#be queer do heresies

[rijl]

Happy Palm Sunday

[rijl]

Me this past Monday explaining to the poor cringing church lady that we named our monthly creativity/embodiment church gathering "Meaty Mondays" because "inCARNation" means "becoming meat/flesh." Shout out to the other young adult who then suggested alternatively "Fleshy Fridays," thus making my contribution comparatively less creepy.

[thepostburningash]

i love my medieval lit module bc in the hour so far we have called st. paul gay and talked about 3 separate heresies

[missnekonyan]

The whole "humans were made in the image of God" thing hits differently when viewed from the angle of gender. As an entity, God is technically beyond gender. But They use gendered language as a means to connect with humanity.

In that same vein, a [tumblr] post once opened my eyes to how the perception of gender and how it works is technically different for everyone. People use the construct and concept of gender to connect with each other - to express themselves. I think it's a beautiful thing.

In that sense, humanity is like God. The creation reflects the Creator. Gender isn't inherent, but it helps explain concepts that may be difficult to describe without it.

This is especially fitting since my view of my own gender is linked to my belief in divinity. Like God, I am beyond such conventions. But for simplicity's sake, gendered terms can help relay it to people.

[laurashapiro-noreally]

Looking for something to read?

Oh look, it's another recs post! This time I'm featuring two stories per author. These are writers I always make time for, whose work stands out as unusually hot, clever, funny, or smart -- sometimes all of the above.

I'm gonna start you out strong with two by @werpiper: After Hours takes Aziraphale and Crowley to the baths after their oyster supper, and all sorts of interesting pleasures are there for our angel to sample. Piper's Crowley is one of my favorites: always evaluating the situation, not quite aware of what his own heart is doing but feeling it anyway.

Fitting In is a new story, still a WIP, but I am utterly tantalized by Muriel's first taste of love -- and tea. This is already rich in detail, soft and fragrant, and I can hardly wait for the action to get going in earnest. The pairing seems surprising but when you think about it for ten seconds of course it makes sense. Sex workers help the curious, the awkward, and the inexperienced every day, bless them.

If you enjoy these, check out @werpiper's back catalog -- they have done a ton of ineffables-through-the-ages, and their series Miracles and Heresy is worth many delightful hours of your time.

I love what @copperplatebeech has been doing lately:

He's Not My Friend is a T-rated story that explores Aziraphale's constant refusal to acknowledge his relationship with Crowley, and Crowley's mirror of that, and how things glacially shift over time. It is subtle and yet specific, it will make you ache and smile.

All Of The Above, also T-rated, is a warm and fuzzy alternative to that, a hilarious celebration of true friendship that made me laugh out loud and still got me right in the feels.

@copperplatebeech can do everything, from quiet, gentle, and romantic to devastating plotty AUs to extraordinarily horny established relationship to absolutely ridiculous humor. Do dive in if you haven't already.

Next up, @cumaeansibyl, master of kink:

better living through technology manages to shove everything I want in a dirty story into less than three thousand words: uptight Aziraphale reduced to sodden wreck, Crowley gleefully showing him what he's been missing, character-driven erotics, and exceptionally funny dialogue.

indulgentiam peccatorum nostrorum is somehow all that and more, turning the "I was wrong" dance into a kink (something I can't get enough of, recs welcome). This one is post-Bastille so it is extra-juicy. Mind the tags!

@cumaeansibyl has a gift for established relationship one-shots, which readers of mine will know are my entire jam. They also have a mind-meltingly hot inverse!omens AU that features different variations of angelic/demonic Crowleys and Aziraphales for our ineffables to play with.

A new-to-me author, Calico, has me hanging by a thread with their Ineffable Romans series. If you want to remember that your ineffables aren't human, that they are inordinately clever but very stupid, that the feelings they have for each other are truly beyond what anyone alive has ever felt, Calico may be the writer for you. This stuff is deep. Also hot af.

Sub Rosa reads like a nasty shag at Petronius', but there's so much more going on here. It is Extremely Queer, driven by power dynamics, and Crowley is fully demonic here and absolutely in control...or is he?

The Intemperance of Liber Pater continues on this theme, with dialogue-driven smut that reads less like a seduction than an inevitability. There's another story in this series, unfinished, and I can't wait to see what happens next.

Last but not least: two short pieces by @ineffabildaddy. I stumbled on their stories just this week and I absolutely love their approach, which I've not seen done quite this way before.

take me as your wife has a tight first-person perspective as Crowley meets Aziraphale for a meal and imagines (or is it his imagination?) that Aziraphale is suggesting Certain Things about how they might occupy themselves later. Indeed, is he suggesting even more? Something about their relationship? Or is it all in Crowley's head?

Only in Dreams is kind of a companion piece, from Aziraphale's point of view -- though hundreds of years later. This one's set after the events of S2 and although just as romantic as take me as your wife, it also offers an ineffable take on the ol' glory hole concept. Just in case you thought I was getting soft. 😏

@ineffabildaddy has a whole series of poems and ficlets like these and I can't wait to explore them all.

[littlestickfish]

Pope Francis removed him for being ridiculously and virulently hateful toward the LGBT and other minority communities, going so far as to say they don't belong in the Church--the Church Pope Francis is currently endeavoring to make safer and more welcoming to these folks.

The misleading part has nothing to do with whether or not it's legal by secular standards. The misleading part is the implication that this was some sort of arbitrary and unreasonable move instead of a rogue bishop who preached hate facing consequences for his actions.

The man was a menace, and this level of disciplinary action is the least he deserves.

im fucking sobbing why did they kill him twice in a row in the community notes

[queerliblib]

Do you have any philosophy books or queer philosophy recs for Pride Month? I want to beat my philosophy professors over the head (metaphorically of course)

oooo fuck yeah okay so first thoughts are:

Feminist, Queer, Crip by Alison Kafer - envisioning new futures through environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability (oh here’s the audiobook of it)

Neuroqueer Heresies by Nick Walker - link is for the audio book (available) our ebook copy has a 6mo wait time 😬. By a queer autistic scholar, contains notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities

The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam - about "finding alternatives-to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society” through an investigation of ‘low theory’ (in contrast to ‘high theory’/‘high culture’)

okay so not all of these are traditional philosophy, per se, however they are heavier on the theorizing so if you’re hungry for more queer theory I also recommend these:

Queering Anarchism

Cruising Utopia

Identity Poetics

Who’s Afraid of Gender (any Judith Butler is worth a read though, also in audio)

Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on our Sex Obsessed Culture (also in audio)

Y’all Means All: The Emerging Voices Queering Appalachia

[mactiir]

I know the average reading comprehension on this site is zero but I'm different. I'm applying wildly inappropriate analysis lenses to popcorn media. I'm doing a queer theory reading of Horus Heresy novels. Now I'm doing feminist analysis of Warhammer 40k canon. Now I'm applying Marxist analysis to The Outsiders. Time for a historical analysis of The Locked Tomb. A post-colonial reading of the entirety of Doctor Who. A psychological anlaysis of Twilight. On the horseshoe scale of reading comprehension I'm at "so much reading comprehension that it loops back around to not understanding books at all actually". You can't stop me. I'm literary analysis Georg

[laziestgirlintown]

4 (of 8) eps in I want to recommend Netflix's Kaos. N's trailer would have you believe it's "What We Do On Olympos" but it's darker than that. It's for the Greek mythology nerds. (Well, it's for me.) I don't want to look for gifs to not be spoilered (Fated?). But the gods are cruel and the people are queer, and hubris and heresy is punished, and people are cruel and the furies do not relent, and your prophecy is bullshit until it isn't, and no one gets out of Hades, including Hades. Or? Also, importantly, there's a kitten.

[polyamorousmood]

why the hell not. Happy spooky season, everybody

Werewolf Polyam Flags!

Free to use!

[rijl]

Pietà with Mohammed Salem's photo of Inas Abu Maamar embracing the body of her 5-year old niece, Saly. Saly was killed on October 17 in an Israeli airstrike on Khan Younis.

"In this season of Lent, it seems to many of us that Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around him. It only takes people of insight to see the hundreds of thousands of crosses throughout the land, Palestinian men, women, and children being crucified. Palestine has become one huge golgotha. The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily. Palestine has become the place of the skull."

(From the 2001 Easter message of Naim Ateek, Palestinian liberation theologian and Anglican priest.)

[meanderingmedievalist]

In the middle ages, clerics were actually the most likely to practice necromancy and it was their heavy use and dissemination of magical texts by these clerical men led to the rise in blaming women for witchcraft — leading to the mass, female-dominated "witch" burnings in the 1600s. From Richard Kiekhefer's introduction to Forbidden Rites: “To the extent that these early witch trials focused on female victims, they thus provide a particularly tragic case of women being blamed and punished for the misconduct of men: women who were not invoking demons could more easily be thought to do so at a time when certain men were in fact so doing.” “The study of late medieval necromancy gives an exceptionally clear and forceful picture of the abuses likely to arise in a culture so keenly attentive to ritual display of sacerdotal power. Our own society, more fascinated with sexuality and its abuse, has its own concerns about miscreant priests and their abuse of young boys; the clerical misconduct most feared in the late Middle Ages was of a different order.” During the middle ages, the church controlled through the lens of spiritual and magical power: women's use of herbs and medicines to control reproductive rights and bodily autonomy was marked as witchcraft. Queer folks' identities and lives were marked as demonic possessions & expressions of devilry. Ideas not in line with Church doctrine were marked as heresy and marks of moral corruption - to believe in heresy was to risk your eternal life. Books deemed too dangerous for "the masses" were burned. Meanwhile, clerical men were summoning demons and using their role as spiritual leaders to coerce women into romance or marriage, to control their congregations, to defeat and punish their opponents and enemies. Does it not sound familiar? Perhaps they did learn from the devil. After all, the devil speaks in inversion.

To quote my cohost over on @maniculum: "History doesn't repeat; it rhymes."

Never forget: every accusation is a confession.

[cowman17]

And here we have a wild Vulcan supporting the queer folks of the imperium

In case you have a hard time picturing how tall the primarchs are, here is my neighbor's 12 ft tall gay skeleton for reference

[sparklyshakespeare]

the case for hyper-femme hotspur

this is my tumblr blog and this is like kind of just what we do heresies

OK so basically okay so

first of all i think anytime there is a character who is so strongly associated with an extreme form of gender expression in our collective zeitgeist (i.e hotspur and hyper-masculinity) there’s something not only extremely fun to play with but incredibly valuable about analyzing the story from the opposite end of the gender performance specturm. also canonically there are like 3 female characters in 1h4 and that sucks. also also don’t you want to see hotspur in pink glitter? i know i do and this tumblr is not a democracy!!

in this hypothetical dream sparkly version of the play, both hotspur and worcester would be women. not played by women, i mean textually explicitly women. this is important!! 

worcester should be very nancy pelosi hillary clinton-esque in the way that this is a middle-aged woman who has been taught that to be successful in her field (politics) she will have to strip herself of most of her femininity and perform a certain level of masculinity in order to be taken seriously. this creates a whole other layer to the hotspur/worcester dynamic when all of a sudden this young, hyper-feminine woman is being taken more seriously and being given more praise than someone who has worked and fought through the bullshit and done it all “right”. she hasn’t earned her place, she hasn’t had to struggle - and worcester resents her for that. (there’s like a whole dissertation to be written about how much of 1h4 changes when only worcester is genderbent, i love you queen worcester you are everything not in this version here you kind of suck lowkey)

henry iv is just a misogynist he just kinda sucks but like this is something we all knew screw that guy

ok now we can talk about hal because i know hes like the one all you little gay people care about. 

to me, it’s never made sense why the Henriad is framed as hal’s hero’s journey. maybe it’s because i’m queer (i’m like actually positive that’s why), but leaving home and finding acceptance and family from a group of outsiders who society has deemed as worthless is the path i’ve watched so many friends walk. having to leave that and return to your shitty dad because “duty calls!” and THEN leaving behind and disavowing the same community that opened its arms to you? i don’t see that as an awesome coming-of-age about learning how to handle responsibility, that’s deeply, deeply tragic. and far farrrrr too true a reality for most members of our LGBTQ+ community here (Bible Belt). SO guess where this version of 1h4 is set!!!!!! anyways, its the Medieval Revival of the ‘70s in the Bible Belt south, the Boar’s Head is a gay bar, and hal is trans. 

hal is trans-masc in some way and this needs to be incredibly explicit (like pronouns pin with trans flag on costume explicit). and then when the news breaks, when “I’ll to the court in the morning.” (we’re cutting the text so this is where that scene ends. cool? cool. cool!), hal takes the pin off. it needs to be like A Moment. it should make me cry, and i cry really easily so that’ll probably be pretty easy to do, but this is a gut punch. 

oh and lady percy is still a woman, they’re gay, because i said so. blah blah blah because look hotspur and hal really were so alike all along and look hotspur is fighting so voraciously because she’s hungry for a world where she can openly and unabashedly be with the person she loves but ultimately because i love lady percy and i love lesbians and this play doesn’t need another man. but also because look hotspur is fighting so voraciously because she’s hungry for a world where she can openly and unabashedly be with the person she loves. worcester and vernon should also both be women and have the blossoming of a relationship but be a lot more discreet about it (worcester should be extremely hesitant). now we get a cool split between younger and older generations of activists in both the feminist and the gay rights movement oooo themes oooo motifs oooo lady gagita 

as far as hal/hotspur parallels go, it’s probably pretty obvious at this point. your dad constantly praising someone who represents, at least in his mind, the ideal concept of a woman, disappointed you can’t be more like her, all the while you’re coming to terms with the fact that you’re not a woman, but he’ll never see that, so what the fuck are you supposed to do?!? it’s a LOT! but i think there’s also something to be said about the less obvious parallel. which is that hyper-femininity is NOT an attempt at ideal polite womanhood or self-Stepfordization, hyper-femininity is in fact the extreme performance of womanhood in rejection of that. hyper-femininity is queer in nature (also hotspur quite literally has a wife but i guess hal wouldn’t be able to tell that just by looking at her) there’s something to be said about the moment hal and hotspur see each other, and then the moment hal and hotspur seeeeeee each other. and go hey, you’re just like me. this person who you’ve been constantly compared to and made out to be lesser than  because you dare to be deeply wildly madly truly you is in fact exactly the same. we’re the same. and oh my god, in another world wouldn’t it have been lovely to just like go dancing together? sucks it’s not another world now we’re going to gay fight each other i guess

[wordslikesilver]

A positive experience I really wanna share with y’all about being trans that I think is so so important to think about. So I’m white, very much from a well off background, all that, also trans so I have experienced plenty of frequent bigotry in my life. I’m doing my damnedest to be aware of and understand the concept of intersectionality and how different layers of identity add different types of privilege or burdens in our society. But you know what else life has taught me so much about as a trans woman? Community.

I’m wrapping up a treatment I’ve just given to an elderly black woman. She looks terribly disparaged at her phone. Ask her what’s up, she tells me oh it’s just there’s so many bigots online. I sit and with a long sigh and small smile I tell her, “yeah. Yeah I know. All too well.” She looks back at me and takes a moment to think then smiles and says “yeah, I suppose you would know.” I feel seen like never before by another person.

I’m at my darling wife’s new year’s celebration at her relatives’ place. We’re playing scattergories. She’s mixed race, lots of black relatives, someone brings up police in passing about something and me and one of her cousins at the same time roll our eyes and both say ACAB and go wide eyed looking at each other, smiling and laughing together about it. It’s a moment of like omg hell yes you totally get me, we know that same anger!

In a women’s space having some girl talk. We talk about makeup and clothes and love. Beauty standards, our bodies, anger, men, love. Cis women asking me tips on eyeliner. Sharing my knowledge and experiences growing as a man and living as a woman. Laughing together about how good it feels being a lesbian, how freeing it feels, how hard it can be. I don’t have periods, but neither does the woman who’s gone through menopause. I’m laughing with them about hot flashes and how miserable they can be. We talk about traveling on the subway, being catcalled, being harassed feeling unsafe. We’ve all been there. They too, are sisters to me.

I’m at a kink party. I’ve brought a bible for some funny impact play. I’m an ex catholic and I love me some heresy in the name of the lord. Emulating the disciplining of another queer person in attempt to cleanse them of sin, deriving pleasure from the ironic madness of the situation. An ex Muslim guy brings out his Quran and angrily reads passages about finding salvation in Allah at the sub we’re having fun with, joining in on the religious heresy. Later in the night, we talk about our experiences and relationships with our religious backgrounds, he’s telling me if he ever went home he’d be killed for his bisexuality. He scorns the radical Muslim faith as strongly as I loathe the radical Christian faiths of the US. We see eye to eye with each other, how of course it’s not all bad, but that doesn’t erase the bad either. I understand in that moment what feelings I didn’t recognize we both have felt caused by our own ways of life we were raised in. The similarities in spite of the world of differences.

I know, I’m just a white girl with a lot to learn in her life about philosophy and privilege and power and a million other little things that separate my experiences from those who’ve lived very, very different lives to me. I will never understand the experience of transmisogynoir and being a trans woman of colour. But that doesn’t mean I can’t empathize with aspects of it. That I cannot build community with them just the same as the people just like me. As I live and learn, I slowly become more aware of the experiences of black peoples, black women, black trans women. I become a more emotionally intelligent person, stumbling into moments like where I, a white trans woman and another, a black cis man, both recognize each other as fellows who’ve known the same pain even if for different reasons. It’s genuinely a favourite experience of mine. The community, the symmetry, the unexpected feelings of “Oh. I didn’t realize we’ve both felt that before. The world feels less lonely than ever, suddenly.” Communities are distinct from each other for experiences unique to them, of course! It’s so beautiful, the rainbow of differences between us all. It is also beautiful, discovering the natural bridges that connecting each other, bringing us together in unity, making us feel so much less isolated in this technicolor world. It’s truly a thing of beauty to me.

From the bottom of my heart, I’d love and appreciate it if folks would reblog/reply with similar experiences they’ve had to this, I think more than ever it is important for us to recognize how close we truly are with the wide and wonderful spectrum of other people around us, nurturing the unity that makes us all shine brighter and stand taller together. Moments where despite how different you were from another person, you could bond with them over experiences you had both lived through and could understand the feelings of. Moments where you found community where you never expected it <3

[misspjsuperior]

Like many contemporary artists I too was inspired to capture my own Roan of Arc interpretation based on Chappell Roan’s recent VMA performance. I was especially enamored with the shiny armor and imagined Chappell singing into a sword like a mic, bearing the banner of her cause, of her people. It makes artistic sense for the rising pop star to reference and embody Joan of Arc as a modern champion of LGBTQ+ expression. How tho? Why is Joan of Arc, martyred by being burned at the stake, so popular in Queer art through the generations?

To understand, we must know what was actually deemed to be her crime. Witchcraft? Sorcery? Heresy? All of these were her charged but NONE of these were her actual convictions.

Jeanne D’Arc also known as Joan of Arc is famous for having been martyred as a heretic after leading her French army to seemingly impossible victories against the English occupation during the Hundred Years’ War and her body at the stake to be burned is a popular theme in art about her life.

But heresy was not successfully convicted against her. Saint Joan was murdered by the state, by England, solely on the grounds of cross dressing.

After prolonged, intensive questioning by Cauchon and the other members of the tribunal, Jeanne d’Arc gave them no answers that could constitute heresy. They accused her of practicing sorcery, but she testified repeatedly that she only followed the word of God and believed in the infallibility of the Church and Pope.

The clerics then proclaimed that her cross-dressing was an abomination to God, to which she answered, “the clothes are a small matter, the least of all things”. However, Cauchon soon realized that through a technicality in canon law, the tribunal could condemn her on this small thing.

The tribunal convinced Jeanne d’Arc to sign a legal document stating her submission to the Church and recanting her claims about hearing the saints’ voices. Attached to that document was a cedula, or royal decree, also avowing that she would no longer wear men’s clothing. Upon her renunciation, the tribunal released Jeanne d’Arc back to prison without indicting her for any crime.

Yet, three days later in prison, Jeanne d’Arc was again wearing men’s clothes. In a later trial, some testified that guards had stolen Jeanne’s female clothes and replaced them with male clothes. Whatever the case, as soon as Cauchon heard the news, he immediately condemned her for lapsed heresy on the grounds of cross-dressing. The same day, the tribunal handed Jeanne d’Arc over to the secular court for her punishment: burning at the stake.

The execution took place May 30, 1431, in the public marketplace of English occupied Rouen, France when Joan was only 19 years old

Now with proposed bills in US states like Texas, Florida, and Ohio that call for children’s genitals to be examined in order to play sports to prove cisgender participation status and which proper jailing parents who do not force their trans children to present as cis, it seems we are have regressed back to 15th century European standards. But yknow the US is still the champion of the colonizing English, look we Americans are still speaking their language right now! No more home of the free than Orleans was before Joan rose up in her power.

Whether or not Joan was actually trans masculine or any other kind of Queer, the fact remains she was murdered on a gender biased technicality. Let’s not let that keep happening over 600 years later.