June Links Roundup: Reclaiming Ugliness

I identify most with the Feminine when She is monstrous.

Forget those flirtatious princesses with little-girl bodies. Give me fat octopus drag queen Ursula the Sea Witch, rape survivor Medusa, skull-stomping goddess Kali with her ecstatic thirsty tongue and dozen limbs. I like romantic walks along the beach at sunset while Cthulhu rises from the ocean. (Preferably in the winter.) When people criticize Barbie for having an unrealistic female form, I laugh; you better believe it, she’s a seven-foot-tall babe who could put your eye out with her perfectly pointed foot.

Now, I do have many parts, with different ages and genders, so there is one who loves rosebuds and sparkly necklaces and kittens. But she is six years old, and this is not the kind of world where she can walk around outside alone.

I have a new mantra for living in a society that indoctrinates us with shame and judgment. Adapt as needed to your circumstances. Each day I look in the mirror and say, with as much glee as I can muster:

I’m fat, I’m queer, and I’m crazy!

Embracing queerness–that is, dropping the effort to be “female”–has opened up all sorts of interesting investigations about habitual patterns of movement in my body, as well as the interpretive filters I unconsciously put over the image in the mirror. It’s almost cliché by now to point out that fat-phobia connects with the sexist backlash against women taking up space. Yet so many otherwise liberal women keep fat-shaming themselves and others, because our gender markers have inequality built in. When we see a big person with expansive, relaxed body movements, we struggle to recognize her as feminine, and therefore attractive. But now that I have been trying to walk more “like a man”–longer, confident steps, with feet and knees turning out slightly to the sides–I’ve found that the foot balance problems identified by my Feldenkrais bodywork teacher have eased up. And I haven’t even worn high heels since the early 2000s!

“Crazy” means that I have PTSD, sensory processing disorder and some other Aspie traits, and an imaginative world that is more vivid and important to me than a lot of meatspace relationships. Feminists have reclaimed madness, like fatness, as feminine excess disapproved by society: a “hysterical” intensity of feelings. Mine is not so chaotic. For me, it’s about not fitting in, seeing what others don’t see, openly taking time for emotional self-care, and not hiding the fact that my priorities are unusual. My shame around craziness is the fear that I will be so absorbed in my inner experiences that I’ll lose social self-consciousness and do something conspicuously embarrassing. This takes us back to femininity and its concomitant demand for 24-7 awareness that you are being looked at, so you’d better be easy on the eyes.

Role Monsters, Jess Zimmerman’s new series at the online lit mag Catapult, says to hell with that. “Being a monster is harder than being a hero,” she writes pointedly in the first installment, about harpies as a symbol of men’s fear of female ambition. But it’s the second essay, “What If We Cultivated Our Ugliness? or: The Monstrous Beauty of Medusa”, that made me cry and cheer.

Before I shaved my head…I had never thumbed my nose quite so drastically at beauty. Fat women often rely on other markers of femininity to edge us into the visible spectrum: flowing hair, smooth skin, expansive cleavage. I’d been weird-looking and tough in my early twenties, but at some point I’d drifted into trying to please people with my presentation, to fit in, to hover around staring at the mark even though I’d never hit it. Hacking into my hair felt as transgressive as carelessly sporting a bad complexion, which I also had at the time. I was wrecking my tenuous connection to beauty, crumpling it up and throwing it away.

I looked great with my haircut, but “great” in the sense of “a vast and incalculable thing.” I definitely didn’t look pretty; I looked further than ever from “pretty,” more than ever like a weird hulking creature instead of a girl. But the haircut also made everything else that was wrong about me—my fat, my heavy bones, my combat boots—fall into place and finally make sense. I wasn’t missing the mark after all; the mark was irrelevant for me. I could make a new mark.

When she was younger, Zimmerman says, she went by the Internet username Medusa, a creature so ugly you literally couldn’t look at her. Now she appreciates the power in the symbol that once represented her low self-esteem.

I didn’t know there was a difference between “not beautiful” and “ugly.” I thought that my failure to meet basic standards of femininity and prettiness meant I was repulsive.
But ugliness is something greater and stronger and stranger than mere non-beauty. It’s not an absence, but a new force, unpredictable and unrestrained. Beauty has rules and symmetry; ugliness does not. Helen of Troy’s face might have launched a thousand ships, but one look from Medusa could have sent them all to the bottom, weighted down with a crew of stones.

According to the Greek myth, Medusa was actually once so beautiful that the sea-god Poseidon desired her. He raped her in Athena’s temple, and the goddess punished the mortal victim–not the god, naturally!– for this sacrilege by turning her into a monster. Zimmerman muses:

Medusa lost her beauty—or rather, it was taken from her. Beauty is always something you can lose. Women’s beauty is seen as something separate from us, something we owe but never own: We are its stewards, not its beneficiaries. We tend it like a garden where we do not live.

Oh, but ugliness—ugliness is always yours. Almost everyone has some innate kernel of grotesquerie; even fashion models (I’ve heard) tend to look a bit strange and froggish in person, having been gifted with naturally level faces that pool light luminously instead of breaking it into shards. And everyone has the ability to mine their ugliness, to emphasize and magnify it, to distort even those parts of themselves that fall within acceptable bounds.

Where beauty is narrow and constrained, ugliness is an entire galaxy, a myriad of sparkling paths that lurch crazily away from the ideal. There are so few ways to look perfect, but there are thousands of ways to look monstrous, surprising, upsetting, outlandish, or odd. Thousands of stories to tell in dozens of languages: the languages of strong features or weak chins, the languages of garish makeup and weird haircuts and startling clothes, fat and bony and hairy languages, the languages of any kind of beauty that’s not white. Nose languages, eyebrow languages, piercing and tattoo languages, languages of blemish and birthmark and scar. When you give up trying to declare yourself acceptable, there are so many new things to say.

For another variation on the feminist theme of “Don’t play a rigged game”, consider this creative midrash on one of the Hebrew Bible’s disturbing tales of parental abuse and violence against women. Fred Clark is a progressive Christian ex-evangelical who blogs as Slacktivist. In this 2012 post, “Regarding Jephthah’s Daughter”, he considers different ways commentators have tried to make this story more palatable. In Judges 11, the Hebrew commander Jepthah vows that if God grants him victory over the Ammonites, he will sacrifice as a burnt-offering whoever first comes out of his house to meet him. Like the father in “Beauty and the Beast”, Jephthah was probably expecting that it would be an animal, not his own daughter. So he had to kill her.

Or did he? Clark contrasts the way the evangelical church taught the story, which assumed that the vow was binding, and the commentaries in the Jewish Encyclopedia, where the rabbis were pretty clear that Yahweh is not a Beast. According to Jewish tradition, Jephthah’s pride, his embarrassment at having made a rash and invalid vow, or (at best) his ignorance kept him from doing the right thing and asking the temple priest to annul his promise. It should have been obvious that God would not respect, let alone enforce, a vow to commit murder. Clark writes:

I don’t recall ever hearing a Sunday sermon on the story of Jephthah, but I probably heard a half-dozen Sunday school or Bible class lessons, and all of them pointed to this as the moral of this immoral story: Don’t make rash vows, because you will be bound by them just like Jephthah was.

And that’s monstrous — almost as horrifying as the original story. Those well-meaning Sunday school teachers all assumed, as Jephthah did, that he was absolutely bound by his vow, no matter what. And thus they all repeated Jephthah’s error — assuming that such vows and rules might somehow matter more than the life of Jephthah’s daughter.

That seems to me to be precisely the opposite of what this brutal little story actually illustrates. It shows us the lethal ignorance and sinful pride of remaining “inflexible.” The story of Jephthah is the story of everyone who decides that vows and codes and rules must be absolute. That way of thinking always ends in death.

While we’re on the subject of critiquing conservative Christianity, ex-evangelical writer Chris Stroop’s blog Not Your Mission Field features incisive articles and interviews about spiritual abuse, right-wing politics, and how they overlap. In a post from May 3, he warns us progressives about the no-true-Scotsman fallacy: “About Those Trump Voters for God? Stop Calling Them ‘Fake Christians'”. Both liberals and anti-Trump religious conservatives have been arguing that the president’s evangelical supporters are Christian in name only. While it’s understandable that believers don’t want to give Tan Dumplord power to define their faith, Stroop says that the battle to define “true” Christianity according to our political or theological preferences is unwinnable:

A modest proposition: while defining Trumpist Christians as “fake Christians” might feel good to the people who understand Trump support as a violation of their Christian values, this categorization is inaccurate from any empirical perspective. In other words, what represents “true” or “pure” Christianity (or Islam or Judaism, etc.) can only be debated within the discourse of the religion in question, that discourse being inevitably multivalent, tension-ridden, and subject to reinterpretation and internal contestation. Arguing over interpretation is part and parcel of text-based monotheisms. Put more simply, theologians and believers get to debate what the “pure” form of a given religion is; no one else does. However, there are no universally accepted grounds they can appeal to on which their contradictory metaphysical claims can be adjudicated, which means that, empirically, there is no such thing as a singular, timeless “pure” form of any religion.

Untenable, too, is the very American, but not especially Biblical, drive to separate pure religious motivations from self-serving political ones.

…[G]iven that these conservative Christians understand their drive to take dominion as a theological imperative, why should we understand their religious worldview and goals as only “ideology,” at the expense of “real” religion?… [For many commentators] the evident answer is that “ideology” is religion they don’t like, and “religion” is religion they do. This is intellectually sloppy…

The temptation to believe these things is powerful. Many of us want religion to be inherently good, and it can make for feel-good politics to reject fundamentalism as “fake” religion. But it is not. Religion is not anymore inherently good than it is inherently bad.

As a survivor of oppressive Christianity, I feel erased by claims that the Christianity I grew up with was not “real.” Let me tell you, I experienced myself as intensely religious well into my 20s, and I do not appreciate it when the Balmers and Goldbergs of the world tell me I was not “really religious” after all. Also as a result of my religious PTSD, I am naturally inclined to the position that organized religion, on the upshot, does more harm than good. I admit this may be my confirmation bias, and this claim would be very difficult if not impossible to demonstrate for the whole course of human history (although it is worth noting that the Abrahamic faiths have served as powerful vehicles for the propagation of patriarchy). The more salient point to my argument here is that harmful practices carried out in a religious context, as religious imperatives, do not stop being “really religious” just because they are harmful. This belief is nothing but wishful thinking and/or political expediency, even if many intelligent people cling to it, having failed to check their own confirmation bias on this point.

Moreover, whether we agree with it or not, Trump-ism is rooted in a worldview that many devout and religiously well-educated Christians have found support for in the Bible. It’s not the only worldview you can get out of Scripture, but it’s firmly rooted there.

The latest Pew data have revealed that it is precisely the most frequently churchgoing white Evangelicals who are currently most supportive of #SoCalledPresident, so you can give up what was literally a #FakeNews narrative concocted by a mainstream media that simply refuses to face the extent of white Evangelical illiberalism. The Evangelicals who voted for Trump are the kind who in many cases send their children to Christian schools or homeschool them, who memorize Bible verses, and who practice daily “quiet time,” that is, a period they spend praying and reading a devotional gloss on scripture or the Bible itself. We must face facts: this group is a Christian community.

When these Christians read the Bible, what do they get out of it? For starters, they appeal to the narrative of the fall and the doctrine of original sin to support an extremely dark view of human nature, the kind of paranoid view that imagines any number of “inherently lustful” men might put on dresses and claim to be transgender in order to spy on women in bathrooms, even though there is zero evidence that this ever occurs (while the medical community’s consensus on the validity of transgenderism is unequivocal). This extremely dark view of human nature leads to a sense that fallible human beings must be subjected to strict discipline or moral and social chaos will result, which in turn serves as “justification” for these Christians’ willingness to use coercive law in order to enforce on all moral norms that are not shared by all and that have no secular justification…This reading of the Bible leads to a sense that only Christians can be expected to behave morally at all, and comes with a concomitant rejection of pluralism (on which see this Twitter thread)…

…These conservative Christians, with their dark view of human nature, also find in scripture typologies through which to understand the world in terms of Providence and apocalyptic prophecy. This leads to what I call a “politics of Providentialism,” which entails reading the will of God into history and current events. Often it involves “recognizing” divine “blessings” and “punishments,” which believers of this sort insist can be applied not only to individuals, but also collectively to nations. One of the walls in my Christian elementary school was emblazoned with the phrase, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD,” the first part of Psalm 33:12.

While the psalmist was referring to the covenant between God and ancient Israel, many contemporary American Christians believe the same type of relationship to exist between God and the United States of America. Thus they argue that if the U.S. “sins” by, say, removing officially sanctioned prayer from public schools, legalizing abortion, and/or legalizing same-sex marriage or passing transgender non-discrimination protections, God may punish the nation with some sort of catastrophe, or at least allow catastrophe to befall the nation by removing the “hedge of protection” with which God supposedly surrounds us when our nation is “obedient” to him (this version of God is always a him).

“But,” you will object, “How can such people claim to follow Christ and at the same time seek to deprive fellow Americans of healthcare and social support?”Many such conservative Christians would argue this is not what they are doing. Believing, as they do, in the inherent and indeed extreme corruption of human nature, and having a deep suspicion that such corruption will be expressed in a high degree in the secular state, which we can make into an idol if we’re not careful, they will argue that individual Christians and churches, and not the government, should provide for the needy. (Yes, this is utopian.)  Some go further, either taking the road of the prosperity Gospel, in which health and material success are signs of God’s favor, or arguing, through an extreme interpretation of the Calvinist concepts of “total depravity” and “limited atonement,” that Christians are only to take care of other Christians. I don’t find any of this to be in the spirit of the Gospel as I read it, but nevertheless it is “real” Christianity.

As I’ve shared in recent months on this blog (e.g. here and here), continuing to call myself “Christian” would drag me back into the rigged game of trying to please or convince others about my identity. Perhaps orthodoxy goes so well with patriarchy because they both fear the internally self-referenced person, as explained in this Psychology Today article by relationship counselors Linda and Charlie Bloom:

They listen and take influence, but they know who they are, what they want, and are guided in their choices by that clarity. While they are respectful of conventional wisdom, and open to personal input provided by their partner, friends and colleagues, ultimately they tend to make their life choices on the basis of their own experience and judgments, rather than defer to the opinions of others. This trust in the validity of one’s instincts or intuitive knowledge is distinct from the notion of “shooting from the hip” or just “going with your gut feeling.” It is the closeness of the partnership that has promoted such self-trust, and that self-trust enhances the partnership.

Self-trust is less not simply “doing what I want to do” but rather is a matter of accumulating the wisdom that is cultivated through the practices of self-awareness, self reflection, and the intention to learn from the results of our life choices. It also doesn’t mean rejecting all outside opinions. Self-trust combines the openness and receptivity of a child’s mind with the understanding of an adult whose wisdom has been deepened through a lifetime of learning and the integration of life’s lessons.

A life that is self-referential is one that is flexible, fluid, and creative. Our sense of security comes from a sense of trust in our capacity to deepen it rather than rely exclusively upon the input of other people and institutions. Self-referentiality allows us to choose from a broader range of options in making our life choices without having to adhere to a particular tradition authority, or belief system. In so doing we are able to meet our needs and address our unique concerns with resourcefulness and creativity.

A system that wants to cut people off from their inner power, and replace it with social control, will start by making them ashamed of their needs for nourishment, pleasure, and authenticity, after which it becomes easier to convince them that God also doesn’t value them unconditionally. I’m much happier being fat, queer, and crazy. And I might be able to turn you to stone.

May Links Roundup: Faith in Atypical Minds

If there’s a unifying theme to this month’s links, it might be “Put yourself in a different frame of mind.”

How does Christianity sound to a person on the autism spectrum? Reading Aspie Twitter has made me realize that I have some spectrum-y traits, particularly in the area of sensory processing disorders, as well as a tendency to take people’s explicit statements and ideas at face value and downplay social-emotional cues that contradict what they’re saying. My literal-mindedness was only enhanced by being subjected to manipulation and gaslighting in my childhood. Nowadays, perhaps I could figure out your unspoken subtext, but I often choose not to, in order to deter passive-aggressiveness and hypocrisy, and avoid spinning out into the old hypervigilant anxiety of waiting for the “gotcha!” from my personality-switching parent. I try to force people to rise to the level of my candor, with varying degrees of success.

When it comes to religion, my Aspie-ness probably makes me less comfortable than the average churchgoer with contradictions between official doctrine and lived experience. Whereas a neurotypical person might bracket theological objections in order to enjoy the interpersonal and aesthetic aspects of church, and understand that this is actually the point of church, I become twitchy at any hints that we either don’t believe or don’t care what we’re saying in the liturgy. I wonder if people on the spectrum are less likely to be affiliated with organized religion, and if this is why.

The progressive Christian blogger “perfectnumber628”, an American woman working in China, also observes that self-advocacy for non-neurotypical needs can be wrongly suppressed by the Christian culture of self-effacement. In her March post “Honest Lent: ‘Seek First God’s Kingdom’ Doesn’t Work If You Have Autism”, she notes, for example, that when certain sensory stimuli are more overpowering for you than the average person, you can’t just take care of everyone else first and wait around for well-meaning people to reciprocate, because they won’t even know that you need help unless you explain it.

I used to act uncertain when I tried to communicate about the loud-sounds problem. I didn’t have the language I needed back then- I didn’t know it was about needs and pain; I thought it was me being weak and unreasonable and selfishly asking for special treatment. I used to ask instead of tell. My tone of voice showed that I believed it was an unreasonable request, and so people didn’t take it seriously- or they made suggestions based on their total ignorance of the problem, and I treated those suggestions as more important than my “silly” sensory issues (which, I thought, are my own fault because I could choose to go to therapy and become “normal”). I used to end those conversations with “I don’t know if I’ll be okay with that or not, but … okay.”

But now I’ve learned to say it this way: “Loud sounds are extremely painful for me, so if there are balloons at the party, I will not be able to go.” Like it’s just a fact of the universe, just a simple cause-and-effect, and I’m not going to entertain any suggestions about how I should “get over it” and “it’s not that bad.” I’m very much “leaning on my own understanding” here- nobody told me “it’s perfectly reasonable for you to avoid things that make loud sounds, because they cause pain to you in a way that’s completely different from what most people are experiencing.” I figured that out on my own, and it’s not like I can ask other people to confirm it- they don’t know what I’m feeling, and I don’t know what they’re feeling. I’ve decided I don’t need anyone’s permission to advocate for myself. If I say this is what I need, then I have the right to tell people and expect to be taken seriously.

I used to “seek first God’s kingdom,” but God did not take care of my other needs. The only way to make sure those unique needs are met is if I stand up for myself, if I communicate to other people that this is a real thing that needs to be taken seriously. Any hesitation, any “humility”, any “putting others first” on my part, when coupled with the fact that other people can’t relate to what I’m feeling, gets interpreted as an indication that what I’m asking for isn’t a real need that other people should care about.

Written from an autistic perspective, but useful for everyone, Real Social Skills is an insightful blog about social rules, boundaries, power dynamics, and resisting abuse and ableism. This article from February, “On trauma aftermaths that don’t advance the plot”, is a must-read for fiction and drama writers who are creating characters with PTSD, as well as people seeking to support us in real life. Life with trauma is less about dramatic revelatory moments, and more about mundane but essential accommodations for chronic fatigue and distraction. What if “I’m triggered” was as straightforward as “I’m allergic to peanuts”? Just let us be honest about our self-care without probing for the story behind it.

It can be exhausting when people see you as a story and expect you to advance the plot whenever they notice some effect of trauma. Pressure to perform narratives about healing doesn’t often help people to make their lives better. Effect support involves respecting someone as a complex human, including the boring parts.

The aftermath of trauma is a day-to-day reality. It affects a lot of things, large and small. It can be things like being too tired to focus well in class because nightmares kept waking you up every night this week. TV wants that to be a dramatic moment where the character faces their past and gets better. In real life, it’s often a day where you just do your best to try and learn algebra anyway. Because survivors do things besides be traumatized and think about trauma. Sometimes it’s not a story. Sometimes it’s just getting through another day as well as possible.

A lot of triggers are things like being unable to concentrate on anything interesting because some kinds of background noises make you feel too unsafe to pay attention to anything else. For the zillionth time.  Even though you know rationally that they’re not dangerous. Even though you know where they come from, and have processed it over and over. Even if you’ve made a lot of progress in dealing with them, even if they’re no longer bothersome all the time. For most people, recovery involves a lot more than insight. The backstory might be interesting, but being tired and unable to concentrate is boring.

Triggers can also mean having to leave an event and walk home by yourself while other people are having fun, because it turns out that it hurts too much to be around pies and cakes. Or having trouble finding anything interesting to read that isn’t intolerably triggering. Or having trouble interacting with new people because you’re too scared or there are too many minefields. Or being so hypervigilant that it’s hard to focus on anything. No matter how interesting the backstory is, feeling disconnected and missing out on things you wanted to enjoy is usually boring.

When others want to see your trauma as a story, their expectations sometimes expand to fill all available space. Sometimes they seem to want everything to be therapy, or want everything to be about trauma and recovery.

When others want every reference to trauma to be the opening to a transformative experience, it can be really hard to talk about accommodations.

Another problematic use of trauma as character backstory is the trope that unresolved anger from abuse turns people evil. Meant to humanize a villain character, this trope can easily have the reverse effect of making survivors seem antisocial and dangerous. Abigail Nussbaum’s sci-fi review blog Asking the Wrong Questions delves into this problem in her 2011 analysis of the X-Men movies. Our sympathies are supposed to lie with Professor Charles Xavier, the assimilationist mentor of the super-powered mutant X-Men, while Erik a/k/a Magneto, a Holocaust survivor, doesn’t believe in the possibility of peaceful coexistence between humanity and his kind, and is therefore positioned as the villain. But what if Xavier’s virtue is simply privilege?

…what troubles me about the film is that it feels like yet another expression of an attitude that I’ve been noticing more and more often in Western, and particularly American, popular culture as it struggles with the topic of genocide and national trauma–a crucial failure of empathy, imagination, and, finally, perspective, that leads to a blanket condemnation of anger.  I saw this in Battlestar Galactica when human characters who refused to make peace with the Cylons–the people who had destroyed their civilization–were made into villains.  I noticed it a few weeks ago when I watched an old Star Trek: Voyager episode, “Jetrel,” in which Neelix is urged, and eventually agrees, to forgive the person who designed the weapon that depopulated Neelix’s home colony and killed his entire family.   And I see it in the increasing prevalence of vengeful victim characters, who are condemned not for the choices they make in pursuit of revenge, but simply for feeling anger.  There is in stories like this a small-mindedness that prioritizes the almighty psychiatric holy grail of “healing”–letting go of one’s anger for the sake of inner peace–over justified, even necessary moral outrage.  First Class condemns Erik not for targeting innocents and embracing the same prejudiced mentality as his Nazi tormentors, but for wanting to kill Shaw.  It places two choices before him: either he takes the life of the person who killed his family and tortured him, in which case he’s a villain, or he relinquishes not only his quest for revenge but the anger driving it (the alternative of putting Shaw on trial for crimes against humanity is never suggested).  As if to add insult to injury, the latter option is presented by Charles–a rich, privileged gentile who has not only never experienced a day of hardship in his life but who, as Mystique points out, has no problem passing for human–with a glibness that belies the film’s claim that he has seen Erik’s memories and fully comprehends his pain.

The key scene of X-Men: First Class has been repeated in all its trailers: Charles tells Erik that killing will not bring him peace; Erik replies that peace was never his goal.  This is the moment that’s meant to define them as hero and villain–Charles, the man of peace; Erik, who embraces killing.  To my mind it’s actually the moment that sums up the film’s moral bankruptcy.  Charles is the hero because he thinks peace of mind is more important than punishing a mass murderer.  Erik is the villain because he can’t stop being angry at the person who murdered his mother in front of him.  Scratch just a little bit beneath that surface and you’ll find the ugly truth that underpins most of Hollywood’s attempts to grapple with the Holocaust and atrocities like it.  Erik is a villain not because of what he does with his anger, but because bad things happened to him.  Charles is the hero because he’s lucky enough not to have been victimized.  The fact is, Hollywood–pop culture in general, actually–doesn’t like victims.  It’s willing to feel sorry for them, but it won’t quite accept them as heroes.  We want our heroes to be strong, inviolate.  Victims–those who haven’t passed through fire unscathed, or somehow worked their way back to the exact same person they were before their ordeal–are suspect, damaged goods, defiled.  We’d rather believe that there’s something wrong with them for how they react to their experiences than to accept that we too might react the same way.  So we consign them to villainy, and embrace as heroes those who are simply fortunate.  There was space in X-Men: First Class to buck against this trend, but instead it reinforces it.  It bills itself as the story of how Charles and Erik became a hero and a villain, but the answer that it ultimately reveals is: because that’s how they were written.

Explanations are tricky things. I’ve always been odd: I have heightened perceptions, skills, and understanding in some areas, coupled with difficulties with some ordinary-life functioning. I think my origin story for these superpowers and handicaps has moved in a more and more socially acceptable direction, from “I’m smarter than everyone” to “I have the true religion” to “I’m a trauma survivor” to “I’m kind of Aspie”. But any of these narratives are only useful to the extent that they help me love myself and build positive relationships with others. Used defensively, to explain to an unkind interlocutor why I can’t drive on highways/hate the beach/can read 100 words a minute/know way too much medieval English history/made up my own religion, self-labeling can expose one’s core self to an even more painful attack than the original criticism of the behavior. So be careful about using your identity group as a human shield. I guess my most important “real social skill” is holding to the principle that we should embrace each other’s diversity, whether or not we understand it.

The Gospel According to Alice Miller: The Truth Will Set You Free

Alice Miller (1923-2010) was a groundbreaking psychoanalyst and author of many books on childhood trauma as the root of personal and societal problems. Some of her work crosses over into theology, as she critiques how certain religious texts reflect and perpetuate toxic family dynamics through the generations. Concepts of original sin, forbidden knowledge, and child sacrifice take on new interpretations when we decide to stand on the side of the child, against parental violence. This hermeneutic has led me to part ways with Biblical Christianity as I once understood it. It was a surprise and consolation to find that Miller rescues the person of Jesus from this deconstruction, giving me a way to keep relating to him without going back into denial.

Miller’s The Truth Will Set You Free (Basic Books, 2001) is a popularization of her theories for a general audience, focusing on the case against corporal punishment of children, rather than the taboo topic of sexual abuse in the family. Even the title is a quote from Jesus (John 8:32), though this may be the choice of the English translator. (The original German title was Evas Erwachen, which I think means “Eve Awaken” and refers to Eve eating the forbidden fruit.) This passage from the last chapter describes a Jesus I can believe in:

The figure of Jesus confounds all those principles of poisonous pedagogy still upheld by the christian churches, notably the use of punishment to make children obedient and the emotional blindness such treatment inevitably brings. Long before his birth Jesus received the greatest reverence, love, and protection from his parents, and it was in this initial and all-important experience that his rich emotional life, his thinking, and his ethics were rooted. His earthly parents saw themselves as his servants, and it would never have occurred to them to lay a finger on him. Did that make him selfish, arrogant, covetous, high-handed, or conceited? Quite the contrary.

Jesus grew into a strong, aware, empathic, and wise person able to experience and sustain strong emotions without being engulfed by them. He could see through insincerity and mendacity and he had the courage to expose them for what they were. Yet to my knowledge no representative of the church has ever admitted the patent connection between the character of Jesus and the way he was brought up. Would it not make eminent sense to encourage believers to follow the example of Mary and Joseph and regard their children as the children of God (which in a sense they are) rather than treating them as their own personal property? The image of God entertained by children who have received love is a mirror of their very first experiences. Their God will understand, encourage, explain, pass on knowledge, and be tolerant of mistakes. He will never punish them for their curiosity, suffocate their creativity, seduce them, give them incomprehensible commands, or strike fear into their hearts. Jesus, who in Joseph had just such a father, preached precisely those virtues. (pgs.190-91)

Working Title/Artist: The Holy Family with Saints Anne and Catherine of AlexandriaDepartment: European PaintingsCulture/Period/Location: HB/TOA Date Code: 09Working Date: 1648
Digital Photo File Name: DT16.tif
Online Publications Edited By Steven Paneccasio for TOAH 1/2/2014

Holy Family of Choice! (source)

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April Links Roundup: Christian Hookups

When I was navigating single life as a college and graduate student in the 1990s, a lot of the ideas that would have made sense of my desires and boundaries were not yet part of mainstream discussion. Today I’d probably identify as a demisexual, i.e. a person who only feels sexual attraction to someone when there’s an emotional bond. Back then, I only had a choice between Christian conservative modesty rules or a “sex-positive” feminism that shaded into peer pressure to prove my maturity through sexual availability. The latter was epitomized by the campus therapist I sought out for help coping with my mother’s mental breakdown; she offered her unsolicited opinion that I had a fear of intimacy because I mentioned that I planned to save sex for marriage.

It’s popular to write thinkpieces scoffing at the proliferation of labels for gender and sexuality, but in my experience, having a theoretical framework for your intimate inclinations does two important things. First, it reassures you that being out of step with your immediate social environment is a normal human variation, not a personal failure to grow up, loosen up, or man up. Widening the lens beyond the people who happen to be in your hometown or classroom reveals that there is no single right way to be in your body. You might even find like-minded friends or partners who use that label as shorthand for your shared values.

Second, identity labels give you a way to be clear about your limits without judging other people. Especially for those of us who are read as female, a simple “No, I don’t feel like having sex with you” is often taken by the other person as either a hurtful personal rejection or as an opening to negotiate, not a real boundary. Religious chastity rules served the same purpose, but required me to assert that everyone else was doing sex wrong. Celibate, opinionated, unconsciously queer…I would have made a great pope.

For me, demisexuality means that I can enjoy sexual fantasies about fictional characters or the hotties in the Jockey underwear catalog, but can’t picture myself getting physically close to a real-life guy unless I trust him and feel seen and cared for by him. The prospect of an unloving hookup gave me a dis-integrated feeling, a stifling sense of being consumed and erased. My body can’t relax if the emotions aren’t genuine; contrary to popular ideas of romance, illusion is a real buzzkill for me.

I appreciated this March 2017 article by Katie Klabusich at The Establishment, an intersectional social justice blog: “The Unspoken Problem With College Hookup Culture”. In her review of Lisa Wade’s social science study American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus, Klabusich finds a way to critique the callousness and emptiness that have become the norm in this subculture, without slut-shaming. The problem is not the number of sexual partners but the lack of a compassionate and responsible ethic about how to treat one another, whether in short- or long-term relationships.

Wade zeroed in on why dudes freak out and why women are so hard on themselves when they feel a thing — basically, students think that emotionless sex is the desired norm…

But can sex — even casual sex — actually be devoid of meaning? And more importantly, should it be?…

…I have realized over time that I wasn’t defective for wanting even casual sexual encounters to have meaning — even if that meaning was “just” fun, release, and temporary connection.

“Clingy, desperate, and needy are extremely effective insults, invoking all the things that students don’t want to be: weak, insecure, unable to control one’s emotions, and powerless to separate sex from feelings. For men, it’s the antithesis of masculinity. For women, it’s a failure to be liberated, modern, strong, and independent…Students aim, then, for aloofness.”

And this aloofness, Wade says, can engender a vicious cycle. “The idea is not just to not care, it’s to care less. Lack of interest is a moving target and the direction is down,” writes Wade. “So, after a hookup, students monitor each other’s level of friendliness and try to come in below the other person. Each time one person takes a step back emotionally, the other takes two. They can end up backed into their respective corners, avoiding eye contact, and pretending the other doesn’t exist.” Wade cites an NYU alum who calls it “the blase Olympics.”

The problem is that this blase attitude can make it difficult to ultimately establish emotional intimacy. “The skills needed for managing hookup culture…are in direct contradiction to the skills needed to propose, build, and sustain committed relationships,” writes Wade.

Gay Christian activist Kevin Garcia explores the same theme in his interview “Let’s Talk About SEX(ual Ethics) w/ Rev. Jonathan Vanderbeck”, an episode of Garcia’s podcast series A Tiny Revolution. From the introduction:

Sexual ethics (one’s personal practice around about the proper expression of sexual intimacy) is a topic of conversation that happens rarely in church because it’s assumed everyone is waiting till marriage. But, if we’re being honest, this is hardly the case. And have we stopped to ask why we believe this way? Or have we even explored what scripture says about this?

In the hour-long episode, they suggest that “covenant” and “one-flesh” language about sexuality in the Bible could be a foundation for kinder and more respectful hookups. All the people you have sex with become a part of you and vice versa, whether you end up in a long-term relationship or never see each other again. Christian sexual ethics should guide people to bring a loving consciousness to all encounters, rather than shaming people for having diverse sexual lifestyles. The current ideal of monogamy leads to hypocrisy and unkindness as gay Christians and former Christians act out their inner conflict on their partners. Listen to the interview and follow Kevin and Jonathan on Twitter.

Given how long it’s taken mainline churches to approve same-sex marriage rites, I don’t expect a liturgy for sacred one-night stands anytime soon. But why shouldn’t there be? Religious ritual and romantic courtship have traditionally provided transition markers between ordinary life and the liminal, powerful, transformative space where intimacy happens. My marriage-first ethic developed from the dearth of such intentional practices to honor short-term affairs. However, older people who’ve done more spiritual and psychological inner work could create such practices for themselves, as Damien Bohler describes in his 2015 post “Sacred Casual Sex” at the spirituality and mindfulness website Elephant Journal.

I am looking for something very specific in a partner that goes beyond attraction and requires a compatibility of life-path. And yet when I meet beautiful individuals who awaken this fascination within me my body, my heart, my mind, my soul wants to know them even if it is for a short while.

In our conventional models of relating the way to do this is through one night stands, casual sex or perhaps ‘friends with benefits.’ After having experimented in all of them I feel none of these ways of being with another are truly satisfying to me. Inevitably some kind of deception occurs, sometimes we are even both privy to that deception. Perhaps neither of us want something longer lasting yet we are sucked in by the ideas that perhaps, because we have sex or share intimately, that we are obligated in some way to pretend that there is more between us than there actually is. Another thing we might do is hold back a part of ourselves from truly becoming intimate and vulnerable with this other because we are not “in love forever after.”

I want more than that. I want the freedom to show up fully with whoever I am with, and also the freedom from unstated obligations and assumptions. I want to love, adore and cherish even if it is only for a short while.

In the article, he describes how he and one of his lovers crafted a plan to explore intimacy in a caring, bounded, and non-exclusive way. I wonder if any Christian media outlet would publish a similar piece. Are the norms of exclusivity and permanence too embedded in our monotheistic covenant religion? How far will queer Christians be able to develop the tradition in a new direction? Never underestimate the power of sex to spur Reformation–see Martin Luther’s rejection of clerical celibacy.

Killing You In My Mind: My Early Notebooks

A few years ago, a writer friend and I were briefly obsessed with the reality show Storage Wars, where a colorful cast of junk-shop dealers competed to bid on abandoned storage units. Since they could only glance at the mystery pile of crap before committing to a price, it was anyone’s guess whether they’d find a cache of rare coins, or a locked safe containing a fake severed hand.

To avoid disappointing future rag-pickers on national TV, this month I am purging my off-site storage room, which contains all the papers, books, and knickknacks I’ve hoarded since the 1980s. (At least that’s what I think is in there…I opened up an envelope marked “stock certificates” yesterday to find photos of my dolls’ wedding.)

In the manner of the Great Book Purge of 2014, chronicled on this blog, the storage excavation gives me an opportunity to discover how my beliefs and attitudes have changed, or not, in 30 years. My trajectory is hopefully of interest to someone other than myself, because understanding the psychology of our political or religious opponents is necessary for any bridge-building in these angry times.

Moreover, as an adult with a child of my own, I can look back at my teenage journal entries and see the ways that my elite schools failed me emotionally, even as (or in part because) they held me up as an academic and artistic success story. My junior high and high school for “gifted children” was wonderful at encouraging multiple kinds of academic and artistic intelligence, but also tended to track kids into the one thing they were superior at and keep them there, and make them too responsible for caretaking other students’ jealousy. We received the weird mixed message, “Be the best you can be, but if you’re bullied, it’s your fault for showing off.” (Not unlike my home life with a narcissistic mother, actually, who swung constantly between demanding that I look thin and pretty as a reflection on her class status, and enviously hiding me in ugly clothes like Cinderella.) I reached a point where I simply wouldn’t try anything I wasn’t already good at, even something as small as switching from sanguine chalk to rough black charcoal in figure-drawing class. Harvard provided superlative opportunities for meeting smart and creative people, but the grading and teaching ethos was predominantly about sorting students into winners and losers, rather than teaching everyone at the level they were on. Maybe I can offer future educators some clues for spotting and supporting traumatized overachievers.

Or simply a good laugh at these gems of misanthropy from my early notebooks. Take, for example, the opening of the mid-90s sestina “The Seven Deadly Virtues”:

Patience first, that pale child dressed in rueful
red, in the brute fears of some banal game
struck down, unable to go against the grain
of her virtuous feebleness, to repel
the force of the frustration that forms
the first thing we learn. Those who can prevent

torture never recognize it, nor prevent
us from giving the name Forgiveness to the rueful
realization we’ve missed our chance at revenge…

(That’s not half bad, though the rest of the sestina becomes awfully long-winded as I attempt to hit those end-words.)

Along the same lines, this list from January 1992 may sound detached and philosophical, but I well remember the anguish of wondering why my “good” self diverged so much from the traits that actually helped me stay alive. List #1 is redacted because its length embarrasses me now.

List #1: My Moral Virtues

Loyalty
Compassion
Willingness to be a nonconformist for a good cause
Concern for ethics
Sense of my own and others’ dignity
Maturity/responsibility (no drugs, no casual sex, no self-destructive pleasures except too much snacking)
Artistic integrity

List #2: The Qualities I Like Best About Myself

Intelligence
Deviousness/effective rhetoric
Assertiveness
Ability to resist oppression through manipulation of the oppressor
Self-preservation instinct
Ambition (without betraying or stepping on others)
Sense of personal style

One can almost glimpse Julian peeking out of the closet in that second list, waiting for me to love him more than those deadly virtues. Instead, these notebooks contain the long-lost original drafts of several quirky but over-intellectualized and gloomy short stories, mostly about humiliated fat women or cruel parents. (Autobiographical much??) From the 1993 tale “Pinocchio Died for Your Sins”, I see that I hated Disney’s film then as much as I do now, for the same reason: it punishes children for not avoiding the temptations and deceptions that adults deliberately put in their path.

This thought experiment from March 1993 reminds me of child abuse expert Alice Miller’s radical midrash on Genesis in Thou Shalt Not Be Aware:

Anthropologists like to say that God and religion are just projections of things we don’t want to admit are really human creations (e.g. norms and taboos that are merely man-made are called God-made). But what if the reverse is true? What could the reverse of that be? …perhaps that we and the rest of the created cosmos are merely projections of things God doesn’t want to face about Himself.

It’s like Beatrice in [Nathaniel Hawthorne’s] “Rappaccini’s Daughter”–her poison is made to bear sole responsibility for an evil we all share. Did God cause original sin so He could blame us for it? In other words, evil came from God’s character flaws but He made us so we’d bear the blame. I don’t actually believe all this but it’s an interesting concept.

What strikes me about this juvenilia is how fiercely I was attempting to be loyal to myself, in the face of social pressure or ideologies that promised an end to loneliness and guilt…for a price. Equally striking is the consistency of my difficulties with Christian virtue and belief, side by side with my attraction to the tradition. Really, nothing has changed, though at the time I framed my dissent as rational individualism rather than trauma activism or queer theory. My long goodbye to Christian identity in the past 3-5 years has been shaking my confidence in any fixed sense of myself or my perceptions, but it shouldn’t. I was always trying different routes to the same goal.

Such as, for instance, November 1990’s “The Instantaneous Reiter Method for Determining the Direction of One’s Existence,” my fancy-ass name for a list of pros and cons about my possible call to Christian ministry. (Little did I suspect the two most important reasons: “vestments are too hot” and “you will become a pagan in 2014”.) In case you want to try this at home, Step 1 was “Write down all the thoughts and feelings you have about the proposed course of action,” and Step 2, “Analyze the philosophical implications of each part of Step 1.” The upshot was, I was aesthetically drawn to Christianity and comforted by a community where I didn’t have to compete or excel (“It would also be nice to love God,” I confessed), but I couldn’t honestly say that a desire to serve God or other people was paramount.

What I feel in church–am I being religious, or is it just an escape from my problems (psalms that say God will protect the righteous)?…I always loved church before I had any problems [Ed. Note: What, as a zygote??] or before church helped. But is religion the last refuge of a scoundrel, or is what you discover in hardship equally (or more) valid as what you discover by peaceful thought?…It would seem that even if now you know how nice it would be to be looked after, that doesn’t make it any more moral or plausible to accept or expect it.

Guys, this is kind of sad, huh? I was truthful enough to realize that it was codependent caretaking to become a minister in order to get love and protection, but no one in my family, church, or education had taught me that I was entitled to love and protection just because I’m human. Nothing immoral or implausible about that.

It’s strange, in retrospect, that my sense of victimization by greedy and arbitrary educational gatekeepers coexisted with my bootstrapping libertarian philosophy, which led me to write some cringe-worthy student newspaper articles about infantilized, needy, “victim culture” (think of your standard editorial against trigger warnings today). I think I was feeling that I shouldn’t have to abase myself, or reveal my private wounds, in order to receive basic kindness and a fair assessment from others. Not that this makes my arguments less wrong, but it suggests that those most vocally against “safe spaces” may be secretly the ones most in need of them, and in despair of finding them.

I leave you with this politically clairvoyant satire of a college entrance exam, from November 1990. Just think, if I’d remained my creed-wielding, Federalist Society dues-paying self, I could’ve been Betsy DeVos.

Existence Aptitude Test (EAT)
“the test to end tests”

There is a penalty for wrong answers. The Educational Testing Service thinks the difference between right and wrong is important. There is also a penalty for right answers. The Educational Testing Service does not want to foster antisocial elements whose intellectual superiority threatens the self-esteem of others and weakens the social fabric.

Therefore, only work out the problem when you have tried to guess and failed. Remember that the least imaginative guess is most likely to be right.

Good luck.

Part I: General Knowledge

(1) Time
(a) past and time present
Are both perhaps contained in time future.
(b) and tide wait for no man.
(c) is money.
(d)

(2) Space
(a) is curved.
(b) and time are one.
(c) is limited, so act now!
(d) ____________

(3) Death
(a) shall have no dominion.
(b) be not proud.
(c) and taxes are inevitable.
(d) to the Educational Testing Service!

(4) The world
(a) is too much with us, late and soon.
(b) is charged with the grandeur of God.
(c)
(d)

(5) Beauty
(a) is truth, truth beauty. That is all we know, and all we need to know. Stop. Do not complete the rest of this exam. Hand in your paper to the proctor.
(b) and the Beast lived happily ever after.
(c) is in the eye of the beholder.
(d)

(6) God
(a) is dead.
(b) is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
(c) bless [insert country’s name here]
(d) knows.

(7) Energy
(a) =mc squared
(b) can neither be created nor destroyed.
(c)
(d) is eternal delight.

(8) Life
(a) is a bitch and then you die.
(b) is a beach and then you dry.
(c) is a bitch and then you marry one.
(d)

Part II: Literature

(1) Lord of the Flies is about
(a) an entomologist.
(b) the devil.
(c) sadistic teenagers.
(d) Harvard.

(2) The title of Gone With the Wind refers to
(a) Scarlett’s dress when Rhett carries her upstairs.
(b) the gracious and infinitely superior Southern way of life.
(c) Atlanta burning.
(d) Margaret Mitchell’s notes for the lost final chapter of the book, in which Scarlett sues Rhett for alimony and Ashley fulfills his latent homosexuality.

(3) In Moby-Dick, the whale represents
(a) the Holy Grail.
(b) the forces of nature that overpower humanity.
(c) a society dominated by the white male power structure which the disabled and disadvantaged seek to infiltrate or destroy.
(d) Harvard.

(4) Coleridge’s lines “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/a stately pleasure dome decree” suggest
(a) a drug experience.
(b) a world of poetic fantasy.
(c) the Taj Mahal.
(d) Donald Trump.

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March Links Roundup: Race and Repentance

Christians this month are observing the season of Lent, a period of self-examination and repentance, and this Episco-pagan is among them. If the Christian part should ever drop out of my identity, Lent would be the last to go. It’s always felt, for me, like opening up more breathing room in our shared spiritual space; a rare time to acknowledge sadness and confusion in a publicly supportive environment, and the luxury of introspection in liberal churches that are usually so focused on outward social action. (Plus, forty days is really the outer limit of how long I can maintain good habits, like eating fewer carbs and not biting my nails.)

On Ash Wednesday, the multi-author blog Feminism and Religion offered this positive re-thinking of repentance as creative tension: accepting imperfection as our natural state, while always striving to grow beyond it. It reminds me of the dialectical-behavioral therapy affirmation (I’m paraphrasing Marsha Linehan here), “I accept you just as you are and I believe you can change.” One could say this attitude is less prideful than the traditional fall-from-grace narrative that implies we were supposed to be perfect. Religion professor Natalie Weaver writes in “A Lenten Reflection”:

Today is Ash Wednesday, where people the world over are reminded that they are born of dust and destined to return to dust.  In the meanwhile, we will fast and repent of all the wrongs wrought by our doings and omissions.  And, while my own disposition sort of naturally enters into that almost masochistic self-reflection, another part of me feels the strong urge to resist that burden.  This is not to say that I eschew moral agency or culpability.  Rather, it is to resist an anthropology of sin and fall.  I sooner would see an anthropology of effort and crawling towards walking.  I sooner would embrace the idea that creaturely life is not perfected, especially while it is still in process, and that sin and error are actually manifestations of the imperfect but noble effort of the child trying to stand; the adult trying to be responsible; the elderly trying to give advice, and all as much as possible for as long as possible.

The great evils of this world are driven by desire for godlike domination and access.  They demonstrate the craven lust to own land and bodies and resources and control.  They are the unchecked will of the self striving to create the world, writ small or large, after one’s own image.  But, isn’t there something of this grandiose self (construed as both individual and corporate, tribal, and national identities) also present in the narcissistic gaze inward, where I try to determine my imperfections and imagine myself without them as in some pre-fallen or post-fallen way, heavenly state?  Does the obsession with sin not betray some deeper sort of god-complex?

I would like to suggest that we are better served by a less audacious theology.  It is wise to be a creature, recognizing the scope and limit of one’s influence and place.  We harm ourselves when we batter our souls with all that we should have done and all that we did not do.  And, even such an exercise diligently undertaken will not change in a lasting corrective sense the inevitability that we’ll arrive at this same bend next year.   The truth is, while we all search, we don’t know in an absolute sense for what we search; we hope for that which is beyond our imaginations.

Among the topics of my soul-searching this year is racism and my complicity in it as a white person. I have mixed feelings about “privilege” language because being treated decently is a universal right, though one that is unfortunately far from universally enjoyed. “Privilege” has connotations of something that was handed to you when you should have earned it, or a coddling of immature sensitivities. But for now, it’s the best commonly-understood shorthand to convey that inequality is structural, not just about personal animus.

In the words of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, white privilege is partly about the “unknown unknowns–the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” We have no reason to question popular narratives of American history that could be dangerously wrong. We might fall for hate-mongering political strategies against a marginalized group without recognizing that they’re right out of the KKK’s playbook.

For example, in this 2014 post from The Weekly Sift, “Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party”, freelance journalist and amateur historian Doug Muder convincingly argues that Reconstruction was the second phase of the Civil War–and the North lost.

The Civil War was easy to misunderstand at the time, because there had never been anything like it. It was a total mobilization of society, the kind Europe wouldn’t see until World War I. The Civil War was fought not just with cannons and bayonets, but with railroads and factories and an income tax.

If the Napoleonic Wars were your model, then it was obvious that the Confederacy lost in 1865: Its capital fell, its commander surrendered, its president was jailed, and its territories were occupied by the opposing army. If that’s not defeat, what is?

But now we have a better model than Napoleon: Iraq.

After the U.S. forces won on the battlefield in 1865 and shattered the organized Confederate military, the veterans of that shattered army formed a terrorist insurgency that carried on a campaign of fire and assassination throughout the South until President Hayes agreed to withdraw the occupying U. S. troops in 1877. Before and after 1877, the insurgents used lynchings and occasionalpitchedbattles to terrorize those portions of the electorate still loyal to the United States. In this way they took charge of the machinery of state government, and then rewrote the state constitutions to reverse the postwar changes and restore the supremacy of the class that led the Confederate states into war in the first place. [2]

By the time it was all over, the planter aristocrats were back in control, and the three constitutional amendments that supposedly had codified the U.S.A’s victory over the C.S.A.– the 13th, 14th, and 15th — had been effectively nullified in every Confederate state. The Civil Rights Acts had been gutted by the Supreme Court, and were all but forgotten by the time similar proposals resurfaced in the 1960s. Blacks were once again forced into hard labor for subsistence wages, denied the right to vote, and denied the equal protection of the laws. Tens of thousands of them were still physically shackled and subject to being whipped, a story historian Douglas Blackmon told in his Pulitzer-winning Slavery By Another Name.

So Lincoln and Grant may have had their mission-accomplished moment, but ultimately the Confederates won. The real Civil War — the one that stretched from 1861 to 1877 — was the first war the United States lost.

The missed opportunity. Today, historians like Eric Foner and Douglas Egerton portray Reconstruction as a missed opportunity to avoid Jim Crow and start trying to heal the wounds of slavery a century sooner. Following W.E.B. DuBois’ iconoclastic-for-1935 Black Reconstruction, they see the freedmen as actors in their own history, rather than mere pawns or victims of whites. As a majority in Mississippi and South Carolina, and a substantial voting bloc across the South, blacks briefly used the democratic system to try to better their lot. If the federal government had protected the political process from white terrorism, black (and American) history could have taken an entirely different path.

In particular, 1865 was a moment when reparations and land reform were actually feasible. Late in the war, some of Lincoln’s generals — notably Sherman — had mitigated their slave-refugee problem by letting emancipated slaves farm small plots on the plantations that had been abandoned by their Confederate owners. Sick or injured animals unable to advance with the Army were left behind for the slaves to nurse back to health and use. (Hence “forty acres and a mule”.) Sherman’s example might have become a land-reform model for the entire Confederacy, dispossessing the slave-owning aristocrats in favor of the people whose unpaid labor had created their wealth.

Instead, President Johnson (himself a former slave-owner from Tennessee) was quick to pardon the aristocrats and restore their lands. [3] That created a dynamic that has been with us ever since: Early in Reconstruction, white and black working people sometimes made common cause against their common enemies in the aristocracy. But once it became clear that the upper classes were going to keep their ill-gotten holdings, freedmen and working-class whites were left to wrestle over the remaining slivers of the pie. Before long, whites who owned little land and had never owned slaves had become the shock troops of the planters’ bid to restore white supremacy.

This history is even more relevant in the Trump era than when Muder wrote it three years ago, because false narratives of the reasons for racial and economic inequality drive much of the Trump-supporters’ policy initiatives and self-image. The second half of the article warns:

But the enduring Confederate influence on American politics goes far beyond a few rhetorical tropes. The essence of the Confederate worldview is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries…

…The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change.

When in the majority, Confederates protect the established order through democracy. If they are not in the majority, but have power, they protect it through the authority of law. If the law is against them, but they have social standing, they create shams of law, which are kept in place through the power of social disapproval. If disapproval is not enough, they keep the wrong people from claiming their legal rights by the threat of ostracism and economic retribution. If that is not intimidating enough, there are physical threats, then beatings and fires, and, if that fails, murder.

That was the victory plan of Reconstruction. Black equality under the law was guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. But in the Confederate mind, no democratic process could legitimate such a change in the social order. It simply could not be allowed to stand, and it did not stand.

In the 20th century, the Confederate pattern of resistance was repeated against the Civil Rights movement. And though we like to claim that Martin Luther King won, in many ways he did not. School desegregation, for example, was never viewed as legitimate, and was resisted at every level. And it has been overcome. By most measures, schools are as segregated as ever, and the opportunities in white schools still far exceed the opportunities in non-white schools.

Today, ObamaCare cannot be accepted. No matter that it was passed by Congress, signed by the President, found constitutional by the Supreme Court, and ratified by the people when they re-elected President Obama. It cannot be allowed to stand, and so the tactics for destroying it get ever more extreme…

Meanwhile, at The TransAdvocate, this 2016 post by Cristan Williams looks at the history behind “Bathroom Bills and the Dialectic of Oppression”. In an interview with Princeton lecturer Dr. Gillian Frank, Williams details “the ways anti-equality groups have historically cast oppressed groups as voyeurs and/or perverts, warning the public that should an oppressed group have equality, bad things may happen in public bathrooms.” Klan spokesmen in the 1960s raised the specter of white women catching “Negro diseases” from integrated restrooms; opponents of the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1980s similarly warned that gender equality would let gay men spread AIDS in public bathrooms and locker rooms. “The political argument that supporting the discrimination of a minority group equates to saving children from harm traces its rhetorical roots back to Jim Crow laws.” Williams quotes Frank as saying:

Analyzing the racial origins of [Save Our Children’s (SOC)] activism and the gay rights response to it in the 1970s reveals a migration of conservative ideas and activists from race-based conflicts to gender- and sexual-based conflicts. SOC’s discourse of child protection embodied a protean logic of family privacy against queer sexuality. That strategy was, in part, learned from southern US resistance to desegregation, dating back to the Civil War, which used the language of privacy and family protection to address issues of race.

(“Save Our Children” was Anita Bryant’s anti-gay activist group in the 1970s.) Frank continues:

The use of mass media to aid in the construction of oppressed groups as sexual threats can be traced back to a specific political narrative initially used against Black Americans. The KKK was perhaps the first to enjoy the use of mass multimedia to inspire the dominate population to view members of an oppressed group as a potential sexual threat. In 1915 the KKK was featured in the movie blockbuster, Birth of a Nation. The movie, originally titled The Clansman, features a White man portrayed as a Black man who tries to rape a White woman. The movie earned more than 10 million dollars (more than 235 million in 2016 dollars) and helped popularize the Black rapist trope within the public consciousness…

…The Republican Party centered their political dialectic upon this trope in the 1988 presidential race between George Bush and Michael Dukakis… Bush portrayed Dukakis’ support of racial equality as an endorsement of the rape of White women by Black men through attack ads featuring Willy Horton. Horton, a Black man who raped and killed a White woman, was constructed to be a central figure in the Dukakis political team. Bush’s aid, Lee Atwater said, “By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’ running mate.”

Imagery used to support anti-transgender politics likewise draws upon the construction of transgender women as sexual threats. Political advertisements against Houston’s equality ordinance consistently featured the message that should trans women be protected from harassment and discrimination, little girls would be raped. The Houston Chronicle reported, “Opponents of the ordinance… have flooded radio and TV with ads saying the law gives men dressed in women’s clothing, including sexual predators, the ability to enter a woman’s restroom. On Tuesday, the group released a TV spot that closes with a man bursting into a stall occupied by a young girl.”

This political dialectic functions to erode the oppressed group’s humanity to the point wherein their mere existence in society is enough to warrant calls for violence…

Visit Cristan’s blog and Twitter feed for more articles about transgender rights and the surprising history of trans-inclusive radical feminism.

Poetry from Reena Ribalow’s “The Smoke of Dreams”

I first encountered Reena Ribalow’s accomplished poetry when she won the 2008 prize for traditional verse at Winning Writers. Born in New York City, she makes her home in Israel, and her work is strongly influenced by Jewish tradition. Her first full-length book, The Smoke of Dreams, was published last year by Neopoiesis Press. This stately, melancholy collection of poems is steeped in sensual memories of bittersweet love, be it for a holy city or a forbidden affair. Her roots are planted in Jerusalem, sacred and war-torn, harsh and captivating. Her more personal poems show the same mix of pleasure and pain in romantic relationships. One way or another, history is inescapable. Reena has kindly permitted me to reprint a poem from The Smoke of Dreams here.

Desert Light

Was it Cezanne who said, “God is light,”
and went South to paint?
Or was it someone else who did not know
that we can take only so much light,
without going crazy?
The slant of afternoon in a dim room,
the dazzle after a passing cloud,
a radiance through shifting leaves,
is all that we can bear.

Here people are mad with light,
their nerves raw with it,
their eyes irradiated;
they cannot see right.
Shadows disappear from streets
without dimension,
with nowhere to hide.
Light hunts us down,
relentless as the Law.

Some plants survive, some thrive,
some play dead by noon light,
wakening to moist life
in the seducing dark.

The light of Europe hints,
suggesting immanence.
Civility infuses light:
the safety of umbrellas, of cloudy parks,
of rooms that hold their breath,
gilded with motes of gold;
this is easy, this wears well.

The prophets were born to desert light,
crazed with it, dooming us
to a surfeit of holiness.

We endure, odd growths
on a sun-battered land.
Saints, madmen, artists
offer their strange and mutant fruit.
Eat of it, they plead,
and know in every cell
the terrible truth:
that God is everywhere.

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.

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…?

Reiter’s Block Year in Review: 2016

They said it couldn’t be done. They said it shouldn’t be done. They said “hold on, I got my Kindle all sticky…”

The no-longer-endless novel was published this year by Saddle Road Press and won Best Gay Contemporary General Fiction in the 2016 Rainbow Awards. If you bought it, thank you! Please write an Amazon review. If you haven’t yet, what are you waiting for? The nights are getting colder…


(Book launch party at Bistro Les Gras, Northampton, with the family of choice: Adam, Roberta, Sovereign, & Ellen. I drank a Cosmo on Julian’s behalf.)

In other news, the Young Master is proud to announce that he is nearly 5 and not a baby anymore. He is an expert at identifying construction trucks and different species of trees. In fashion, he enjoys combining homemade paper earrings and Mardi Gras beads with his large collection of robot, truck, and dinosaur shirts. His favorite songs are Major Lazer’s “Bubble Butt” and Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling”. He now has the attention span for full-length movies, and likes to role-play scenes from Charlotte’s Web, Finding Nemo and Finding Dory. (I wonder when he will realize how Wilbur the Pig is connected to the pound of salami he eats every week. Ah, lost innocence.) Because of these films, his imaginative play lately includes a lot of baby animals who are sad because they lost their mommies. Is he trying to express something about being adopted? I wish Disney/Pixar didn’t rely on this trope so much. I welcome suggestions of good cartoon films without dead or absent mothers.

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After a long and difficult passage, I feel I’m finally settling into a place of peace with my nonbinary spirituality. It’s time to start trusting that Jesus is who I want him to be. Faith means choosing to imagine a divine Friend who lets my attachment and independence ebb and flow, contrary to the template from my childhood and the jealous God that other wounded souls have created in their parents’ image. In my pagan practice, I’ve noticed myself shifting away from “magick” in the sense of trying to make things happen through ritual, and towards using ritual to create a space where I can commune with benevolent spirits. This is not to say that I disbelieve in magick, only that I’m not ready for it. I need a clearer adult perspective to ensure that I’m not returning to childhood strategies of escaping abuse through supernatural fantasy. Or, to put it another way, I need to sit longer with the fear of not getting what I want (hint: book sales) and examine whether I am using this goal to fulfill the wrong needs, before I light candles and bury pins in the ground to feel like I’m achieving something. The Tarot is great for this discernment exercise.

Without further ado, here are the high-and-low-lights of 2016:

Best Poetry Books:

Some amazing books by queer poets of color have been published this year. Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s i’m alive / it hurts / i love it (Boost House Press) writes with honesty and wit about her life as a transgender woman who manages anxiety and depression. She makes the daily choice to feel everything, though pain coexists with joy. Taxidermy is the organizing metaphor for Rajiv Mohabir’s The Taxidermist’s Cut (Four Way Books): a stripped and reconstituted skin as shapeshifting for survival, as forbidden gay intimacy that always carries the hint of violence, and as inescapable and often misread ethnic identities in a dominant white Christian culture. Mohabir descends from Indian indentured laborers who were transported to British Guyana’s sugar plantations, and grew up in Florida. Another standout debut collection, Donika Kelly’s Bestiary (Graywolf Press), depicts healing from incest as a series of metamorphoses into real and mythical creatures. I’ve currently just started Phillip B. Williams’ Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books), a formally innovative, visceral and intense collection of poems through which the American tradition of violence against black male bodies runs like a blood-red thread.

Best Fiction Books:

Through brilliant use of flashbacks and alternating perspectives, Robert Olen Butler’s A Small Hotel (Grove Press) tells the story of Michael and Kelly Hays, a Southern professional couple who are divorcing after two decades of marriage, though it becomes apparent that they are both still painfully in love with each other. As soon as the reader starts to side with one character, a new twist reveals the other character’s vulnerability and the dysfunctional family pattern that he or she is struggling to break. The novel winds toward a suspenseful climax as we wait to discover whether they will tell each other the truth before it’s too late.

It wouldn’t be a Reiter’s Block Year in Review without Cthulhu! Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (Harper) is a suspenseful and satirical novel-in-stories about an African-American family in 1950s Chicago who tangle with a cabal of upper-class white occultists. Each chapter cleverly inverts the xenophobic tropes of one of H.P. Lovecraft’s classic horror stories, with the implication that the heartless and greedy cosmic forces of the Cthulhu Mythos are more a self-portrait of Jim Crow’s America than an enemy from beyond the stars.

Best Nonfiction Books:

New York Times op-ed columnist Charles M. Blow’s gorgeously written and introspective memoir, Fire Shut Up in My Bones (Mariner Books), is a case study in overcoming patriarchy and healing from abuse. Brought up in rural Louisiana by a devoted but stern and overworked single mother and their extended family, young Charles yearned for more tenderness and attention than a boy was supposed to need. An older male cousin preyed on his isolation, giving him a new secret to add to his fears of being not-quite-straight in a culture where this was taboo. Channeling his need for connection into school achievement and community leadership, Blow found himself on both the giving and the receiving end of violent hyper-masculinity as a fraternity brother. In the end, he recognized that self-acceptance, not repression, was the best way to become an honorable man. Blow writes like a poet, in witty, image-rich, sensitive lines that flow like a mighty river.

Rev. Elizabeth M. Edman’s Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity (Beacon Press) proposes that Christianity and queerness have a common interest in rupturing false binaries that create injustice and estrangement. Read my review on this blog.

Queering Sexual Violence (Riverdale Avenue Books), edited by Jennifer Patterson, is a must-read for social service providers, activists, policymakers, and anyone who studies child abuse and intimate partner violence. The book fills a gap in the common understanding of abuse as something that men do to women and children, and as a social problem best solved through legislation and policing. This familiar picture excludes survivors for whom the carceral state does not routinely offer justice: people of color, the disabled and neurodiverse, and of course the many LGBTQ people who hesitate to out themselves to the police and the courts, fearing that their victimization will only be compounded. Read my review on this blog.

Favorite Posts on the Block:

Trusting Tootle

Tootle and his classmates at the Lower Trainswitch School for Locomotives are cuddly, expressive precursors of the colder computer-generated animation of Thomas the Tank Engine. Scuffy conveys a world of emotion with just eyes, eyebrows, and the tilt of his smokestack. These books are selling nostalgia for an era when America was an industrial powerhouse and no one had heard of global warming or acid rain. However, both tales hammer home a repressive message about staying in your assigned social role and doing what you’re told.

Nonbinary Femme Thoughts

I like the word “bigender” even though my eyes keep reading it as “big gender”. Or maybe that’s why. I have BIG gender. Too much to pick only one.

Today My Dreams Come True

Who has watched over me during this arduous journey of self-discovery and activism? Where did I get my faith to persevere in the face of spiritual abuse and mental health struggles? I know that I have been protected, by someone I still call “the Holy Spirit” even though most Christian language doesn’t fit me anymore. Someone up there implanted compassion, hope, truth-seeking, and determination in my heart. Someone strengthened me to be true to myself when people I loved couldn’t accept who I’d become. So… thank you, Holy Spirit.

What Country Is This?

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.

Book Notes: Gay Theology Without Apology

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).

Rest in peace, Prince. May we all purify ourselves in the waters of Lake Minnetonka.

 

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