calamity's child

one of my professors in class this week referred to “don’t ask, don’t tell” as “ask, don’t tell”

i hate that legislation, i hate the repeal of it, i hate the military, and i hate assimilation. but ask, don’t tell ?!?!?!??! i have more grief over the ignorance of non-queer, non-trans people in trying to be our allies and making such egregious mistakes. do they think this makes me feel like they are on my side?

1. school started this week, and i am starting to adapt. i don’t have any school books yet, i don’t have any computer. i am out of practice and i’m not quite sure what to do with myself. the work is nowhere near as academically rigorous as i want it to be, and it makes me sad, and resistant. i need to finish my chapter sections and to finish about three thousand papers.

2. i have my second meeting with my rabbi on monday. i need to  read more conversion accounts before then. my tasks between our last meeting and this one was to read some narratives of other people’s conversion stories, and to go to shul more. i have done  the second part, though i can already tell that in school it’s going to be really hard to balance out school/shul/social life. stories about conversion are hard, i find. there is so often a partner, marriage. another person. a narrative about “feeling jewish” for long before, about resonance. i don’t have that, just years of theological studies that narrowed down tightly, through theological questions that led me to this fact: the thing i was trying so desperately to create, it already existed, for thousands of years. why feel alone and struggling, when i can join millenia of jews, praying together, lighting candles together, fighting for the world together. and as reductive as that is – all jews are certainly *not* fighting for the *same* world – it is still central to the practice and beliefs of judaism, that our task as human beings is to create the world to be, with god.

3. my broken-and-healed-up humerus is having a HELL of a time this winter, and i need desperately to go back to yoga. i can only hope that it can stretch and move back into its home, my shoulder.

4. i am making space in my heart for love again, and it is easing and breaking and stretching, all at once.

5. this week’s mussar practice is focused on separation. i am thinking about my emotional relationship with work, about the ways that i’m being read as a lesbian and not as a trans person at school, and about class – being working class, but passing as middle class, and becoming further ensconsed in a middle class profession. i’m thinking about separation in terms of staying true to myself while recognizing what other people are putting on me, in terms of separating myself from my own defense mechanisms, which are fueled primarily by rage and martyrdom and do not necessarily serve me anymore (but do effectively keep me feeling like i’m the only one who really gets me), and challenging myself to remain open to the people around me, who are working and fighting and struggling and loving alongside me.

6. i am starting to work some crystal magic this week, with hematite, howlite, and serpentine. they are all very different, but they possess some remarkable similarities: protection, groundedness, insight, clarity. they are strong rocks.

there is no snow day, but i am taking one anyway: when i walked to the b/q at 8 this morning, it was off, so i came home, stripped to my leggings and put on a hoodie and legwarmers and beanie, and i’m here for the day, reading for school, writing for my book project, and dreaming of the mushroom bourguignon i am making for dinner. i am thinking about the next couple months ahead of me, my new life with my schoolschedule, mussar and its time requirements, and still am thinking about joining a justice and jewish thought reading group. probably it’s a bad idea, time-management wise. but it seems like such a good group, and the religiousness will give me sanity in the midst of my first ever non-religious-studies degree program. we will see. it seems at this point easier to drink some more coffee, stare at the snow and be thankful i don’t have to touch it until it’s time to go to the store for mushrooms and wine, and write.

you know what i love studying? religion. theology. god. people-in-relation-to: -text, -each other, -god, -tradition, -community. and here i am, starting my first non-religious-education degree, and all i can look at right now are programs in jewish education, rabbinic programs, the jewish studies curriculum at the graduate theological union, where i almost pursued doctoral students in my previous path of theological education.

i am already thinking of ways i may be able to bring up religion in my msw curriculum. it just is so formative, our thinking about god. it shapes what we believe is possible for ourselves and our world, for human relationships, and for interrupting the legacies of injustice that invade and shape our world. religion both helps us get through our days and it helps us fight on into the future. how can i not be spending my life immersed in it? i feel a little at a loss about what i’m doing.

i am so close to finishing my degree!!!!!! thesis gets turned in as soon as second edits are in from m. and i get it all printed up. next: inane writing assignments and two presentations. then: commencement!

i have it, in a big way

i think the problem is that i’m just so scared about getting this thesis done. i’m not afraid that it’ll be bad, because i know that’s not the case. i’m annoyed that it’s so busy-worky – only my thesis advisor and second reader are ever going to read it, unless by some chance of fate i succeed in publishing it. i’m not staying in theology, but it will help me get a job as a research librarian. it’s really off the wall, and i’m rather terrified that no one’s going to get it or that people are going to be dismissive because i’m not a christian. because that’s something that’s realistic to expect. after all, i’m writing about how we have to be willing to suspend our belief in god when doing liberative theological analyses. which doesn’t seem to be misguided at all. i just am so scared that people are going to write me off as that wacky-ass queer who is too critical.

i don’t know how to end that kind of writer’s block, though. it’s not like i can rationalize my fears away.

my friend, c, used to have a spirit that hung around her a lot. the spirit’s name was mason & mason was always around to affirm c and to boost c’s confidence, and make c smile. i could really use a mason in my life right now. that’d be good, good news.

first, there is now an orchestra practicing in the castle i live in, across the courtyard from me. it’s rather nice.

in points:

1. Feminism is a liberation movement
2. Poststructuralism, at least in the foucauldian sense, is also a liberation movement
3. Feminism has gone about its liberation-making by first critiquing the static, universal, masculine subject of modern Western philosophy and then positing and relying upon a static, universal feminine subjectivity that either contradicts or is added to the mix of Western philosophy.
4. The latter tactic is prevalent in libertion movements in the united states: a problem is located in relation to the identification of a subject. Some kind of consciousness-raising happens in the groups that identify themselves as oppressed, marginalized, and otherwise neglected by social systems, philosophies, and political action groups. In feminism, this looks like, throughout the 60s-early 80s, groups like the Combahee River Collective and the Radicalesbians arguing that lesbians, women of color, poor folks, and folks with varying dis/abilities had been systematically ignored and written out of the narrative and political practices of feminism. As a result, lesbian feminism, womanism, and other fractured feminisms came to light as means of particular communities addressing their own particular needs. These were later lumped in together as ‘feminisms’, but the effect is that the feminine subject, cast as an able-bodied, white, middle class, straight woman still reigned.
5. Feminist theorists and activist quickly caught onto this, however, and have argued for a fractured sense of subjectivity that still falls under the rubric of ‘the feminine subject.”
6. Feminist postmodern/poststructuralist theorists jump in at this point, notable examples in the United States are Judith Butler and Donna Haraway. (then in my thesis I’ll talk about some particualr things – subjectivity in each (performativity for Butler, cyborgs for Haraway) and knowledge (discourse/matrices for Butler and situated knowledges for Haraway).
7. These deconstructive tasks, however, are not done for their own sake.
8. Michel Foucault argues, in his introduction to Gramsci’s (??) Anti-Oedipus that the task with which we are faces is to fight fascism, in its various incarnations. He offers a ‘guide to anti-fascist living’ with these recommendations:
   

   • Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia
   • Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.
   • Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
   • Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even thought the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.
   • Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth, nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
   • Do not demand of politics that it restore the ‘rights’ of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to ‘de-individualize’ by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.
   • Do not become enamored of power

9. Hopefully at this point, the connection between poststructuralist deconstruction techniques and the political sensibilities of feminism are exceedingly clear: the task of feminism is to destroy the systems of thinking that produce and enable oppression, especially gendered oppression through patriarchy and misogyny. Foucault’s argument is that we do that not through the production of a new discourse of rights whereby women are valued as ‘individuals’ just like men: instead, we need to de-individualize. This is dangerous within a political context that already casts as non-existent all sorts of people who “don’t make it” as authentic subjects – that’s why Foucault and Butler’s arguments about subject-making are compelling and useful: the production of subjects is not simply a philosophical or theological task that is concerned with identifying the rights and responsibilities of human being. The production of subjects is a movement within a larger discourse that regulates human being and thus makes-abject those bodies which do not accede (willingly or not) to hegemonic norms.
10. Feminists within theology are absolutely interested in liberation, generally. They have engaged, with feminist theorists, in the task of deconstructing the western universal subject, and have also engaged, more or less, in applying deconstruction methods to theology. Usually, this results in a nuanced and helpful theological anthropology that works towards ending oppression within theological and secular communities and also recognizes, in new and more responsible ways, the great diversity of belief and being that exists within Chrisitan theology.
11. Feminist theologians dealing with poststructuralism, however, have not made a convincing or clear argument about the ways in which theological discourses (1) are complicit in the production of the moden subject, which depends on the idea of God in a Christian context and (2) are left relatively stable within postmodern feminist theology. When ‘doctrine’ or ‘tradition’ are interrogated, the destabilization that occurs is named as necessary and part of what it means to be living in a postmodern world, but is not generally linked to this project of anti-fascist living tha Foucault has named as the point of his method and studies.
12. We do not engage in deconstruction because it is en vogue or because it is necessary to in our current academic climate. Postmodern and poststructuralist approaches to understanding human being, in a Foucauldian context, are not merely about deconstructing the modern subject and exposing the myriad fissures in identity and ontology with which we are faced. These philosophical practices are not about seeing what happens to human subjectivity under interrogation, but are fundamentally about radical political change and accountability for the histories of domination that are characterized as “western civilization.”
13. This penchant for radical change marks the shared goal of Foucauldian postmodern and feminist theology. If feminists want to adequately use postmodernism, we cannot stop at human anthropology or a deconstruction of doctrine. We need to ask how our theological traditions are complicit in the production of power and regulating subjectivities in the modern West. We need to be willing to submit divine subjectivity to rigorous deconstruction, just as we have been willing to submit ourselves to it. We need to be able to understand that theology is not merely faith seeking understanding but it is also a regulatory practice: the dichotomy between God/human being is alive and well in many feminist theologies (even that which name immanence as a core value) – we need to ask who and what God is, what function it serves to rely upon monotheism and historical doctrinal practices, and how Christian theological discourses have reified a sense of humanity that is absolutely deprived of any responsibility, history, or agency (other than in the relationship that individual human beings have with God and/or their community of faith – which is sometimes cast particularly, and sometimes universally). We must ask to what extent it is okay or not that Christian theology depends on categories that are named as problematic in postmodern criticisms – the universality of human being (we are all one in the body of Christ), God’s grace (and humanity’s fall/human depravity/sin), God’s transcendence/immanence, and triune/unitarian theology (which is always a monism). I ask these questions not to produce an encore of the ‘death of God’ but because it is important to ask how theological categories like these are productive in subject formation within modernity. From that place, feminist theologians can begin to engage in this task of ridding themselves and theology of fascism. We must, however, suspend our committment to Christian theology and tradition for long enough to engage it, openly and honestly.

judith butler’s key concept is ‘performativity.’ it refers not to gender as a purely volitional performance, but to the ways in which the norms of gender which are produced and reified through discourse/discursive acts. for example, ‘girlness’ is something that’s named and continually produced. a baby is born and the statement ‘it’s a girl’ is performative – it identifies and requires adherence to its dictates at once. it covers up its ‘constructedness’ by naming itself as primary. gender is performative because gender norms at once tell us what (gender) we ‘are’ and what we need to do in order to be recognized as a valid subject – gender is a primary way in which people are made into intelligible subjects in a heteronormative hegemony.

thinking about performativity and god is a little bit convoluted. it’s an important project, however, because

• feminist theology is mired in gender essentialisms
• feminist theology is a site in which substantial critiques of power and history develop and enter into theological discourse/s
• feminist theologians have long been willing to ‘re-imagine’ god
• it’s very possible that the kind of political transformation feminist theologians want to see/help materialize is contingent upon submitting monotheistic power narratives to critique

performativity is a useful concept for this because it requires us to examine the ways in which key attributes of god (universality, transcendence, immanence, unitarianism (even in its triune form), omniscience, omnipresence, goodness, etc.) are not prior to but derived from our convictions about human subjectivity. human being has long been said to have been made in the image of god. feminist, poststructuralist, and queer theories have succeeded in fracturing the monolithic and universal human subjectivity that characterizes modern philosophy (and theology). many feminist theologians, however, in appropriating poststructuralist arguments for ‘human anthropology’ stop short of extending this critique to divine being because of commitments to divine being in the christian context and traditional understandings of what is meant by that. this interruption of deconstructive practices results in a failed critique. human being is named as fractured, fragmented, polyvalent, diffusive. this is both a blessing and a curse – a blessing because it testifies to the great diversity of human being; a curse because it likewise testifies to the separtive and fragmenting powers of sin. god, as always, is the unifiying feature – the figure that saves us from truly reckoning with what it means to live in a space that is characterized by polyvalence. if divinity, in the christian context, is let to maintain its univocality and transcendence, any attempt at poststructuralist feminist criticism will be trumped because divinity is the source and foundation of the modern subject, especially in christian theology.

in order to go about critiquing divine subjectivity in a postmodern context, judith butler’s theory of performativity is emanently helpful. it asks us to suspend our assumptions about what is ‘natural’ in order to examine the ways in which naming something instills a disciplinary regime that requires the subject to function/perform in particular ways that mask the disciplinary regime and naturalizes this process. in relation to divine being, it is not god as an agent that is at question, it’s the ways in which we understand divine being, historically and personally – it’s our discourse about god that is at question and the ways in which divine being functions as a “character” or subject in the narrative of human existence in the (christian) post/modern west. universal subjectivities have long been cited as politically problematic because, in producing the subject (discursively), the subject is racialized, sexed, and classed in accordance with racist, sexist, heteronormative, and classist regimes. in other words, to be a viable subject within discourses of universal subjectivity, one must be apprehensible, or pass as, the norm: the universal subject is always a boy, always white, always straight, always (the ever elusive) “middle class.” even in feminist liberation theologies and contemporary feminist theory, there is heated debate about the ways in which white feminist theories adopt a version of womanhood that’s posited as Womanhood or Femininity itself at the expense of women of color, poor women, lesbian women, queers, and trans people. the only women who count are women who are identifiable as women to ‘the world’ as feminine subjects in the first place. feminism has long been interested in shattering this typology of universality, but there is contention about how to do that and to what end that is done. some embark on this task in order to include the widest range of ‘feminine’ voices. poststructuralists, like judith butler, embark on this task in order to call into question the category ‘woman’ in the first place: it is not a name, a law, that exists prior to a person who then is named as “woman.” it is a performative – it is something that someone is formed into (never yet fully). similarly, to what extent are the attributes of god performatives that have been given to the divine subject as part of the disciplinary regime of modern subjectivities? to what extent do divine universals uphold and require the universal subject and in what ways do theologians who are interested in political liberation from disciplinary regimes/hegemonies in the modern west fail to fully realize their task by isolating their theologizing to human being?

>difference between god who is multiplicitous b/c god is god and that’s what god must be and god is multiplicitous b/c it’s important for us that god is not one.

I’m starting to have fleeting thoughts of sentences for my thesis, so I’m just going to write them as they come, for safe-keeping.

• God, according to Christian theology, has no corporeal body save (1) Jesus and (2) the liturgical community (or the world, depending) – the ‘body of Christ’.
• God has no corporeality save the divine subjectivity/ies produced discursively. God has no corporeality, no subjectivty, apart from that which we ascribe to divinity.
• ‘God’ is the name of a divine subject.