Posted by Robyn on Mar 3, 2010 in
Technology,
iLife Feeling really thankful to have Simone, she’s a beauty!
Listen, I know that owning a Mac is about privilege. I get that. As a queer person of color, I recognize my own participation in hegemonic structures. I get it all. All I’m saying is that I’m grateful. Completely thankful that I have a new machine. I will use my machine to help deconstruct hetero-patriarchy. I’ll get creative! Not to worry!
Tags: iLife, Technology
Posted by Robyn on Feb 28, 2010 in
Ethics,
Feminism Lately I’ve been having a lot of conversations around ideas of desire and intimacy. My conversations have mostly been with queer folks of varying expressions of identity and relations (single, monogamists, and polyamorous). These have been fruitful conversations and have challenged me to think about my own concepts of desire and intimacy.
I have several relationships that are intimate, intense, and compelling. These relationships are relationships of love, certainly, but I don’t have genital contact with these folks. Meaning, I don’t think these relationships qualify as polyamorous relationships. Yet, these relationships are primary to me–I desire these few folks and we share a level of intimacy that I don’t necessarily share with others. And, finally, I love them. I’m committed to them.
So, what is the place of desire and intimacy in relationships–relationships where you love someone but don’t necessarily have genital contact with them? For a decade I’ve been known to say that eroticism exists in any/every relationship. Dire, compulsion, and intimacy exists in interpersonal relationships. Is this an ethic of love?
On aside, I’ve been twittering w/ some poly folks attempting to both understand and support this expression of relationship. I’ve enjoyed this virtual perspective. I also have a colleague and two good friends who are poly; they all are in the Denver area. I’ve enjoyed learning about this expression of relationship and find myself asking the same question: where is the place for desire and intimacy?
If I have desire, compulsion, and in some of my relationships, and I’m not poly, then what is the difference here? Genital contact? I feel it has to be more than that, but I’m not sure what it is. I’m committed to learning, and I’m committed to getting a better sense of what the ethics of love really is. If you have thoughts, please deposit them here and join the conversation.
Finally, I’m super thankful that I had a parent who didn’t police my every move in the first 12 years of my life, allowing me to form opinions and value statements independent of her own. I think this gave me the skills to be open to different forms of love and relating, albeit challenging to do as a theologian/ethicist!
Tags: Ethics, love
Posted by Robyn on Feb 27, 2010 in
iLife This is a test post. This post was created from the WordPress widget of Simone. Amazing!
Tags: iLife
Posted by Robyn on Feb 26, 2010 in
Feminism A Feminist’s Feminist
Remembering Mary Daly, 1928-2010
By Mary E. Hunt
I read Mary Daly’s book Beyond God the Father in hardback while the ink was still wet in 1973. While the rest of my graduate theological education is a blur of books, I can still feel the excitement in my fingers as I turned each brilliantly written page. I knew that my world would never be the same. Thanks to Mary Daly, the world at large isn’t the same either.
A feminist philosopher par excellence, Mary created intellectual and spiritual space where none existed for women before. In her courageous, outrageous and prophetic work she put her finger on a central tenet of patriarchy: “If God is male, then the male is God.” No tinkering with petty problems for Mary: She took on the Divine, the Higher Power. Contra millennia of religious sexism, she asserted that women are full human beings who can and should direct their own lives. Religious excuses for women’s oppression would never pass unnoticed, unchallenged, again.
She began life as a “good Catholic girl,” brought up in a working-class neighborhood inSchenectady, N.Y., the only daughter of older Irish parents. Her mother, Anna, insisted to Mary that she wanted one child, a girl; in fact she wanted Mary. That motherly love permitted Mary to weather many a storm. A combination of genius and unwillingness to postpone insisting on what she knew to be true characterized Mary’s complex life of struggle, conviction and yes, joy.
Mary completed doctorates in theology and philosophy in Switzerland in the mid-1960s, when most American universities did not admit women into such graduate programs. She was inRome for a month during the Second Vatican Council where she saw up close the costumed eminences of Catholicism—the pope, cardinals and bishops—in all their patriarchal plumage. They made decisions, while well-educated women watched with Mary from the ecclesial peanut gallery. The moral and spiritual hideousness of the scene informed her critique, sparked her activism and resulted in her first major book, The Church and the Second Sex (1968).
In 1971, Mary became the first woman in 336 years to be invited to preach at Harvard’sMemorial Church. She used the occasion to invite—incite, really—many women and a few men to walk out, leaving behind the Gods of their fathers. It was a symbolic action—one prominent Protestant woman admits now that she went back inside for coffee as soon as the protest was over—but it reverberates still in the freedom women feel to leave, question, denounce and/or recreate their religious traditions.
Mary Daly’s subsequent writings, especially Gyn/Ecology (1978) and Pure Lust (1984), are efforts to connect the dots between the oppression of women and the pillage of the planet, andbetween abstract theory and concrete women’s experiences. She was a philosopher who saw the intersections of sexism with racism, class differences, sexualities, colonialism and ecocide before the rest of us did. She did not solve each issue fully to our postmodern satisfaction—indeed, her critics raise important points about many matters she addressed—but she understood the link between women’s well-being and planetary survival long before Kyoto or Copenhagen.
Mary’s work was foundational, so basic that she had to cowrite (with Jane Caputi) theWickedary (1987) to define or redefine the words she needed to articulate her vision for a just and biophilic globe. She wrenched words such as “hag,” “crone,” and “lesbian” from their patriarchal contexts and reshaped them positively, lest women continue to internalize oppression. Her approach to language was playful, on target and adopted by many. Her reversals of patriarchal logic were the work of an excavator, digging up and setting aside what was in women’s way in order to clear space for more people to live well.
In subsequent autobiographical works, including Outercourse (1992), Quintessence (1998), and Amazon Grace (2006), she catalogued her adventures as she lectured about and lived radical feminism. She had fun doing so. She was a performance artist at teach-ins and workshops. She drew attention to the unjust structures and ridiculous claims of “academentia,” always offering imaginative, if wild, alternatives. Not even her closest friends accused her of being easy to get along with, but we all appreciated her Irish wit and her relentless efforts to make change.
Mary was Socratic in her approach to teaching, frequently disarming students by asking not only what they thought but what they felt. She taught at Boston College from the 1960s, when it was still a mostly male undergraduate institution, until 2000, when she unsuccessfully defended her decision to teach women and men separately. Boston College had tenured and promoted her over the years after their initial efforts to deny both, but in the midst of the new millennium’s cultural war, a right-wing organization put forth a male student to challenge her decision to teach men in colloquia apart from women. The university settled the ensuing lawsuit and Mary retired. But she kept teaching and writing, enjoying the occasional radio or television appearance and finding her way on the Internet.
Mary Daly was a mystic at heart, valuing intuition as much and sometimes more than intellect. She got “vibes” about places and people that informed her analyses and choices. Her meticulously footnoted work always included references to conversations with friends whom she loved, though we all knew it was her cats who captured her heart. She taught my daughter to meow before she could speak.
Despite her international reputation for taking on patriarchs and their institutions, Mary was a shy and modest person who lived simply. She was nocturnal, often waxing poetic on late night phone calls to sleepy friends (I was one of them). She was exuberant about swimming in the lake behind her apartment. Her joy was to sit on a blanket under a tree and watch the clouds.
Mary died in early January after several years of debilitating illness, which she endured with characteristic humor and fortitude. A friend was reading from the Wickedary as she passed over. While by patriarchal measures, there were no immediate survivors, the reality is that she is survived by many circles of women and yes, some men, who took her advice to throw their lives as far as they could go, just as she did.
Scholars will debate her work for generations to come. I predict a cottage industry of panels, dissertations, and anthologies will emerge. But she really wanted to create a “hedge school,” modeled after the Irish ones of the 18th century set up to educate rural poor people in barns and fields. She believed in women sharing stories, sparking one another’s ideas. It seems that every feminist has a Mary Daly story, and virtually every one includes how deeply and personally Mary Daly “changed my life.” What most don’t say is that they changed their own lives because Mary made space for them.
Now she joins the feminist panoply of foresisters that includes Mary Wollstonecraft, Matilda Jocelyn Gage, Harriet Tubman, and Simone de Beauvoir. She is a feminist’s feminist. We who have more space in which to live and work are proof that Mary Daly’s daring and dauntless efforts to change the world succeeded beyond even her wildest dreams.
MARY E. HUNT is a feminist theologian and co-director of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Tags: Feminism
Posted by Robyn on Feb 25, 2010 in
iLife Today I woke up at 4:16 a.m. Mountain Standard Time. My minidanes were needing to go outside. It was my Chihuahua mix, mainly, but my Bostie got up too. Now they’re both back asleep on the ottoman and couch, respectively. I may join them once finishing this post.
I ventured outside in the darkness of the early morning. It was quiet and still, no sounds penetrating or disturbing my walk with my dogs. It was nice. Never did this happen in Chicago. There were always the city noises disturbing early morning and late nights. This morning, however, it was different here in Denver. Calm, Silent, and Collective.
I thought about several things while I was outside: my academic work, my job (and how I feel under qualified and yet challenged), and the world around me. It was not too terribly cold, either, so I took my time on my walk. Chilly, but a nice walk.
The train tracks were empty–no Light Rail or commercial trains impinging or disrupting my time outside. That changed as I neared the end of my walk, though. The Light Rail flew past me, and it was completely empty. No passengers on board. I don’t think this ever was the case in Chicago. Trains were never empty. Trains were always full of commuters. As I peered off toward the Interstate, there were barely any cars I could see. One or Two whizzed by in the far off on I-25. The city was certainly asleep.
As I walked inside, the city began to become alive, albeit slowly. Another Light Rail train flew by. It was still empty. A commercial train also came into my field of vision as I walked back inside. It was slowly passing by in an intentional manner as if it wanted to be noticed.
Now, it is more alive outside, though it is still dark and early. I’m sipping on some ice water contemplating brewing some Louisiana Coffee (coffee w/ chicory), and I’m still thinking about school, work, commitment, etc. I’m largely thinking about how under qualified I am to be doing Academic Technology. I feel very much challenged and supported in this hybrid space. Oh! I’m also thinking about hybridity. More on that later.
I feel/think/sense that my contribution to Academic Technology is important. But, I’m an eccentric person (i.e. I don’t remain in the establish or usual pattern. I deviate.)–an eccentric person in that I’m a big believer in the ways in which technology can shape our pedagogical practices and content distribution. it may even contribute to our identity formation! I just think that technology can add so much. But, technology isn’t perfect, and I’m certainly not fetishizing technology. It requires a fair amount of commitment (there’s that word again). All that said, I’m considering the important work of Academic Technology and how I can be better at it. How I can be more committed to it.
The other thought I was having on my walk was concerning hybridity. In many ways, I continue to face the challenges of being a hybrid in such a white dominant world. How do I carve out space for myself, and is that even important? In my Race, Class, Gender seminar one of the professors wondered how I identify. This got me to thinking about my own intersectional identity and hybrid awareness. How do I really identify?
I once thought that queer Mestizo was sufficient, then I began reading some ethnography and reflexive work in the area of Communication Studies. I wondered then if White Latino was better or if White Mestizo was sufficient? Where does the queer then go? I’ve shied away from using the “a” at the end of Spanish words in reference to myself as a way to disrupt the gendered word or normative gendered expression, and as a way to present myself as queer as possible. I don’t do it because I identify as male or masculine, but I don’t necessarily identify as female or woman–I’m not entirely sure I know what it means when people use these binary terms. So, I use the masculine when identifying myself. There is no gender confusion, only intentional gender disruption.
My early morning thoughts are just that…early morning thoughts. I tend to be more reflective in the mroning, and I so enjoy quiet early mornings. I like not having the mid-day interruptions. This quiet, early morning is so very nice. I need to have a commitment to more of these early mornings…tis good for my mental health! And, its likely good for my own thinking–more clear; less cluttered thoughts. After all, I was thinking about identity and hybridity this morning. That’s not cluttered or messy at all!
Now time to finish my water and decide whether I’m going to brew some coffee or lay back down, preferably on the couch with my bostie, Lily.
Tags: iLife
Posted by Robyn on Feb 22, 2010 in
Queer,
iLife I’ve been having several conversations all centering on sex, eroticism, and intimacy. And, these conversations have NOT been in the bedroom. These conversations have been in public discussing what many believe to be private or bedroom conversations, and these conversations haven’t necessarily included my primary partner. When I think about these topics, I necessarily think about the body and how the body is implicated in sexual activity, eroticism, and intimacy. I also think about how relationships (understood broadly) engage in the intersection of sexual activity (broadly understood as something other than genital contact), eroticism, and intimacy.
Take, for example, the phrase: I love you. How often do you hear this phrase from someone other than a family member or partner? I think that most of us understand this phrase as either evoking something romantic or part of a family narrative. What if we risked our bodies in some of our relationships where we encounter intimacy and voiced this phrase? What if when we greeted one another (one of our intimate, close friendships) with this phrase? I know of someone who practices this, and I think its beautiful. I’m also jealous that this person shares this type of intimacy w/ another body. I want to have this. I want to have this outside my primary pairing.
Having this sort of relationship for me means some organic element is present. This doesn’t happen often; it’s rare. When I consider forms of intimacy or eroticism in relationship, I naturally think of my own cultural context whereby Latinos greet/leave one another w/ a kiss. While this is a component of culture, this requires a fair amount of organic-ness to enter into that space w/ another body.
Another element that comes to mind around this is how important the body is in this verbal exchange. The body can’t simply be absent or invisible when telling someone you love them. It requires a level of attachment and engagement. So, if the body is required in this exchange of words and intimacy, what does that exactly mean? What narrative drives this exchange? How is momentum achieved when approaching this intimate space w/ another?
When I tell someone I love them my body is necessarily implicated in this exchange. It is, perhaps, an erotic text exchanging with another erotic text, another body. Its a beautiful space to share with someone, and I’m grateful that I have this with someone outside my primary pairing.
p.s. I love you
Tags: iLife, Queer
Posted by Robyn on Feb 21, 2010 in
Theology,
iChurch Peter Rollins in an interview doing some important epistemological work and explaining “Emergent Church.” Looks like you have to click on the link (at the end of this post) to get to the interview.
Tags: iChurch, Theology
