ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Hey friends! In this episode, we're diving into intimacy. Is knowing the “type” of person someone is really the same as knowing them? And does adding your Myers-Briggs letters to your dating app profile actually lead to better matches? 🤔
This week, we're on a mission to find a definition of intimacy that's deeper than the usual, and we found one in Jennifer Nash’s Black Feminism Reimagined (2018). But before we give you the TL;DR of Nash’s work, we take a fun detour into the history of the Myers-Briggs test. Did you know the test was originally designed to match people with the "right" jobs? Now it’s popping up on dating apps like Tinder to help users find the "right" people. Kinda weird, right? Maybe you think so too, or maybe you’ve made MB your own, and hey, we love that for you!
Taking a step beyond MB, we explore Nash’s idea of a Black feminist love politics, which offers us a different way to think about intimacy. What if intimacy wasn’t about fitting someone into a type, but about an ethic of witnessing—seeing the world as someone else sees it? And what if vulnerability wasn’t about the power to hurt someone, but the ability to be undone and remade through your encounters with others?
As always, we wrap up with our half-baked thoughts—where we share ideas we haven’t fully worked through yet, but we totally stand behind. You’ll just have to tune in to hear them!
Thanks for listening! Don’t forget to rate and review the podcast on Spotify and Apple Music, follow us @nameitpod, and share the episode with a friend! ✨
---
Where We Know From:
Jennifer Nash, Black feminism reimagined: After intersectionality. Duke University Press, 2018.
Gillian Brockell, "Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers: The Women Behind the Personality Test You Can’t Avoid." The New York Times, October 14, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/14/obituaries/katharine-briggs-and-isabel-myers-overlooked.html
David Stovall, "The Racist Beginnings of Standardized Testing." NEA Today, September 27, 2021. https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing
Take the Myers-Briggs test! https://www.16personalities.com/
