Category Archives: Politics and Culture

February Links Roundup: Beyond Visibility

Welcome to Bizarro America. I hope you’re reading this blog in your downtime between calling your elected officials to oppose the Muslim travel ban, the Affordable Care Act repeal, all the cabinet nominees, etc., etc. Check out the website 5Calls to find phone numbers and scripts for the latest issues. Western Massachusetts friends, sign up for 413StayingConnected. My mom Roberta went to the Women’s March in DC last month, and we took the Young Master to the one in Northampton. Keep up the resistance.

With my usual impeccable sense of timing, I’ve chosen to come out as a nonbinary Episco-pagan during the most repressive regime in my lifetime. Oh well. I can only hope that I’m obscure enough to remain at the bottom of the watchlist. Good thing poetry books don’t sell. In all seriousness, I hate having to second-guess myself before I experiment with male clothing, but I’ve never been able to hide who I am, even when I wanted to.

This segues into our first link, “Gender Selfie-Determination”, a compelling lecture and slideshow by Alok Vaid-Menon at the Annenberg Space for Photography. I found this one via Lee Wind’s blog review site for LGBTQ teen books and media. Vaid-Menon is an Indian-American nonbinary transfeminine writer and performance artist. In this 85-minute presentation, they challenge the concept of “visibility” as liberating in and of itself. Photos of trans* and gender-nonconforming people, even in well-meant “awareness” campaigns, can just as easily contribute to fetishizing them as to representing their subjectivity. Vaid-Menon asks, what happens when the shoot is over, and they have to run the gauntlet of transphobic attacks in public places just to get home from the studio? A person who presents as neither male nor female is never not visible. When you see harassment, instead of reassuring them “You’re beautiful” (something that would clearly be sexist if said to a cis-female victim), ask “How can I help?” and then do it. During this sharply funny and eye-opening presentation, Vaid-Menon also deconstructs comments left on their Instagram selfies, and reads powerful original poems.

One thing I got out of this lecture is that I don’t have to convince anyone with my gender presentation. I’m not being nonbinary for them. Bowtie and big boobs? “No one will believe me,” the voice in my head whispers. Vaid-Menon talks about fighting off the assumption that they’re trying and failing to pass for one gender or the other. Beyond offering “visibility” to others, cisgender and cis-passing people need to rethink the power relations involved in taking, posing for, and viewing photos. In a January 12 Facebook post, Vaid-Menon wrote:

there is this thing that happens where i can perform for over an hour about being trans & then after the show people come up to me & call me “he.” there is this thing that happens where people invite me to perform & call me “he/his” in the request. there is this thing that happens where my gender is only understood as my performance art & that the minute i walk off stage & i’m just considered a man again.

they want our appearance, but they do not want our knowledge.

& it hurts so bad because it shows that trans people are only regarded for what we look like & not our intelligence. people want to stage the aesthetics of diversity (look so many pretty genders!!) but they don’t want to regard the knowledge systems we are sharing…

…i want a world where we don’t make assumptions about people’s genders based on what they look like. i want a world where we trust what people say about themselves. i want a world where it’s no longer acceptable to say “man or woman.” i want a world without the gender binary all together. i want a world where you call me they, not just because i am nonbinary, but because you recognize that i (& you) contain multitudes.

This next link is another variation on the theme that appearances are…not deceptive, exactly, but more complex than you’d think. Apparently an elderly woman had been praying to her St. Anthony statue for years before she discovered that it was actually a figurine of Elrond, the elf king from The Lord of the Rings. Amid the Internet mockery, Patheos Pagan blogger Hearth Witch Down Under asked the provocative question, “Why Not Pray to a Toy?”

When you buy a statue or figurine of a deity or other figure such as a saint, you generally don’t buy it thinking it is a literal embodiment of that deity – it’s merely a representation.  For some traditions a statue, figurine or piece of artwork is purely symbolic, it helps you focus your thoughts, prayers or praise – you aren’t aiming these at the image or icon, you are aiming through the image or icon to the true recipient.  The icon is like a conduit, not an actual being.In other traditions the belief is that when you do pray to a deity, the deity may come to you and embody the statue you have dedicated to Them.  It’s a temporary abode for the deity while They visit you.  But the statue is still not actually Them, it is just a place for Them and again, a representation of Them…

…Since we generally don’t see these icons as being the deities we pray to, then I have to wonder why it matters who the icon is based on originally.  So the person (or more likely machine) that created the Elrond figurine had the intention of creating Elrond.  But the woman praying to it was not praying to Elrond – that figurine, in her hands, in her mind, in her heart was not Elrond.  It was Saint Anthony.  It was so much him that when she prayed using that figurine it would have focused her mind to connect with Anthony – she surely wasn’t going to connect with the spirit of Elrond.It doesn’t matter what the icon or image looks like – what matters is how it connects and focuses you.  Many people pray without icons and images, without figurines and statues, without symbols to focus their intent.  If you can pray to a deity without using any symbolism at all, and you can connect to that deity – then I think it’s pretty obvious that what matters in prayer is your aim.  If your aim, your intention, is what connects you with deity in prayer and ritual, then how other people perceive your statue is hardly going to matter.

From my initial explorations of modern paganism, it seems there’s a healthy acceptance of diverse views about whether our magical tools, rituals, and deity representations are inherently powerful, or gain meaning primarily from our intentions. Compare this to Christians’ historically bloody disagreement over whether the Eucharist is the “real presence” or the “symbolic remembrance” of Jesus. I tend to approach magic spell books the way I do cookbooks, that is, haphazardly. Using the right color candle is less important than finding one that will stay lit! Maybe I’m lazy, or not completely bought in to this pagan thing, but I think I’m really just too postmodern to take any religious forms literally. They’re all human-made, culture-bound, imperfect vehicles for contacting the Beyond.

But then again, Barbie is one of my spiritual guides, so Elrond is not much of a stretch…

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Cultural appropriation from Christianity may be a silly thing to worry about, since it is the dominant religion in America and not the heritage of an oppressed minority. Yet I still have qualms about my post-Christian workaround for enjoying church. The way I tell it to myself, in my youth I recognized the sacred energy in Christian rituals, art, music, and buildings, but felt it would be dishonest to participate when I didn’t believe the words I was singing or saying. Then I was able to convince myself of enough doctrine to take part with a clean conscience…and then I wasn’t. Now I believe that we’re allowed to greet the sacred wherever we find it, and that it isn’t the exclusive property of one religious system.

But how respectful is this, really? Am I misappropriating the church experience by redefining it in terms that its adherents wouldn’t recognize? I’m avoiding the ultimate liberal power-play where I claim that the parts I like about Christianity are the truest or highest essence thereof. Is that good enough?

At his long-running feminist blog Amptoons, Richard Jeffrey Newman recently linked to a New Yorker piece by Rozina Ali about the erasure of the Islamic roots of Rumi’s poetry. The most popular translations, by Coleman Barks, have recast Rumi as a generic mystic, easy to quote in any number of New Age or secular contexts. Newman notes:

Ali begins her article by talking about the famous people—Coldplay’s Chris Martin, Madonna, Tilda Swinton—who claim their lives have been transformed by Rumi’s work. Multiply their number by the many tens, if not hundreds of thousands for whom Rumi has come to represent an, if not the essence of spiritual enlightenment—a mystic whose teachings welcome all people, of whichever persuasion, onto the path towards God, or whatever it is they call the ultimate Truth they are trying to reach—and you end up with an inordinately large number of people who do not understand that the openness they so value in Rumi was made possible for him by, would not have existed for him without, Islam. More to the point, and adding insult to injury, given the demonization of Islam that is so pervasive in our society right now, people could be forgiven for thinking that the teachings of this English-language Rumi are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Islam, rather than being a significant thread within them.

Politically, my à la carte Christianity doesn’t have such dire implications, but I suppose what it all comes down to is boundaries. Is anyone harmed when I re-pagan-ize Christmas in my own mind? I’m a strong believer in not taking something that isn’t offered, and it seems that the Christian experience is offered on certain terms–submitting to the spiritual authority of Jesus, for one thing. When I extract a spiritual encounter from its relational context in the Body of Christ (the church now and in history), am I committing an offense against Jesus, other Christians, or no one at all? The jury is still out.

Two Poems from Alan King’s “Point Blank”

My first poetry book recommendation of the year is Alan King’s Point Blank, published in 2016 by Silver Birch Press. A three-time Pushcart nominee, King is a Caribbean-American poet, the son of immigrants from Trinidad and Tobago. His family roots give his poetry a robust and celebratory quality, whether he’s writing about the spices of home cooking, the seductive musical soundtrack of his parents’ marriage, or the father-son dynamic of power struggles and wordless affection. King appreciates women’s sensuality in a way that reminds me of the late great musician Prince, an unashamed desire that has enough reverence in it to avoid objectification. Yet certainly the life of a black man in America is far from idyllic, as King shows in his powerful narrative poems about racist microaggressions and police shakedowns. His relationships with his family and students sustain his life force in an environment that is ready to dehumanize all of them.

Point Blank is a pleasurable read that is also an important document of black American life today. He kindly shares two poems from the collection below. Visit his blog for poetry videos and essays on social issues.

Bound

On the bus in rush hour, he enters
with the brim of his baseball cap
over his left ear, where a snubbed out
Black & Mild sits like an aromatic
marker with its black tip exposed.

You checked the weather today.
Cloudy skies with a chance of rain.
Your boss called you into his office,
talked about the economy and running
a struggling paper, how he’s got to let you go.

Think of it as a paid vacation,
he said. You look up at the guy
with the Yankees cap and phone to his ear.
I’m on my way, babe.

His smile says his destination
is a garden hidden in a labyrinth,
where the sun slides its iridescent tongue
over a tamarind-colored woman,
oiling her skin while she sleeps
among orchids and birds of paradise.

You imagine that garden
on the other side of your front door,
where you’ll open like morning glories
when your wife
descends on you like dew.

****
Freeze

A man sits handcuffed on the curb
while his trunk and back seat are searched.

You watch from across the street,
heading to your car. His woman
was making a Malaysian chicken dish, sent him
to pick up coconut milk and curry.

It’s night. The sound of car tires
on wet street makes you think of paper
torn slow in long strips.

The officers, thorough in their search,
remind you of thieves you once saw.

You couldn’t say what you felt,
watching them take their time,
as if instead of searching for money and CDs
they were detailing the interior.

The man is every WANTED poster
you saw on TV, in the papers,
in post offices.

He is that night years ago.
When you followed your mom to return a rental,
and lost her in traffic, when the red and blue
flashes made you
a cornered cat.

You tense up when that moment
on the street gets just as close. Your keys
in one hand, sorbet and cookies in the other.

At the sight of what flashed in his mirror,
he knew he was tagged in a game older
than Jim Crow. Tonight, the sirens
and police lights say, Get off the street
unless you want trouble, too.

But the wind shoves you down the block,
muscling you back to your car
and to everything you love. You think
of the handcuffed brother
and his woman growing restless,
trying not to worry.

January Links Roundup: The Usual Obsessions

Happy 2017, readers! This year on the Block, you can look forward to more poetry book reviews, queer musings, sales pitches for The Novel, and theological opinions that I will probably retract in 5-10 years. Also, I will try to develop some interests beyond nonbinary handwringing, Netflix series, and bitterness toward my family of origin. But in the meantime, enjoy these links to my usual obsessions.

An und für sich is a multi-authored blog curated by Adam Kotsko, covering topics in philosophy, international literature, radical Christian theology, and popular culture. Indulge your Mad Men nostalgia with their thoughtful interpretations of selected episodes. This one post about the Season 4 episode “The Summer Man” summed up how the show taught me to get over my envy of other women. I’ve always felt like a Peggy in a world of Joans. Based on the women I saw on TV and the behavior of my peers, I felt it was expected of me to know how to use sex appeal for popularity and power, and this is a social skill I just don’t have. I would beat myself up about this, then resent the Joans of the world for colluding with men in devaluing me. By depicting Peggy, the nerdy career girl, and Joan, the vampy secretary-administrator, with equal nuance and compassion, “Mad Men” showed me that the grass wasn’t greener on the other side.

The dilemma faced by ambitious women at SCDP face isn’t about which strategy is the winning one, because there isn’t any winning strategy. Any woman with a little ambition, who isn’t content to be a performing pet or a meaningless secretary, is going to be a target. Her only choice in the matter is whether she’ll be hated for being a bitch, or despised for being a whore.

Speaking of “Mad Men”, what about Betty? Kotsko’s posts led me to this brilliant, tragic analysis of the ice princess of the suburbs, from Sady Doyle’s (sadly discontinued) feminist blog Tiger Beatdown. Betty Draper was painful and fascinating to watch because she reminded me of my bio mother. The storyline in Season 7’s “Field Trip” where Betty ruins her son Bobby’s school trip with her grandstanding and petulance could have been taken from a hundred incidents in my childhood. Doyle writes:

We all said we wanted Betty to get in touch with her anger, but we expected that anger to look admirable and positive and feminist. We didn’t consider that it might just be anger. That she might just not bother to think about how she was serving the world or women or the audience when she finally got to the point of rage.

And it’s not Don’s fault. Maybe it was, but that’s over now; what happens to Betty is pretty much exclusively Betty’s fault from here on out. She grew up thinking that there were two roles to play, abuser and abused. Now that she wants power, now that she’s sick of being abused, she’s chosen to become an abuser. She honestly does see that as her only other option. She’s angry at something that happened to her so long ago she can’t even exactly name it, but she’s playing that thing out with her children, and especially with her daughter, every single damn day. She’s become her own worst problem; every single time, every single time, she screams at Sally or hits her or threatens to cut her fingers off, she makes it that much less likely that she will ever be able to face how fucked up she is and get over it. It’s not easy to come to terms with what was done to you. But it’s much, much harder to come to terms with what you do.

That’s why Betty makes me cry so much this season, why her scenes make me sick to my stomach and why I feel for her more than ever: We talk a lot, in feminist communities, about abuse. And we talk a lot about how oppression can warp your understanding of self, about how some people raised in an oppressive system will internalize that system. We talk about how people who are victims of abuse often perpetrate it. I just don’t think we were prepared to see that play itself out on Mad Men. We wanted Betty to read The Feminine Mystique and get her mind blown and rise above; or, we wanted her to stay a victim, so we could relate to her better, or at least keep feeling sorry for her. But sometimes, people just get damaged until they start damaging. Sometimes, people are lost. We hate Betty now because she’s not going to stay a victim, but the truth is, she’s also not going to be saved.

The Reddit board Raised By Narcissists is a validating, informative, and well-moderated community for us real-life Bobby Drapers. (Trigger warning for discussions of abuse and self-harm.) I feel a weird sort of relief every time I come across a thread about another behavior that I thought was unique to my family, like “Does anyone else’s narcissists purposely mispronounce words even after being corrected many times?” or  “What did your Nparent do to try to ruin your wedding?” (I tell Shane when he’s playing too close to the breakfront with my wedding china, “Be careful. Many Bothans died to bring us these dishes.”) As you might expect, I really liked this post, “Bad definitions of ‘forgiveness’ in the ACoN community”. I agree with the post writer that we should not cheapen or muddy the word “forgiveness” by conflating it with moving on from an unrepentant abuser. As one commenter added, “the common notion of forgiveness is meant to be used with normal people, where there is genuine remorse and it benefits both sides. Forgiving an abuser only benefits the abuser, and that’s exactly why they hold it up like the holy grail.”

Another hat tip to Kotsko for my discovery of the blog Gay Christian Geek. The author, a British transgender man, appears to have stopped blogging in March 2016, but the archives promise hours of good reading. See, for instance, this 2014 post, “Boyhood/Girlhood”, exploring difficulties in how to conceptualize one’s pre-transition childhood. GCG finds that the “always already this gender” narrative is too simplistic for him.

There is a truth in the suggestion that I always was a boy; there is a truth in the admission that I never had a boyhood. These truths are not contradictory so much as complementary. Each alone only tells a fragment of the story.

For me, the value of the “always was” narrative is very limited. I see its use for trans people who were conscious of their gender from an early age; but what does it really mean for me? For a female-assigned child with two cis brothers, who deeply internalized the “(birth) genitals=gender” message of a cissexist society, who could plainly see that I was not a boy in the precise way that my brothers were boys, who did not know that there was any other way to be a boy and who therefore assumed that my desire to be a boy belonged to the same imaginary realm as my desire to go to wizard school? (And later, on discovering feminism, decided my desire to be a boy must be rooted in internalized misogyny?)

I find more use in a negative framing and a paradox: it’s not that I “always was” a boy, but that I never was a girl, and that I was not a girl even as I was a girl…

…My childhood as I lived it at the time was, as far as I knew, a girlhood. My childhood as I view it from my current perspective as a male adult is not-a-girlhood. Both perspectives are true.

Much as I long for boyhood, driven by losstalgia for a past that was never mine, and much as I could psychoanalyze my childhood gender identity, seeking evidence for the sublimation of my own felt maleness into an abundance of carefully nurtured fictional personae – even so, I have had experiences that turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Anglo-American culture categorizes under the heading of “girlhood.” I was given dolls and dresses alongside legos and pants. I was permitted, even encouraged, to embrace masculinity as male-assigned children still tend not, even in liberal households, to be encouraged to embrace femininity. I first embraced feminism as an insider, and I know firsthand fears such as that of walking alone among men as a (perceived) woman at night (though I think I am a better feminist now that I am no longer at war with the feminine in me).

My girlhood, as I understand it now, is not a matter of having “been” a girl, but of having experienced much of what is culturally considered to be part of girlhood. It is not an ontological but an epistemological girlhood. Even as I ache for the boyhood I should have had, I recognize that I have learned a great deal from girlhood and that it has been a major contributor to the man I am becoming.

Last year I began intermittently journaling about instances of gender dysphoria or role-switching fantasies in my youth, in hopes of finding some “always already nonbinary” evidence that would validate my sense of unease with my embodiment. I quickly became dissatisfied with this project because there’s no way to disentangle the strands of societal sexism, familial abuse, and genuine queerness that made me what I am. More to the point, no after-the-fact explanation or identity label can give me back the years I lost being alienated from my full gender expression, nor open up possibilities that were permanently foreclosed by my childhood development.

(For what it’s worth, I think I really was a girl until I hit puberty. I have a very strong feminine side, but she’s permanently six years old. Or a sea monster.)

I might pick that journal up again this year, but without the agenda to collapse these personalities into a single essential one, even one with the expansive label of nonbinary. In “The Dry Salvages”, T.S. Eliot famously wrote:

We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness.

Eliot was a supreme poet of regret, of stunted desire that he hoped to assuage via religion or sublimate into art. In the realm of imagination, he could at last take the road not taken, and more than that, become the person who could have taken it. Rather than seeking after a meaning in the past that will give me “happiness” now, I should just give my un-expressed selves some space to have their experiences between the pages of my journal. And who knows where else…?

Book Notes: Gay Theology Without Apology

Gary David Comstock’s Gay Theology Without Apology (Wipf & Stock, 1993) is a radical, important essay collection that uses the experiences of gays and lesbians in the church as a foundation for democratizing and diversifying our methods of interpreting the Bible. As he says in the introduction, “Christian Scripture and tradition are not authorities from which I seek approval; rather, they are resources from which I seek guidance and learn lessons as well [as] institutions that I seek to interpret, shape, and change.” (pg.4) Comstock is a UCC minister and Wesleyan University chaplain. His essays re-imagine key Christian concepts and Bible passages to help us develop “a relationship with Scripture that is modeled on friendship rather than parental authority.” (pg.6) The chapter that spoke most to my present concerns was “Leaving Jesus: A Theology of Friendship and Autonomy”, so I’ll be focusing on that essay, but I recommend reading the whole book.

When support for gay rights brought me to a crisis of faith in my moderate-evangelical orthodoxy, I had two choices. I could join the ranks of Christian scholars explaining why the affirming position was supported, or at least permitted, by a reasonable interpretation of the Bible. Or I could be honest about the fact that I would continue to hold that position, regardless of what I could find in Scripture. Having chosen the latter course, I’m stuck with the liberal’s dilemma: If the Bible is not my highest authority, how is it relevant? What does it add to the values I already live by, or the process by which I make decisions?

I greatly respect Comstock for confronting the sleight-of-hand that we progressives engage in when we try to remain under the Christian umbrella while pointing it in our preferred direction. It was so refreshing to have permission to walk away from this power struggle over “WWJD?” In the “Leaving Jesus” essay, he writes:

I think we need to stop using Jesus as our trump card in waging the struggle for peace and justice. First, because it is opportunistic; we use him as we wish for our own ends. Second, because we really do not mean it; I do not think we are involved in movements for social change because Jesus would have been with us, but because we want, need, and think we ought to be involved. Jesus gets tagged on as a rationale or support for what we know or have decided we should do. And third, because it is not an effective strategy; the organized, mainstream church has more power for establishing the prevailing image of Jesus than do marginalized people within or outside it. The history of Christianity has shown that Jesus is up for grabs; and whoever is most powerful determines the prevailing image of Jesus. (pg.93)

Now, this is not to say that every Christian is treating Jesus as an afterthought to their personal preferences. Probably most of them feel they have had genuine encounters with Jesus through prayer and Scripture, and that those encounters are guiding them to certain positions on social issues. That’s equally true for the priest of my liberal parish who supports gay rights, and for my conservative Christian former mentor who opposes them. It was true for me when I had the revelation at the 2006 Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing that led me to write Two Natures, a project that blew up my relationship with Christian orthodoxy.

We should tremble at the presumption of declaring that our opponent’s God-encounter is delusional, just as we refrain from undermining their sanity by disputing what their heart and body tell them about their sexual orientation, gender identity, or trauma history. “Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.” (Romans 14:4, NIV)

And yet, don’t these contradictory theological results reveal the insufficiency (or possibly over-sufficiency) of the concept “Jesus” to restrain wrong actions? Comstock has anticipated this issue as well:

That the Bible is a resource for defining and lending strength to the formation of various faith communities that believe and act in various, and often conflicting, ways is not easy for those whose faith community is predicated on being right and changing others. To acknowledge and allow for a multiplicity of expressions may be to tolerate forms of Christianity that are unacceptably oppressive. But to argue for the primacy of one form, our form, over another is to become engaged in a contest for which there is no winner. Each community can claim a biblically based Jesus who supports it. (pg.95)

Comstock argues that any theology based on appeals to authority–even the authority of Jesus–still has more of Caesar in it than Christ. As Audre Lorde said, the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house. The Jesus way is more radical. He called his disciples friends, not servants who obey without knowing why (John 15:15).

To be occupied with arguing over the correct image of Jesus is to be caught up in establishing and recognizing him as a master. Over and over we end up with a “top man” in whom we put our hope and trust, instead of giving ourselves and each other the power to decide and do what should be done, instead of taking responsibility for claiming and doing it ourselves. (pg.98)

…[Jesus] does not seem to have wanted to found an organization that would be preoccupied with fawning over him and perfecting his image. A friend bids us well, not holding on to us with last-minute conditions about loyalty and preserving his name, but trusting and expecting us to love one another–a rare and wonderful example of rescinding patriarchal privilege, and perhaps one that many would do well to follow. But its value and power lie not in proposing yet another example of how wonderful Jesus is, but settles on us the task of being our own example, of finding out from each other how wonderful we can be for each other. (pg.99)

Revisiting this essay, for the purpose of this blog post, has clarified why I feel stuck and heavy-hearted in my current prayer life. I grew up in a home where the opposite values were modeled. Life with my bio mother was all about one-way loyalty; protecting the family’s public image at the expense of the facts; proving that my way was the “right” way before I’d be granted any autonomy; never growing up; and acting grateful for love that was supposed to be unconditional but actually depended on meeting the above conditions perfectly. The only way to break that pattern was to end the relationship completely. So on a gut level, when I think about accepting some aspects of the Biblical Jesus and refusing others, I’m terrified of abandonment and punishment. My childhood instincts tell me that it’s all or nothing: either submit to the commands I don’t believe in, or forfeit my claim to any love, help, or approval from Jesus. This tears me in two.

I’d like to stay friends with a Jesus who embodied God’s overcoming of all divisions between clean/unclean, spirit/flesh, divine/human. I want to continue drawing hope from love’s triumph over death and humiliation in his Resurrection, without accepting the dogma that the universe runs on the blood sacrifice of the innocent. I’d like to believe he would listen and learn from my feedback about situations where “turn the other cheek” and “forgive 70 x 7” can impede healing and justice for the abused. It would be great to feel that he trusts me to figure things out and will forgive me when I mess up. And finally, if it turns out that Jesus is not the image that channels God’s love to me most clearly, I wonder if I can ever feel that he sends me on my way with a blessing, as scarcely any of my mentors and parental figures have been able to do.

What would make the progressive church a place where I could grow into this kind of friendship with Christ? First, more awareness of and stepping back from the struggle for narrative dominance. If we were truly secure in our freedom to relate to Jesus in our own ways, we wouldn’t need to appeal to a selective reading of Scripture as if it were the only right one. Second, sermons that dare to reject or critique the Bible passages presented in the weekly liturgy, instead of leaving them there like undigested lumps. I find it hard to handle the cognitive dissonance of being confronted with controversial texts that we then avoid in the rest of our worship experience. Third, guided conversations as a community about how our psychological baggage affects our theology. The church willing to take on this challenge would truly be a model for a counterculture of love and equality.

December Links Roundup: Into the Dark

kaliimwithher

“Turn your face away from the garish light of day, Turn your thoughts away from cold unfeeling light, And listen to the music of the night,” the Phantom of the Opera sings in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical. These lines captured my heart when I saw the show 25 years ago. Darkness as fertile, safe, restful, profound, and full of tenderness.

As we approach the Winter Solstice, and a political transition that feels apocalyptic for many, the spiritual qualities of darkness invite closer attention. In both popular culture and pagan literature, we need to rethink the colonialist metaphor of “light” magic as good and pure, “dark” or “black” magic as evil and sexually decadent. Lasara Firefox Allen’s Jailbreaking the Goddess, a new book of intersectional feminist spirituality, suggests the terms “empowered” and “occluded” (rather than the Jungian “shadow”) to refer to the helpful and destructive aspects of an archetype.

I’ve been exploring the Pagan channel on the religion blog portal Patheos, which is where I found John Beckett’s blog, Under the Ancient Oaks. Beckett is a Druid and Unitarian Universalist. In a post written shortly after the presidential election, “Be the Dark”, he had a refreshing take on the ubiquitous urgings on social media to “be the light”. Many of us on the Left did not have a ton of happy confetti to throw around last month. We were feeling scared, despondent, angry, and overwhelmed. Even if we had it in us, was spreading positive vibes really helpful or a form of denial? Beckett reflected:

[W]hat if you don’t particularly feel like being the light? What if you’re still hurting, still afraid, still mad as hell? What if you’re just not a love and light kind of person?

Then be the dark.

Be the safety of the dark. We tend to think of the dark as a dangerous place, but for a wide variety of nocturnal creatures, daylight is dangerous and the dark is where they’re safe. You can’t see as well in the dark, but that also means it’s harder for you to be seen. Our mainstream culture mocks “hiding in the dark” but if you’re up against predators who are bigger, stronger, and more numerous than you, hiding in the dark is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Embrace the safety of the dark.

He went on to praise other positive qualities of the dark: restfulness, nurturing, and the ability to create illusions. Finally, he dared to encourage us to be the danger of the dark:

Here we shift from nice safe pretty Nature metaphors to the reality of what must be done in the dark… Being the danger of the dark is knowing in your soul that you’re scarier than anything that might come after you. This isn’t the testosterone-driven braggadocio of young men. Rather, it’s the quiet confidence that comes from the direct, first-hand experience of Gods, spirits, and magic. It’s knowing you have allies in the Otherworld – not servants you can call down at will, but mighty Powers with whom you are aligned and at whose side you will fight… and win, eventually if not immediately.

It’s knowing your own Will can be enhanced with herbs and stones, with blood and piss, and with the bones of other creatures. It’s knowing the power of words and the power of symbols.

It’s knowing spells that go against your morals, that you would never use… unless there was no other way.

It’s knowing that as long as you have breath you have hope, because you have magic and you have Will.

Some of the most interesting scenes in Once Upon a Time happen when Regina, the semi-reformed Evil Queen, must partner with the heroes to fight a threat to their town. She’s a risky but invaluable member of the team because she’s willing to be the bad cop when nothing else works. In the current season, she’s split off her Dark side so that she can be a good person who gets a happy ending, but dis-integration is not working out well for her or anyone around her.

(If you’re all getting tired of OUAT life lessons, don’t worry, I’m now binge-watching Luke Cage.)

Also on the subject of Dark Goddesses, a friend sent me religion scholar Vera de Chalambert’s article “Kali Takes America: I’m With Her”.  (The subtitle was Hillary Clinton’s campaign slogan.)

…Donald Trump might already be picking his deplorable cabinet, but it is the Dark Mother, the destroyer of worlds, oracle of holy change, the tenderhearted be-header, that won this country. Kali has brought down our house in a shocking blow; all the illusions of America, stripped in a single night. We are not who we thought we were. Now we must get ready to stand in her fires of transmutation. We need them…

Paradoxically, the price of true hope, it seems, is being unsettled beyond repair. And this is exactly the opportunity our political moment is presenting to us all. Right now, from all corners of our shocked culture, there are cries of hope, demands of needing to become even brighter lights amidst the spreading darkness. I disagree.

I think that this moment gives us an opportunity for reckoning only if instead of running for the light, we let ourselves go fully into the dark. If instead of resolving our discomfort too quickly, we consider the possibility of staying in the uncomfortable, in the irreconcilable, in the unsettled.

Before we rush in to reanimate the discourse of hope prematurely, we must yield to what is present. Receptivity is the great quality of darkness; darkness hosts everything without exception. The Dark Mother has no orphans. We must not send suffering into exile — the fear, the heartbreak, the anger, the helplessness all are appropriate, all are welcome. We can’t dismember ourselves to feel better.

We can’t cut of the stream of life and expect to heal.

Cutting off the inconvenient is a form of spiritual fascism. By resolving to stay only in the light in times of immense crisis, we split life; engage in emotional deportation, rather than hosting the vulnerable. Difficult feelings need to be given space so they can come to rest. They need contact.

In a culture of isolation, be the invitation to everything.

The intuition that the Dark Mother has returned is pervasive if we heed the signs, and our thirst for the dark is deep.

She may not be an official Goddess yet, but Ursula the Sea Witch (from Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”) is the form that the Dark Mother has been taking for me lately. Like Kali, she has a lot of arms, and she’ll fuck you up. Half octopus, half chanteuse, she is loud, large, lusty, and speaks the truth that you may not want to hear. She’ll tell you the price of following your dreams. Can you pay it?

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I had no gaydar when “The Little Mermaid” was released in 1989, but when I re-listened to Ursula’s song “Poor Unfortunate Souls” a few months ago, it was obvious she was a drag queen! Was I just reading my own preoccupations into her? Nope. In the literary journal Hazlitt, Nicole Pasulka and Brian Ferree’s article “Unearthing the Sea Witch” reveals that she was based on none other than Divine, the countercultural icon of outrageous filthiness from John Waters’ movies. Lyricist Howard Ashman, a gay man, also added a smidgen of Audrey II, the carnivorous plant from his hit musical “Little Shop of Horrors”.

The article concludes, “Ursula is a plum role because as Glenn Milstead [Divine’s birth name], Howard Ashman, John Waters, and generations of queers and drag queens know, being ostracized, fat, and sick can bring its own strength and power… [I]n stories like these there is no convention. There are only relationships. Deep, firmly felt connections between strange, gross, gorgeous, and utterly authentic characters. What’s subversive about Ursula, Audrey II, and Divine is that they cannot be contained.”

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November Links Roundup: Queer Connections

Conservatives, and liberals still in the denial stage of grief, have been calling for “unity” after this week’s presidential election. I think we need to talk about solidarity instead. Not making nice with people who are ideologically committed to hurting us, but taking a hard look at the ways that our different marginalized groups have not cared enough about each other’s concerns. Feminists need to wake up to racism in our ranks. (53% of white women voted for Trump. Embarrassing.) The gay rights movement needs to address class and poverty, along the lines of Harvey Milk’s support for labor unions. While we celebrate access to  institutions like marriage and the military, we risk forgetting about youth homelessness, employment discrimination, and healthcare and basic public safety for transgender people. All groups should pay more attention to disability issues.

On that note, Reiter’s Block reader Alex Diaz-Granados invited me to spread the word about his online resources for LGBT children and teens with cerebral palsy. Alex wrote to me:

Children with disabilities are sometimes more likely to be bullied than their non disabled peers. This includes children that are also part of the LGBT community. Obviously, this is not a good thing.

Having cerebral palsy, I understand how critical it is for parents of a child with CP to have access to reliable information, especially when it comes to delicate topics like these. Equally as important, I represent CerebralPalsyGuidance.com because I believe in their mission of providing quality cerebral palsy information and assistance to families in need.

He pointed me to the article “Cerebral Palsy and LGBT”, which discusses dual discrimination against youth who are both LGBT and disabled, and provides links to anti-bullying information for teachers and parents. One of the inspiring stories in this article features Australian playwright Thomas Banks:

25-year-old Thomas Banks, from Australia, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy as a toddler, but knew he was gay by the time he was 12. Throughout childhood, he was called names and teased mercilessly. Even today, he hears numerous myths that unaware people think about disabled people.

“Some of the misconceptions about people with disabilities are that some people think [cerebral palsy] is an intellectual disability but it’s not, said Banks. “ Some other people think I’m stupid, but I’m not. And people think people with disabilities are asexual.”

Instead of dwelling on the issue, Banks became a writer and advocate for being gay with a disability. He even created his own theatrical play, Someone like Thomas Banks, which explores how he uses the Internet to date and find love. He also raises community awareness through workshops, where he talks about communication difficulties that many people with cerebral palsy go through.

Visit his Facebook page to learn more.

Regular readers know I am a big fan of British feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed, who writes about the paradoxes and projections of diversity work: essentially, how the person who calls attention to a problem is silenced by being labeled the source of the problem. On the website Brainlina, you can find a Sara Ahmed Reader with 40+ pages of excerpts from her books The Cultural Politics of Emotion and Strange Encounters. In the chapter “Queer Feelings” from the former book, Ahmed asks us to question:

…how the defence of the war against terrorism has evoked “the family” as the origin of love, community and support… What needs closer examination is how heterosexuality becomes a script that binds the familial with the global: the coupling of man and woman becomes a kind of “birthing”, a giving birth not only to new life, but to ways of living that are already recognisable as forms of civilisation. It is this narrative of coupling as a condition for the reproduction of life, culture and value that explains the slide in racist narratives between the fear of strangers and immigrants (xenophobia), the fear of queers (homophobia) and the fear of miscegenation (as well as other illegitimate couplings)… Hence, the failure to orient oneself “towards” the ideal sexual object affects how we live in the world, an affect that is readable as the failure to reproduce, and as a threat to the social ordering of life itself.

Heteronormativity, Ahmed writes, is one way that a national culture creates a sentimental bond of sameness that is exhausting to challenge. Being comfortable within your world’s unconscious assumptions can blur your awareness of where you end and the world begins. This feeling is easy for leaders to co-opt for patriotic or in-group identity purposes. It dulls critical thinking about your culture as a culture, one of many possible social arrangements.

One of Ahmed’s objectives in this chapter is to “reflect on the role of pleasure in queer lifestyles or countercultures, and…how the enjoyment of social and sexual relations that are designated as ‘non-(re)productive’ can function as forms of political disturbance in an affective economy organised around the principle that pleasure is only ethical as an incentive or reward for good conduct.” Read more here.

Ahmed’s analysis feels timely, because there is a temptation for progressives to question whether personal issues like sexual orientation and intimate relationships are a bourgeois distraction from “real” movement work. To the contrary, a culture that forcibly shapes or suppresses our personal lives works hand in hand with a state that seeks to co-opt our loyalties.

In this post from October, “Trump, Sexual Assault, and Incest: When Forgiveness Is Failure”, progressive Christian blogger Rebecca Todd Peters draws a connection between Trump supporters who gave him a free pass for predatory behavior, and Christians who wrongly pressure survivors to forgive instead of seeking justice. Certainly, it made me cringe to see evangelical leaders distorting the language of grace and repentance to defend Trump as a changed man. Peters writes:

While it is true that Christianity is a religion that is rooted in forgiveness, it is also rooted in justice. While Christianity teaches that God’s grace is so profound that anyone can be forgiven for anything – no matter how awful; God’s grace is not a substitute for meaningful justice in human community.

Sexual assault is traumatic for anyone. To have it happen to a pubescent child who is only just beginning to mature threatens to provide life-long damage to this woman-child. But to have it perpetrated by her father and tacitly condoned by her mother is to have the most sacred and profound parental obligations of care, protection, and safety severed and shattered forever.

I am a huge fan of the idea of restorative justice, which promotes alternative sentencing and community-based solutions that seek to help and heal communities in situations where healing and restoration are possible. These models are based on the notion that many crimes are offenses against individuals or communities and that perpetrators are better rehabilitated when they confront their very real harm and damage that their crime has caused in the lives of very real people.

In cases of sexual assault, restorative justice is neither a healthy or viable option. Asking the victims of these crimes to play any role in the rehabilitation of their perpetrators threatens to revictimize survivors. More importantly, it implies that the healing of the perpetrator is not only as important as the healing of the survivor but that survivors “owe” something to their perpetrators in the form of forgiveness.

Christianity does not require or promote the idea that victims have any obligation or moral responsibility to forgive the people who have violated and harmed them. While people may choose to do this as a part of their healing process, that is very different from teaching or implying that Christianity requires us to forgive or to “turn the other cheek” when we are harmed.

As you all know, I agree with this psychologically 100%, but really wonder how it’s supported by the text of the Gospels…? Commenter Iain Lovejoy raised the same objection, and suggested an alternative framing:

Forgiveness for abusers doesn’t mean abandoning the protection given to victims under the criminal law, only ceasing to hold anger against them and wishing only to see genuine repentance and their freedom from the sin inside them that caused them to act as they did, and recognising criminal penalties as an unfortunate necessity rather than a desired revenge…A truly repentant person would welcome paying for his crimes, not seek ways of avoiding doing so.

By either of these standards, I think we can still be mad at Trump! More tricky is how we respond to our neighbors who voted for him. When is it skillful to be honest about our anger and pain, when is a kinder approach called for, and when should we simply take care of ourselves by not engaging with bullies? This is my current discernment challenge. I’m starting with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s online guide “Speak Up: Responding to Everyday Bigotry”. (Hat tip to Captain Awkward for the link.)

What Country Is This?

This morning, in the bluest of blue states, I woke up to the news that a racist, sexist demagogue would be the next president of the United States. My world quaked and settled off-kilter. It reminded me of the day after 9/11, when realities I’d taken for granted literally crumbled, and I no longer felt I could predict what it meant to live in America. This time, though, the threat comes from within. I am frightened to realize that a large percentage of my fellow citizens are either prejudiced against minorities and women, or indifferent to our survival.

This morning, in the bluest of blue states, this Episco-pagan has never felt more Jewish. Growing up on New York’s Lower East Side in a non-religious but culturally Jewish family, I can’t remember a time I didn’t know about the Holocaust and the pogroms. We watched “The Sound of Music” and “Fiddler on the Roof” as history, not just entertainment. My mother got me a passport when I was born “in case we have to emigrate to Israel” and always reminded me that our host country could become hostile overnight. Now, going to Israel is not a win, either in terms of safety or social justice (I don’t have the right to displace the Palestinians!), but the mindset endures. I’ve read too many books about assimilated, well-off European Jews who refused to believe that their neighbors would turn on them. This racial memory needles me when I read Christian thinkpieces (usually by straight white men) about how we need to rise above our political differences and come to the communion table with our enemies.

This morning, in the bluest of blue states, when I opened the door to my 4-year-old son’s room, he greeted me with his thousand-watt smile. “I’m a butterfly!” he exclaimed, jumping on the bed and waving his arms to demonstrate the yoga pose he learned at his Montessori school. I want to live in an America where my son will always be safe to be a butterfly. His best friends are the children of single moms, lesbian couples, and a Muslim-American family. His birthfather is a Central American immigrant. He’s never had to worry about the people he loves, or even notice that they’re different from the “norm” that many voters yesterday were determined to enforce. I struggled with whether to leave him in this state of innocence, or to inoculate him with a little of the rational paranoia that is my birthright. Jewish again, I went with the latter.

“Mommy and Daddy and Grandma are sad today because we don’t like who is going to be in charge of our country.”

“Why?” asked the Young Master, echoing the morning-after cry of Democrats everywhere.

“Some people are very angry because they don’t have enough money for food or going to the doctor. And it’s okay to feel that way. But sometimes when people are angry, they blame the wrong person, just like when you’re upset and you throw a toy even though the toy didn’t do anything wrong. But don’t worry, we will always keep you safe.”

The Young Master, absorbing perhaps 10% of this, drummed his feet against the bathtub and growled to show me what “angry” looks like. We had breakfast and walked to school. I looked at the graveyard across the street, where I had planned to be buried after living the rest of my life in this house, and tried to practice non-attachment.

This morning in the bluest of blue states, I took courage from the survival of queer, Jewish, and African-American people through hundreds of years of oppression. I remembered growing up in the 1980s with the constant fear that President Reagan would push the red button and destroy the planet in a nuclear war. I was inspired by the memoirs I am reading this winter for the Winning Writers self-published book contest, about Jews who escaped Nazi Germany and African-Americans who migrated north in the Jim Crow era to seek equal opportunity. And I re-committed myself to upholding the humanity of all people through my work as a writer and publisher.

I’m still here.

Coming Out Witchy, and Other Links on Spirituality and Trauma

“My gender is witch,” proclaimed poet Charlie Bondhus, concluding a masterful set of published and new works he read at the LGBT Center in NYC last month. (Witch? Which? Switch!) In four words he summed up the elusive quality of our overlapping identities: queer, magician, writer. All involve a commitment to phenomena that may be immeasurable by outsiders and therefore vulnerable to challenge. Am I making this up? And who decided that creativity was a slur, anyway?

Little Red Tarot columnist Andi Grace explores the real obstacles to public witchiness in her latest post, “Coming out of the woo closet: Facing shame, stigma and historical trauma”. They write:

[T]he woo closet is the forces that keep us from being open about the way that magical, energetic, psychic, extra-sensory or spiritual forces nourish and guide us. To my mind, the woo closet is very old and is one of the most powerful spells (or cluster of spells) that keeps us from stepping into our truth and power.

I see the woo closet as being composed of several parts: historical trauma that has roots in the witch burnings, the stigmatization of neuro atypical mental states, and also the legacy and present day impacts of colonization–specifically as it relates to spirituality and conceptions of knowledge and knowing…

…If we accept that our bodies carry trauma from previous generations then we must also accept that unless we find ways to heal that trauma, we will carry it with us in our bodies and spirits. What this means is that, in a very real and tangible way, my body fears for its life in coming out as a witch and this manifests as anxiety, defensive self-judgement and deeply woven feelings of shame. The feeling of fear that I have when being honest that I can see and feel spirits, isn’t one that is just in my head. It’s in my bones and my spirit and it’s literally been burnt and drowned into my memory. And no, it won’t just go away with positive thinking, though that is one small piece of the magic needed to turn the tide of this spell…

…A fundamental mechanism of colonization is devaluing ways of knowing that don’t fit into empirical knowledge systems. This devaluation is used to undermine the sovereignty of indigenous people and ultimately to steal land, resources and labour. It has also been used to justify cultural, spiritual and physical genocide. Much of western science and higher education models are based on the assumption that empirical, measurable “truth” and linear understandings of time are more valid than understandings that do not fit into this box…

…The legacy of colonization and witch hunts has lead many people to believe that things like energy, visions, dream work, astrology, herbalism, tarot and magic are bogus and manipulative pseudosciences that should be disregarded with righteous fervor. Sure, we should be discerning (particularly with regards to oppression and appropriation) and yes some people are lying manipulators, but that doesn’t mean we should just dismiss whole systems of knowledge that have long and rich histories with tremendous learning and guidance to offer us.

Andi Grace’s piece includes useful guidelines and resources for folks with European ancestry to recover pre-Enlightenment ways of knowing, without being appropriative and colonialist in a different way toward nonwhite indigenous cultures. Here, for me, is where trauma and my political ideals get their wires crossed.

I agree completely with the critique of appropriation. But I feel this gut-level resistance to claiming a bond with my ancestors (bad-ass Polish witches, no doubt) because abuse and abandonment have largely severed my ties to my biological family. My mother is the product of multi-generational child abuse and mental illness. I blame my ancestors for our destroyed relationship; I don’t want to summon their spirits! My father is a nice guy but was absent from my life until I was 30. We’re becoming friends, but time will tell whether we ever have that sense of relying on one another like a true family. Perhaps this is where the writer magic comes in: I may have to invent a trustworthy ancestor who can be my guide through Eastern European hexery.

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[Baba Yaga and the skulls of her enemies. Source]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Turning to what’s new in the Christian blogosphere, I was struck by this article at the Feminist Newswire, “‘The Least of These’: Black Children, Sexual Abuse, and Theological Malpractice”. Author Ahmad Greene-Hayes, a Ph.D student of religion at Princeton, is the founder of Children of Combahee, a new initiative to end child sexual abuse in black churches. He argues that “respectability politics” combined with homophobic and patriarchal theology in the black church create an environment where secret predators can thrive. Churches’ model of sexual morality/deviance should shift away from upholding rigid gender roles, and toward prioritizing consent and safety–a paradigm that admittedly the Bible does not always support, but here is a case where we must talk back to the Bible.

Black church people have used silence as a means of protection from white racial-sexual terrorists. To mitigate the effects of white supremacist violence, many African Americans do not address intracommunal violence, and in some instances extracommunal violence, because they do not want to portray the race in a negative light or they want to be race loyal, or even race first, everything later. These patterns are deadly and send a loud message that racial justice takes precedence over the justice that every individual deserves in regards to their bodies and psyches—regardless of age, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status, religion, or any other marginalized identity.

The inability (or unwillingness) to address sexual violence as an evil that pervades home, church and community is steeped in larger cultural “norms,” though abnormal, of cogitatively dissociating one’s lived experience—in Black flesh—from one’s embodied and experienced sexuality. In other words, the inability to address violence and trauma as it relates to Black sexuality can be traced back to the plantation where rape and torture were codified by law and the theologies of the master class. In some ways, the contemporary Black church—which grew out of enslavement—mirrors the plantation of times past, and survivors are pushing the church to consider its reinscription of master tactics—that is , attempts to abuse, silence, marginalize, shame, victimize, and dehumanize marginal subjects, or as Jesus said, “the least of these.”

For white people reading this analysis, the takeaway message (in my opinion) should be that we can’t fight child abuse without fighting racism. The black church’s code of silence and internalization of toxic mainstream gender roles are an understandable survival strategy for an embattled minority. We have to do our part to end that battle.

Finally, here’s a comprehensive article from the progressive blog Religion Dispatches about campus Christian organization InterVarsity’s recent decision to oust all LGBTQ and affirming staff members. “Inside InterVarsity’s Purge: Trauma and Termination at the Premier Evangelical Student Org” is written by journalist Deborah Jian Lee, author of the well-reviewed book Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women & Queer Christians are Reclaiming Evangelicalism (Beacon, 2015).

InterVarsity has rolled out a policy that calls for staff who disagree with its theological position to come forward and quit by November 11. If staff members disagree, the national campus ministry stated in a letter to staff, “we trust that they will alert their supervisors and conclude their work [within two weeks].” (The policy does not apply to students, though students who disagree cannot be leaders, and it includes dictates against divorce, pornography and pre-marital sex.)

Supporters of InterVarsity’s decision see the policy as a commitment to “orthodox” theology, while critics call it a “purge.” The news, first reported by TIME on October 6, has unleashed protests from droves of InterVarsity students, alumni, influential InterVarsity Press authors and Christian leaders, many of whom have released petitions calling for the organization to revoke the policy. Within InterVarsity, a number of LGBTQ and ally staff, including Vasquez, have formed “the Queer Collective,” which for months has been pressing executive leaders for unity amid theological differences. They have elevated stories of LGBTQ-affirming people in the organization and documented the mental health impact of LGBTQ exclusion.

Despite their advocacy, InterVarsity announced its policy in a manner that Queer Collective leaders see as severe and punitive. For example, InterVarsity created a “helpline” for staff who felt unsure about the organization’s theological position, but the “helpline” only offered “limited confidentiality,” according to a July email sent to staff workers by then-interim president Jim Lundgren and president-elect Tom Lin. If a staff worker announced their disagreement with InterVarsity’s position and did not declare this to their supervisor, “[the helpline] resource person [would] inform the supervisor.” This, and reports by other staff workers who say they have been questioned about their beliefs, seems to contradict InterVarsity’s claim that it is relying solely on the self-declaration of LGBTQ-affirming staff.

Despite the ministry’s disclosure of the helpline process, “to call something a ‘helpline’ as a place of support and also make it a place of whistleblowing—that’s not just harmful, but also unethical,” said Teresa Pasquale Mateus, LCSW, author of Sacred Wounds: A Path to Healing from Spiritual Trauma. Mateus sees patterns of spiritual abuse in some of InterVarsity’s treatment of LGBTQ-affirming staff and students and warns of serious emotional “collateral damage” in the aftermath of “the purge.” Already, members of the Queer Collective and other InterVarsity insiders say that every day raises new concerns about emotional trauma, unemployment, resignations, disaffiliations, and the future of InterVarsity.

This fracture reflects the larger rupture over sexuality taking place across the evangelical movement…

Lee goes on to describe InterVarsity’s inconsistent treatment of LGBTQ students and staff, their refusal to repudiate the discredited practice of “ex-gay therapy”, and despite all this, the difficulty of turning one’s back on the diverse and passionate Christian community that IV represents for many people.

Leaving isn’t so simple. To many like Vasquez, evangelicals are their people. As Alexis Garretson, a George Mason University senior who identifies as queer and LGBTQ-affirming explained, InterVarsity is actually the friendliest of the campus fellowship options. If students left InterVarsity for greener pastures, they’d have to leave Christian community altogether. “LGBTQ Christians fiercely believe in the faith we have,” explained Garretson. “Asking us to leave goes against our identity.”

To staff workers who have worked for InterVarsity for years and sometimes decades, leaving the ministry means losing both their livelihood and the entire community they’ve built for themselves over the years, sometimes since their own college days. After all, InterVarsity isn’t just a student club, it’s a family. “People here just loved me from the first moment I got here,” Scripps College junior and LGBTQ-affirming InterVarsity member Rachel Geller told me. InterVarsity goes the extra mile to welcome new students, surrounding freshmen with an immediate posse of friends at the start of college, following up with relentless evangelical zeal.

It’s also a lifestyle. Much like the Greek system, the activities are all-consuming: Bible studies, fellowship, dance parties, retreats, prayer meetings, dorm gatherings, group lunches, study dates and so much more. To feel this sense of love and belonging so fiercely every day is intoxicating, students and staff say. It’s what leads so many students to graduate college, join the 1,300 member staff, and build their lives around the organization’s mission. For Vasquez, “InterVarsity was the air I breathed.”

Perhaps the most consequential reason LGBTQ-affirming staff workers want to remain in the fold emerges from their concern that once they leave, LGBTQ newcomers will be isolated in a community that publicly welcomes them but privately misunderstands their most fundamental needs.

Is it just my love-avoidance that makes this description seem a little cultish? Be that as it may, it seems to me that similar reasons keep people connected to abusive partners: to protect the children, or to avoid what seems like the greater trauma of losing an entire family network. Building up new love relationships takes time and courage. Leaving is a leap into the void, at least in the beginning. Some of us decide we’re ready to make it, but woe be to those who pushed us off that cliff.

Sacred Wounds and Rescuing Jesus are going on my very long Amazon wishlist now.

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October Links Roundup: Did I Shave My Legs for This?

Hello, readers. As you can see, things have been busy around here, and the dishes (and emails to myself with “blog about this!”) have piled up. We return this month with some links about gender roles and personal grooming.

This piece about body-hair positivity, from the feminist website Bust.com, got a number of sympathetic comments and personal confessions when I shared it on Facebook this month. The article by Eleonor Botoman features a video from the fashion magazine Allure, in which several young women of different ethnicities share the shaming messages they received about body hair and their journey to accept themselves au naturel.

No girl should be placed in the position of sitting in her mother’s bathroom with a razor because someone (a fashion magazine, friends or family) told them that removing body hair will make them more beautiful. Girls as young as eleven shouldn’t feel insecure about wearing shorts in the summertime because their mom said no or be teased for having darker hair and have to spend hours shaving from head to toe in order to avoid more bullying.

These girls realized that they were wasting so much time keeping up with this ritual. They found self-love through the act of simply stopping and setting down the razor, choosing to spend their time doing other things they enjoyed instead. Letting go of social conventions brought on this new kind of self-acceptance for every natural part of their body.

If you go onto social media and you see a girl post an image with visible body hair (armpit hair, a mustache, pubic hair, you name it), there’s always this massive wave of backlash of comments (usually from male users) as they call her ugly, manly, gross, unhygienic. It’s ridiculous. It’s not like these girls are kicking puppies. As Monica puts it, “I’m literally doing nothing,” so why do people keep reacting in this angry way? It’s just hair! The problem is not a sanitary one. It’s because these women present themselves with visible body hair and disrupt the flawless-is-sexy narrative.

If you’re the kind of girl who enjoys body hair removal, who finds something soothing in taking the time to shave in the shower, then do it! But if you feel like you’re wasting time or don’t want to keep enduring the pain of razor bumps or getting your hair ripped off, then don’t feel pressured to keep removing your body hair! Don’t conform to someone else’s idea of beauty! We need to love our bodies with all of its hair, bumps and stretch marks.

I was that 11-year-old girl, disgusted with my legs because of their pallor and fuzziness, afraid to wear shorts or skirts without uncomfortable stockings. But that was nothing compared to mustache shame. Good Lord, if I could take back the thousands of dollars I spent in my teens and twenties to have my facial hair ripped out with hot wax or electrocuted with needles, I could afford to advertise my novel in every gay magazine in America!

I could have just shaved with a razor, as I do now, but I abhorred the idea for many years because I thought only guys shaved their faces. It would be admitting gender failure, if only to myself. Though the Allure video doesn’t talk about this, the body-hair stigma for women seems intimately connected to society’s policing of the binary. When I was going through puberty, I wish someone could have said to me–and more importantly, to the adults and schoolmates who shamed my ‘stache–that there is such a thing as genderqueer and it is okay.

If, like me, you’ve ever tormented yourself pointlessly with the question, “Am I really nonbinary or do I just hate wearing nylons?”, Ozy’s blog Thing of Things is for you. Ozy is assigned female at birth, identifies as nonbinary, and uses “they” pronouns. In this recent post, “Some Questions for FTMs, Answered”, they take on the argument, common in some cis-feminist circles, that women who transition are mis-identifying their problem as gender dysphoria when it’s really sexism-fatigue. In an ideal world where women’s social roles and safety were not constrained by gender, would any of us still need to reject our womanhood? The end point of this argument is that we should fight to create that ideal world, rather than a world where female-to-male transition or NB identity are normalized.

Ozy’s response is clever, thoughtful, and multifaceted, and is based on the principle that we should respect people’s diverse experiences of selfhood without making them justify it according to a one-size-fits-all ideology. The whole thing is worth a read. I’m highlighting this part because I recognized a quirk of my own life in it. I also feel more comfortable recently with my girly aspects since I started identifying as NB. (The boldfaced part of the quote is a question from the original article to which Ozy is replying.)

What if there was no such thing as hormones or surgeries and you had to just live your life as a lesbian, how would your life be different?

Well, I used to live my life as a queer woman, so here are the differences I’ve observed:

The closest thing to being seen as nonbinary, if you’re presenting as a cis woman, is to be seen as a butch woman, so I made a lot of effort to be seen as a butch woman. I didn’t wear skirts or colors. I didn’t complain when I was in pain. I didn’t admit to liking Disney movies. I was very clear that typically feminine things were stupid, that most girls were stupid, and that I liked hanging out with men and my exceptional non-stupid female friends.

(It always confuses people when I tell them I conformed more to my assigned gender after transition.)

To be clear, this wasn’t conscious. I had no idea what a trans person was, back when I was trying to be a girl. I thought of myself as a woman. But on a subconscious level, I still valued not being either of the binary genders, and if the closest thing I could get to that was being a gender-non-conforming woman, then by God I would watch as many action movies and wear as much black as necessary to make this happen.

And then I transitioned and about six months into my transition– around the point where I realized that this really wasn’t going to go away and I could be nonbinary as long as I wanted– by some mysterious coincidence colors reappeared in my wardrobe, Alan Menken reappeared on my playlists, and I started whining like hell whenever I had a stomachache.

So there you go. I’d much rather not detransition. I think being a gender-non-conforming women should be left to people who actually want to be gender-non-conforming and actually want to be women, instead of to people who are putting up with it because it’s the closest you can get to being nonbinary.

The queer feminist website Autostraddle published this roundtable discussion, “What We Mean When We Say ‘Femme'”, to explore and celebrate the diverse ways that queer people define themselves with this word. One question they asked was whether emotional labor and caregiving is part of your femme identity. Visual artist, educator, and storyteller Rudy Loewe answered with a resounding yes: “It’s allowing a particular kind of tenderness to be part of your identity.” By contrast, beauty blogger Aja (Fit for a Femme) said something closer to my own perspective: “I associate being femme more with vigilance than with emotional labor or self-care. That’s the energy I put into the world and that I feel from other femmes. The emotional force in my life comes from the quality of relationships I seek, not from being femme.” I also related to Erin’s punchy description, though I lack her mechanical skills:

Honestly, my femme experience is entirely tied to my appearance and not at all how I would identify my personality. I say Utility Femme, which to me means I CONTAIN MULTITUDES. Like I’ll be made up and then wear some sensible shoes, or I’ll make sure I have on like eight necklaces and then definitely be able to replace your car’s front bumper. So to me, it feels less like a brand and more like an aesthetic. But you know what? When I see other femmes and femmes with femmes it makes me want to get in a car and drive with the windows down while I blast an air horn out the driver’s side because of how pumped it gets me. 

I don’t associate femme with emotional labor at all, and actually, I don’t really associate femme with tenderness! I equate Femme with being able to ruin someone’s life IN A GOOD WAY if you wanted to, this bubbling-just-beneath-the-surface strength. Not that strength and tenderness are mutually exclusive, but maybe it’s that their approach feels different.

Meanwhile, Cecelia’s words about femme and witchcraft challenged me to rethink my instinctive aversion to the words “emotional labor and care work”. There is a way of being a caring femme that is not codependent, though it is hard to find models for it in our patriarchal culture.

When I broke up with femininity and embraced femme, I felt strong and confident and powerful, but I was left with certain desires that I couldn’t find room for in myself. What was I supposed to do with my desire to nurture, to care, and to love something deeply?

This is why magic and other healing practices are so necessary to how I identify as femme. I use witchy things to care for myself and show other people that I care for them. Reading someone’s tarot is a way to remind them (and myself) that vulnerability is a measure of growth and strength. Lighting a candle and saying a spell for another femme is a strategy that reminds me how important it is to comfort and protect each other. When I didn’t have a personal understanding of the word femme and only understood my caring process through the traditional femininity I inherited, I felt fragile and lost. The differentiation between the two is, in many ways, totally arbitrary — but by taking the word femme on as a project, I was forced to actively investigate and take apart the ways that traditional femininity lived in my body. Claiming femme made me feel like an agent of my own experience, not a passenger.

What does femme mean to you, readers?

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September Links Roundup: Could This Be Magic

Apologies for another long blog hiatus due to book promotion, practicing witchcraft, and reading the picture book Construction Trucks twice a day to the Young Master. (I highly recommend this one, by the way: very informative, with illustrations of multi-ethnic male and female workers. Bet you didn’t know how cement gets to the top of a skyscraper.)

A high blood pressure scare this summer motivated me to rethink my expectations and self-image with respect to health. I wondered, what if I set my sights on true wellness, instead of settling for functioning on top of a constant feeling of fatigue and fragility?

I remain deeply conflicted about how much to have faith in this vision. I have enough friends with PTSD and chronic illness, not to mention the brilliant disability activists I read online, to know that positive thinking can’t wish away every limitation. Our idea of “wellness” is partly constructed by a society with unforgiving norms about bodies and productivity. On the other hand, I’m well aware of my learned helplessness as a trauma survivor and the health toll of a habitually over-activated nervous system that hasn’t learned that the danger is past. As the bumper sticker says, I don’t have to believe everything I think.

A friend sent me Louise Hay’s self-help book You Can Heal Your Life, which gave them great hope during a low point in their recurring health problems. I achieved some stress reduction through her mantras; “I trust in the process of life” was an appealing re-framing of prayer because I’m going through a phase of mistrusting anthropomorphic god/parent figures. However, I found her wider philosophy kind of crazy-making for my personal trauma recovery.

Hay is also a child abuse survivor, and like some other spiritual teachers with this background, e.g. Teal Swan, she has coped by believing that we attract all our negative experiences–either in order to grow spiritually, or because we had the wrong beliefs. This feels to me like a flight from the painful truth of being powerless at our parents’ hands. It also elides the political dimension of trauma, an analysis that has empowered me more than any mantra. I prefer Alice Miller’s advice that our psychosomatic illnesses will clear up when we listen to the child inside. Hay overstates the case by framing all misfortune–medical, financial, relational–as an individual psychosomatic symptom.

I got a reality check from this 2010 article from Tikkun Magazine, reprinted on the blog Common Sense Religion. Be Scofield’s “When Positive Thinking Becomes Religion: How ‘The Secret’ and Law of Attraction Poison Spirituality” skeptically examines the historical lineage of the positive thinking movement, from 19th-century opponents of Calvinism through Christian Science to today’s Oprah Winfrey Show celebrities. These movements always run the risk of becoming cultish and neurotic because there’s no process for recognizing factors outside an individual’s control (boldface emphasis mine):

While there are no claims of virgin births or bodily resurrections made by the new prophets of positive thinking they do preach many miraculous and magical ideas. And the law of attraction’s most prominent promoters borrow tactics from the play book of Christian fundamentalism, ones that are found in any group based on psychological totalism. Like other religions the law of attraction (as it is taught) promises salvation from the difficulties, anxieties and tensions of everyday life. Charismatic leaders viewed as Godlike shout the gospel in auditoriums and halls instead of churches, practitioners meet in small groups comparable to Bible study and devotees believe they have discovered a revelatory truth. The storyline of many of these new prophets is that they were once lost but are now saved.

The law of attraction is actually the perfect example of a postmodern salvation. It is individualistic (no community needed, one person’s thoughts run the world); narcissistic (the universe will supply ME with anything I ask for); focused on immediate gratification (its central teaching is to “feel good now”); materialistic (strongly emphasizes achieving money and wealth); detached from structural reality (lacks an awareness of political/social/cultural systems) and is hypocritical (claims to be free from religious dogma when it is actually reproducing it). Just like Christianity created a religion about Jesus which most often disregards the teachings ofJesus, a religion has been created about positive thinking while distorting its real meaning.

Many Christians believe that Jesus is the answer for everything. All you need to do is accept him as your savior and pray when in need. When Jesus (the invisible, magical and wish granting friend) doesn’t answer a prayer the error can never be with the doctrine or dogma but rather it resides in the individual who doesn’t have enough faith or hasn’t prayed hard enough. This aspect is perhaps one of the greatest ironies in the history of positive thinking because as the new thought pioneers in the late 19th century broke away from the harsh Calvinism of the day they kept its most central element: incessant and obsessive self-monitoring of the internal landscape. Both the conservative Christian and law of attraction devotee must continually purge themselves searching for either sin or negative thinking. But rest assured both are not allowed to question the doctrine or dogma because this is just more evidence of their own shortcomings. Once the idea that the doctrine is perfect, flawless and divine has been planted the believer has only one place to examine and deconstruct when something goes wrong: his or her own mind and soul. Critical thinking in both cases is portrayed as dangerous and harmful.

The same conflict causes me to waver in my commitment to my new spiritual path, which is turning out to be a combination of Tarot, spell-casting, and some vestiges of folk Christianity (saints, hymns, the Holy Spirit). In both liberal and conservative churches, I used to shield myself from the weakness of my faith through intense engagement with theology. My current practice is intuitive and charismatic–not in the sense of speaking in tongues, but in expecting effects from my invocation of spiritual forces. I have to conceive of prayers (which is what spells are) as making changes in this world, not merely as a psychological trick to make myself feel better.

Some of my new role models for responsible magic are the bloggers Clementine Morrigan and Maranda Elizabeth. They’re both queer, disabled, survivor witches who use Tarot and creative rituals to re-center themselves in their life stories. Morrigan’s seawitch ‘zines are affordable ($3 US & Canada, $4 elsewhere) and filled with experimental essays, poems, and collages placing ripped-out phrases from psychiatric reports into a ritual context. Magic serves as critique of a mental health system with no room for non-normative bodies or spiritual modes of healing. In her recent post “Theory, Magic, More-Than-Human Worlds, and the Arts”, she reflects on a summer writing conference and the difficulty of translating her sources of inspiration into academia’s approved ways of knowing:

From a theoretical standpoint I am interested in how the more-than-human world can be a source of relationship, solidarity, and strength, in the face of trauma and violence. My lived experience as a survivor of child abuse has shown me that the more-than-human world can be sustaining. My relationship with trees, birds, and landscapes are what allowed me to survive. These relationships, which continue to be central to my recovery and growth, are difficult for me to articulate. These relationships were never linguistic and they were not relationships I spoke about with others. The safety I felt in the presence of trees was a private wonder, one which I now long to express.

As a writer and artist I am interested in how the arts can create space in which to speak trauma, in ways which traditional discourses do not allow. Because the violence I experienced happened within the family, within the home, as so much violence does, and because this violence existed in the double-reality of simultaneously being true and untrue, as so much violence does, and because the body experiences violence in nonlinguistic ways, I have found that mainstream discourses of trauma fail in expressing the complex embodied realities of trauma. The arts have opened up space for me to express aspects of trauma which I have been unable to express in any other way. The arts have also offered me the work of other trauma survivors which are instrumental in the process of my own healing…

… As much as I feared bring my creative practice into conversation with academic work, I feared bringing my spiritual practice into the conversation even more. Again and again, in subtle and overt ways, spiritual ways of knowing are dismissed and laughed at within academic writing. Each time I read theory which quickly and without engagement dismisses spiritual ways of knowing, I feel discouraged from being honest within my academic work. My creative practice and my magical practice bleed into each other. They both involve ritual, pause, noticing, intuition, and awareness of the connectedness of things. Writing poetry, filming plants, planting a pollinator garden and noticing bees, each of these practices returned me to my magic. This return opened up a deep space of sadness and longing. I began to feel deeply ambivalent about my academic work. I use language like ‘more-than-human relationships’ but I am not honest about the spiritual nature of these relationships. My creative work this summer resulted in a crisis of faith, not in magic, but in academia. I began to wonder if I could exist within academia if I could not be honest about the role that witchcraft plays in my experience of the world, and in my knowledge production. This resulted in the writing of a paper titled “Can Theory Be a Spell?” in which I unpack the importance of spirituality in my life, as a survivor of violence and sober alcoholic, and take the first steps toward bringing my magic into conversation with my theory.

Buy “Can Theory Be a Spell?” as a ‘zine for $3 here.

Maranda Elizabeth offers online Tarot readings “for weirdos, queerdos, misfits, & outcasts!” Her series “Exploring Trauma, Madness, Chronic Illness, & Disability with Tarot” meditates on selected cards with an emphasis on their significance for these issues. She wants us to discover the elders or role models in our “lineage” as mad people–a provocative question, since I’ve always thought of my family’s mental health history as a curse or a burden. My biological mother owned several popular books on magic (I suppose everyone did in the 1970s, but still…), used to brag that she had psychic powers to know what I was thinking (it usually wasn’t good), and was somewhat proud when my aunt pointed out her resemblance to the Wicked Witch during our annual viewings of The Wizard of Oz. Embracing my magic potential scares me because she didn’t use her powers for good. Some part of me would rather have no power than risk being connected to her this way.

Not coincidentally, this year I’ve been binge-watching Once Upon a Time on Netflix. This fantasy-melodrama features fairy-tale characters trying to change their fates in the modern world. I wouldn’t say it has a consistent theology, but it tackles the great questions of religion: Do people have free will to choose good or evil, or are they predestined by the Author or their own intergenerational trauma? Is anyone completely good or bad? Does magic always come with a price that’s too high?

By the end of the first season, supernatural events convince the skeptical characters that their enchanted cosmos is not a delusion. The town psychologist is bumbling and ethically compromised (and also doesn’t remember that he’s really a cricket) so no one makes a strong sanity-saving case against magical thinking. So far, no villains have tried, cult-leader style, to make people believe in fake magic as a smokescreen for real abuses of power.

In the world I live in, belief in magic is riskier than that. And under “magic” I include the Law of Attraction and other New Age philosophies that attribute practical power to your intentions, as well as Christian prayers and rituals. I return as always to the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.” The wisdom is the kicker. In my abusive family of origin, I was groomed to fix adult problems that I actually had no power or duty to change, while having to resign myself to unnecessary physical pain and fear. So every time I light a candle to ask St. Dymphna or Ursula the Sea Witch for protection, I wonder, “Is this just my child self escaping into a fantasy world, avoiding the knowledge of my helplessness?”

Perhaps the conclusion of that Tikkun article can offer some guidelines. The author asks “What is a healthy spirituality?”

…[A]ny holistic system of spiritual or psychological development and transformation embraces the shadow. The law of attraction’s incessant avoidance of all things “bad” and obsession with feeling happy all of the time is what leads to narcissism and a dangerous denial of reality. A much more healthy but difficult approach is to learn to be present with what is arising in your awareness whether it is feelings of sadness and anger or joy and happiness. There is very little depth to a spirituality that is based on a superficial and shallow attempt to be happy all the time, but yet this depth is crucial for true growth. When devotees of the law of attraction are unable to be perfectly happy it is easy for them to blame themselves for failing to apply the law properly, thus doubling the pain or sadness…

…[I]f a spiritual tradition makes cosmological and metaphysical claims about the universe it needs to be done in the context of the reality of immense structural inequality, oppression and injustice. We can ask, can this idea about the nature of existence hold up in the face of racism, Imperialism and war? Or does the idea simply justify the dominant powers that be by empowering them to believe the divine or cosmic order of the universe is on their side? These are just a few of many elements that can be described as part of a spiritual system that is ethically sound and responsible.

Come to think of it, the characters in “Once Upon a Time” do sort themselves into reality-based or denial-based worldviews. Belief in magic is not the dividing line. Rather, it’s the kind of magic they practice. Good magic is powered by true love; takes moral responsibility for using power; sometimes requires sacrifice; is merciful even to wrongdoers; doesn’t trample on others’ free will; and is used for the benefit of others as well as one’s self. Bad magic tries to acquire love through control and deception; is frequently focused on revenge, blaming everyone but one’s self for bad outcomes; benefits at others’ expense; can be defeated by true love; and if practiced by women, causes them to expose more cleavage. (Hey, I never said the show was immune from sexism.) While practitioners of both types of magic may feel trapped by intergenerational trauma, the bad magicians use it as an excuse to repeat their forebears’ misdeeds, while the good ones say, “The buck stops here,” even if they have to give up something they really want.

In other words, the power of magic–the power of intention, desire, and belief–is like any other power. Delusional, selfish people wield it badly, and self-aware, empathetic people wield it as well as possible (though not perfectly). I can’t protect myself from all possible harms or errors by refusing to commit to anything. I guess I’m an existentialist witch.

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Regina the (reformed?) Evil Queen from “Once Upon a Time”.  (Source)