Drunk Church

The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’re not like other girls… Join us for our most recent episode as we offer a critical re-evaluation of the figure of the bimbo and deconstruct societal preconceptions of femininity at large through our own cosima bee concordia’s essay “My Official Bimbo Diagnosis”. With our two remaining brain cells we ponder, why does everyone seem to hate femininity so much, and why it is that femininity is seen as a threat to feminism? We argue (to the degree that bimbos can string ideas together) that femmephobia is in part the result of an aesthetic double bind. This double bind normatively expects us all to perform gender while also punishing or shaming those who perform gender “too much”. The “too much” of gender is dangerous because it wrests us from the pervasive myth that gender is natural. In a patriarchal world where the masculine is the neutral ideal, femininity is always “too much” and thus provides a useful scapegoat to perpetuate misogyny in both men who hate women and feminists alike.  In an effort to challenge these totalizing power dynamics we examine the extent to which it is both possible, and necessary -- albeit not without risk -- to take pleasure in gender even though it is gender that oppresses us. In what ways can we re-purpose the too much of gender? How can the BDSM dungeon as seen through Susan Stryker’s “Dungeon Intimacies” be “a technology for the production of (trans)gendered embodiment”? And finally, could it be that the only gender binary that matters is Gender Minimalism vs. Gender Maximalism?For discussions on all those questions and more, listen to “Bimbo Theory: A Gender Maximalist Guide to Having It All”Read "My Official Bimbo Diagnosis" by cosima bee concordiaTo not miss out on episodes and get bonus content, sign up for our Patreon -- you're what makes this show possible!Intro and outro song is "Bless You" by the Ink Spots Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! 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! Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is a special mini episode, driven by the immediacy of the horrors happening right now in the Gaza Strip.Mia Khalifa, controversial public figure and Lebanese ex-porn star, was publicly reprimanded and fired last week by Playboy for her "disgusting actions"—a.k.a. voicing solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation against settler colonial apartheid and genocide. Obvious contradictions arise here that can be extrapolated to better understand the entire structure of how easily signs are twisted and power is inverted to justify the horrors of imperialist and colonial power, as well as how our marginalized identities are used against us in an attempt to turn us against the most marginalized for the lie of our own meager benefit.It’s no mistake that “terrorism” is only used to describe violence committed by politically disenfranchised actors in the absence of state sanctioned power. State power commits much more violence, but naturalizes and invisibilizes it as necessary and normal. Only resistance to the state is terrorism, which is why terrorism is such a powerful idea in order to confound where power actually lies—it seems as if it is suddenly the disenfranchised who inflict the greatest horrors, the oppressed made oppressor and the oppressor made oppressed. If you don’t believe in violence, instead of condemning the disenfranchised you should be steadfastly in solidarity with oppressed peoples in their struggle for liberation from the tyranny of state power, which constructs, commits, and excuses the vast majority of violence. If saying you don’t believe in violence leads you to be on the side of colonial and imperialist power, all you really believe in is the comfort, stability, and privilege of the status quo.Free Palestine Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! 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 Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Given the failures of affirmative consent, how can we develop a better more nuanced framework that both embraces the messiness of sex and attends to the ways in which intimacy makes us uniquely vulnerable? What is the insatiable will that drives us to seek 'more and more' in our intimate encounters and aesthetic experiences? In what ways does play allow us to straddle the line between the real and the fictive so as to stir up the unconscious and trouble simplistic dualities such as normative understandings of Eros and Thanatos? How could a form of ethical sadism serve to guide our erotic relations so as to enable us to flirt with danger and play with limits? Come with us and play with fire in our third installment of Avgi Saketopoulou's “Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia”.Grab a copy for yourself from NYUPress to follow along!Intro & outro song is "Bless You" by the Ink SpotsSign up as a Drunk Church patron for access to a community discord, a private RSS feed with a selection of extended and bonus episodes, discounts on Drunk Church merch, and more! Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! 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 Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Diving into our second segment in our series on Avgi Saketopoulou’s “Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia”, we take you through the first chapter: "To Suffer Pleasure: Limit Experience and Transgression". What is the nature between desire and disgust? Where does perversity first arise, and what does it mean to seek experiences of overwhelm rather than shrink from them? Even more radically, what political potentialities can we find within the experience of self shattering as a force that detranslates the stubborn meanings of the ego? We hope you continue to enjoy delving into this difficult text with us to challenge even some of our most dearly held notions. Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! 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" Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For this episode we do something a little different, going through some of the hottest subjects of discourse of the current moment as a way to review lots of the major themes we've covered in Drunk Church so far. Honoring our Villain Arc, we talk generational divides, the ludicrousness of a "Trans Inclusive" Radfem, overall rise in fascistic sentiment across generations, and, perhaps most importantly, the ways in which understanding queerness as being always built up and against perversion is more relevant than ever.In place of confessions, we share the submissions we received after our "Trauma & Taboo: The Unspeakability of Sexual Violation" episode from when we created an anonymous space for people to share their own unspeakable or unsayable experiences of violation.If you would like to listen to the full episode on a patreon only RSS feed, sign up for Drunk Church on Patreon. Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! 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. Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Drunk Church returns victoriously for the start of our second season with “Trigger Warning: A Holiday Special!”, our festive conversation on violation, power, desire, fantasy, patriarchy, and the ambiguity of trauma's uncontrollable nature centered on Paul Verhoeven’s fabulous Christmas film “Elle”. Get cozy and snuggle up with a cup of hot coco, and join us for a little bit of holiday fear.Intro and outro: White Christmas as performed by the Ink Spots Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How is it that desire, when taken to its conclusion, curdles into horror? For our Halloween Special, we linger with two transgressive erotic BDSM novels—first, with Pauline Réage's classic "Story of O" and then with its provocative leatherdyke echo in Jane DeLynn's "Leash"—to see the ways that our desire has the power to undo us. We have explored before how eroticism may destabilize us, stretch the ego like an overworn condom, or even make us stare into the abyss of our own dissolution—now we will stretch those limits as far as they can go.Will we hide from desire—repress it and hope it goes away instead of coming back someday in even more monstrous form—or do we open ourselves up to it even in all its horrific power, and take the ultimate leap of faith? In the end, the choice is yours and yours alone.Show notes:"Story of O" by Pauline Réage"Leash" by Jane DeLynnThis week we asked you for things you desire but are scared of on Instagram—these are shared in place of confessions.Intro and outro song is "Bless You" by the Ink Spots Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! 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 Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In our penultimate discussion on "Hatred of Sex", we do something literally no one in the history of the world has done before: we call Freud problematic!! That being said, we also look at how Davis and Dean's brilliant take of Freud's concept of the unconscious degenitalizes and unbinds sex, allowing pleasure to move around the body in ways that do not look so different from the understandings and practices of leatherfolk. We focus in on the system that seems to love hatred of sex the most—the security state—tracing how it functions to perpetuate carcerality by co-opting the efforts of feminists and other activists to confront harm within our legal system. Helped along by regressive patriarchal forces with much less good intentions, bureaucracies of risk tighten and the most marginalized are cracked down on even more than they already were. Davis and Dean write, "this scrambling messiness of sex can never be entirely covered over by hating it—or for that matter by trying to love it", and we concur—we're here to get dirty.Show notes:"Hatred of Sex" by Oliver Davis and Tim Dean"Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personalities and the Sciences of Memory" by Ian Hacking"Studies on Hysteria" by Freud & Breuer "Case Histories I: 'Dora' and 'Little Hans' " by Freud"Governmentality" by Tania Murray Li "Histories of the Transgender Child" by Jules Gill-PetersonYou're Wrong About, "The Victims' Rights Movement"Gretchen Felker-Martin's Twitter ThreadIntro song is "Bless You" by the Ink Spots Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! 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 Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today we present the first part of our discussion of the polemic “Hatred of Sex”, exploring how our hatred of sex (like hatred of democracy!) is endemic to the structure of sex itself, and exists in the “open minded” and “sex-positive” just as within the Puritanical and conservative. As a psychoanalytic companion to Bataille’s erotocism, we look how we hate sex because it challenges the walls we build and the flags we plant—amongst all this hatred, what does it mean to insist that sex is still of the utmost importance, to find pleasure in being undone, and to locate meaning in the uniquely singular messiness of our embodied experiences? Show notes:"Hatred of Sex" by Oliver Davis and Tim Dean"Hatred of Democracy" by Jacques Rancière"Risking sexuality beyond consent: overwhelm and traumatisms that incite" by Avgi Saketopoulou"Erotism: Death and Sensuality" by Georges BatailleIntro song is "Bless You" by the Ink Spots Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! 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 Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We watched “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” and are confronted with the infinite horrors of fascism and the ways we are all made complicit in them. While discussing this grotesque indictment, we also delve into gay leftist director Pier Paolo Pasolini's writings and the mystery surrounding his murder that occurred just a few weeks before the film premiered..Serves as good company to “The Fantasy is Death” and available to patrons at any tier..CW: the infinite horrors of fascism Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! 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 Get access to full bonus episodes, an exclusive RSS feed, and more by subscribing our Patreon! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.