tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16128493050416349532024-02-08T01:39:46.502-06:00Polyamorous PaganismThe Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.comBlogger25125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-69557929022324617892013-10-01T22:08:00.000-05:002013-10-01T22:08:00.526-05:00What Happened?Hello internet. I hope you've been following me on <a href="https://twitter.com/Falcc" target="_blank">twitter</a>. Sorry about the whole no updates thing. <br />
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I had all of these grand dreams about continuous weekly posting about Pagan Spirit Gathering. Clearly this did not happen. So what happened?<br />
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Well, people that follow me regularly elsewhere have seen a solid taste of what my life has been like lately. Suffice to say blogging formally has taken a backseat to surviving more and more difficult life experiences, not to mention college.<br />
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The important facts are here:<br /><br />I am in counseling for anything serious.<br />
I am not self-harming.<br />
I write every day, which means I'm actually doing much better in some ways than I was when I was blogging.<br />
Most of my problems will probably be significantly mitigated by the end of the year.<br />
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Finally: <br />
For those of you that follow me on Twitter, recognize that some facts on my past blog posts are now very outdated. Don't be alarmed by this. I will be updating them as I can. The daily tweets take canon precedence. <br />
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Does this mean I'm back to regular blogging? Let's see how the semester goes.The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-82454417560506952022013-10-01T21:59:00.002-05:002013-10-01T21:59:08.782-05:00The Goddex
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<b>Below is one of my best attempts to describe the concept of a Queer Divine archetype, and more generally an allusion to how I understand both deities and gnosis as developing. This was written for a syncroblog at <a href="http://www.queertheology.com/synchroblog2013/" target="_blank">Queer Theology.com</a> It does not necessarily represent an endorsement of said website. </b></div>
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Once there were things.</div>
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Before these things existed there was
nothing, but because they existed this was no longer true.</div>
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These things did not have names,
because there existed no things to name them. They did not exist from
one time to another time because there was nothing which marked that
one time was different from another, and so there was no time.</div>
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In some ways they were not even things.
What could a thing be without something to label it a thing?
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Italo Calvino gave this more thought
than I will here.</div>
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Things changed.</div>
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Soon there were things that had ideas.
They weren't necessarily significant ideas but they existed.
Something communicated an idea about something to another thing.</div>
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This was discourse.
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Eventually there was time, and from
that point on discourse existed throughout time.</div>
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Discourse changed things.</div>
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Discourse exists in a state of
interaction with all other discourse.
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Different ideas exist in discourse, and
through discourse ideas about things are codified. Ideas become
rigid, turn into tools, creations, patterns, behaviors, systems,
groupings, associations, and especially concepts.
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There were also numerous things which
were then not just themselves but also associated with other things.
There were signifier and signified, the subject and the object,
meanings, connections, all fueling discourse.</div>
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Soon there was a concept of us. We
existed. There was a we. We were a thing, which was also a set of
things, which was also a codified set of ideas held in unison amongst
the collective we. We were a position, a principal, a discourse, a
group, a people, a path, a belief, a faith.</div>
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Our Gods spanned the heavens and the
Earth. They roamed across plains, over hills, through sees and skies.
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When we created the concept of a deity,
they were there as though they had been already. We looked to the
path, and saw them step from the trees, and from the moment we saw
them we knew them. When we knew them, it was as if we had always
known them. As if they had begun to exist and thrown their existence
backwards into the very beginning, so that they had always been
there. They were concepts that we knew. They were all of the ideas
and associations we had ever expected them to be once we knew that
they could be at all. They were a discourse onto themselves.
</div>
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Soon there was a concept of not us.
Those who were not us were a not-thing, in that we are a thing which
they were not. This was, oddly enough, also a set of things, usually
much less pleasant. They were not us, and if that was an acceptable
thing to be that is what we would be.
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The discourse of the other.
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It's not really about if they had other
Gods. It's not even about whether anyone actually deviated, or
whether there really is deviation, or whether something existed from
which to deviate. They were just not the group that decided whose
group they belonged to.</div>
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We exist in this group. You and I. It's
why we're here, writing/reading this.</div>
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The laws were codified, the
associations were codified, the rules were spoken and unspoken from
birth in every interaction. This too was discourse. It was a
discourse that we failed to maintain, that we subverted, that we
disregarded. We were the first Emperor of Rome to know she was a
woman. We were an unhearable echo before, and from the moment that
we, you and I now, knew that we existed we began to always exist. We
did not hear the discourse of what had always been right and true. We
did not hear there was no other way, what was proper, what was
expected. We heard war, but we did not hear what was heard so clearly
by those who warred upon us.
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Instead we heard the Goddex.</div>
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Then there was Hir.</div>
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Ze existed from the moment that we
realized that Ze existed, and began to exist infinitely before at the
same time. Ze was and is a concept embodied. A discourse shaped into
a body which was then entirely its own to shape other discourse. The
discourse of the discontent. The discourse of the abused, of the cage
rattler, of the dissatisfied, of the denied. The discourse of change
and subversion and recreation, deconstruction.
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When we create a Queer concept, we hold
Hir in our minds. Ze is everything that we see, no matter what we
see, because Ze is in all Queer things.
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All works of gender bending</div>
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Each act of tranarchy</div>
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Every moment of self care</div>
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These are Hir works.</div>
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There is no one pronoun that captures
Them. Per is every race, every color, all genders. He cannot be
encapsulated in a single shape. She cannot be from a single
backgrounds. E is not even a single deity, but an archetype that umbrellas several and is not fully any of them, but Eir own being. It is each and every marginalized, denied, and deprived
voice, hand, face. Ze is every act we take in which we continue to
deny those that wish we did not exist the satisfaction.</div>
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Ze is The Outcast.
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The Explorer.</div>
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The Great Revealer.</div>
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Ze is everything that we can accomplish
together, everything held by us alone, but us collectively, by us
every moment in which we are ourselves.</div>
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Once Ze came to exist, Ze had always
existed. We had never for a moment been without Hir and everything Ze
signifies.
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Once Ze came to exist, Ze created us.
</div>
The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-50593868542664492012013-07-05T12:28:00.001-05:002013-07-05T12:56:02.805-05:00PSG Post 1: Coming HomePagan Spirit Gathering isn't easy to explain, and I'm not sure I can encapsulate its mystique in a blog post. I've spent some time being introspective on the whole experience and I'll convey as much as I can, but it's definitely something one should experience for themself. <br />
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When you arrive people welcome you home, when you leave it's just a supply run for next year. Everything is designed with the idea in mind that this is a safe haven, a resting place for those spiritual wanderers that consider themselves Pagan, or closely related. It's the place you come to, and then come back to, that you were always meant to be.<br />
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In some ways this isn't far off. Despite sounding overly romantic, Pagan Spirit Gathering really does represent a space to be absolutely and unabashedly Pagan, and it really hammers home how seldom that's true elsewhere in the world. It takes place in a campground in Illinois, so unlike most conferences and conventions that take over a hotel in the middle of a city of otherwise uninterested people, PSG creates an entirely Pagan space and then shuts the rest of the world out for a week. Everything is done in an effort to shut off the space, physically and energetically, from the mundane world. To paraphrase one of the gatekeepers, "even if the cops showed up, we'd make them wait at the gate like anyone else a ticket." It's a place for Pagans to be Pagans. That's welcoming.<br />
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It's only in being in my actual home again that I've been struck by just how much the atmosphere of PSG is different. Casual, desexualized nudity is probably one of the most obvious things when you arrive, and even the clothed people are usually in whatever makes them most comfortable, whether it's something reminiscent of a Renaissance Fair or simply whatever best expresses one's identity. Clothing is only the tip of the iceberg however. Being able to go into a crowded space and discuss esoteric concepts, knowing for certain that you won't be attacked by someone because your faith makes them feel insecure in their own, is powerful. No one stares at you when you thank the gods or shout a rousing "hail Thor!" while standing in a downpour. Your right to express your faith is taken as a given. It's shocking how alien this is in the rest of the world, and how easy it is to forget the ways we're restricting ourselves.<br />
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In some ways it's still not-quite home. The paths are full of vendors selling handmade clothing, books, ritual objects, statues, drums, staffs, and Pagan themed bumper stickers. Food vendors sensitive to vegetarian and vegan needs (and really good at providing delicious food) show up throughout the week. Fire spinners pop up frequently at nightly events to put on a show. Concerts occur two or three times a day with a large number of Pagan bands playing. There's still a definitive festival atmosphere to the whole place. It can be easy for new attendees to feel completely overwhelmed trying to make it to as many things as possible. Aside from the concerts there are numerous rituals hosted by<a href="https://www.circlesanctuary.org/" target="_blank"> Circle Sanctuary</a> (the organizing group) itself, or other groups within the camp, workshops held by community members on a variety of Pagan related subjects, and throughout the Gathering there are numerous energy workings, get-togethers, mingles, meetings, discussions, debates, and late-night coffee groups (thank you Goblin Traders for a very unique experience. And cookies.).<br />
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At the beginning of the week a number of rituals are performed to set up the major landmarks of PSG: the bonfire circle whose flame burns continuously through the weak and is filled with the ashes of the previous PSG fire each year, Psyche's Grotto as a space for psychological counseling and healing, the Rainbow Camp which serves as a space for Queer Pagans, the Moon Lodge and Temple of the Sun God, Amethyst Circle for Pagans in recovery, and the Crone Temple dedicated to older women in the Pagan community. Meetings are held at spaces for children and adults alike to get everyone settled in and welcomed. At the end of the week they're taken down again with equal ritual consideration. The PSG community pays special attention to making sure people of all ages have adequate programming available to them, as well as offering numerous rites and rituals for both men and women in each age range. I'll be writing more later about PSG diversity, where it succeeds and where it fails, but for now I'll just say there is a LOT of stuff going on for a large variety of people. <br />
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Community altars are also created, with people bringing in their own contributions to dedicate to a collective sacred space. Altars for ancestors are covered with pictures, altars to different elements are set up around the bonfire circle, and even a weatherworking altar is assembled in the hopes of keeping away both heat and rain (to mixed amounts of success). Over the course of the week a labyrinth of candles is put together and taken down, a sacred hunt is held over one night, and a large drunken revelry known as Pan's Ball is held as a way to focus energy away from over-enthusiastic partying the rest of the week. Everyone from the Gnome Camp (who were apparently very active this year) to the Ghetto Shamans camp ("So mote that shit") creates their own spaces with their own magics and customs for the span of the week. Everything buzzes from sun-up until well after sundown every day. All of it watched over by the incredible Selena Fox, flitting too and fro in her golf cart, getting people to chant whatever she wants and raising up positive energy. <br />
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There's so much else involved in PSG, but I can't list it all here, so I'll be writing a series of posts. It's also not a perfect place, and I'll be discussing more of that soon, but it is an incredible place. It's a place that allows a Pagan the space to express their faith without the looking specter of Christianity looking over their shoulder. It's a place to connect with people on a beautiful spiritual level and make amazing friends. It's a place that feels, despite any flaws it may have, an awful lot like coming home. I miss it already. The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-75736144564167422902013-06-29T11:08:00.000-05:002013-06-29T11:08:43.840-05:00Quick Post: Failure in the Face of DOMA's RepealI'm finally back from an INCREDIBLE trip to Pagan Spirit Gathering and a subsequent incredible trip to Indianapolis to spend several days with my partner and metamours. I'm all set to get working on a long list of PSG articles, but there was some news during my absence that needs addressing.<br />
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First of all, Exodus International is shutting down. This is the most positive news for Queer people in recent memory. Exodus International has been responsible for the physical torture and psychological abuse of Queer people for decades, through a process referred to as "conversion therapy" but more aptly termed "suicide conditioning" due to the extremely high rate of suicide that follows the practice. Whether leaders of this organization can ever be forgiven for what they've done is a question I have little interest in, but the organization itself is pulling its support for conversion therapy and shutting down. That's satisfying enough. The lives of Queer people everywhere became brighter as this behemoth crumbled.<br />
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The bigger news of course is the Supreme Court decision made the other day on the Voting Rights Act. By ruling a key article of the act unconstitutional the Supreme Court has essentially reopened the way for mass voter disenfranchisement, literacy tests, and other tactics to prevent oppressed groups from having any access to the voting booth. Chief Justice John Roberts, who deserves to go down in history as the man intent on resurrecting Jim Crow, authored a decision which has the ability to bring an end to voting rights for everyone in the country that doesn't look white enough to vote Republican. State governments have been reassured that if they put measures in place that disenfranchise people of color the Supreme Court will allow them to continue.<br />
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It's because of this second piece of news that the celebration of the overturn of the Defense of Marriage Act is so depressing to watch. Having pumped millions of dollars into ridding the world of this legislation, signed into law by a President that just got a GLAAD award, Gay rights organizations have been popping champagne left and right in the wake of this other Supreme Court ruling. They have been celebrating so hard they seem to have missed the news from the day before, and I'm not surprised. Assimilationists have been so busy convincing themselves that they're just like everyone else they can't be bothered to recognize that this facade only goes as far as the companies trying to get the pink dollar. It has never reached the ears of the majority of society, never enough to put a dent on Queer teen suicide statistics, or bullying, or police violence. When these people scream and cheer about being able to get married in exclusively traditional liberal states that have already adopted same-sex marriage they drown out the deeper underlying cry that starts ever earlier in the United States: "The election is coming."<br />
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I'm going to speak frankly here: The repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act has accomplished nothing. Nothing. Zero. I don't just say this as someone that thinks marriage isn't useful for Queer people, I'm speaking literally as someone that hasn't been partying so hard since it was repealed that I can still conceive of long term planning. The Supreme Court just crippled a law that was meant to guarantee everyone in this country the right to vote. The immediate consequence is going to hit people of color the hardest, because they are once again able to be systematically denied their right and ability to vote at the whim of state and local legislators in an incredibly racist country. If you don't care about this I already want to yell at you, but for Gay people that can't seem to muster up concern over their post-DOMA haze, let me ask you this: When you pull up to your polling place with your Human Rights Campaign bumper sticker proudly polished to celebrate democracy, what exactly makes you think you'll be allowed to vote for someone that will guarantee you keep your right to get married? This is the conceit of the cissexist, white supremacist, Gay movement, the belief that the white picket fence protects them from the oppression faced by those "other" people. When you blink your way out of the haze and realize that right wing reactionaries just seized the ability to increase the power of white supremacy in this country, you're going to have to confront the cold hard facts that they don't see you as the right kind of white people, no matter how fabulous your wedding has been.<br />
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The Supreme Court did not just cripple black voting rights. They did not cripple people of color's voting rights. They crippled voting rights. This affects everyone. EVERYONE. This isn't a hard concept. When conservative state legislatures set up a pile of hurdles to keep people from voting they will bring in another wave of more conservative legislators that are perfectly capable of voting same-sex marriage back out of the states it's already legal in. What's more, those hurdles can just as easily be applied to people that read as Queer as they can to people of color. Sure, you can make sure you don't present too femme, because the Gay movement has been so good about femmephobia already, but you're staring into the tunnel back to the 1950's. You're looking back into the closet, back into the pits with the other "degenerates." No matter how well you've been dancing to the demands of heteronormative society you never made lasting change, because lasting change might scare off the allies. This is your whirlwind we now reap. All of us just lost decades of ground.<br />
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When you think to yourself "I deserve one day to celebrate. Things are still rough but we got a victory. We can sleep easy for at least a while" you do so out of ignorance. Not only do you need to utterly ignore a huge act of racism to keep the buzz going, but you need to ignore that when you wake up it won't be your legally recognized partner tapping you on the shoulder. When you wake up it will be to sirens blaring, to the beat of the jackboots descending onto your throat at full force, eager to return after being lightly restrained for so long, Tomorrow may look rosy for you now, but election day will come around not long after, and the Supreme Court has ruled that your needs, your rights, and you yourself have no place in that day and age. The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-21294657232246720672013-06-15T20:35:00.000-05:002013-07-05T12:56:26.538-05:00Wandering to Pagan Spirit GatheringHurray! Starting tomorrow and extending for the entire next week through this following Sunday I will be attending <a href="https://www.circlesanctuary.org/index.php/pagan-spirit-gathering/pagan-spirit-gathering.html" target="_blank">Pagan Spirit Gathering</a> at Stonehouse Park in Illinois. If any of my tiny number of readers is interested in meeting me I will try to assemble a rudimentary sign. Failing that I will be showing up tomorrow in my Polyamorous, Pagan, and Proud t-shirt.<br />
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While I don't have one of the fancy official press lanyards or badges, or whatever they give out, I will be taking lots of notes over the week and will be posting all about the gathering after it happens (or as it happens if there's a method of getting signal there and something is important enough to post about during). I don't know yet if my twitter will be silent but my phone is more likely to work than my laptop, so be sure to follow me on twitter as @Falcc and keep up on my adventures.<br />
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So! Much! Excitement!The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-30844342158705216672013-06-04T14:25:00.003-05:002013-06-04T14:25:12.768-05:00Outlining The Radical Potential of PolyamoryWith the last of my classes finally wrapping up I've been looking forward to blogging with renewed vigor. My problem lately has been less about not having anything to write and more about having too many subjects I want to tackle at once. I've decided it would be best to start really digging into intersectionality and tie together some of the concepts I've started explaining with my blog. After <a href="https://www.circlesanctuary.org/index.php/pagan-spirit-gathering/pagan-spirit-gathering.html" target="_blank">Pagan Spirit Gathering </a>in mid-June I'll almost certainly be on a Pagan writing kick so in the mean time I'm going to tackle a few Polyamory concepts.<br />
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I want to begin by taking a look at what I consider to be the potential for Polyamory as a practice and as a movement. I've already explained <a href="http://www.thorandthoth.blogspot.com/2013/02/what-is-it-polyamory.html" target="_blank">what Polyamory is</a> but now I want to look more at the possibilities Polyamory represents. Others have put forward some <a href="http://www.polyamoryonline.org/articles/polypolitics.html#top" target="_blank">lessons</a> for the building of a polyamorous movement but before we get to that we need to ask ourselves a fundamental question: what is the value of Polyamory?<br />
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I've tried to make it clear on my blog that I'm not an assimilationist. I reject the idea that mainstream society should be the ultimate arbitrator of what is and is not acceptable, and so I'm not interested in providing bullet points for how polyamorous people can serve the greater good of society as it's defined by that mainstream. Instead I'd like to point out the new things Polyamory can do on its own and with other activist movements in order to create a new, better society. <br />
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The obvious improvement would be just allowing everyone the ability to love multiple people without being pressured into choosing just one and facing the emotional backlash of that constraint. Many of us first discover Polyamory for the very obvious reason that we want multiple partners and this is the system which encompasses the fulfillment of that need. Poly people having full access to the relationship structures they want is a worthy goal all on its own. This is a valuable goal and a major polyamorous movement could push for this access.<br />
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That's a definite start, and right now this is about as far as the Polyamory movement, if such a thing exists, has gotten in its world-building. However, it's not very radical. Ideas of <a href="http://thorandthoth.blogspot.com/2013/03/fighting-for-polyamorous-marriage.html" target="_blank">Poly marriage</a> and the like mirror pushes for same-sex marriage and involve the same limitations. If we honestly want to create a space for Polyamory in the world we need to do it so that it can serve people other than straight, white, cisgender men with money. Otherwise the face of Polyamory will look more like Hugh Hefner than any major Poly blogger or activist alive today. Women who are already discriminated against for any expression of sexuality that isn't controlled by men would still be pushed away from having multiple partners, while men with power and means would be able to legitimize the casual adultery they currently commit whether or not their partners accepted it emotionally. People of color who already <a href="http://www.makezine.enoughenough.org/Is%20Gay%20Marriage%20Racist.pdf" target="_blank">lack equal state recognition and protection in marriage</a> would be disproportionately discriminated against in applications for legal and social support on the basis of having multiple partners, as compared to white people. Queer relationships, which have long had a component of openness or even Polyamory to them, have already faced this pushback by society and been called on to adopt straight-acting picket fence relationships, even as society continues to legitimize rich, straight, serial monogamist celebrities. Essentially: the legitimization of Polyamory would not reshape the existing system, it would merely etch new grooves into the existing system for new kinds of oppression and discrimination to flow through. This may work just fine for people that fit into a lot of categories in power, but let's keep in mind that even if you are a straight, white, cisgender man that just wants to date multiple cisgender women, a society that makes room for a triad of poor, black, Trans women won't keep you out, but a society that doesn't make that room will always be acting in ways which limit you, and every human being. <br />
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So how can we do better? Let's take a quick look at the negative systems that Monogamy reinforces and then I will explain how a radical approach to Polyamory can help to dismantle them.<br />
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Non-monogamous relationship structures exist in numerous non-Western societies, not necessarily in a style that we would want to mimic or would approve of, but that's relative and besides the point. We can look at them and see them existing. Look at 'em go! Insisting that different ethnic groups are more or less predisposed to non-monogamy gets very racist very fast, which is why people that do that came up with a scientific sounding phrase called "Evolutionary Psychology" to put that racism into objective-sounding scientific terms. Evolutionary psychology is one of the more prominent and problematic
pseudosciences that exists, so I won't try to pretend to know that we're
predisposed to Polyamory or Monogamy, instead I'll just say that Monogamy and Polyamory (usually expressed as Polygamy and rarely as Polyandry when it's culturally codified) are clearly culturally empowered regardless of what people would normally flock to. What this cultural discrepancy really means is that elements of western culture as a whole are constructed to keep people monogamous. This is called compulsory Monogamy and it does a lot of damage, but it's easy to see why it exists.<br />
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Money doesn't like to trickle down, but it does like to move in straight lines. Monogamy, if you're actually doing it, is a surefire way to make sure your money, time, and property all transfer to a direct descendent. Western society as we know it today was tempered in a feudal era whose power structure depended on "divinely empowered" royalty, and the only way to know for sure who Jesus was a fan of was that they were directly descended from a king. We now know that most of these kings were having sex with everything that moved, but they weren't allowed to act like it, and obviously if they couldn't get away with it those without money and power had to be pushed into the same system. Land stayed in family hands, money stayed in family hands, bastard children were incredibly bad for business. While we've seen a rise in adoption, partnerships developed out of love, divorce, and same-sex partnerships nothing has fundamentally changed in the past five hundred years in regards to the ways money and property move. Occasionally a lawyer ends up with it, or a family pet, but for the most part we're operating within the same framework as always. Money moves in straight lines, and rarely disperses outward to benefit communities. This is a big reason to keep Monogamy front and center in the Western psyche: if a dozen people hold money and property collectively instead of two (with the societal assumption being that the husband will control it solely) <br />it starts to look an awful lot like Socialism. <br />
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Besides strictly monetary reasons Monogamy serves as a powerful force for shame. <a href="http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2010/04/04/what-is-slut-shaming/" target="_blank">Slut-shaming</a> is completely decontextualized by an egalitarian polyamorous society. A woman can't be put down for having multiple sexual and/or romantic partners if that society empowers women to freely do so. It's the difference between calling a woman a Lesbian for wearing pants in the 1940's and doing so now. Restrictions on what our society allows a woman to do are the foundation for most gender-based oppression, with more violent acts being used to reinforce those societal norms. With our society being geared towards compulsory Monogamy, women are expected to find one person (ideally man) and settle down without straying or expressing her sexuality outside of that single person. As mentioned above powerful men have always flaunted this rule without the same level of societal repercussions. For instance, while many people felt it was grounds for impeachment, society as a whole never got as outright <i>angry</i> at Bill Clinton for cheating on Hillary as they did at Kristen Stewart (oh yeah, even I managed to hear about this and I deliberately try to avoid celebrity gossip) for not sticking with her much older co-actor (for that matter, how angry was everybody at the married man she was having sex with? That guy got all of zero flack for it). Monogamy also serves as a shaming agent for people of color and Queer people. Regardless of the standards, histories, and traditions in those communities regarding multiple partners the straight, white standard is the basis for judgement, and subsequent punishment. <br />
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When you look at an idea intersectionally it stops seeming so neutral and innocuous, doesn't it? The further you get outside of privileged identities the more the everyday operations of society turn into oppression, and Monogamy is no different. To put a counter to this, let's look at some ways Polyamory can form a useful addition to the various forms of activism already attempting to counter these oppressions.Keep in mind these aren't quick-fix solutions, just outlines of ways in which Polyamory may contribute to larger struggles than itself.<br />
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<b>Feminism - </b>Right off the bat the obvious way Polyamory can benefit feminism is that it evens the playing field in regards to sexuality. Even with the rise of radical forms of feminism which attempt to break away from patriarchal expectations instead of just trying to make room within patriarchal systems, women face pressure to conform to normative relationship structures. While men are able to get away with serial Monogamy single mothers, regardless of circumstances, are painted as bogeymen by politicians. Cheating men and women are given completely different cultural allowances for their behavior and their partners are given vastly different ranges of acceptable responses. By creating a society in which women, and other genders, have equal access to multiple partnership systems of patriarchy lose much of their ability to police women through their sexuality. <br />
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<b>Queer Liberation -</b> From the first moment a group of Gay men met in a bathhouse Queer identities have been shaped by non-monogamy. Modern attempts to whitewash this history to make it palatable to straight media and politicians are simply covering up a core aspect of what free sexuality represents. While Gay rights movements may not be advanced particularly far by putting Polyamory back into the culture, Queer Liberation benefits immensely from access to a system that allows for vastly different ranges of romantic and sexual expression that are as queer as the participants themselves. Polyamory is about re-opening the bathhouses, cruising in the park, and hooking up at the bar without sacrificing a sense of stability and loving wholeness when straight society insists you pick one or the other. It's an all Trans commune love-in, a Bisexual relationship that doesn't require you to be a <a href="http://loveisinfinite.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/attack-of-the-unicorn-hunters/" target="_blank">unicorn</a>, or any relationship that doesn't make you feel like you're doing something Dan Savage would talk about himself doing behind his partners back. While Queer Liberation is not about earning societal legitimacy so much as taking the space we deserve, by putting Polyamory prominently into that space we have the opportunity to create worlds of desire and choice that are vastly more intricate than the one-size-fits all offering of Monogamy. To put it simply: radical Polyamory IS radically Queer. <br />
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<b>Anti-Capitalism - </b>I haven't sat down and written up a "What is it?" article for Socialism, or Anti-Capitalism more generally, yet (which I guess I need to fix soon) so if my blog is the first time you're encountering these ideas this post might not be the perfect intro. For everyone more versed in the subject, Polyamory represents a style of communal living within a single chosen family. By seeing past the ideas inherent in Monogamy about the separation of people and relationships into tiny cookie-cutter segments, wide-ranging polyamorous families not only share resources with each other but help deconstruct the segmented nature of communities. If your extended family expands through some lover-of-a-lover-of-a-lover into incredibly wide expanses you're pushed to see people as being much closer to yourself and create deeper more meaningful communities even with people you aren't in a relationship with.Polyamory is a basis for creating a new consciousness focused on sharing of love, support, and resources in wide ranging ways which carve huge cracks into the foundation of Capitalism. Additionally, by expending definitions of recognized relationships beyond those which capitalist systems are able to readily shape to their advantage, Polyamory can help to derail oppressive financial systems which require money to flow in easily trackable ways instead of outward into a community.<br />
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These are just a few of the major ways radical Polyamory can support other styles of activism. More people living in a house together, or living off the grid together, could benefit environmental activism. While Polyamory does not correlate exactly to relationship styles predating western colonialism, by expanding the range of relationship choices outward from Monogamy we also disempower Monogamy's colonizing, Christianity-reinforced influence. If we're willing to open our minds to moving beyond our personal romantic interests and see how they reflect upon society, we as polyamorists can not only offer infinite love, but also infinite change.The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-10816131904431752432013-05-14T22:00:00.000-05:002013-07-05T13:04:23.533-05:00Quick Post: Talking Without Training WheelsI haven't posted anything in much longer than I'm comfortable with. Such is the power of the magic of finals. Beltane, May Day, and Pagan Coming Out day all fell by the wayside since my last post, and while I thought about sitting down to right something related to them if I didn't handle school first it would have put at risk my future prospects for school, housing, and insurance. None of this is what I want to talk about today, though. I'm picking and poking at some more important posts but today I have positive up-beat news for once.<br />
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I'm in a relationship again. It's been quite a while since this has been true and I'm all warm and glowy about it, even though most of the interaction between us occurs at a distance. I also have metamours (people that are dating my partner but not myself) for the first time and it's a unique kind of experience. As it happens my partner seems to draw in Queer loves like a magnet, and I can't blame them for pursuing zir.<br />
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Over the last weekend I had many incredible experiences as my now-partner visited and we formalized our relationship. I don't have zir consent to discuss some of them, although I will say they were revolutionary praxis at its best. What I can talk about is how amazing it is to talk to someone at a similar level. Not to suggest that most people I know are lacking in intelligence, nor to suggest that the conversations I do have involve someone that knows less about most subjects than I do (often quite the opposite) but rather that most people I speak to do not have the particular range of experiences and knowledge that I do. This isn't a value statement, most people just don't have the privilege to be able to spend six hours in a day delving into<a href="http://www.titsandsass.com/" target="_blank"> sex worker blogs</a> to make up for not knowing what the views of actual sex workers are. All I can claim to be is incredibly well read and fairly well spoken. My partner shares these traits, which was a large part of our coming to connect with each other.<br />
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When the two of us talk we touch on a variety of subjects, but being activists most of them have to do with queerness or other maligned identities. Normally when either of us discusses these subjects we bump into some problems. We're often speaking to people from outside our respective communities that don't have the background on issues we feel passionately about. Other times we're speaking within the community but about subjects that aren't on the radar of the average (if there is such a thing) Queer student just trying to get by. Why more people don't spend their time thinking about ways to clarify concepts of privilege and oppression in their daily lives is largely beyond me, but it's the sad truth of the matter. This all means that when we bring up complex ideas put together from a dozen different sources we're more likely to spend the conversation explaining background than diving right into things. I'm thankful to know a lot of people for whom this isn't the case, and when it's not we get to do something my partner playfully referred to as "talking without training wheels."<br />
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It's amazing to talk to someone that self-analyzes and self-corrects. Someone that doesn't need to hear zir argument is ethnocentric because there's already a clarification of the limits to which the argument would reasonably apply. Someone that says things like "not that that isn't also valid" and "because <i>clearly</i> that makes a difference" and knows just why I'm smiling in response. Someone that not only has a broad understanding of zir own identities but of the needs and identities of others. These aren't things we get to take for granted in a heterosexist, racist, classist, tranphobic, and otherwise oppressive world. They are not givens, even if they should be. So when we talk with someone like ourselves, someone that knows that anger is justified and when a phrase is problematic, it's an incredible thing. It's beautiful. It can cause a deep and abiding connection over the simplest of topics. It's something more people deserve to feel.<br />
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While it's not easy to explain the value of abstract learning until you've actually had it, this is definitely one of those things more people need to do. When you realize you've spent so much of your life talking with training wheels, bumping into people with your words and crashing awkwardly against concepts, the freedom to converse down mountain trails and through shaddowy woods with someone you love is intoxicating. I highly recommend taking the time and learning how.The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-38499351611935648622013-04-22T23:55:00.001-05:002013-04-23T08:15:45.710-05:00My Face Was in BostonI can't get over how similar the captured Boston bombing suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and I look. Oh, there are certainly differences, I'm something of a European mutt, but it's easy to envision him as an ancestor of mine at a young age. Someone that grew up in the area could probably visually distinguish my ambiguously defined Russian ancestry's bone structure and what-have-you from Chechnyan if such a distinction exists, but we're both Caucasian with ancestry from roughly the same region and I see my face in his face.<br />
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We're similar in a lot of ways. In addition to sharing a roughly similar appearance we're also fairly close to the same age. We've both lived most of our lives in the United States. We've both been subject to an indifferent or hostile system and felt alienated. According to mainstream society we both hold extremely radical views (though in very different directions). While there is no way I can sufficiently condemn his decision, and that of his brother, to murder innocents in pursuit of whatever goals he had, I recognize that if I had been raised in different circumstances I could easily have been Dzhokhar. His path isn't mine and I have no interest in becoming a killer for my ideology, which will forever create a gulf between us, but as I look at his picture I still see in his face a face not unlike my own.<br />
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Society doesn't see my face in his face. In fact, society, mainstream media sources, and politicians do not see his face at all, because his face is problematic. His face, like my face, is a white face. He is quite literally Caucasian. His face is disruptive to all of the carefully laid propaganda about brown faces and brown bodies being the source of terrorism in the United States and throughout the world. That's why it's being ignored in favor of his religion which fits into that messaging more easily and is more easily recoded back to a hatred of brown faces and bodies. <br />
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Despite having a similar face to one of the actual Boston bombers I will never be <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/04/the-saudi-marathon-man.html" target="_blank">tackled and have my apartment raided due to the color of my skin.</a> My ancestry won't be called on to question my patriotism, and in fact my utter lack of patriotism won't be connected to my ethnicity at all. I won't be accused of sympathizing with the bombers by people that see me on the street just because of my ethnicity or perceived ethnicity. I do not have to fear a sudden wave of anti-Russian violence. Russians, as well as most groups that make up my ethnic background, became generically recognized as White when it was convenient for the United States to incorporate us into a coalition to stand against civil rights for African Americans. Now I'm immune to the level of racism that has swept the media and Boston itself since the bombing. <br />
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White people aren't profiled. We aren't even acknowledged as a group until we're placed in some sort of conflict with People of Color. We make up <a href="http://www.nmcsap.org/statistics.html" target="_blank">the majority of reported rapists</a>, are responsible for the majority of terrorist attacks in the history of the United States, are <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2377408/" target="_blank">more likely to use illegal drugs</a> than any other racial group, and are more likely to be serial killers. In fact, while the casualties of the Boston bombing are by no means insignificant and each of them deserves justice, more people in the United States have been killed by <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/06/us/wisconsin-temple-shooting" target="_blank">White Christian terrorists</a> within the last year than died in Boston. None of this is used as evidence of a deficit in the morality of Whites, or for that matter Christians, as a whole. White school shooters aren't even discussed as being White. They're "mentally unstable". Racism can't touch us, because it's a system we've invented to elevate ourselves. <br />
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Instead of targeting me and others that look like me in the wake of an act of terrorism, or really any tragedy deemed newsworthy, people across the United States are looking for other scapegoats. When a shooter is a <a href="http://gawker.com/5973485/the-unbearable-invisibility-of-white-masculinity-innocence-in-the-age-of-white-male-mass-shootings" target="_blank">White male from the United States</a> he suddenly becomes subject to mental instability. Gun control debates after shootings by White men are based around keeping guns out of the hands of those with mental illness, even though they are <a href="http://bazelon.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=3VY7DQkm_DA%3D&tabid=655" target="_blank">more likely to be victims of gun violence than perpetrators.</a> Gun violence in major cities is addressed as a deficit in the <a href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/02/reactions_to_president_obamas_chicago_guns_speech.html" target="_blank">stability of families of color</a>. White Christain bombers like Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph have their religious identities debated, invisiblized, and denied. Muslim bombers regardless of race are seen as representing all Muslims and a deep current of violence inseparable from Islam. Immigrants are stigmatized while terrorists born and raised in the United States are not grouped on that basis.<br />
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These ideas are playing out across a national stage once again in the wake of the Boston bombing. Politicians are feeding into Islamophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment, media outlets like CNN are playing on racial fears to stir up anti-Arab violence, and gun control debates will again be sidelined to pass laws increasing the size of the police state. To quote <a href="https://twitter.com/drones" target="_blank">a news monitor on drones</a> on Twitter, somewhere someone is certainly whispering in ears the question, "Could drones have found the Boston suspects faster?" Immigrant communities will be targeted broadly enough to blanket as many brown bodies as possible under the label of "terrorist threat."<br />
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There will be no attempts to address the ways in which American culture radicalizes people. No mainstream voice will speak up about the ways anti-immigrant sentiment fostered this violence. No source of this violence outside of the bombing suspect himself will be sought. No one will ask if this violence is characteristic of White men. No one will look at me twice because of my resemblance to a terrorist.<br />
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We won't come to see why the construction of this debate is itself breeding hatred, desperation, and future acts of terror. The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-70897269132148386582013-04-14T15:16:00.001-05:002013-07-05T13:03:39.225-05:00I Was NOT Born This WayEvery time I come back from a queer space I'm stuck in a particular mindset. It becomes incredibly hard for me to interact to the rest of the world with anything except disdain. This mindset makes it hard to do school work, to talk to people that aren't Queer, and sometimes to feel anything other than anger. Basic functions of the world like money and clothing take on a sickly look. My social cohesiveness breaks down completely. I want to spit at people and deface billboards.<br />
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Every single person in the world should feel this way. <br />
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This is a fury that the world beats out of oppressed people on a daily basis. It denies the validity of our anger. Mainstream US society maintains that there is something disruptive about an <a href="http://www.racialicious.com/2011/05/18/quoted-yes-black-women-have-a-right-to-be-angry/" target="_blank">angry black woman</a> and something natural about being sexually assaulted. That it is unnatural to be Trans* but natural to experience <a href="http://www.questioningtransphobia.com/?p=638" target="_blank">"Trans Panic"</a> and murder a Trans* person. <a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/105887484/Occupy-Wall-Street-Strike-Debt-The-Debt-Resistors-Operations-Manual" target="_blank">Debt resistance </a>is against the law but there have still been no prosecutions of bank CEOs that approved illegal credit default swaps and left millions homeless. The United States is claiming more indigenous land in Guam to facilitate a new Korean War, food prices are low because of slave labor, and it's illegal in more cities every day for homeless people to sleep anywhere other than too-small, underfunded, often-abusive shelters. We are expected to live with these realities because they serve the status quo of the privileged. They determine what is right, natural, and acceptable. All resistance is ridiculed, infiltrated by FBI, beaten by police, and derided by capitalist media outlets.<br />
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Quite frankly I'm sick of being spit on, and I want to spit back. <br />
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To that effect I need to address a gross discourse that gets bandied about by the last people that should be embracing it. Let me be absolutely clear: <b>every time someone says "born this way" a Queer person dies</b>. They curl up into their closet, certain that if they were "really" Queer they would know it by now, unequivocally, and the fact that they have doubts is evidence of their simply being the straight, cisgender person everyone always told them they were. All of their feelings are chocked up to the same feelings of same-sex attraction that evangelicals claim everyone feels the first time they're caught having a gay affair. The lack of "acceptable" narrative from their birth ("I've always liked boys/girls", "I've always felt like I was really a man/woman" are the only "acceptable" narratives) means that someone questioning their sexuality or gender identity must be wrong. They're not just hearing the messages from the homophobic preachers, they're hearing the homophobia and transphobia from themselves and from the Queer community telling them their fluidity is problematic. We are actively culling our own ranks by regurgitating -phobic discourses to people that may well BE us if only they knew there was an option open. <br />
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<a name='more'></a>The terms heterosexual and cisgender actually came about after the terms homosexual and transgender, but these identities were all created by cisgender heterosexuals (CisHets) in order to police the lines of "natural decency." The line in the sand was biological absolutism. The CisHet definition from the start was that everyone is born CisHet and anyone that was anything else had chosen that form of deviance. This paved the way for "corrective" treatments, Queer bashing, imprisonment, chemical castration, the asylum eras, and denial of basic human rights to shelter, sustenance, and bodily autonomy.<br />
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"We were born this way" is not designed to contest these designations but to echo them. As if somehow insisting that biological absolutism exists will turn it into a shield instead of a bludgeon. Let me assure you, as a Pagan, oppressors have no qualms about accepting choice so long as you choose to be one of the members of the oppressive group. There is no power structure in the United States targeting Christianity even though they aren't "born that way." This is the essence of the problem. We're arguing with CisHet people about the basis for our identities instead of arguing that they shouldn't have the right to question our identities regardless of their origin. Instead of demanding that church and state recognize our inborn queerness and stop harming us for something that isn't our fault we should be asking why they get to define who is acceptably subject to violence. We're arguing to a referee that plays on the other team.<br />
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By accepting at face value the way in which oppressive groups have framed our existence we will never be liberated from that oppression. Again: oppression is not derived on the basis of choice or non-choice, it is derived from a perceived superiority of some groups over others and the empowerment of that superiority through systemic reinforcement. The high school bully and conservative politician don't actually care if we're born this way or not, they're trying to beat our identities out of us because they simply aren't acceptable things to be. It may be scary for those bullies to hear that their own sense of identity is questionable, and that they're just as likely to be Queer or Trans* as the people they're oppressing, but they ARE just as likely and placating them isn't going to stop the violence. Arguing for this sense of absolutism IS violence. It is the basis for violence. Violence is excused because the superiority of one group over another is preserved and that is all that group needs to legitimize their violence. <br />
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I'd like to take a moment to address concerns that what I'm saying may be disempowering to Trans* people that need to assuage cisgender society in order to receive backing for medical aspects of transition. I realize what I'm saying may sound like "you weren't really born the wrong gender, you're making it up" and I want to make absolutely clear that I am not arguing that. Instead, what I am arguing is that the cisgender establishment getting to decide whether your narrative is "acceptable" or not, whether you're "Trans enough" is obscene. I am not suggesting that transitioning reinforced gender binarism, or that by claiming that narrative in order to get the go-ahead to transition (or because the standard narrative does fit your real experiences) that you are somehow betraying yourselves and Trans* people everywhere. I recognize the need to maintain legitimacy in situations in which it presents violence. My argument is entirely with the long term discussion that is held around these issues. I'm calling for an end to <a href="http://freethoughtblogs.com/nataliereed/2012/04/02/harry-benjamin-syndrome-syndrome/" target="_blank">"Harry Benjamin Syndrome" Syndrome</a> (and for people to read everything Natalie Reed has ever written because she has probably said all this much better than I'm saying it at least twice by now).<br />
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I don't have similar assurances for LGB people. "Born this way" may build sympathy with some of the oppressive elements of our society but a gentler tyranny still leaves us with the boot tenderly pressed against our throats. It's time we stop begging the church and the state to stop slandering and beating us and start to stand up and loudly demand the rights we deserve. All of them, <a href="http://thorandthoth.blogspot.com/2013/03/why-im-not-excited-about-same-sex.html" target="_blank">not just marriage</a>. When we started this fight, really got going, in the 60's we recognized that the boot stomping on us, and we didn't try to reason with it, we tried to get it off of us. This included anti-governmental rhetoric, and quite frankly it aught to come back. Does that sound scary? Does picking a fight with the government, Occupying Queer, sound like a step too far? That should give you some idea of how very little this mainstreaming argument accomplishes. It is not a threat to the power that continues to beat down on us. <br />
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I am not content with the way I was born. I am not willing to define myself as a temporarily depressed heterosexual, out to make my way as close to the standard as I can. I am Queer because everyone should be Queer. Everyone, regardless of their object choice, should reject the standards by which straight is defined. It needs to be torn down, completely dismantled, and all of its power stripped from it with the same force and vitriol that its existence has inflicted on us. We need to get rid of "straight." Not the word, that's not good enough, and not the people (I'm not talking about violence against all straight people, if that isn't already clear), but the power structure that creates straight and "other." Every person in the world deserves the ability to be Queer, to defy normativity, to deconstruct their gender, love, body, sex, and desires and wear them in strips around their bodies like a rainbow flag. I made myself this way, and you can make yourself you.<br />
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So quit basing yourselves on the rhetoric of a people that are not you. We should be indoctrinating children by being proud and open even in front of curious little eyes. We should be blowing up the nuclear family by living the lives we want and resisting state violence against queer families. We need to stop holding bible studies to better argue that our identities don't displease the Christian god and start leaving churches that refuse to foster us for who we are, regardless of why we are. We need to stop allowing cisgender standards of care to be the only respected standards of care and cisgender-approved Trans* narratives to be the only Trans* narratives. We should admit that we are destructive to society because our society is broken, cruel, and needs to be put out of its misery. We need to get off of defense and onto offense or we'll never stop being left on fences. The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-78215955250258239692013-03-31T16:15:00.001-05:002013-07-05T13:02:57.540-05:00Why I'm Not Excited About Same Sex MarriageAs a Queer identified person I've found my romantic and sexual attractions range a fairly wide gamut, including some people that would be identified as being the same sex as me by the state and/or federal government. With this in mind same sex marriage sounds as though it could have a major impact on my life and open up all sorts of possibilities. Additionally I largely see same sex marriage as a foregone conclusion even if it may take a while. So why aren't I more excited?<br />
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As people that know me have gradually realized I'm a marriage resistor. I see the institution of marriage as unnecessary to create stable families and view the insistence on marriage promotion amongst politicians as a method to subtly control individuals. I also see a number of the every day acts of violence and oppression perpetuated against Queer people as being more important to focus on than, and in many ways unrelated to, the legal status of same sex marriage. Naturally this has caused a lot of conflict with the mainstream Gay rights movement that seems to be all about marriage as a way of obtaining legitimacy in the eyes of straight society. <br />
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I've spent the last few days discussing these views with friends and I recognize that I'm not likely to change many minds. Rather than attempting to explain why people should be opposed to marriage, or why the community as a whole should at least be shifting its primary focus from marriage to other issues without fully opposing marriage, I will instead be outlining what I see as being the limits of same sex marriage. These aren't pros and cons, I recognize in many instances that same sex marriage does offer concrete benefits to people that are being deprived of them at great personal cost. Instead this is merely an explanation of what those benefits are, and where they're lacking. My hope is that those in the Queer community who currently have their eyes on marriage will not see this as an attack on their personal ambitions, but rather a call to recognize that if they choose to see same sex marriage as a stepping stone to larger progress they cannot allow themselves to lose momentum when it's achieved.<br />
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Also, this list is not equally balanced. I don't see it that way, I see the institution of marriage as a bad thing. It's not fair and I won't try to make it sound fair. Take my bias for what it is. <br />
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Finally, this is not a commentary on the legitimacy of either law being currently debated by the Supreme Court. Proposition 8 and the Defense of Marriage Act are both despicable and unjust laws and I hope they are overturned with the strongest language possible. This is entirely a commentary on the seeming focus on marriage as a worthy end goal in itself. Now, without further adeiu:<br />
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Same sex marriage WILL allow you to share health insurance with your partner.<br />
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Same sex marriage WILL allow Queer people the legal right to visit their partners in the hospitsal. <br />
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Same sex marriage will NOT provide you with health insurance. If you are poor, homeless, unemployed, or some combination of the three and cannot afford health insurance for yourself the legalization of same sex marriage won't change that fact.<br />
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Same sex marriage will NOT provide with health CARE. The with healthcare considered to be an industry rather than a right the boundaries of what one is able to receive for their personal care is largely decided by the insurance industry. Coverage for mental healthcare, surgeries and procedures meant to reduce or eliminate ones body/gender dysphoria, and access to birth control, contraception, and abortion will not become more comprehensive or affordable should same sex marriage become fully legalized.<br />
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Same sex marriage will NOT guarantee access to healthcare that is hospitals are legally obligated to provide to you. Refusing to treat someone at an emergency room is already illegal and it hasn't kept <a href="http://www.masstpc.org/issues/health-care/" target="_blank">Transgender people from being refused care in life-or-death situations or otherwise mistreated by healthcare providers</a> (please note that this particular link involves the Affordable Care Act which itself may or may not impact the numbers provided over time). Same sex marriage will have no impact on this practice.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage WILL require the state to respect established monogamous partnerships between two men or two women. <br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT force individual agencies of state authority, such as the police force, to respect your marriage. Homphobic or transphobic police officers may still act to separate you from your partner with the pretext of a legal system that is homophobic and transphobic in its design. Once separated these entities may dispute your right to legal visitations or delay access. Your identity may still be used as a way to bias a -phobic jury as to your guilt. You will still be at higher risk of police harassment based on your identity or perceived identity. Your identity may still bias judges in child custody cases. <br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT <a href="http://taboojive.com/intersex-part-two-marriage-equality/" target="_blank">guarantee equal marriage access for intersex people. </a><br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT impact state or federal restrictions on Polyamory. However it may open up many unsuspective same-sex moresomes to felony charges related to bigamy or adultery. <br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT guarantee access to publicly provided resources such as welfare that require an individual to overcome the bias of a supervising official.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT force the state to respect the marriages of Queer People of Color. The state doesn't even respect heterosexual marriage amongst People of Color and has shown itself to be perfectly content ripping families apart in support of the prison industrial complex. Homophobia will still exacerbate this process. <br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT force the United States military to provide equal benefits to the spouses of Queer soldiers. Nor will it shift the allotments of military funds to benefit soldiers over outdated Cold War style weapons systems that benefit the weapons manufacturers.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT stop Queer people from being killed by the United States government in any country the military is currently at war with or occupies. Bombs are indiscriminate.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT encourage the United States government to intervene in the mass slaughter of Queer people even in countries which we currently occupy. Even during the occupation of Iraq the United States government has failed to curb or eliminate <a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/rights/iraqi-government-behind-targeted-gay-killings-says-bbc" target="_blank">the execution of Queer people by the Iraqi government</a>.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage WILL have a positive impact on the economy.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT create an economy that is centered around the needs of individuals instead of consumption. While wedding cakes and lavish parties allow Queers to participate in a ritual of capitalistic excess there is no way to be sure that the economic stimulus will be meaningfully spent to help Queer people. Increased tax revenue may be given as a subsidy to a corporation or faith based initiative whose actions directly harm Queer people. <br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT reduce<a href="http://www.endhomelessness.org/pages/lgbtq-youth" target="_blank"> the huge percentage of Queer and/or Transgender people on the streets. </a>It will not cause straight parents not to abandon or harm Queer youth, stop abuse and assault in shelters or the adoption system, or increase funding for programs that help homeless Queer youth. Additionally, strong proponents of same sex marriage such as New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg also promote "quality of life" laws which are incredibly harmful to homeless people of all stripes but especially damaging to gender non-conforming youth and Queer youth of color. <br />
<br />
Same sex marriage WILL allow Queer people to pass on inheritance to their children.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT end employment or housing discrimination which prevent Queer people from having an inheritance to pass on.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT guarantee legalized adoption by Queer parents or prevent biasing in the adoption process. <br />
<br />
Same sex marriage WILL provide tax breaks and to married Queer couples equal to those given to married straight couples.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT provide a structure that guarantees safe and respectful elder care for Queer people.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage WILL allow same sex partners to apply for immigration.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT remove biasing in the immigration system.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT increase opportunities for Queer undocumented workers to immigrate safely without the threat of deportation and state violence. <br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT increase the rate at which Queer people in countries in which their lives are threatened receive asylum. <br />
<br />
Same sex marriage WILL provide a sense of psychological benefit that comes from the legitimacy of having ones partnership recognized legally.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT end Queer suicide and is not certain to reduce it.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT end child abuse against Queers and is not certain to reduce it. <br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT make conversion therapy illegal.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT end Queer bashing.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT end homophobic or transphobic bullying. <br />
<br />
Same sex marriage WILL allow Queer people to have lives more like those of straight people with less restrictions.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT make straight people respect Queer people, our properties, our families, our bodies, or our lives.<br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT make the Human Rights Campaign care about Transgender people for anything other than money. <br />
<br />
Same sex marriage will NOT guarantee future reforms. <br />
<br />
Sadly this is just a brief list, I'm sure others could contribute even more. However it is a snapshot of just how far we still have to go. I don't want it to sour your wedding cake for you, or make you think you don't deserve a day to celebrate. What I do want is for you to remember when the cake is eaten, the dancing is done, and the celebration is over that the rest of us are still hungry, shambling, and in desperate need for the next step to be taken. There can be no slowing down, no faltering, and absolutely no doubt that marriage is NOT the end of Queer needs and Queer rights. The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-88013673140059804792013-03-25T23:37:00.001-05:002013-07-05T13:01:56.498-05:00Labeling the BoxesWords are important in activism. It's not just about saying the right things, or explaining things in the right way, it's also having the right words to describe what it is you're talking about. That's why I made the (probably futile) effort to coin the term <a href="http://thorandthoth.blogspot.com/2013/02/your-god-not-god.html" target="_blank">gnostivism</a>. Words can be harmful but they can also be helpful in mitigating harm. Identity labeling is considered by some to do more harm than good, and I really disagree with that. So I'm going to try to explain why I see it as beneficial, at least for right now.<br />
<br />
The main argument against identity labeling is that it only serves to divide people. There is a certain notion amongst particular groups of progressives that by eliminating all distinctions between people we'll be more likely to treat each other equally as human beings. This is a fairly positive idea all by itself, and isn't a bad thing to want to work toward, depending on how one does that work. I would say that, in fact, I do believe that in an ideal world identity labeling will be de-emphasized and people would be allowed to just be people, in whatever way they happen to express that. However, jumping to the elimination of labels in any situation short of an ideal world can lead to a lot of problematic responses to real world issues.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Imagine you've been having a feeling. It's really affecting you and has been for a while. You have trouble sleeping, it's making you really depressed, you feel alienated, and you're getting desperate about it. You go to a friend that you trust to try to describe it, but it's vague so you aren't quite sure how. You tell your friend that you have trouble thinking about parts of your body as belonging to you. You don't associate with the way the people around you are acting. You can't understand the appeal of sex at all and you think there might be something wrong with you. Now, we don't live in a perfect society. In the real world there's a good chance this will end with one less friend and no help given, but let's argue that this isn't the case and your friend really wants to help. So how does this break down with and without identity labeling?<br />
<br />
A policy of "just treat people like people" often discourages one from actually informing themselves about the needs of different identity groups, because that information is irrelevant to the goal of being kind to everyone. Not to say that this is the case for everyone that believes in label elimination, but this is often the interpretation of the philosophy for those who are members of mostly dominant groups. So in this instance your friend can assure you that you're a good person, tell you there's nothing wrong with you, and maybe act as a general sort of comfort. It's a nice reassurance to have but doesn't do anything concrete to address your discomfort. You're pretty likely to keep feeling depressed, and if people notice that you aren't acting like most of the people around you are you'll find yourself open to harassment and harm. There's no bad intent held by your friend, they just don't know any better than you do what's going on.<br />
<br />
On the other hand, if your friend has seen, or heard of, or been exposed to an explicitly defined identity group outside of societal norms they might be able to point you towards something concrete. They may not be able to tell you that you are in fact an <a href="http://www.asexuality.org/home/" target="_blank">asexual</a> or <a href="http://genderqueerid.com/gq-terms" target="_blank">bigender</a>, because the visibility of these particular groups is low, but they might be able to suggest that you're Transgender because they saw a news special about that community at some point. Suddenly there's something you can search, hundreds of books and articles you can read, a community that you can find online to talk to that may be able to lead you to your specific identity. You could find real ways to help yourself feel comfortable in your own skin, and have an understanding of your feelings. That's a lot of progress because of a word, and that word only came to you because of exposure to a group that uses it. <br />
<br />
Having a word for something you're feeling makes it real and concrete. This is partially a function of the human mind, we remember connections better than ideas, and partially because that word means that whatever you're feeling has been felt by at least one other person. There is something incredibly reassuring about knowing that you're not alone in your feelings and an offer of a shoulder to lean on is hard pressed to compare. <br />
<br />
In this instance those that oppose identity labeling would make the argument that the social construction of these identities in the first place is what leads to people feeling of displacement or dysphoria. They argue that ultimately oppression can only exist in a society that has individual identities which it can insert into a hierarchical system. On one level this is absolutely true, but it fails to take into account the fact that our society currently has hierarchical systems already in place using words connected to ideas to enforce them. Men are considered better than woman and man and woman have (usually incorrect) definitions attached to explain them. If we get rid of the words "man" and "woman" (not to mention the dozens of other gender possibilities) without disassembling the hierarchy first we still have a structure in which some people oppress others through <a href="http://www.thegloss.com/2012/11/12/career/bullish-life-men-are-too-emotional-to-have-a-rational-argument-994/" target="_blank">male-coded derailing tactics</a>, or the suppression of others through physical violence. The behaviors don't stop being taught and encouraged, but there is suddenly a lack of effective methods to identify the victims and allow them to organize.<br />
<br />
Historically genocide and slavery in the United States continued even after religious colonization swept away the divisions that supposedly separated the humans from the heathens. Our modern understanding of race evolved out of equally evolving excuses to continue to oppress people of color even after they embraced the supposed olive branch offered by Christianity. Indian-Americans were long considered legally White by the US government due to Aryan ancestry, but they were still subject to oppression on the basis of their skin color. Queers have been bashed, imprisoned, and institutionalized by heteronormative power structures for over a century without ever identifying with a label or even necessarily having one. It's only because of the recognition between individuals that they share a common identity that these groups have been able to push back against these structures to begin with, and that fight is still a long way from done.<br />
<br />
I would posit that when you claim to be <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/colorblind/201112/colorblind-ideology-is-form-racism" target="_blank">racially color-blind</a> or assert that pronouns don't really matter, <a href="http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-they-and-the-many-reasons-why-its-correct/" target="_blank">so why not use "he" instead of "they,"</a> that this does more to disrupt the support systems of the people you're talking about than it does to end their suffering. The ideal of a fully unified society is just that, an ideal. Living as if the ideal is here now is a privilege that only those who aren't already suffering can afford. For the rest of us that ideal will take a lot of work to achieve. Whether you're with us or not you shouldn't be trying to take our labels away from us, because we don't just use them to label our boxes. We use them to label our flags as we march, fight, and demand that unification and equality. The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-20006283228460692992013-03-18T09:54:00.000-05:002013-07-05T13:01:09.299-05:00The Horror of Steubenville and Every Other City<b>Trigger Warning:</b> Rape, Rape culture, misogyny, violence against women, victim blaming, possibly incoherent swearing by me, ALL links contain potentially triggering material<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a> By now I have to assume most people that follow the news are aware of the Steubenville case, but for those of you who live in a much happier world than I a court in Ohio finally found two high school football players guilty of the brutal rape of a young woman. Daily Kos has <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/01/03/1176096/-The-Steubenville-Gang-Rape-A-Timeline" target="_blank"> a timeline of the events leading up to the trial</a>, including the efforts of the city of Steubenville to derail efforts to even get the trial going, and the fact that if it weren't for KnightSec and other brave hacktivists from Anonymous this story might have been swept under the rug months ago and a young woman might never have found justice.<br />
<br />
Many people much smarter than me have already written on this case from numerous angles. Alexandra Goddard of <a href="http://prinniefied.com/wp/?COLLCC=3161614243" target="_blank">Prinniefied.com</a> for instance broke the case itself, and so I'm linking to her blog's main page as a sign of my absolute respect (it's worth reading everything she's been writing on the subject). <a href="http://bitchmagazine.org/post/everything-you-didnt-want-to-know-about-the-steubenville-rape-case-but-feel-like-you-have-to-kn" target="_blank">Bitch Magazine</a> has a slightly longer timeline (I should note neither of the timelines have been updated to include the end of the trial) as well as some details on the heinous activities of "bystanders" who were not convicted in the case despite clear involvement, <a href="http://persephonemagazine.com/2013/01/04/in-defense-of-internet-vigilantism-the-steubenville-rape-case/" target="_blank">Persephone Magazine</a> has some well-deserved praise for the vigilantism of KnightSec that helped make this trial happen, and <a href="http://gawker.com/5991003/" target="_blank">Gawker</a> has some well-deserved scorn for CNN correspondent Poppy Harlow and anchor Candy Crowley for their absolutely heinous portrayal of the convicted rapists as victims of the justice system.<br />
<br />
I won't attempt to do a better job than the amazing women that have been pursuing this tooth and nail from the get go, and I won't try to rehash what they've already said because they've said it better. Go check out the links, read through their commentary, and recognize what they have to say. Even more than the mainstream coverage of this entire fucking horror show it's worth reading the commentary of people that don't feel the need to play nice as to not offend pro-rape football coaches in their target demographic. Instead of retreading that ground I feel the need to add my voice to a chorus of people of all genders and call for an end to the disgusting, toxic masculinity and rape culture that fueled every aspect of this crime and the defense of it.<br />
<br />
The boys that tried to defend the rapists by hiding pictures and videos they'd taken (and in some travesty of justice aren't in jail for) of the assault and rape of Jane Doe are horrible people, but they aren't unique. They're everyone at a party that isn't willing to do something to stop someone from taking advantage of a drunken (or drugged) partygoer. The idea that something excuses that behavior, that there is some acceptable basis for rape, is in those drunken heads not because they're a hidden evil that has crept into our society but because they weren't taught that you don't have to say "no" before an action is non-consensual. Parents do not teach children this, because to those parents rape is the fault of the woman. From that point on children grow up thinking rape is the fault of the woman. Only the victim is blamed.<br />
<br />
The football coach and parents of Steubenville that blamed Jane Doe's rape on her getting drunk at a party (and whether she was actually drugged or not doesn't matter, she was fucking unconscious, there is nothing acceptable about penetrating an unconscious woman under any circumstances) aren't raving loons in the wilderness. They're products of a system that insists that women are responsible for the actions of the men that surround them because men aren't smart enough not to fuck anything that moves. This is about men insisting that men are too immature, too incapable, too violent and disturbed not to rape and then criticizing women for expecting better of them. Their arguments are echoed in every city in the country. As I right this it's the night after St Patrick's day and I guarantee that by tomorrow someone will have made all of their arguments all over again about a dozen new sexual assault victims.<br />
<br />
Even the rapists, especially the rapists, are not some kind of feral beasts dragged out of the woods and temporarily mistaken for football players. Trent Mays and Ma'lik Richmond are what it looks like when boys and men are given a sense of entitlement to the bodies of women, told that violence is acceptable as long as at least some of it happens during a football game, and reassured by every news program, movie, magazine, tv show, and authority figure that if they rape someone it'll be the woman's fault anyway. These two despicable monsters that deserve to rot away for much longer than one-to-five years are in fact despicable human beings that could just as easily be any other entitled young men that aren't taught any better.<br />
<br />
Our sex-ed courses don't explain what consent means because consent might lead to kids having sex before marriage. Parents don't explain what consent means because they often don't know themselves. Authority figures don't condemn sexual entitlement, violence, and machismo because the people in power are men that value those things. People at parties don't speak up because they don't know what to do, what not to do, and how to react when that line is crossed.<br />
<br />
Every single one of us is just another person at the party with a potential rapist watching to see if we're going to say something or do something to stop them. It is our responsibility, every single one of us, to do better and to teach others to do better than what has been done by every despicable human being in Steubenville. We can raise a generation of men that are told not to rape, and no amount of "criminals can't be taught" will matter because they're out children to raise. We can stop the crimes of this generation from being swept under the rug, going by without notice, or even from happening at all if we're willing to act every time. We can do better. We have to. To do anything else is to let rape continue.<br />
<br />
-Blessed Be<br />
<br />
P.S. if you'd like to explain to CNN why sympathizing with rapists isn't acceptable for "serious journalists" let them know at <a href="http://www.cnn.com/feedback" target="_blank">their feedback page</a> and give them a shout out on Twitter @CNN if you feel like explaining publicly, or you're like me and prefer to use a measured response via e-mail and a long series of expletives in public you can do both<br />
<br />
<b>Update:</b> Change.org has a new <a href="https://www.change.org/petitions/cnn-apologize-on-air-for-sympathizing-with-the-steubenville-rapists#share" target="_blank">petition</a> up demanding an apology from CNN<br />
<b>Update 2:</b> FOX news makes it clear they're still the most worthless, misogynist, and pro-rape "news" agency in existence by <a href="http://www.alternet.org/media/fox-news-airs-name-16-year-old-steubenville-rape-victim" target="_blank">outing the underage rape victim on national television </a>The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-22099653922074202532013-03-07T15:02:00.000-06:002013-03-07T15:03:40.268-06:00What My Queerness is Not<b>Trigger warning: </b>some homophobic language <br />
<br />
I'd like to take a moment to clarify, because sometimes there can be confusion.<br />
<br />
My queerness is not homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, or just plain sexual. It is not dependent on who I am attracted to, who I am in a relationship with, or who I am married to.<br />
<br />
My queerness is not based on genitalia, chromosomes, hormones, gametes, musculature, broad shoulders, long legs, body hair, deep voice, or sex assigned at birth. <br />
<br />
My queerness is not my long hair. It is not my black-painted finger nails. It is not my eye shadow, the way I shave, or my desire to have my facial hair permanently removed. It is not dependent on whether I'm wearing a skirt or jeans. It does not come off with my clothes. It does not come off in the shower. <br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br /><br />
My queerness is not workplace appropriate. It is not the going the same direction the company is going. It is not conductive to efficiency. It is not going to go over well with HR. It is not interested in being part of the corporate family. It does not believe in the CEO's vision. It is not going to wear a tie.<br />
<br />
My queerness is not quiet. It is not going to sit silently in the back of the room. It is not unobtrusive. It is not subtle. It is not going to just let that stand. It is not interested in making sure all voices have equal weight in the way I am described, identified, labeled, and commodified. <br />
<br />
My queerness is not designed for your comfort. It is not staying on message. It is not showing how similar I am to my elected "representatives." It is not just like you. It is not going to church. It is not an eagle scout. It is not a white man in a suit appealing to all the things we have in common. It is not interested in meeting the standards you have before you're willing to empathize with another human being.<br />
<br />
My queerness is not afraid of the words heterophobic, politically correct, oversensitive, argumentative, problematic, unsatisfiable, sinner, subversive, weird, freak, faggot, cock-sucker, and especially not radical.<br />
<br />
My queerness is not negatively affected by other people fighting for their rights. It is not afraid of being seen with sex workers. It does not feel compelled to assert it's cis-ness to gain validity. It is not interested in the framing of rights of queers and rights of people of color as a competition. It is not threatened by standing with union activists, anarchists, or communists to fight for a common cause. It is not worried about being looped in with "those people."<br />
<br />
My queerness is not your queerness. <br />
<br />
My queerness is not just an identity<br />
<br />
My queerness is not just a political statement.<br />
<br />
My queerness is not going away.<br />
<br />
I hope that clears everything up.The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-48442446739697394072013-03-01T13:26:00.000-06:002013-07-05T13:00:35.152-05:00Fighting For Polyamorous MarriageMy favorite podcast, the excellent <a href="http://polyweekly.com/" target="_blank">Polyamory Weekly</a>, just had a show on the subject of <a href="http://polyweekly.com/2013/02/pw-350-to-fight-or-not-to-fight-for-poly-marriage/" target="_blank">polyamorous marriage</a> (so nice, I linked them twice) and whether or not it's something we should be fighting for as a movement. I always enjoy these kinds of discussions and I actually have strong feelings on the subject, so I was planning to just call in when I realized that I have one of those fancy blog things now. Suddenly I'm able to comment on things soapbox style, so I thought I would do that instead.<br />
<br />
Most of Cunning Minx's points on this show come from an article by Mistress Matisse (Poly bloggers have the best names) called <a href="http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/you-may-now-kiss-the-bride-and-the-other-bride-and-the-other-bride-and-the-other-groom/Content?oid=15991850" target="_blank">You May Now Kiss the Bride and the Other Bride and the Other Bride and the Other Groom</a> so I'll be discussing those first.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
<br />
The Mistress' first point is about what constitutes Poly marriage<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For starters, poly-
marriage organizers would have to agree on a precise definition of what, exactly, poly marriage even <i>is</i>.[...] No matter how you phrased it, any workably pithy legal
definition would necessarily exclude certain configurations of people.
And poly people get uncomfortable at the idea of excluding people—it
reminds us unpleasantly of monogamy. So that's a problem.</blockquote>
This concern echoes a larger concern about what relationships are supposed to look like. In Polyamory we've worked hard to break away from the idea that relationships have a set model or standard. When I speak to classes or do presentations on Polyamory (this is something I actually get to do now! People ask me to come and talk about things for an hour and I get to do that!) I talk about something I call Polyamorous Theory. Basically this refers to the broader implications of Polyamory as opposed to the day-to-day scheduling and dish-washing arrangements that actually fill the time when you're dating multiple people. Polyamorous Theory functions similarly to Queer Theory but focuses specifically on relationship construction. As a movement, if you can call us that, we aren't trying to make standard Monogamous relationships but with three people instead of two, we're trying to blast down the "societally approved relationships" box wholesale and let every individual decide what kind of relationship they want to be in. If we're approaching marriage we should be doing it the same way.<br />
<br />
Instead of bumping our heads together trying to decide what Poly marriage would look like, how about we agree on some legislative goals that benefit people in every different kind of Poly arrangement? Instead of pushing for marriage right away let's start by fighting against the laws that make our current arrangements illegal. In Wisconsin for example both <a href="http://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/944/III/16/2" target="_blank">adultery</a> and <a href="https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/944/II/05" target="_blank">bigamy</a> are class 1 felonies as of 2006. These laws and others are specifically constructed in such a way that they cause legal problems for anyone in a Poly relationship that is married or has a married partner.<br />
<br />
Additionally there are numerous other legal battles we could be fighting that don't look like marriage but allow for Polyamorous marriages to exist. Fighting to make kinship for the purposes of hospital visits based on the patient's desires rather than legal marriage or biological relation only would be a great start. Instead of trying to hop on the assimilationist bandwagon to share insurance why not fight for universal healthcare like other "developed" nations? The battle to overturn oppressive cohabitation laws is as important to Polyamorous relationships as any piece of paper handed over by a judge should be.<br />
<br />
This leads into Mistress's second point<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But let's say the poly community comes up with a way of defining "poly
marriage." Then comes the price tag: It costs five bucks to file an
initiative, but persuading voters to change the law in favor of poly
marriage would take a lot of skillful and extremely expensive political
marketing. How many gay/lesbian bars have I been to where a drag queen
or a leather daddy had a microphone in hand and was working the tipsy
crowd like a carnival barker for marriage-equality donations? Too many
to count. Unfortunately, poly people are not oppressed enough to have
our own bars. We only have potlucks, and no one drinks very much at
those (although I have very much wanted to on the few occasions I
attended one). I shudder at the idea of Obama-esque daily e-mails from
Poly Marriage Now begging me for money. But fundraising infrastructure
is key—and queers have it, poly people don't.</blockquote>
There are a couple good points here: we don't have the money and we don't have the infrastructure to fight a marriage equality fight. I think we all know some people that do, though. As a member of the Queer community, and quite honestly a radical marriage resister (strong feelings, I finally mentioned this halfway in), I've been vocal about trying to get the Gay and Lesbian rights movement off their assimilationist kick and towards a push for real equality that serves poor Queer people of color, old homesteading Polyamorists, and affluent white Gay professionals equally. I'm not alone in this call, and a mass of activist Polyamorists joining the ranks of those already seeking broader reforms in numerous areas could help to shift attention of those with the momentum to those fights. Kinship agreements, decriminalization of alternative styles of family-building, there are a lot of groups already fighting these fights and we can serve as a bridge between them. Popular opinion may take money to move but there is already money going into issues that could really use more people to publicize, inform, and work towards them.<br />
<br />
Finally Mistress Matisse raises the specter of Polyamorous divorce.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Now, a mortgage isn't a marriage license—although I probably could have
gotten a divorce faster and cheaper than I could have sold one-third of a
house. But I'm extremely glad now that I didn't make a legal and
financial commitment to two other people that I would have had to
dissolve while going through an intense emotional upheaval with one of
them.</blockquote>
I won't argue that divorce would just go away or stop being difficult if we'd only get over some particular cultural ideas. Okay, maybe it would, but even I don't have a solid idea for how that would come about. Instead I would argue that this still keeps the discussion in terms of the heteronormative marriage ideal, plus one. It's to no one's benefit trying to push people towards a shared house and a picket fence if that isn't what they want. It's to our benefit collectively to have that as an option available to us, but not to make it the only option that allows us access to whatever it is we expect to get out of marriage. Minx points out that she is personally too introverted to give up the free time she has living on her own. That's understandable, but she could still probably benefit from a law protecting her right to have sex with her married partner. She would probably benefit from a legal arrangement that allows all of the partners she chooses the ability to visit her in the hospital (as long as they gave her some free time between visits). She might even benefit from a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/02/california-multiple-parents-bill_n_1644613.html" target="_blank">multiple parents law</a> if she decided that she has an interest in raising children. All of us should at least have these options available to us.<br />
<br />
So should Polyamorous people be fighting for marriage? Probably not. Even aside from the points above marriage is already a broken institution for a lot of the people that are able to access it. Polyamorists would get far more out of addressing the inequalities inherent in laws based on family structure, expanding benefits given to married couples to more groups, and making sure that we aren't considered felons if we are married. Whether we're ready to become a real movement and fight for any of these things is an entirely different question.The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-45208299564006191912013-03-01T12:07:00.000-06:002013-07-05T12:59:50.730-05:00Quick Post: Intentions and Bad CookiesDepression is horrible. I know this is a pretty controversial sentiment, right up there with bee stings aren't fun and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0171804/" target="_blank">Boys Don't Cry</a> is "not a feel good movie." Depression is so horrible that when combined with a persistent illness it's very difficult to drag one's self out of bed some mornings, or even some afternoons. However, things are expected of me. Health and mental well-being are great concepts and all but they don't serve the capitalist machine or help me fulfill my get-a-piece-of-paper-to-signify-my-intelligence plans so I need to prioritize. Since that's hard to jump right into from a position of "if I lay here all day and don't move, maybe I'll feel better tomorrow" I'm doing some blogging first to get warmed up for the important things like journal entries that aren't graded on content. <br />
<br />
Here's a slightly more controversial fact: intentions don't matter. It's kind of depressing when you think about it (or maybe that's just me) because intentions are given so much importance in our social interactions. "It's the thought that counts" may be as well recognized for its passive aggressive implications as it is for its honest sentiment but it's still a cultural standard for our feelings on intentions. In America, at least, we've really embraced this concept that well-meaning gestures are much more important than shallow but practical ones. When a surprise goes wrong because your partner turned out to be allergic to the chocolates you bought it's still supposed to be better than if you had ruined the romance by asking beforehand. Romance is a good intention, surprise is a good intention. Here's a better cultural standard: "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."<br />
<br />
We treat intentions like some kind of magic spell. Simply by informing someone that our intentions were good and pure there's some kind of expectation that the mistakes we made in the actual implementation should be less painful to us. Imagine if surgeons used this logic. "I only meant to cut out the cancer, I didn't mean to lacerate all those internal organs. Hey, there's no call to get upset, I didn't do it on purpose!" The well-intentioned speakers expect to get away with their mistakes, in fact they will actually be upset if something that they didn't intend to be harmful is called out when it actually causes harm, simply because they're well-intentioned. Consequences aren't nearly as important as disposition for the person that doesn't have to receive the consequences.<br />
<br />
Would someone ever forgive a drunk driver for causing a loss of life solely on the basis that their only intention was to get home before the police caught them? It's absurd to imagine.<br />
<br />
So what does this mean for those of us in oppressed groups? We're continuously bombarded with messages about who we are, what we want, what is expected of us, and some of those messages are harmful. Actually, I would say the vast majority of what oppressed groups hear in the world is constructed in a way that causes harm to their sense of self and well-being. That's part and parcel of being oppressed, it is itself an aspect of oppression. Some of those messages are aimed at us by people that honestly just want to help. The concerned uncle that's sure just telling you to "suck it up" will help beat back the depression, the police officer that tells a group of young women to watch what they wear when they go out at night, and the <a href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2013/02/reactions_to_president_obamas_chicago_guns_speech.html" target="_blank">politician</a> that tells an African American audience that the best way to reduce gun violence is to have stable monogamous marriages are all probably genuine in their desire to help produce a solution to problems they see. They're still wrong to say it, the effects of their words can still lead to incredible suffering for the people that they're unconsciously disempowering. They ARE at fault for these words.<br />
<br />
My point is simple: you are judged based on what you actually say, not what you mean to say. Your words are harmful based on what people hear, not what you think they SHOULD hear. If you are striving to be a genuinely good person this means you have to take responsibility not just for your words but for the effect they have and respond in kind. Don't be defensive, don't try to shift the blame to how the other person perceives what you said, just accept that they have had a reaction and you now need to operate from that situation instead of the one you envisioned. This applies to everything: misgendering, racial insensitivity, slurs you didn't know where slurs.<br />
<br />
There are no rewards for trying not to be a horrible person and not making it. There's no way to request that reward in a well-intentioned manner. No one wants to give you a cookie just for trying, and if someone does it's probably full of salt. The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-24941193394340494662013-02-25T17:59:00.000-06:002013-07-05T12:59:20.962-05:00The Gender Room<span class="userContent">It has one toilet and one sink. There is no
stall and no urinal. The door locks. What makes it a men's room? </span><br />
<br />
<span class="userContent">Perhaps the lack of changing table means that it has asserted itself a sense of resentful masculinity? Is it the kind of room that despises even the slim progress of equality that has lead to nurturing fathers, single fathers, and pairs of fathers? Could it disdainfully relegate those duties to the women's room down the hall, no doubt full of frills and lace and things more appropriate for changing a baby?</span><br />
<span class="userContent"><br /></span>
<span class="userContent">Does it silently criticize those that don't fit its image of masculinity? Are the business students that pass by too slight for it? Is it upset by my long hair, shocked that a man would walk through the world this way? What would it feel like if I had come in wearing a skirt?</span><br />
<span class="userContent"><br /></span>
<span class="userContent">Can it imagine the ill woman, clutching sadly at the locked handle of its sister room? Will it consider the man standing outside its anonymous door, not obviously suggesting its singular nature, and wondering if he passes well enough to go in or if he must find the tucked away gender neutral restroom, laying unadvertised in some other hallway, before his need to go becomes an infection? Would it refuse to serve its purpose if they'd entered? Would it stop its long months, still too newly built to have gone years, of uncommenting silence in order to object?</span><br />
<br />
<span class="userContent">Does it resent its label? Has it always wished to be some other sort of room? Would it sympathize with those people that have rejected their own societal label? Can it even tell when someone walks inside it what society has labeled them from the moment of their birth? </span><br />
<span class="userContent"><br /></span>
<span class="userContent">There is nothing that passes in or out, no person, no substance, no horrific drunken expulsion or clogged overflow that is more degrading, more obscene, more thoroughly revolting than the image it holds no responsibility for. The sign that proclaims something the room can never convey on its own, has no reason to convey, has no need to convey. The glaring fault, terrible only because of all of the things that must be the wrong in the world before that label would exist. Like a scarlet letter, labeling all who enter as under the sway of society's judgement. </span><br />
<span class="userContent"><br /></span>
<span class="userContent">Superfluous.</span><br />
<span class="userContent">Ridiculous.</span><br />
<span class="userContent">Meaningless.</span><br />
<span class="userContent">"Men's Room" </span>The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-83087428103240596482013-02-20T22:34:00.000-06:002013-07-05T12:59:01.013-05:00Your god, Not GodWriting a blueprint for a new coalition is hard. That's all I can say to people that I know are waiting for a particular post to go up. In the mean time I want to tackle something on the religious end of the issues I care about. I've been fairly focused on queer issues for a while and I think it's time to shake that up.<br />
<br />
There is a form of oppression in our culture that I think is
often only recognized spiritually but which has very tangible effects. Feeling something spiritually is difficult to quantify exactly, especially for people that aren't religious. There also aren't solid terms for different forms of religious oppression the way there are for other kinds of oppressions, so I can't point to a concept that can be more easily recognized by people with more removed relations to faith. For a working term, admittedly one that doesn't quite roll off the tongue, I'll be using "Gnosivism".<br />
<br />
This refers to the assumptions that<br />
<ul>
<li>Everyone in a society has the same religion, or that everyone is hearing the same thing from the divine, as the mainstream of the dominant religion . </li>
<li>The dominant religion of the culture is superior to all other religions</li>
<li> And that members of other religions or those lacking religion can be freely mistreated, harmed, oppressed, discriminated against, or litigated against.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Gnosivism is derived from the Greek word "Gnosis" or "knowing" which in the modern world means an experiential knowing of the divine, and refers to something along the lines of <a href="http://www.jmu.edu/safezone/wm_library/Heterosexism%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf" target="_blank">heterosexism</a> or <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cissexist" target="_blank">cissexism</a> (bonus: the lack of good explanations of cissexism online compared to heterosexism is itself cissexist) which is why I chose to structure the word that way. So for example in the United States most Christians will assume everyone they meet is also Christian, and if they seem nice they may also assume they're of a similar mind when it comes to knowledge of God. That's gnosivism all by itself. In the US Pagans are also fairly likely to assume people they run into outside of spaces specifically designated for other religious groups are Christian in some manner similar to the mainstream in that area, which could be considered internalized gnosivism. We'll often assume, based on their sheer number, that whoever we meet is probably Christian and may even have strong feelings about how we're going to hell. Meanwhile in Egypt Western travelers might express gnosivism by assuming everyone they meet is Muslim. Obviously racism can act as a major component of gnosivism. No oppression is a vacuum.<br />
<br />
Now that that's established (and a damn fine word it is, if I do say so myself) we need to look at why it's a problem. On the spiritual level this is the problem of having only
one god available. Tangibly it's a problem of allowing a single religion to hold societal
influence.<br />
<br />
I should note that this is destructive for a lot of people even on a physical level.
Religious groups that have power get to make the rules. If you don't
like them there's a long history of executions, assassinations, and
bombings to reinforce the "will of" deity X. These destructive acts are absolutely worth addressing, at length, but those conversations have already been started elsewhere so I can take my time jumping in. My purpose with this post is to outline how gnosivism works as a concept so the people in those conversations potentially have a word to use and can solidify the acts they experience into a clear system.<br />
<br />
The effect of this aspect of religious oppression we don't actively consider, but are still affected by, is in how we view ourselves in
relation to our religion (if we have one). How validly we view consider our own belief in the face of a plurality of beliefs, how we are able to engage with our own faith community and with interfaith, and the views others have about our faith communities or about the Atheist/Agnostic communities are all affected by the existence of gnosivism.<br />
<br />
My personal belief ( which I guess would be considered part of my
theology, so you can totally discard it due to its lack of objective facts and just focus on the effects) is that people are called to by deities if they're meant to
worship. Some people only hear one, some hear many, some don't hear any
and all of these are equally valid. You aren't more or less moral for
hearing any deity, it's just how things work spiritually. That's my view
anyway. <br />
<br />
If this is the case, when you're in a situation with a culturally empowered
religion and you have something about yourself that extends outside of
what that religion allows (identity, beliefs, actions, things that make
you feel personally fulfilled but aren't harmful outside the context of
that belief system) you're confronted with a conundrum. How do you
square religion with what you're doing? For some people this is pretty
easy, we recognize deities that are supportive and affirming want us to
partake in part of their belief system, or we realize no deity has ever
made themself known to us in any way and embrace Atheism. For others
this is harder, because our society tells those people "What you're
doing goes against our god's will. Your behavior needs to shift to match
our god." A lot of people really internalize this because that is how
societal messages work. That's one form of gnosivism in play. <br />
<br />
How does gnosivism affect those that internalize it? Well, when you have a society assuring
everyone that there's only one deity available to them, that only one
exists, and that at least one exists, it's harder and harder for people
to find themselves in that belief system when it diminishes them as a
person. Some people in the LGBTQ community have found peace in
Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or other belief systems that have rules
against "that sort of thing" with a new reading of how their texts are
meant to be, guided through their relationship with their deities.
Others have felt further and further alienated, and this drives many
people that are believers to suicide or horribly damaging self-hatred.
They feel honestly called to faith, but can't seem to square the circle.
The problem here is that "called to faith" should not only refer to the
societally empowered faith. Someone hears a god speak to them, and the
people around them say "That's Jesus" or "That's Allah" or
what-have-you, and because that's the only messaging they get that's
what they believe, which brings in all these conflicts with themselves.<br />
<br />
Atheists have another related problem: they don't hear anything. To them everyone around them seems to be hallucinating, and the hallucinations don't particularly like the people that don't hear them (I'll be covering the "Religion is a Mental Illness" meme soon if it helps explain why I feel fine acting irreverent about something intrinsic to me). People will assure children, even adults, that would otherwise be perfectly happy just not having religion in their lives that their lack of religion is due to some kind of character defect. Even when you're actively aware and fighting this kind of rhetoric it still hurts when it comes from someone you love, or someone that has power to affect your life.<br />
<br />
What's worth considering now is how SHOULD the system be? What do we begin working for when we acknowledge the presence of gnosivism? Instead of trying to fit our personal journeys on the path of the
Christian just because that's the messaging that our society allows to
be presented, we should recognize the voice of A god is not always the
voice of "big G" God. Your purifier may be Apollo, your sacrificer may
be Odin, your prophet may be closer to The fates than Mosses or
Mohammud. Maybe the reason it's so quiet "out there" in spiritual space is that you don't need someone to talk to you. That isn't to say those deities and figures don't actually
match up to anyone, but we need to stop buying into the idea that it
matches everyone just because a lot of people in those beliefs are
saying it's true. Nothing about this is any easier than eliminating any other systemic biases, but it's a tiny bit easier if we can use a common language to talk about them. Hopefully this is a start.<br />
<br />
P.S. - I'll probably submit Gnosivism to Urban Dictionary sometime soon, but I'm a big fan of the word so I'm purposely claiming credit using it here.The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-35248013927795114682013-02-17T22:53:00.000-06:002013-04-23T00:24:46.676-05:00I Will Not Go QuietlyI was planning to put together a post today discussing the formation of a coalition. I actually have about a third of it put together already, but I'd hoped to finish it later tonight. Then someone told me that I should go back into the closet.<br />
<br />
It doesn't matter who it was. It doesn't matter that they probably meant it as honest advice with no actual malice. If anything that makes it worse. Quite honestly it also doesn't matter that they eventually tried to apologize. It happened. <br />
<br />
I am a Polyamorous, Pagan Queer. I am a man and I wear skirts. I march at rallies, I vote, I speak, I protest. I have strong feelings about the society that allows homelessness and foreclosures to exist in the same nation and I'm vocal about them. I am also white, fairly well off financially except for my crushing debt burden, and fairly young with no dependents. I have more of an opportunity to be out than most people in the oppressed categories I'm in, but I still face all the prejudices and oppressions that coming out brings. I walk my campus in femme cut clothing along with masculine. I wear things associated with women: makeup, nail polish, skirts and leggings. Pictures of this are already online and there's not much chance of getting them off now, not that I'd want to. I've peppered the internet with essays, blogs, posts, and for several glorious seconds I've even appeared in Daily Show footage for speaking at a rally. I am out.<br />
<br />
To be out to me means to be free. To have cast off my closets and my broom closets and my men's section clothing racks and women's section clothing racks. To have sat across from my parents and said "I love both of these women, and they love me. This is because of who I am" even knowing we wouldn't last beyond college and even knowing they might not understand. To have stood in front of hundreds of people, sat on panels, stood before classes, and told them I'm Queer. To have stood up before professors and said "I'm Queer and I am NOT okay with what you said."<br />
<br />
To me being out means to be watched. To know that only one police officer needs to be the wrong one to come across me walking at night in a skirt and make an assumption, and so to fear all of them at least a bit. To know that my employment and my housing are always in a tenuous state because of a lack of legal protections, and no will to back up those that exist. To know that a gendered bathroom is never an entirely safe space for me.<br />
<br />
For someone that has never had my experience, someone apathetic to activism, to tell me that because it might be safer for me in the short run I should go back in the closet is an absolutely heinous act. Closeting someone is an act which dismisses all of their identities as being secondary to the ones they are expected to have. It is an act of intense violence, stripping someone of their autonomy and acting as an apologist to their oppressors. Pushing someone back into the closet is no less than a dismissal of the entire movement that spawned a response to the AIDS epidemic. If someone wants to be closeted, or needs to be closeted out of concern for their own well being, they should never be condemned, but to tell someone that is free of the closet that they would do better to go back embodies the force of all subtle oppressions, microaggressions, and assumptions into a phrase. "This world is better than you. Your place is where it put you. It's better if you just see that."<br />
<br />
If I lose my home, if I cannot be employed because I raised my voice for the thousands of people that cannot raise theirs, I would rather live on the streets like Sylvia Rivera than to allow myself to be silenced. If I am subject to violence I will face it as has every activist before me that refused to be moved, to be pushed away, to be quieted, to be closeted. Let my name be sung in a hall somewhere like a hero, shouted out like a demand that violence be addressed, that suffering be addressed, that oppression be addressed, and that the apathetic not sit idly by because I went out with my head up and out. <br />
<br />
I refuse. I reject. I deny. Unequivocally, without exception and in no uncertain terms: The Closet. I am burning my closet down, right here, and right now. Here I stand for all the internet to see.<br />
<br />
-Thorin SorensenThe Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-3475534484907901942013-02-16T10:25:00.001-06:002013-07-05T12:57:16.932-05:00MBLGTACC part 3: Identity Caucuses and Allies<a href="http://thorandthoth.blogspot.com/2013/02/mblgtacc-part-1-unpacking-mblgtacc.html" target="_blank">Part 1 is here</a><br />
<a href="http://thorandthoth.blogspot.com/2013/02/mblgtacc-part-2-polyamory-and-politics.html" target="_blank">Part 2 is here</a><br />
<br />
"I hate it when allies talk," is something I was told by a close friend after <a href="http://www.mblgtacc2013.org/" target="_blank">MBLGTACC</a> was over and we were discussing our experiences in different identity caucuses. For the first time in my life I've been able to understand this sentiment, and it's a heavy one so I'm taking a whole post to break down what it means to me and potentially what it should mean to allies. The first part of this post is largely based around experiences at MBLGTACC, and so it's related primarily to the LGBTQ community, but in relation to the allies themselves it doesn't matter what group they're allies of. This is important content to understand.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Some background: I'm a big fan of allies in a lot of ways. I'm proud to have had the privilege of speaking at an Ally Day march and rebuking <a href="http://katebornstein.typepad.com/" target="_blank">Kate Bornstein's</a> famous quote that "we don't need allies, we need members." I've said that as a member of the Polyamorous community I'm thrilled to have Kate Bornstein as an ally. The first time I ever attended MBLGTACC I did so as a passionate straight-identifying ally with barely a hint of the queer man-in-a-skirt I'd eventually become. That same conference I attended a Bisexual/Pansexual/Fluid caucus as someone trying to better understand the feelings of same-gender attraction. Ultimately I didn't find myself identifying within that community but it was one of the stepping stones that led me to recognize Polyamory was feasible in the real world and to finding my own Queer identity. <br />
<br />
Some more background: An identity caucus is an event at MBLGTACC, and possibly other queer conferences, that allows members of a particular identity group to get together and talk about issues relevant to their group. At some conferences caucuses are closed, which means that only members of the identifying group can enter, and some are open which means that people not of that group can enter. In the past closed caucuses have had problems with people of color being visually assessed for group membership which led to a reassessment of how caucuses should be held. As far as I'm aware this was not the reasoning behind having open caucuses this year at MBLGTACC, it was a public relations calculation. That means that regardless of the validity of allies being in caucuses generally the open caucuses this year were sleazy.<br />
<br />
<br />
To get down to the meat of the issue what really needs to be discussed is the role of allies in queer space, more generally in what could be considered member-only spaces when talking about other communities. Let me start by breaking down the background.<br />
<br />
First off, there is something incredibly wrong with the fact that I've had the opportunity to speak at an Ally March but no pride marches because there aren't any where I live. I won't take back anything I've said about the value of allies, and more importantly (to me) I won't break my rule of making a post specifically about my campus (and for that matter I'm not that big a fan of corporate-choreographed pride marches to begin with). What is an issue is that the role of allies in many queer spaces is given more emphasis than the actual queer people those spaces are supposed to be designed for. Secondly, when I was a straight ally at MBLGTACC I was completely obnoxious. Someone had informed pre-feminist-me about the existence of something called "conference sex" and as someone that hadn't discovered feminism yet I felt entitled to it and definitely made some people uncomfortable with flirting. I took up time at the Bi/Pan/Fluid caucus trying to sort out my own issues instead of listening and allowing people that couldn't do their sorting elsewhere to wait. If I could go back and yell at myself I'd do it. If anyone that attended that caucus reads this, I'm sorry. <br />
<br />
I believe that allies have an important role to play, despite valid criticisms from the Queer community about how they're playing that role and disagreement over whether that role really exists. That role does not grant additional privileges from the community. You do not say 100 supportive things to LGBT people and earn access to some kind of super secret life bonuses. You can't be-a-decent-human-being yourself into being an honorary Queer. Why not? Because what allies express when they say they should be able to enter queer spaces or use reclaimed language IS privilege. Those things they're asking for aren't things that communities are obligated to hand out to everyone that hangs around long enough, they're resources that members of the in-group fought their whole lives and often died for. Safe spaces are still new. Safe spaces in which a police officer can come onstage and introduce her partner, like MBLGTACC, are radically new. For allies to see something shiny that we've only managed to pick up for a tiny fraction of the time our movements have existed and insist that they, the people who have always had safe spaces, always had the right to speak openly about whatever they thought, and already have the 23 hours a day and 364 days not dedicated to an identity caucus, deserve a chance to hold it is not only wrong, it's vile. It doesn't matter how nice my gold dollar looks to a millionaire, I don't owe them any time with it. I was never owed the time that I took from the caucus I sat in on as an ally.<br />
<br />
When you become an ally to a community your goal should be eliminating the privileges you already have, not keeping them when you're outside the community's line of sight and claiming to deserve equal time when you're in it. Your responsibility when you are in a space set aside for a group you aren't a part of is to listen and, more importantly, to leave if you're asked to. Everywhere else you can go in the world you get to talk, to claim that you're being oppressed by not being able to speak in a single room is the height of privileged vanity. Having lost ten minutes of time with people I could truly identify with and might never see again to someone that seemed to have just wandered in by mistake is enough to make me frustrated and angry as a Polyamorist. Some of the groups in other caucuses have experiences that, quite realistically, cannot be talked about in front of members of the group responsible for their oppression. To assert that your own presence is more important than the feelings of safety of the other people around you, or to assert as MBLGTACC's planning coalition did, that the inclusion of allies is important enough for public relations that those feelings don't need to be considered, is disgusting. They aren't the actions of anyone that should be allowed to consider themselves an ally to a community.<br />
<br />
<br />
So I would say to my friend, "Don't hate it when allies talk in your caucus. An ally wouldn't talk."The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-13930396876106615782013-02-14T14:52:00.003-06:002013-07-05T12:55:29.410-05:00MBLGTACC part 2: Polyamory and Politics<a href="http://thorandthoth.blogspot.com/2013/02/mblgtacc-part-1-unpacking-mblgtacc.html" target="_blank"> Part 1 is here</a><br />
<br />
A few more days out from <a href="http://www.mblgtacc2013.org/" target="_blank">MBLGTACC 2013</a>, the Midwest Bisexual, Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, Ally College Conference, I'm ready to took another look at the conference and assess feelings that aren't just longing to return. It wasn't a perfect conference, as much as I loved it, and although it was the most inclusive of Polyamory of any MBLGTACC I've attended that also left more room open for things to go wrong. So with a queer movie night behind me (Watched "<a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0203166/?ref_=sr_4" target="_blank">Together</a>" and apparently Scandinavian comedies are based around the idea that if as many people as possible are miserable it must be funny for SOMEONE and romances universally mean always going back to the man that hit you) I'm ready to tackle the Polyamory workshops and caucuses, how they worked, how they didn't, and what they could have done. <br />
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I've started adding handy labels to posts to designate the level of understanding you'll need to have of a specific community to jump right into a topic. This way I won't have to be as extensive with providing definitions for terms I've covered before in each new post. If you're coming here for a Socialist perspective for example (which I really am going to get to extensively once the MBLGTACC stuff is properly wrapped up) but aren't really familiar about Queer identity or Polyamory, there are some articles you should check out before others will make sense to you, and vice-versa. So introductory posts that explain issues entirely from scratch get labeled as "Basics" while in-group topics will be labeled with "Intermediate" and theory that is deep in-group will get an "Advanced" tag. If you don't know much about Polyamory feel free to check out my <a href="http://thorandthoth.blogspot.com/2013/02/what-is-it-polyamory.html" target="_blank">What is it? Polyamory</a> article (now updated to include more readings on the subject) and some of the linked websites before trying to understand this post. <br />
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This was the first year of my attending MBLGTACC that they were hosting Polyamory workshops and I made sure to make it to all of them. One of the first set of workshops at the conference was <i>Polyamory: A Consensual Alternative to Traditional Monogamy</i> presented by Eddie Rich, midway through Saturday was a workshop called <i>Poly-tics</i> hosted by Kelsey Friemoth and aimed at Polyamorists as well as Polysexuals (Bisexuals, Pansexuals, or others that have attraction to more than a single gender), and a Polyamory identity caucus which allowed Poly people to get to know each other and discuss important issues in a more organic format. Three events focusing on one identity, including one of the limited number of caucuses, is an impressive offering from the conference. Eddie Rich mentioned during the first event that they had discovered their own Polyamory at an event at MBLGTACC more than three years ago and it seems to have been the only workshop in that time to discuss it. So this has been a big jump and I want to say how much I appreciate the MBLGTACC planning coalition for allowing Poly people the opportunity to represent ourselves and for including an accurate and respectful definition in your glossary of terms, and to the heads of workshops and caucus facilitator that gave us a voice. <br />
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That said, some of the events raised concerns worth addressing. Eddie Rich's Polyamory workshop was thoughtful, covered basics of Polyamory while also getting into more advanced ideas, and they were incredibly quotable. The event was worth it if only for their amusing descriptions and explanations of ideas and earned even more points for being really informative. So it was saddening when Eddie spoke from an informed and authoritative position on the seeming disposable nature of secondaries. "Extracurricular Activities" may not sound quite as hierarchical as "secondary" but it still implies they're the people you drop when they start taking up too much of your time with your primary. Some secondary relationships are purely sexual, some of them are romantic and just aren't as close as the ones between two primaries, but all of them are real relationships and deserve the same level of consideration as any relationship between two people. As the workshop progressed there was a little more time to flesh out the reality of primary-secondary interaction but it was still a dark spot in an otherwise fantastic talk.<br />
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<i>Poly-tics</i> wasn't fantastic. The workshop was described in the MBLGTACC guidebook as follows:<br />
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Polyamory is when a person experiences the ability of loving more than one person. Polysexuals are people who identify themselves as capable and willing to be attracted emotionally, physically, and romantically to more than one sex. Social norms dictate that both of these are ambiguous and therefore undesirable. In this workshop, we will explore why that is and how we still conform to these norms within the LGBT community. </blockquote>
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Based on the last couple lines of the description and the name being a play on politics, it seemed reasonable to assume <i>Poly-tics </i>would cover some of the politics of the LGBTQ community as they related to Polysexual identities and Polyamory. For those that don't know these are topics of major importance. The erasure of Bisexual identity in Gay and Lesbian spaces is a tragic but common experience, Pansexuality gets the same treatment and doesn't even make it into the acronym, and Polyamory throws a monkey wrench into the concept of "marital equality" as Gay rights organizations attempt to frame it. We have a lot of ground to cover when it comes to politics. None of this came up. The actual presentation portion of the workshop was around 30-40 minutes out of an hour and half, and focused almost entirely on defining the terms being used. Only a single token reference to "stereotypes sometimes come from within the community as well" touched on the potential politics of <i>Poly-tics</i>.<br />
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I can't really blame the presenters for the way <i>Poly-tics</i> fell apart. One of the problems our community has is that it still hasn't found its voice. We've gotten used to presenting Polyamory on a 101 basis and explaining how people can have this kind of relationship but we haven't steeled ourselves to deal with the fact that our relationships are still illegal in the eyes of the state. Instead we've sat on the sidelines of the Gay and Lesbian rights movement peering in, often without an understanding of the much more radical approach that paved the way for the current generation of gradual legislative victories. Rather than asserting our own voice as a community we've been content to live our lives and express our loves as if our own relationships were a casual side project to the more important rights work of our other identities. So what is it you say when a room of Polyamorous people comes to talk about politics? Many of us don't even know where to begin.<br />
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I hope to start changing the trend of Polyamory being talked about as if it exists in a vacuum outside of other rights struggles on this blog, in my own community, and hopefully at the next MBLGTACC. Our rights and needs are as important as any and we need to recognize this. On that note, my final MBLGTACC post will be on the subject of the conference identity caucuses, including the Polyamory caucus, and the subject of ally inclusion.<br />
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<a href="http://thorandthoth.blogspot.com/2013/02/mblgtacc-part-3-identity-caucuses-and.html" target="_blank">Part 3 is here</a>The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-27012598809545822592013-02-12T01:04:00.004-06:002013-07-05T12:54:53.264-05:00MBLGTACC part 1: Unpacking MBLGTACC<div align="LEFT" style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
At the moment I am recovering from an incredible weekend at the Midwest Bisexual, Lesbian,
Gay, Transgender, Ally, College Conference otherwise known as
<a href="http://www.mblgtacc2013.org/" target="_blank">MBLGTACC</a>. This is one of the largest annual conferences in the
country, certainly the largest in the Midwest, that is specifically
about queer issues. Over 2000 people of all different identities,
some of them far beyond the scope of the included acronym, converge
on a college somewhere for a single weekend of discussions,
workshops, networking, learning, teaching, and in some cases having
conference sex. I hope that explains the delay in posting this. People don't sleep at MBLGTACC so much as they close their eyes briefly between late night events and early morning ones, and I've been thrust straight back into normative society and homework without processing time. Expect several posts in this series but don't expect them all right away.</div>
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I want to spend some time
unpacking my own experiences at the conference, and the conference in
general. As amazing as the conference was for me there is still a barrier of
entry that includes monetary requirements, college attendance, and
travel. There is a value to sharing some of the insights gained in
this setting with people that couldn't access it, and allowing
additional processing opportunities for the people in attendance.
While I hope that much of my blog will be easily accessible without
needing to locate a ton of outside readings, some posts are
predominantly aimed at those that have an understanding of a specific
community already. While I will try to provide some links for
“obscure” terms my expectation is that people already in
the LGBTQ community will be the ones most interested in MBLGTACC. </div>
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If you're utterly lost this may be a post to explore again after I've
had the chance to elaborate on more topics.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>As a final note of disclaimer this is a description of my personal experience. I cannot do justice to the
concerns over accessibility issues or the attempts to delegitimize Trans
women by the Lesbian Connection group at the conference. I'm not
sufficiently informed about either incident and there are better
bloggers than I that will almost certainly be covering it. These were major issues that cast a shadow over the conference and they cannot be ignored, but I also know better than to try to explain them from the position of an uninformed ally. I also cannot speak for bisexuals that felt their identities had been misrepresented in bi-pan-fluid spaces. Although I was a witness to some of those incidents, I cannot speak for those individuals. Finally, my personal experience of the conference was overwhelmingly positive, but that shouldn't detract from the problems that people of other identities had to face at it in terms of overall consideration of the event. <br />
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For this post I want to look at the overall feel of the event, how it differs from normative spaces, and why it manages to linger with me so long. Hopefully this can offer some insight into the construction of queer spaces generally. It's hard to put into words why some of it was amazing to me. Non-gendered multi-stall bathrooms, for instance, don't seem like the kind of thing someone can get excited about, but to experience a space radically removed from arbitrary societal restrictions and to watch that space continue to work without the breakdown that normative society warn of shows a concrete example of how queer theory can work in practice. Allowing every individual to share their pronouns instead of assigning them by visual stereotypes, while still imperfect in a society that ingrains this instinct in us, offers a form of empowerment that is just as meaningful and important as the right to wear the clothes one chooses. Cuddle puddles of ambiguously gendered people, any or all of whom might be romantically involved with the others, and brightly dyed hair contributed to a sense that different priorities held sway than those we empower in society as a whole.<br />
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This atmosphere I describe still resonates with me as slightly mystical. Especially for its absence. While I can never say for sure without knowing someone what they identify as in their private lives, I can feel fairly assured that most people I meet outside of queer spaces are not queer. I can say this not out of a sense of heterosexism but rather because all of the problems in society aren't already solved. As cruel as it is to say the feeling I have now is comparable to jet lag. I feel dragged down by my own disinterest in anything the dominant culture can present to me. I find myself shaking my fist at gendered bathroom signs, even while acknowledging how strange it seems from the outside, and pondering acts of transgression in class rooms while I'm unable to focus on my assignments. Everything that is valuable only because it is expected of me fails to keep my interest.<br />
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I can definitively say that I'm not alone in this. I've managed to keep up with new friends from MBLGTACC that share my experiences. The lackluster return to the mundane can't compete with the sense of less for having left an attempted utopia, however flawed that attempt was in reality. For a brief period of time involving almost no sleep, uncomfortable beds, early mornings, and overpriced food we lived on a higher plane. Now we're back, but our heads remain in the clouds, pondering the place that most closely resembles where we truly belong.<br />
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For the next few posts I'll try to be more concrete. Look forward to discussions of workshops, open caucuses, and allies.<br />
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<b>Update: </b>I'll be adding basics, intermediate, and advanced tags to content so interested readers can find posts based on an identity they're interested in learning about and read from their individual level of understanding<br />
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<a href="http://thorandthoth.blogspot.com/2013/02/mblgtacc-part-2-polyamory-and-politics.html" target="_blank">Part 2 is here</a><br />
<a href="http://thorandthoth.blogspot.com/2013/02/mblgtacc-part-3-identity-caucuses-and.html" target="_blank">Part 3 is here</a> </div>
The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-58430999134755660472013-02-07T10:48:00.000-06:002013-04-22T18:32:45.172-05:00What is it? Polyamory<i><b>What is it?</b> is one of several types of posts I have planned
for Polyamorous Paganism. I hope to use it to outline the basics of an
identity, concept, practice, or act that not everyone floating around
the internet may be familiar with. These aren't 100% comprehensive
posts, and they aren't infallible. I can only explain my personal views
on what a subject is, and I don't speak for the entirety of any
community. Additionally, I'm still learning. In many of these
communities I'm still a student and in some of them I'm still new. <b>What is it?</b> is only meant to be an introduction to a subject and an invitation to start learning along with me. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
I am polyamorous. At one point that was one of the hardest things I've ever had to say to another human being. I've said it online and in classrooms, and most of the time I'm as comfortable mentioning it to a casual acquaintance as I am to an auditorium full of people. I've helped start the Polyamory discussion group for the Fox Valley, although I haven't been able to attend in months, and I'm the go-to activist for any speech or presentation on the subject on campus. I actually get to do two presentations on the subject on the same day later this month, one of them for a class full of freshman. At the same time this was one of the most difficult subjects I've ever spoken to my family about. It has inspired some of the happiest moments I've ever had in relationships. It makes up the root of the first word in the name of my blog.<br />
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So what is Polyamory? The word breaks down to "many loves" with "poly" coming from ancient Greek and "amor" coming from Latin. The first instance of the word that I'm familiar with comes from a Usenet group created by <a class="new" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyamory" target="_blank" title="Jennifer L. Wesp (page does not exist)">Jennifer L. Wesp</a> in 1992, although Pagan priestess Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart uses "polyamorous" two years earlier in her article <a href="http://www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Bouquet-of-Lovers.html" target="_blank">A Bouquet of Lovers</a>. There is apparently some dispute as to whether the origin of the word rests with the Zells or not although I personally have no opinion on the matter.<br />
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In general when it's being discussed Polyamory refers to the practice of having several romantic relationships simultaneously with full knowledge and consent of all participants. In practice this can mean anything from an open relationship (which refers to a romantic relationship and additional sexual relationships) with a possibility of romance developing to a triad of people that are each romantically involved with one another, or one of hundreds of other possible combinations of different kinds of attraction and involvement. In theory Polyamory is more about recognizing that there isn't a specific model for relationships rather than simply expanding the number of possible models. Each couple, triad, quad, grouple, constellation, moresome (welcome to a movement that is still developing a shared language), or relationship configuration (my attempt at a technical term for academic purposes) has the ability to define for itself with input from all members how that relationship should work. What is and isn't allowed inside and outside of the relationship, what is and isn't considered cheating, who wants to know what about other members of the relationship configuration or outside lovers, all of these things get to be discussed openly and with full understanding by everyone involved.<br />
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This is an identity most people never run into. There's a lot of stigma surrounding it, there are still very real <a href="http://polyinthemedia.blogspot.com/2013/02/closing-arguments-in-sister-wives.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PolyamoryInTheNews+%28Polyamory+in+the+News%29" target="_blank">legal ramifications</a> to having multiple partners if you're out (bigamy and cohabitation laws are selectively enforced but still on the books whenever the state wants them), we're still young enough as a movement that we haven't done much organizing, and other civil rights movements frequently <a href="http://www.modernpoly.com/article/hrc-falls-classic-rights-movement-divide-and-conquer-tactic-implicitly-derides-poly-people" target="_blank">toss us under the bus</a> (although, to be fair, scientists have yet to discover a group of people the Human Rights Campaign wouldn't scapegoat to keep their agenda on track). It's only recently that we've started getting exposure as a movement in popular media. <a href="http://polyinthemedia.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Poly in the Media</a> is a fantastic tracker for this exposure but some major accomplishments in visibility are last summer's action not-quite-blockbuster <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1615065/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" target="_blank">Savages</a>, Showtime's <a href="http://www.sho.com/sho/polyamory-married-and-dating/home" target="_blank">Polyamory: Married and Dating</a> (reviews <a href="http://www.modernpoly.com/article/online-reactions-polyamory-married-and-dating" target="_blank">here</a> if you have seen it and want to know why sex takes up so much of the plot), and a triad even appeared in season two of the FX phenomenon American Horror Story (in this last instance it's arguable that this is Polygamy, not Polyamory, a difference I'll address in a second and <b>SPOILER ALERT</b> <span style="color: white;"><span style="background-color: white;">FX treats multi-partner marriage the way CSI treats Transgender people and manages to fit both a murderer and their victim into the same triad within an episode of introducing their relationship</span></span>). <br />
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Since most people don't have a lot of background much of Polyamory is explained in terms of how it's not cheating or Polygamy/Polygyny. I'm going to do it a bit differently but I'll still cover those briefly. First of all Polyamory IS a highly <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/03/polyamory_and_its_surprisingly_woman_friendly_roots_.html" target="_blank">feminist movement</a> and in fact <a href="http://freaksexual.wordpress.com/2009/11/05/nonmonogamy-for-men-the-big-picture/" target="_blank">discourages</a> some of the sleazy pick-up tactics that occur in hetero-monogamous dating culture. Without the cookie-cutter definition of what should make a relationship to fall back on Polyamory has to create a culture of consent (Cliff at Pervocracy sums up <a href="http://pervocracy.blogspot.com/2012/01/consent-culture.html" target="_blank">consent culture</a> awesomely). There have been very few studies conducted on the subject so far but the <a href="http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/living-single/201301/is-polyamory-bad-the-children" target="_blank">few that exist</a> show that Polyamory does not have negative effects on children of Poly parents.<br />
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Most people that have heard of non-monogamy think of Polygamy (many spouses) and more specifically Polygyny (many wives) a practice found in certain Mormon and Muslim communities and most that haven't heard of it think of cheating. Polyamory isn't exactly either of these things, although there is nothing about it that specifically precludes marriage. While Polygamy tends, if only because of the existing precedents, to refer to one man with multiple women or one woman with multiple men (Polyandry, which is found in some communities in Asia) Polyamory is gender neutral. Constellations may have one men with multiple women, but there isn't a default restriction on those women from dating other men, other women, or each other, or a restriction on the man dating another man as there is in Polygyny. Again, each relationship structure is self-defining. As for cheating, the central difference is that Polyamory is consent based. If your partner knows what you're up to and gives you the go-ahead that is their decision on what is considered to be cheating and what is not.<br />
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This more or less wraps up the basics of Polyamory, although like all topics I'll be expanding on it quite a bit as I go on. This will probably be my last post before <a href="http://www.mblgtacc2013.org/" target="_blank">MBLGTACC</a> tomorrow but I may throw up a short one about the event itself on the nine hour drive to Lansing. If you want to keep up with my adventures there between blog posts be sure to follow me <a href="https://twitter.com/Falcc" target="_blank">on Twitter</a>. <br />
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<b>Update:</b> I should have done this right away but here are <a href="http://www.morethantwo.com/" target="_blank">a</a> <a href="http://polyweekly.com/" target="_blank">few</a> <a href="http://www.modernpoly.com/" target="_blank">links</a> to help people interested in Polyamory learn more about the subject. The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-12209436098974331872013-02-06T20:14:00.002-06:002013-07-05T12:54:05.439-05:00What is it? Queer<i><b>What is it?</b> is one of several types of posts I have planned
for Polyamorous Paganism. I hope to use it to outline the basics of an
identity, concept, practice, or act that not everyone floating around
the internet may be familiar with. These aren't 100% comprehensive
posts, and they aren't infallible. I can only explain my personal views
on what a subject is, and I don't speak for the entirety of any
community. Additionally, I'm still learning. In many of these
communities I'm still a student and in some of them I'm still new. <b>What is it?</b> is only meant to be an introduction to a subject and an invitation to start learning along with me. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
There are only two days left before the start of <a href="http://www.mblgtacc2013.org/" target="_blank">MBLGTACC</a>, the Midwest Bisexual, Lesbian, Gay, Trans, Ally College Conference. While the word Queer doesn't make it into that title it is one of the largest queer events in the Midwest. It's also one of the two big events I look forward to every year for reaffirming and enhancing my identity (the other one is <a href="https://www.circlesanctuary.org/index.php/pagan-spirit-gathering/pagan-spirit-gathering.html" target="_blank">Pagan Spirit Gathering</a> in the summer) so I want to include it as part of my blogging experience.<br />
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So what is Queer? How is an event or a space queer? Why am I so inconsistent with capitalization?<br />
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Despite being the only part of my personal identity that I've taken an entire college class on, Queer is still a difficult word to define properly, even more than Pagan. Most people have only heard it used as an insult aimed at someone for their actual or perceived sexual identity. A few of us have been exposed to it as a synonym for "askew" or "odd" and probably heard it spoken by someone with a monocle. There has been more mainstream exposure to the word as synonym, but not in an insulting manner, for Gay (usually in the context of homosexual men specifically) such as on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. If you're actually in the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) "community" you may recognize Queer as an umbrella term for a whole mess of other letters that don't make it into the top four (I'll be talking about prioritization of those letters eventually on here)<br />
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So which is it? Well, they're all sort of right, except when it's being used to insult someone for their sexual identity in which case it's bullying. There is nothing right about bullying. Queer originally meant something long the lines of odd, askew, or "touched in the head" and you'll still find it defined that way in <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/queer" target="_blank">academically approved dictionaries</a>. As anyone that has gone through an American public school can tell you, at some point this word became an insult synonymous with homosexual, probably drawing equally from the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronormativity" target="_blank">heteronormative</a> (I will dedicate a full blog post to this word eventually, but for now let's leave it to Wikipedia for an overview) assumption that anything not explicitly heterosexual is odd and undesirable and from the erroneous belief that homosexuality is symptomatic of mental illness. In more recent years there has been a serious effort to reclaim this language (I'll also do a post on reclaiming language eventually. If I keep mentioning future posts here maybe I'll actually keep myself posting regularly) which is why you'll hear a lot of people using Gay and Queer interchangeably or using it to refer to the entirely sexuality and gender identity equality movement. A lot of this has occurred in academia, where it's discussed as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_theory" target="_blank">Queer Theory</a> (thanks again Wikipedia), and older members of the gay rights movement aren't all that thrilled with Queer after making such a strong effort to reclaim Gay. I can say that my generation has latched onto this word like a life-preserver.<br />
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Finally, the way I tend to use Queer comes from a specific understanding of it both inside and outside of LGBT groups. To be Queer means to be continually subversive, to dismantle, reshape, deconstruct, and repurpose systems of all kinds, but especially systems of oppression. Queering is used as a verb (queer with a lowercase q) to refer to the act of subverting an object, concept, space, system, or ideology from the purpose that our society has declared unilaterally it is actually for. To queer is to take a revolutionary action, reclaiming ourselves and all components of our existence from the people that make decisions on our behalves and deciding for ourselves just what, who, and why we want to be. To be Queer is a matter largely of self-identification, but for a lot of people it means being someone that wants to move beyond all other available labels, or to change those labels, because they're insufficient. So this word can refer to people that are Gay or Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered, Intersex, Femme, Butch, Asexual, Kinky, Polyamorous, Pansexual, Omnisexual, or anyone else on <a href="http://katebornstein.typepad.com/kate_bornsteins_blog/" target="_blank">Kate Bornstein's</a> awesome list of acronyms (which sadly I can't seem to find in its entirety) but can also refer to people well outside of gender and sexuality spectrums. Can a graffiti artist be Queer because they make private spaces public? Is an environmentalist Queer because they help take people off the grid and out from under the control of the Capitalism over-system (The Pollinators certainly thought so, though they don't seem to have an online presence I could link to)?<br />
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I say yes to all of the above, and that's how I'll be using the word over the course of my blog. I should also note I tend to use queer as an adjective (queer spaces, queer ideas) and a verb (to queer) in lower case and as an identity in upper case. Hope that clears it up a bit.The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-52635118585431943142013-01-27T22:28:00.003-06:002013-07-05T12:53:00.021-05:00What is it? Paganism<i><b>What is it?</b> is one of several types of posts I have planned for Polyamorous Paganism. I hope to use it to outline the basics of an identity, concept, practice, or act that not everyone floating around the internet may be familiar with. These aren't 100% comprehensive posts, and they aren't infallible. I can only explain my personal views on what a subject is, and I don't speak for the entirety of any community. Additionally, I'm still learning. In many of these communities I'm still a student and in some of them I'm still new. <b>What is it?</b> is only meant to be an introduction to a subject and an invitation to start learning along with me. </i><br />
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I am a Pagan. This has been true to varying degrees over the past ten years of my life, sometimes in the guise of Wicca, sometimes as a general polytheist, and, since starting college, a fully embraced identity label with an understanding of what that commitment entails. <i> </i>To me this is one of the most meaningful parts of my identity. It's also part of the second word in the name of this blog. So what is Paganism?<br />
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The <a href="http://www.paganpride.org/" target="_blank">Pagan Pride Project</a> provides the definition I've come to consider to be the most accurate to my understanding of Paganism.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
A Pagan or NeoPagan is someone who self-identifies as a Pagan, and whose
spiritual or religious practice or belief fits into one or more of the
following categories:<br />
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<ul>
<li>Honoring, revering, or worshipping a Deity or Deities found in pre-Christian, classical, aboriginal, or tribal mythology; and/or</li>
<li>Practicing religion or spirituality based upon shamanism, shamanic, or magickal practices; and/or</li>
<li>Creating new religion based on past Pagan religions and/or futuristic views of society, community, and/or ecology;</li>
<li>Focusing religious or spiritual attention primarily on the Divine Feminine; and/or</li>
<li>Practicing religion that focuses on earth based spirituality.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
If this sounds vague it's because it has to cover a huge swathe of people. Paganism is accurately understood as more of an umbrella term than the name of a single religion. Under that umbrella lies hundreds of belief systems both new and ancient which are further subdivided into covens, churches, temples, groups, and solitary practitioners. Most of the people in all those different groups worship some number of thousands and thousands of gods, goddesses, and spiritual beings. I say most because one of the truisms of Paganism is that there are very few truisms. We're an incredibly individualistic bunch that come to a lot of different belief systems mostly through experience rather than direct conversion.<br />
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While avoiding expectations of universal identifying factors here are a few characteristics that tend to be accurate about Pagans:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>We're a non-proselytizing religion. You'll never find us knocking on your door during dinner because we don't care what your practices are as long as we're allowed to practice ours in peace.</li>
<li>We tend to be based around experiences rather than texts. There's a joke that refers to Pagans as "People of the Library" since we have so many books, but our connection with the divine tends to be based around personal gnosis, not scripture.</li>
<li>There are more of us than you think. Due to both subtle and overt forms of oppression that are enforced by more populous religious groups Pagans aren't always out about their religious beliefs. You may know a few without even realizing it.</li>
</ul>
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All of these points and the ones above are contentious. The number of different ideas about what Paganism is and what it involves are staggering. I'll go into much deeper depth later on for those who are interested, but this is a good functional definition going forward for people looking to understand how Paganism connects to other identities.<br />
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If you're interested in learning more about Paganism <a href="http://paganwiccan.about.com/" target="_blank">About.com</a> is an incredible starting resource. Patti Wigington really knows her stuff and she even has an article on Pagans and Polyamory. For more advanced information check out the Pagan portal over at <a href="http://www.patheos.com/Pagan" target="_blank">Patheos.com</a><br />
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<b>Update</b>: I'll be adding basics, intermediate, and advances labels to content so readers can find an identity they want to learn about and read from their own individual level of understandingThe Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1612849305041634953.post-60199190000588646952013-01-25T23:53:00.000-06:002013-04-22T18:31:26.270-05:00Polywhaty What?So it's finally happened. I have a blog. This is that fantastic moments in every modern activist's life where they start telling people they feel ways about things.<br />
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Twitter has been a fantastic resource, helping me to learn from more
established activists in real time and keep up with major issues, but (character limit reached) it has an obvious drawback for larger blocks of content. Facebook doesn't have a character limit but I'm left with a limited pool of people to discuss issues with. I was warned away from Tumblr as if I had suggested poking a bear with a stick covered in meat. Now I've finally settled on a location and a format and I'm ready to begin for real.<br />
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So who am I? What is a Polyamorous Pagan and how does that differ from either of those things alone? Why do I suddenly have a blog?<br />
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For the purposes of this blog I'm a collection of identities attempting to express their connection to one another. I'm an eclectic polytheistic Pagan exploring multiple mythologies, learning to energy work, and engaging with city spirits.I'm a currently-single Polyamorist and self identified Queer. I'm a Socialist in theory, looking for a praxis I can get behind. I'm a cis-male but I like to present androgynously. I'm a student, an amateur novel writer, an activist. Most importantly I'm all of these things at the same time, trying to remain a single coherent idea.<br />
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The reason I want to blog is because I've spent a lot of time reading Pagan blogs and Polyamorist blogs without seeing the content that makes a sustained connection between those identities, and others that I myself have managed to experience simultaneously. I've been inspired by <a href="http://www.patheos.com/About-Patheos/Sufenas-Virius-Lupus.html" target="_blank">P. Sufenas Virius Lupus</a> tying together Queer identity with Paganism in a way that helped me to make the same leap, Crystal Blanton and Nadirah Adeye from <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daughtersofeve/" target="_blank">Daughters of Eve</a> exposing the invisibilization and marginalization of women of color by the larger Pagan community and demanding better, and <a href="http://www.modernpoly.com/" target="_blank">the Poly & series by Modern Poly</a>. I think a new voice is necessary not only to speak on these numerous groups and movements individually, but also to bridge the gap between them and show what they have to gain from one another. So I will be commenting on issues relevant to Paganism, or Socialism, or the Queer/LGBTQQIAAPP (and I'll be covering acronyms extensively) community, or Polyamory as distinct from Queer, but also how they connect to one another and to other communities and other movements.<br />
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My plan is to start my blog with a series of "what is..?" posts to help explain some of the terms I've already used. I can't provide a perfect definition of some (greater minds than I are arguing about what Pagan covers even as you read this) but I can explain what each identity has meant in my life and give some broader background for people entirely new to the terms. Following that I'll attempt to tie them together and show how neatly they can fit that way. Stuck between these posts and following indefinitely after will be posts on individual issues, ideas, or replies to other articles. <br />
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Ideally I'll even be able to keep things interesting. The Polyamorous Paganhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02101169186427343146noreply@blogger.com2