The Embodiment Problem

I'm beginning to worry that I'm nothing more than a ferocious, obstreperous, intractable contrarian; that all of my philosophy, theology, and metaphysics are based on nothing more than denial and negativity; that I have an uncontrollable urge to qualify, mitigate, and negate any statement I see, simply because it is a positive or categorical statement.

Maybe I'm being a good deconstructionist, drawing attention to Derrida's insistence that every word or statement contains a trace of its negation, or maybe I'm just a buzz-killing, problematizing Negative Nigel (not that the two are mutually exclusive). What's clear is that I am intensely suspicious of any position, idea, belief, or argument, and I will find ways to criticize even the ones I agree with.

Of course, this makes it rather difficult to establish which ones I do agree with, because literally everything in the world seems fatally flawed to me. One area where I have absolutely no idea what I think or believe is to do with embodiment.

Queer theologians LOVE embodiment. In an understandable reaction to the sex-negativity of the matter-denigrating dualism that still pervades our culture (the religious form descending through Christian thinkers heavily influenced by popular Greco-Roman philosophy; the secular flavor popularized by Descartes), queer theologians take Merleau-Ponty's observation that the body is inseparable from the self and use that to unproblematically celebrate embodiment as an innate good. Susannah Cornwall writes that she's never met a queer theologian who didn't agree with the statement that embodiment is good (yes you have, Susannah, I just didn't mention it).

Well, if it's a consensus view in my field, I'm going to have to problematize it. I'm a contrarian like that.

Truth be told, though, my need to problematize the simplistic “embodiment = good” equation stems ultimately not from theory but from my personal, very complex and conflicted, relationship with being embodied.

Early childhood was probably the time I was most comfortable in my skin. I played sports, took my shirt off when I felt like it, got rough-and-tumble sometimes and curled up quietly with a book at other times. I've never been coordinated or graceful (ask my mother about my disastrous semester of ballet lessons), but I haven't always been as uncomfortable and awkward as I am today. Sadly, I hit every single branch on my way down the puberty tree, from bad posture to bad skin to a severe case of the Bella Swan lolclumsies, all of which still afflict me today (to the point where there is an evil plot on the part of my more Schadenfreude-prone friends to kidnap me and take me ice-skating, just for the lulz).

It's not that I hate my body precisely. I hate some of the things that it does (every month: this time it's not going to happen, this time I have willed it out of existence with the sheer force of my hatred for it), I hate its limitations (third arm and stalk eyes now, pls – or at the very least a sense of spatial awareness and a cure for motion sickness), and I hate most of all the meanings other people read onto it. Sometimes I think that all this fumbling toward a trans* identity is simply an attempt to wrest a modicum of control over how others read my body.

Like, I often think that I would like T and top surgery, but is that because I want those things themselves or because I want the meaning they would cause others to read onto my body? And it's not as though you can separate those things. (One reason why the “man trapped in a woman's body” narrative is unhelpful for me: completely detached from the body, what possible meaning can “man” or “woman” have? I've been trying to answer that question my entire life.)

And I know that T and top surgery wouldn't magically make me enjoy being embodied. This isn't a straightforward case of “here are the things wrong with my body, let's fix them.” It's more a case of ontological dissatisfaction with the very fact of my having a body at all. T and top surgery might alleviate the symptoms, but there's no cure.

The problem with YAY EMBODIMENT is that I don't feel that way about embodiment. If embodiment is a good thing and I should love my body, then my dysphoria and general antipathy toward physical reality have to be pathologized. And that puts me in the weird position of wanting to defend my dysphoria. Like, don't tell me how to feel about my own body! I can hate it if I want to!

Shit's complicated, yo. And, as abstract as it sounds to debate embodiment and the nature of the relationship between mind/soul/self and body/matter/physicality, it's not mere ivory-tower pontification. It's really important for how I live out the rest of my life.

Yes, I made this. Yes, it helped me figure stuff out.

You Are A Boring, Selfish Jerk

It's a fundamental tenet of my theology and my anthropology that admitting you are a boring, selfish jerk is the first step on the lifelong road to not being a boring, selfish jerk.

The trouble is, sometimes I find myself unable to take any other steps.

When I haven't written anything in a while, it's usually because I've been getting bogged down in self-recrimination. There's no point. I have nothing to say. God, I am such a boring, selfish jerk.

External validation doesn't really help. In fact, my psyche can get quite creative in trying to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of, say, having many awesome friends whilst knowing myself to be a boring, selfish jerk. At best, I am cheered that I have at last developed some ability to pretend to other humans that I am not (entirely) a boring, selfish jerk.

After all, what is human interaction but a continuous endeavor to pretend to one another that we are not (or, to put it less cynically, to try not to be) boring, selfish jerks?

And how am I supposed to live out the sacred mantra Be True To Yourself when even I can't stand my true self?

I think seminary probably has a higher-than-average concentration of people who loathe themselves. I think an acute awareness of and furious frustration with your own total depravity can be a very powerful motivating factor to orient yourself toward the Ultimate.

Sometimes, though, it swamps you. It's not that life doesn't go on. It's not that you don't still have plenty to enjoy and be grateful for. It's just that you go about it all stooped under the consuming burden of self-knowledge. And what are you supposed to do with that?

What do you do with all that self-loathing?

27 Days Later

That's all I fucking need, I think furiously. I check my planner: 27 days. Lately the intervals have gotten a few days shorter, hovering around the textbook 28, but flow duration is still longer than average. I've had 17 days off.

Looking at my planner, I remember what I thought last month, and the month before, and the month before that: That's all I fucking need. I think back over the past decade. Ten years – that's approaching half my life – I've been putting up with this monthly exodus of dark matter, and not once have I been able to feel anything remotely positive about it.

Every month: That's all I fucking need.

Fifteen years old, in the bathroom, crying and cursing my body for its monthly betrayal, uncontrollable, infuriating, pointless. Twenty-one years old, in the bedroom, being upbraided by my girlfriend for my squeamishness about bodily fluids. All the years in between, growing into feminism, learning to deconstruct my internalized misogyny, reading Steinem, finding out that many women see this as something empowering, something beautiful, something to celebrate.

I don't find it empowering.

I don't find it beautiful.

I don't want to celebrate it.

I'm utterly sick of trying not to hate it. I'm sick of trying to locate some essential femininity in it. Sick of trying to see it as emblematic of the life-giving facility of the female body. Sick of trying to view that same facility as a source of power rather than a source of visceral horror, something I would gladly relinquish given half a chance.

I hate it, this thing my body does. I want to be rid of it.

Dear "The Big Bang Theory": It's Over.

I hate you, The Big Bang Theory.

I've not always hated you. (I've always criticized you a lot, with good reason, but I've not always hated you.) A couple Decembers ago, when my relationship was falling apart and winter was doing its usual number on me, I marathoned your first three seasons. You've never been a good show as such, but you were an adequate guilty pleasure.

I mean, I was always troubled by your broadness, your reliance on lazy stereotypes, and your tendency to invite the audience to laugh at your characters rather than with them. (NERDS LIKE TYPICALLY NERDY PURSUITS! AHAHAHA!) But I put up with all that for the same reason my queer sisters suffered through five seasons of The L Word: when mainstream representations of people like yourself are so rare, you take whatever crumbs you can get. And also because Sheldon was awesome.

(Remember when Sheldon was awesome?)

Last year, though, you were in serious decline. The twin headlights in the darkness of season four were Mayim Bialik and Melissa Rauch, both criminally underserved as Penny's friends Amy and Bernadette. And now you've completely lost the plot.

You've always kind of mocked your characters, but it used to be in an affectionate way; now it's just outright contempt. It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia this ain't – you're not a dark, edgy show about horrible people doing horrible things; you're a fluffy three-camera sitcom for mindless entertainment, and You're Doing It Wrong.

Look at How I Met Your Mother. It's always been better than you, of course, but the comparison stands because it too is a show well past its prime, coasting on its six prior seasons of audience goodwill. (Again, not like Always Sunny, whose seventh season is completely killing it and, if it continues like this, might just be the best thing to happen to television ever.) HIMYM has gotten lazy and is spinning its wheels, but – ideological problems aside – is still a pleasant, unchallenging watch, because it doesn't hate its characters.

You seem determined to make your viewers hate all your central characters. You've stripped them of every non-loathsome characteristic, reducing them to cartoonish bundles of broad tics, unfunny running gags, and unbelievable interactions.

And you're just so fucking offensive.

I've put up with so goddamn much of your shit. For four seasons I've overlooked your dumb gender essentialist stereotypes, your constant racism, your sneering at nerd culture; and I just can't take it anymore. The four episodes of season five that have aired so far turn the racism and slut-shaming up to eleven, but it's the most recent episode that was the final straw for me. It was so irredeemably loathsome on every level that I no longer feel even the slightest pang of regret in saying:

Fuck you, The Big Bang Theory. I hate you and will never watch you again.

Love The Haters

You know what's really, really hard? Loving your enemies.

It's such a pat phrase that I don't often really think about what it means. Circumstances don't currently compel me to spend time with people I don't like, so I find myself dismissing this commandment: “eh, don't really have any enemies.”

If there's one thing I've learned from this whole ugly riots mess, it's that I absolutely do. And I've been able to codify something about myself that makes me feel a little weird:

I have a lot more sympathy for people whose actions repel me than for people whose words repel me.

I condemn the rioters' actions while seeking to understand their point of view. Good job me. Top marks on loving your enemy right there. But the people who are saying horrible things about the rioters, impugning their humanity and calling for mass murder (encasing them in concrete and unleashing polar bears on them are just two of the suggestions I've seen on Facebook)? I condemn them without even trying to understand their point of view.

Maybe it's because my hate-spewing Facebook-friends are mostly a lot like myself in terms of background and socioeconomic circumstances – heck, a few years ago (pre-SJ, pre-Christianity) I might well have been saying the same things myself – and the reason I'm lashing out at them is because I understand them too well, and I want to distance myself from the things I could all too easily see in myself.

So what does it mean to love your enemies?

Let's start with enemies. That is like a ridic melodramatic word in today's parlance. Obviously it means the people you find it hardest to love. For me personally, I think ideological opponents is probably a better term. The fantastic Christian Humanist blog recently linked this super-interesting article, which argues that

“...as a culture, liberalism has become insular and narrow-minded. It lacks the capacity for the generous appreciation of other points of view needed in a pluralistic society. That capacity is more likely to be found today among conservatives, particularly religious conservatives.”

That's a helluva thing. Now, I don't really consider myself a liberal – liberalism's a little far right for my tastes – but it's certainly closer to me than conservatism, and (without wanting to get into discussion of whether it's a valid or defensible statement) this bold, extremely questionable assertion has got me examining my beliefs more critically than ever before.

I have an unfortunate tendency to pride myself on my “generous appreciation of other points of view”. I'm constantly checking my privilege, trying to be super-duper politically correct, accounting for the multifarious effects of background and circumstance and identity politics. The only people whose point of view I don't try to understand?

Right-wingers. People who don't seem to care about social and economic justice. People whose politics are in direct opposition to mine.

The thing is, in my actual interpersonal relationships I am okay at this. I have friends who are conservatives. I dearly love certain people who are racist, sexist, heterosexist, etc. When I was a small child living far away from my biological grandparents, an older couple living in our neighborhood were surrogate grandparents to me and my brothers, and I vividly remember the shock of learning, years later, that they believed God made black people and white people separate and we should stay that way. It was the first time in my life I confronted head-on the truth that sometimes people you care about have really objectionable views, and it's a lesson I've had to keep on learning.

And yet it's easy to make exceptions and justifications for people you already know and love. When the people with objectionable views are mere words on a screen, it seems logical and right to put principles above people.

To really live a Christian life, though, means always putting the people above the principle. (Side note: one of the reasons I adore children's fantasy classic Silver on the Tree is because of its take on this issue.) It is possible to reject someone's objectionable views but still understand and love em. It has to be possible. That's what God does: God understands all of us completely, and God loves all of us completely, and God absolutely rejects injustice and hatred.

How does God do it? I don't friggin' know. That's why God's God, and I'm not. I do know that it's my duty as a human being to try as hard as I possibly can, and that as long as I live it's going to be really, really hard.