From racialised police brutality to climate change, #MeToo, trans rights, COVID-19, the prospect of nuclear war and the prevalence of trauma we are constantly bombarded with high stakes problems that we are expected to speak out about and act on. On closer inspection, the popular solutions to each of these problems arent easy to reconcile. Black Lives Matter activists demand prison abolition, while #MeToo feminists want rapists in jail and while our objections to war and police brutality make us suspicious of state institutions in general, our responses to climate change and COVID-19 reinforce our dependency on them. Out of the Fog cuts through the confusion. Renée Gerlich suggests that readers move beyond feeling overwhelmed and emotionally manipulated. She draws on a radical feminist tradition that demonstrates how our despair is connected to our most pressing social problems, and offers a framework for assessing and interpreting the current political landscape. Out of the Fog delivers clarity and guidance in this bewildering time. Renée Gerlichs insights will help you develop the capacity to speak with an authentic voice and to act purposefully and with impact in the world. ...understanding how our private heartbreak relates to our large-scale problems is the only way we can unravel the helplessness we feel, claim our voices, and take action in the way we deeply crave. We cannot do any of these things while living with the cognitive dissonance of competing ideas, priorities, solutions, and top-down paternalism.
Renée Gerlich is a New Zealand-based writer and artist whose work can be found on Feminist Current, Savage Minds, and her blog, reneejg.net. Renée has a background in art history and education and completed her Masters in Art History at Leiden University in the Netherlands. She was researcher for the 2016 documentary called The HeArt of the Matter, about the development and subsequent rollback of education reforms implemented by New Zealands first Labour government, directed and produced by Luit and Jan Bieringa. In 2021, Renée founded Dragon Cloud Press to publish her A Brief Complete Herstory, an accessible, female-centred, short and illustrated history of the world from the Big Bang to neoliberalism, available at dragoncloudpress.com.
