Review: Turn This World Inside Out

[Nora Samaran. Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture. Chico CA: AK Press, 2019.]

This book has its origins in an online essay by Nora Samaran called "The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture" that went viral when it was first published, and also I think in a direct follow-up that circulated quite widely called "On Gaslighting." These two essays are included and also augmented by a few other pieces by Samaran and by a number of dialogues between Samaran and other people engaged in related work around violence, healing, and justice. The book aims to flesh out what the author means by "nurturance culture" and to talk about the various kinds of work being done to create it.

I encountered the original essay twice over the years, once not long after it was published when I was looking for material about shame (an abiding interest of mine), and then more recently when someone pointed me in its direction in response to a question about resources related in a broad sense to listening. Both then and now, I find it a powerful piece that speaks to the work that men need to be doing on our own and with others to make our lives better and to make us better able to be part of just and liberatory communities. In my most recent reading of it, it did make me think about a tendency I first noticed during the initial rise of #MeToo, which is the relative lack of public space for engagement with the *specificities* of men's experiences of how we are harmed by and complicit in patriarchy. This essay, for instance, outlines several broad ways in which human beings form our capacities for attachment to other human beings, and I can see myself in that typology, but I also as I read felt quite conscious of the limits of broad categories, even reasonably accurate and robust ones, to translating insights for self-work and political intervention into the messy, category-overflowing realities of everyday life. Of course, this broad public lack of space for engagement with specificity and nuance is not the fault of this essay or really any other piece talking in broad terms about men's complicity/men's harm under patriarchy – the problem is how little we ourselves talk and write about how that big picture plays out in our everyday lives.

As for the rest of the book, I thought it was mostly interesting (other than one piece that missed the mark) and it certainly created the basis for a more politically expansive way of thinking about nurturance culture and about harm and justice in our communities. A lot of the basic ideas in it were things I had encountered before, but there are far fewer resources out there talking about this kind of work happening in grassroots ways than there should be, and it is always valuable to encounter new voices, new examples, and of course some new-to-me ideas. I'm a big proponent of a model of producing knowledge of the world that prioritizes listening/reading across difference as a way to understand each other, ourselves, and the social world that has produced us both, and the dialogues in this book were an opportunity to do that. However, my engagement with the original essay, from my first reading of it years ago to my just-once-more-before-I-mark-the-book-read final re-read yesterday, was much more self-focused, much more directly about the hunger that I think many men feel to have these experiences named in a way that both prods us to effort and suggests useful tools, and the rest of the book was mostly not that. Of course I do recognize how inappropriate it is to wish for a book by an anti-authoritarian feminist to be more centred on men's needs – that wasn't the goal of the book, nor should it have been, and listening deeply to all of these other people is also key to men figuring our *stuff* out, albeit in a somewhat different way. But I do hope that this book not only inspires men to have conversations with each other, but inspires more of us to write and to share and to publish in ways that continue to explore Samaran's ideas and to create space for understanding the specificities of how complicity in and harm from patriarchy winds through our lives.