adahm asked: i mean i had to watch it in highschool health class it was really trippy but i dont remember it well

wait, you had to watch THAT and not the more famous tv movie about her? IN SCHOOL?? (thanks for the link, btw.)

I have this memory that I’ve been trying to retell but I can’t quite remember how it panned out. I took this gym/health class my senior year of high school, it was all girls and one bro and a dude gym teacher, and the dude gym teacher said something really stupid about anorexia, I can’t remember, but it was something about “girls and their vaginas” and feelings, or something. my bff and I laughed and laughed, hysterically, in front of the whole class, and we got in trouble and I remember I had to talk to some counselor or something about “respecting people with eating disorders,” and I kept laughing and laughing.

The only thing I want to say about it is that the only thing I really wanted or cared about or planned for—okay, this is not true, I was very ambitious, I wanted a lot for my future, pathologically, I mean, less than a year ago I was worried about getting my 3.94 up to a 3.99, but—the only thing I wanted was to be a librarian, or just to do what I did every day, and I can’t have that anymore, and it sucks. It sucks because some of the people who fucked me over literally made posts that said my whole “drama” “hurt them” because hurting me made them lose followers.

persephonette:

this is a blog about my face and my hair and if you come here for anything else go away

(via persephonette-deactivated201207)

Andrew Greeley, in The Catholic Imagination, points to the “metaphorical nature of creation”—particularly, here, the idea of sex as an Earthly manifestation of God’s love—as imbibing Catholic sexuality with sacramental powers.  Literally.  Martin Luther advocated only two sacraments—Baptism and Communion—a philosophy which is by no means universal, in a practical sense, to Protestantism but it’s certainly ideologically powerful—for Lutheran political-ideological reasons that I probably don’t need to walk you through.

In Catholicism, though, sex is, almost literally, a sacred act.  Not in the restrictive sense (although that has happened as well), but in the ritualistic sense.  From Greeley:

In the Protestant heritage, there is considerable reluctance to equate human love with the divine […] Marriage, while good and holy, has never become a sacrament.  If one says in this tradition that human sexual union is like the union between God and Her people, there is an immediate need to insist that God’s passion is very different from human passion.  Thus, the Protestant imagination…stresses the ‘unlike’ dimension of the metaphor and is in fact very uneasy with the idea of metaphor.

It’s an interesting possibility, right?  The idea that this religion which aimed to bring you closer to God ended up defining you as separate from God.

Of course, Greeley and Heartney both are dealing more with Medieval and Baroque Catholicism and American Catholicism is so bound with Protestant culture that I think this metaphor and the role of sensuality takes a different form (and, of course, American Catholicism is so rooted in Enlightenment Catholicism rather than Sensual Catholicism to begin with).  In short, you could say that American Catholicism, especially Midwestern Catholicism, is like Catholicism + Weber (and so much immigrant culture that you really can’t separate).  Posing the question:  can you have this kind of sensual, metaphorical spirituality in Capitalism?  Et cetera. 

My comfort with Weber is only peripheral, really, and for Marxist functions (ah, the embarrassing Marxist first two years of college).  I remember in one of my Mexican History classes, a guy of Mexican origin talked about how Weber has been historically used to actually argue that Mexicans—and their Catholic and/or indigenous religious backgrounds—inherently don’t value hard work.  It’s something I need to chew on for a while, it’s a really powerful perspective.  If anything, in America, we are an ideologically Calvinist country and and we can’t separate that reality from discussions of other Christian perspectives.  Especially not in working-class, immigrant Catholic midwestern communities.

I think that Baroque Catholic sensuality—and I love this idea of God metaphors especially—is totally prolific in feminist art.  Distill all these discussions into bite-sized pieces:  you cannot separate sex from guilt of sin.  You cannot separate sin from femininity.  We are bookended, first by Eve’s original sin and finally with Mary’s act of perfect redemption, giving birth to Christ.  You cannot remove Western Feminist art from this lineage of feminine sin, sin which is defined through the body:  through eating, naked; through entering a world in which you’ve gotta stop being naked (I would make the argument that, Biblically speaking, we can all thank Eve for fashion ‘cause without original sin we don’t need to wear pants); through a pregnancy which is both pure—bodyless-and completely cosmically sensual (again, depending on your denomination).  This is even on top of two thousand-some years of embodied miracles—the history of Catholic nuns and lady-saints might actually be an underground history of the famale orgasm.  Just sayin’.  Throw in a few ancient Platonic assumptions and you got a whole pile of “woman is no more than, and wholly synonymous with, her body.”  It’s empowering and limiting, both.  Infinitely.  It’s a way to start talking about yourself, and it’s a way to reflect on how you’ve been talked about for all of history.  And if there’s any unifying principle of feminist art it is that:  to explore how you’ve been talked about, and how to talk about yourself. 

If there is a theological history of using your body as a metaphor for your relationship God—in good and bad ways—well?  You know, that makes sense to me. 

(via rgr-pop)

PLZ EXPLAIN. can we have discussions about twee in relation to radical politics all day please.

ALSO to totally counter your tag-point about no queer ukulele girls i would like to mention my current band the ukekaties, which is a two-girl all-katies ukulele band and we are both some kinda queer. the problem is we haven’t actually made music yet.

(via katydidnot)

I present to you:  the patriarchy.

I’m sorry I erased your queer ukulele experiences, though.  I think acoustic guitars are a worse symbol of the patriarchy and I guess I didn’t call them out or anything.  And, if you recall, I also make ukulele music.  So there’s that.

(via katydidnot)