UpFront

A closer look at President Daniel Ortega’s rightward shift in Nicaragua; Why Zionism is incompatible with queer liberation; Plus, Amy Sueyoshi on “Discriminating Sex”

Photo: Fidel Castro meets Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo. By Alex Castro/Cubadebate, licensed by CC 2.0.

On this show:

0:08 – Dan La Botz (@DanLaBotz) journalist, labor union activist, and author of What Went Wrong? The Nicaraguan Revolution: A Marxist Analysis, from Haymarket Books joins us to discuss the crackdown against opposition leaders in Nicaragua by president Daniel Ortega. La Botz explains that Ortega has enemies on all fronts, from across the political spectrum. The Ortega regime has ordered 17 arrests this month, under a new law passed back in December which allows the Nicaraguan state to arrest and detain anyone for up to 90 days without a criminal charge.

0:33 – Erwin Chemerinsky, constitutional law scholar and dean of Berkeley Law returns on the show to explain some breaking news from the Supreme Court.

0:44 – Why is Zionism incompatible with queer liberation? Lila Sharif, Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana — Champaign and Christina Carney (@MizzProfCarney), Assistant Professor of Black Studies and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Missouri join us to discuss pinkwashing by the Israeli government and Palestinian solidarity movements in the US.

1:08 – We spend our second hour re-airing an Against the Grain interview that CS Soong recorded in 2018 with Amy Sueyoshi. (@AmySueyoshi) They discuss the stereotypes of Japanese geisha, Chinese sex workers and Asian men which proliferated in San Francisco in the early 1800s. Sueyoshi links these stereotypes with leisure culture and white peoples’ changing gender and sexual norms in her book, Discriminating Sex: White Leisure and the Making of the American “Oriental” from University of Illinois Press.