever pitch today.
In her book School Moms, education journalist L...
When Anne Pinkerton's brother unexpectedly died alone in an extreme sport accident, she faced the same question over and over. People would always ask, "Were You Close?" They asked out of concern, but the question felt almost impossible to answer.
In some ways, Anne and her brother David weren't close—they lived in different states, he was more than a decade older. But that distance seemed beside the point when she consi...
What if the image the world loves you for is the one that’s destroying you?
In her memoir Fetishized, Kaila Yu deconstructs "yellow fever," exploring how pop culture and Western beauty ideals shaped damaging stereotypes about Asian women—and how she once embodied them herself. After spending years in the pinup and import modeling world, auditioning for film roles steeped in dehumanizing tropes, touring globally with her ...
In this candid and funny conversation, artist and author Mary Catherine Starr talks about her viral comics on motherhood, marriage, mental load, and more. From the story of the infamous peanut butter jar to the deeper patterns of household inequality, Starr explores how social expectations, internalized roles, and everyday choices shape parenting partnerships. Through humor and heartfelt honesty, she reveals why moms nee...
Most people who experience the death of a parent come to understand that grief isn’t something you get over—it's something you try to learn how to live with.
That's what author Maddie Norris discovered after losing her dad at seventeen. Instead of looking away from the pain, she studied it—through the lens of her father's own work as a medical researcher on the science of wounds.
About 11 million kids serve as their family's interpreter in the US today. In this episode, Olivia Abtahi joins Relationscapes to talk about her beautiful new picture book celebrating these kids: The Interpreter, inspired by the lives of real kids navigating bureaucracies, burnout, and belonging.
We talk about how adults can better support children in this role and what it means to write a book that resonates in two lang...
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