Katie Barclay

speaker

340 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 3 Aug

Katie Barclay’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The History of Literature · 821 A History of the Kiss (with Katie Barclay) | Wonderland Books! (with Amy Joyce and Gayle Weiswasser) · 3 Aug 2026 podcast

So we associate it with faith and Christianity.

But the ask,

anus is where all the bad things come out and the pollution and the corruption and the sin and so when people do ass kisses they associate it with this kind of sinful corruption and so it's also a shameful act and so Absalom feels shamed and so part of his disgust isn't just the idea oh you kissed something disgusting it's also he feels like the shame has attached to his body and he's trying to

wash himself clean of the shame, which he's not successful at doing.

I mean, we see that because then we see ass kisses as an insult, but you say, like, witches are accused of kissing the devil's ass, and Jewish people are accused of similar acts associated with heresy and corrupt kind of non-Christian corruption.

and so the ass kiss in the medieval context has all this kind of rich connotations of corruption and sin and shame which then continue in the insult but the insult now i think is much milder than it would have been then and it seems like we're back to power again where she intended that she knew that that was going to be the effect and was kind of trying to turn the tables on this guy

Yeah, and also what I really love about this, so in this story, you've got this young Alison, and she has this horrible old man who's married to her, and a horrible old man who wants to kiss her, and then the young man who, in the book I call it roughly woo, but basically he kind of harasses her until she agrees to be

his lover right so she's not really in a great position and in the story all three of these men end up punished in various ways whereas she kind of walks out of this fine right she has no real bad consequence and so i actually really like it as a story of kind of of saying to men you know perhaps you're maybe the limits of your gender power but also perhaps you deserve to be punished for your lecherousness and your inappropriate behaviors and your harassment of women and and she's one who kind of stands victor i guess

Yeah, and also I think why we insult each other in that way, right, is because we kept it alive with these inheritances of these really great stories that feel sort of, they're funny and they're familiar and there's a nice bit of vengeance.

Oh, yeah, they're good kissies.

Also because they have beautiful illustrations.

But no, that's another one that's quite interesting for Power, right?

Because she is a teenage girl and he's a man in his 30s.

And so today we're all very like, whoa, we're not into that.

And he's a teacher or he becomes a teacher because he's attracted to her.

And then in the classroom, they share all these kisses when they should actually be educating themselves.

her and at one point he also hits her because that's how you educate like if he wasn't seen to have a physical punishment then there would have been suspicion that he wasn't properly educating her right so i think from a modern audience we're just like that's not good

But she is super bright and so she's hard to put as an innocent teenage victim because she's so influential and she writes herself and she has this really great kind of diatribe about why marriage is bad for women and why she doesn't want to do it.

But also she sees herself as she gives him advice and for his philosophy she's

a very active, engaged thinker, writer, and they have this really interesting intellectual partnership.

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