Drunk Church

The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We are at most only temporarily able-bodied and minded. While we may live our lives more or less aware of our relationship with disability and while we may experience different periods of health and illness, the fact that we are all pre-disabled is an immutable aspect of the human condition. For our second annual Drunk Church Halloween Special we explore the dark and dusty contours of this one undeniable truth. In what ways does this insight effect our ability to create solidarity with one another across different experiences? Given that disability is a fundamental condition to being human, what does it mean to reject notions of cure and instead demand conditions for our own flourishing? Utilizing Susan Sontag's "Illness as a Metaphor" as a point of departure, we lay out our own personal histories of disability to show how our relationship with disability is inextricably linked to our understanding of the self. The lens of disability exposes the urgent need to confront the eugenic specters that loom large over every aspect of our lives in order to truly care for one another.We asked listeners to share their experience with disability with us by telling us ways that disability has influenced the way they experience the world, and at the end of the episode we share a selection of them with you.Happy Halloween and god bless all the goth mommies and daddies of the world! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is a teaser--to access the full episode on an patron only-RSS feed, sign up at our Patreon.What if you became a zombie, but instead of becoming a mindless brain eater you find that you're exactly the same except for a new and uncontrollable urge to commit the most unspeakably horrific things you can imagine? What if you found yourself reveling in your newfound bloodlust?Join us for our special bonus review of Rob Jabbaz's exquisite 2021 Taiwanese pandemic body horror film “The Sadness” as we answer the call of the void and embrace the the depth of our depravity, exploring the thin line between everyday kindness and cruelty, self preservation and the death drive, and the dynamic relationship between sadism and masochism. At the end of the world there is a certain peace to be found in finally not having to pretend you will be saved.Aren’t you tired of ignoring all those intrusive thoughts?This episode was in production longer than any other and its release marks an important milestone for us. A combination of audio issues, chronic illness, and mental health struggles really kicked our ass over the past many months and kept us from doing the work that we love. Adjusting our work habits and being patient with ourselves has been a difficult but rewarding process. On a much brighter note, this also marks our first episode since Drunk Church’s one year birthday back in July! Thank you so much to those of you who have kept with us and our chaotic process—we couldn’t do it without you.Intro and outro is "Bless You" by the Ink Spots Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the free teaser—to get access to the whole hour and a half bonus version, go to our Patreon and sign up at "Getting Tipsy with the Lord" or higher.Andrzej Żuławski’s fever dream “Possession”—quite certainly the most extraordinary breakup film ever made—serves as our subject for today’s bonus episode, and we invite you to join us as we are engulfed within the overwhelming tides of the mythosymbolic realm that it reveals to us. The film's dream logic defies reduction to rational understanding—indeed, such attempts would strip away its very essence, the power that renders it so profoundly affecting as it pulls us deeper and deeper into its unraveling horrors.We ask: What does it mean to be possessed? And how do we, in turn, seek possession of others and ourselves? In horrified fascination, we witness the characters' frenzied pursuit of various forms of possession, only for them to realize the multifaceted ways in which they themselves are possessed—not merely by desires like lust and jealousy, but also by institutions such as family and state. Our unsettling revelation lies in the disconnection between self-mastery and possession, leading us to contemplate whether, under these totalizing circumstances, reclaiming a sense of self necessitates surrendering to a kind of possession. Could it be that in order for us to truly experience ourselves authentically we must let ourselves become vulnerable to a possession that un-masters us, gives ourselves over to others, and risks the very same sense of self that we are so desperately in pursuit of?From escapades in espionage to the many tentacled eldritch horrors of the erotic unconscious, we trace the intricate anatomy of a breakup and the dissolution of the family, arriving at both terrifying and potentially liberating conclusions.Also featured: cosima’s dog and her dog’s dog friend who demandingly took center stage throughout recording in such a way that editing them out seemed in bad taste.Embrace the arcane journey with us as we explore these depths!Intro/outro song by "Bless You" by The Ink Spots Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We are thrilled to present our first episode of a series working through Avgi Saketopoulou’s brilliant “Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia”—a text so meaty that this episode does not make it past its introduction. In the vein of Oliver Davis and Tim Dean’s “Hatred of Sex” that we covered last season, “Sexuality Beyond Consent” speaks to a society that has become obsessed and terrified of trauma, rational subjects looking both to shield ourselves from any possible experiences that could create it and to heal and eliminate any of it that has already gotten inside us. Avgi Saketopoulou presents us with an alternative: subjects that are always opaque to ourselves and with trauma that is never inert or erased, for whom experiences of overwhelm can open ourselves up to confrontations with that opaqueness in us, and with them strange new possibilities. We could not be more excited to submit ourselves to this incredible work and see what arises from the encounter in the weeks to come.Grab a copy of “Sexuality Beyond Consent” for yourself from NYUPress to follow along!Into song is "Bless You" by "The Ink Spots" Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Continuing with our Season 2 Villain Arc, we examine the vilification of victims and the gridlock of taboos that surround sexual violation through a discussion of our very own Aurora Laybourn’s original work “Cavarero’s Repugnance: Naming Sexual Violence”. Building from a critique of Adriana Cavarero’s "Horrorism", Aurora argues that the repugnance of sexual violence has a silencing effect that renders it unintelligible and unspeakable by recontextualizing Medusa, the figure Cavarero uses to represent the horror she evoked on others, as a rape victim herself.. The figure of Medusa exposes how when faced with victims and their narratives we overt our eyes and choose not to see, preferring to villainize them instead. Looking straight on has a freezing effect, as to do so would force us to confront the horrifying extent to which we are implicated in perpetuating the negative effects of sexual violence.We apply this critique to a wide range of issues ranging from interpersonal harm, plagiarism, sex work and transness—asking ourselves what it means to engage with the messy intelligibility of violation regardless of the horror, and to see the human face behind the gorgon's mask. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This free version of the review is a shortened version of our full episode, which is available to all subscribers on their patron-exclusive RSS feed. You can sign up to our patreon to get access to exclusive content and help keep the show going hereFor today's sermon we talk about "Secretary" starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader, a film that serves as a major root for the yearnings of countless leatherqueers for its perverse romance. What does it mean for a movie to be "problematic"? How does Mary Gaitskill's original much darker short story inform our understanding of the film? What does it mean to want something that everyone says is bad for you? How does desire open up ways outside of the well trod narrative paths of the family? What is "good representation" anyway? We discuss all of these things rolled up in the ooey gooey romance of it all!Intro and outro song is "Bless You" by the Ink Spots. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For our grand finale to this four part series on "Hatred of Sex" we investigate the ways that attempts to subsume sex into neat and tidy identiy categories inevitably tighten bureaucracies of risk. These administrative processes police sex at the margins, while simultaneously letting sexual abuse run rampant as long as it happens within appropriately normative forms. The hypocrisy of this fragrant abuse of power should come as no surprise! The fact that right wing pundits gleefully argue that the age of consent should be dramatically lowered and rape should be taken less seriously while at the same time inciting violence against trans and queer people by equating them to groomers for the mere fact of their existence is not a result in a lapse of logic. None of this is a mistake—it is fundamentally rooted in the logic of a hatred of sex. Following Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, we lay Attachment Theory bare, exposing it as as a thinly veiled attempt to make the messiness of inner experience and sex administrable to produce the proper white middle class subject. Attachment Theory's commitment to producing docile bourgeois subjects has led into the entire field of traumatology which equates all conflict to abuse, thus reducing abuse as a category and further obscuring the very experiences it initially sought to render less opaque. "Hatred of Sex" rests on the bold claim that "there is no escaping sexual inappropriateness, even when sex is pleasurable and consensual, and thus no escaping our inclination to hate it". What matters then is what we do with sex from here—keep trying to hide the mess, or get filthy and shattered by its unbinding potential?Show notes:"Hatred of Sex" by Oliver Davis and Tim Dean"Governmentality" by Tania Murray Li "Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy" by Jessica Fern"Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personalities and the Sciences of Memory" by Ian Hacking"Trauma and Recovery" by Judith Herman"Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975" by Michel Foucault"Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes: An Anti-Carceral Analysis" by Chloë Taylor Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Having shown how hatred of sex is endemic to sex itself, in our second discussion of “Hatred of Sex” we trace some of the most influential thinkers today to show where our contemporary discourses on queerness has gotten us. Starting with Gayle Rubin’s thinking of sex that decoupled it from feminism's framework of gender and gender oppression, we look at how the slipperiness of sex was subsumed into the easier to deal with bounds of identity. We talk about porn wars, detransitioners, intersectionality, Freud, consent, the AIDS crisis, pushing bodies beyond their limits, and so much more. Come with us and, as Leo Bersani would say, embrace sex in all its deplorability—after all, we are here “not just to come, but to come undone.”Show notes:"Hatred of Sex" by Oliver Davis and Tim Dean"Thinking Sex" by Gayle Rubin"Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later""Is the Rectum a Grave?" by Leo Bersani"The Gay Science" by Michel Foucault"Relocating Marie Bonaparte’s Clitoris""Erotism: Death and Sensuality" by Georges BatailleIntro song is "Bless You" by the Ink Spots Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Nietzsche said "God is dead"—now so is the Goddess. Through a reading of Donna Haraway's fabulous "Cyborg Manifesto", we delve into what it means to write, speak, and live knowing that there is no originary or objective meaning to draw from. We look at how blaspheming against systems of thought means to take them seriously, even as we confuse their boundaries and repurpose them for survival, and, most importantly, pleasure. Through Haraway's figure of the Cyborg we explore the leaky fusions opened up within these "illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism", embracing their monstrousness and contradictions while rejecting their cruel fathers as inessential. Corrupting the most deeply held essentialisms on our hard drives, the Cyborg does not attempt to flee back to an original innocence but to survive and thrive in the mess of it all—after all, isn't it only in the muck of the profane that the sacred emerges?End notes:A Cyborg Manifesto from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature by Donna HarawayFull Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family by Sophie LewisThe art of Hajime Sorayama Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Finishing off our discussion of fascism through essays from "Leatherfolk" that complicate the problem of desire, and use that to move onto contemporary queerness to look at how homonationalism and homonormativity haunts the discourse on all sides. How is it that such deeply regressive notions are laundered into our understandings of queer and trans identity? Maybe the answer can be glimpsed in the mess of erotocism all along.Show Notes:"Fascinating Fascism" in Susan Sontag's "Under the Sign of Saturn""Leatherfolk" anthology edited by Mark Thompson"Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times" by Jasbir K. Puar Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

To exist against and NOT with. This does not suppress joy but exalts it, it is not despair but immense hope. Today we deliver you the finale of our three-part close reading of the work and life of Laure (also known as Colette Peignot)—masochist, poet, revolutionary, and the only female member of the secret society Acéphale—dying in Bataille's home at the age of thirty-five as the forgotten author of many of the best ideas he is known for. For our last time spent with Laure, we investigate her political writings to look at how her philosophical views directed her commitments in material ways and drove her to engage with leftist thinking in contrarian ways through a deeply Nietzschean lens. We also think about Laure in the context of the many themes of our show so far and as we move forward, including to take a second look at her erotic text in order to elaborate on its relevance to our contemporary thinking around both trauma and BDSM. According to her own wishes, we are here to invoke her favorite Blake quote and "drive (our) plow over the bones of the dead" in order to grow something new. Sources:"Laure: The Collected Writings" by Laure, with contributions by Georges Bataille and othersIf you like our show and would like to help out, sharing the show with your friends and rating us/leaving a comment! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.