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.

Nerd Theology II: Response to a Response

Victoria of Gaudete Theology wrote a critique of my post Nerd Theology. I'm thrilled to respond, both because the back-and-forth makes me feel like a ~*real academic*~ and because dialogue is essential to any meaningful exercise in process theology (which “Nerd Theology” most certainly is).

“In this tent we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling.”
2 Corinthians 5:2

“[In Heaven] there will be no animal body to weigh down the soul in its process of corruption; there will be a spiritual body with no cravings, a body subdued in every part to the will.”
Augustine, City of God XIX.17

There are two major frustrations I have with human physical reality as we currently know it:

1. That the human body is so limited. I can't number the times I've wished for a second pair of arms. Or stalk eyes. Or the ability to fly. Or – the most frustrating aspect of being human – the ability to function without needing to waste a third of my life sleeping. (As brilliant and important a field as it is, I don't want to get into disability theory just now; all I'll say is: read The Chrysalids, and don't accept the popular conception of the non-disabled body as normative, whole, and ideal.)

2. That the human body limits understanding. One of the earliest lessons you absorb with your baby formula is “don't get strung up by the way I look, don't judge a book by its cover” (N.B. If as a small child you absorbed the lesson in exactly this formulation, you are probably a much more awesome person than I am). But grounding my essential personhood in the particular physical body with which I am currently lumbered is doing exactly that. When you look at me and judge me to be a woman, you're reducing my personhood to a socioculturally constructed identity. Everyone, of course, makes these judgments all the time, every day, because we have no way of connecting mind-to-mind, personhood-to-personhood, and really understanding one another.

This is where God comes into it. Victoria points out that the incarnation collapsed the one true dualism of Creator and created; for Christians, this collapsing is perennial because of the Holy Spirit, the aspect of the Creator God that is now a part of us. This universal Spirit makes us one body – it connects us, mind-to-mind, personhood-to-personhood – but in our current physical reality we have no way of truly concretely experiencing this connection. The point of a transhumanist, biotechnological theology is to seek real and tangible ways of exploring our unity in the Spirit.

She's right, of course, to point out that I risk succumbing to Cartesian dualism. (Oh, irony – in seeking to avoid one form of dualism, I get sucked into another.) I suppose her point is that, whatever issues I personally may have with it, our experience as humans unquestionably encompasses the physical realm. I suppose my point is that I believe our experience of the physical realm could and will be radically different without the loss of our humanity.

And I do think the resurrection supports this belief. Jesus' post-resurrection body retains what is awesome about having a physical body (and I do recognize that some things about it are awesome; just because I'm so often uncomfortable in my own skin doesn't mean I don't enjoy good food and hot baths and hugs from those I love), while adding a number of upgrades and bugfixes. Teleportation? Yes please! Ability to pass through matter? Bring it on! The resurrected Christ is arguably the first post-human.

Nerd Theology

I've said it before, but I loathe dualism. Dualism stems from essentialism, and essentialism is garbage.

Take gender essentialism. A lot of classical theology revolves around the idea that Male and Female are discrete categories with a fundamental, essential, spiritual distinction. Reading Barth on this issue requires a strong stomach. He calls it a “natural dualism” (ah, the argument from nature, my ~favorite~! Tell me, if nature's so awesome, why do I have to dye my hair to make it blue, the most awesome color hair can be?) and declares that anyone who's not Monogamously Heterosexually Married is defective as a human being. Within a Monogamous Heterosexual Marriage framework, conveniently enough, women must be subordinate to men, and a “mature” woman understands and accepts that subjugation is actually equality, because, um, LOOK, QUEERS!

In one stroke, Barth dehumanizes not only all the women and all the queers but even the single non-queers, and it all stems from his gender essentialism. People who have built themselves a worldview of queer-hating, woman-subjugating, MHM-idealizing dualism are terrified of deconstructing gender, because if you take away that foundation then the whole house of cards comes tumbling down.

I don't believe in gender essentialism. I don't believe in gender. There is nothing about me that makes me somehow fundamentally and essentially female. Everything about me that could be called “female” is a social construct foisted on me, on the basis of the visible physiognomy of the meat-body in which this consciousness currently resides.

I am not a woman. I am not female. I am a human, socio-biologically constructed into the artifical category of “female”. Femaleness is no part of the essential Me (nor, need I say it, is maleness) – no more than the red hair I had yesterday or the blue hair I have today.

Too often, queer theorists become body essentialists. They ground the fulness of human experience within the physical reality of the human body: male, female, able, disabled, eating, running, breathing, touching. I say, Screw that. The physical reality of the human body is a limitation on human experience. True human experience is in the consciousness, the mind, the Me that does the thinking and feeling. My consciousness is like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, one stage removed from the physical world which I experience in the firing of synapses. The physical brain itself is a set of electrical pulses*. The I, the consciousness, is the sentient, sapient being that analyzes these electrical pulses.

*OR SOMETHING, I DUNNO, I STUDY ANCIENT TEXTS NOT GRAY'S ANATOMY

There's no reason to confine humanness to the human body. With the growing expansion of biotechnology, the human body itself need not be what it once was. With the extension of neuroscience and artificial intelligence, the human consciousness need not be confined to even an altered human body. If a human consciousness could be downloaded into a different physical receptacle, would it somehow no longer be human?

I believe in the singularity. I believe in the New Jerusalem. I believe in a radically altered future form of human existence, one that deconstructs and transcends the arbitrary social categories into which we are foisted based on random genetic characteristics. I believe that one day there truly will be neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female.

I believe that, when all the deconstruction is done, there remains some substance that is the true person, apart from all sociocultural construction and life experience. If I didn't believe that, how could I believe that God loves every one of us passionately and equally?

I believe in science fiction, and I believe in God. I believe in humankind, and I believe in the future. I'm a nerd, and I'm a theologian. It makes perfect sense.

God of Speculative Fiction

Christian fundamentalists, militant atheists, and some of the more irresponsible corners of the media like to paint Religion and Science as two discrete forces in a binary opposition. To scientists, this narrative asserts, faith is a mendacious force wilfully blinding people to the truths of scientific endeavor and the methods of rationality; while religious believers bury their hands in the sand of the like-minded community or seek to discredit the facts that would falsify their faith or at least render it unnecessary.

Needless to say, I despise binary oppositions with the white-hot hatred of a thousand suns, and this one is an especial desk-denter. I'll not insult my readers' critical thinking skills by explaining how you can totes believe in God and evolution at the same time!!eleventy (though if you've stumbled upon this blog, say in a Google search for “rob bell gay” [spoiler: he's not!], consider fine-tuning your reading comprehension skills before commenting, ta very much).

Christian writer Alister McGrath observes that university Christian groups are often populated primarily by science students, and my own experience bears this out. I think there's an argument to be made for the intellectual humility of scientists, as opposed to liberal arts students like myself who arrive at university convinced that, if we don't already know everything worth knowing, we certainly will after three/four/ten years of studying Latin/gender studies/ancient Sumerian. McGrath's explanation, though, is that “scientists are used to talking and thinking about reality in terms of models, in terms of partial and conceivable representations of reality, and thus have little difficulty in handling the same tools when speaking and thinking about God”.

The same, I believe, applies to speculative fiction fans. Whereas the practice of scientific inquiry endows a way of conceiving reality that can be transferred to thinking about meta-reality, sci-fi and fantasy provide images that we fanpeople can use as our models for conceiving God. (And, before you ask, I have indeed uttered the sentence, “Dammit, Jim, I'm a speculative fiction fan, not a scientist!”)

It's not just that fantasy's Big Three – the writers whose worlds even haters of fantasy are familiar with: Tolkien, Lewis, and Rowling – are all Christians whose culturally-ubiquitous works incorporate and recreate aspects of Christian mythology. It's that speculative fiction has a unique power to tap into our deepest longings, magic wands and talking animals and interstellar travel and time travel and epic quests and all the things that are OMG SO FREAKING AWESOME and I WANT TO GO TO THERE: things that transcend our everyday reality and echo back to our little earth-bound time-bound physics-bound lives some small taste of eternity. If you believe in the Christian story, with its great cosmic happy-ever-after, then it makes sense that you'll experience some profound yearnings for better, cooler, more miraculous worlds than our own.

For example:

Talking about God the Holy Spirit is difficult. This is the aspect of God that lives inside every believer. (If you thought the concept of the Trinity was a head-scratcher, consider that one of the persons of the Trinity is also a zillion persons. HEAD ASPLODE.) People just don't talk about the Holy Spirit as much as they talk about God the Creator and Jesus Christ, because it is one baffling concept. Here are some of the models I use for thinking about the Holy Spirit:

• my dæmon

• my Patronus

• my Iron Man armor

• my Spidey-sense

• my Green Lantern ring

• the Force

All images taken from nerddom; each one something every geek has longed desperately to have; each one partial and inadequate as a model, but taken together representing something of the power and awesomeness of literally having God living inside of you.

I think the parallels between fandom and Christianity are striking. How do we respond to Middle-Earth? Some with indifference; some with hostility; some with passionate love and longing. Some people are cautiously interested in the story itself, but grow to despise it on account of the intense nerditry of the fanbase. Some people are introduced to it by their friends, while others find it on their own. Some people are switched off by the story as presented in one medium, but love it in another. Some people think it is a load of crap and can't believe grown humans are wasting their time on a pointless fantasy world.

To those on the outside, the intensity is often alienating. But to those within the fold, all things are given through the connection that we share based on our deepest longings and the magical world that, for brief moments at a time, promises to meet and surpass them.

(Have I ever ended a prayer to God, you ask, with the words “I leave it entirely in your hands”? I HEREBY INVOKE WHATEVER IS YOUR COUNTRY'S EQUIVALENT OF THE FIFTH AMENDMENT.)

Geek Identity

“What are you doing this weekend?” my coworker asked, as she wiped down the bar.

“My Dungeons & Dragons group is meeting for the first time in ages,” I replied – whereupon she collapsed into a fit of laughter that lasted for about five solid minutes. Each time the giggles seemed likely to dry up, she would take another glance at me, patiently waiting for her to finish, and a fresh wave of uncontrollable mirth would strike. Eventually, staggering upright, wiping away the tears, she hiccuped out,

“I suppose – you still have – a few more years...”

Most of the people I regularly spend time with, online or in real life, are, like me, nerds. The ones who aren't tolerate my nerdiness, to the point that they don't tend to laugh uncontrollably at me (to my face, anyway). I had forgotten that the world is full of people who react to forthright declarations of geekery the way my coworker did.

If geek culture – as signified by markers like Dungeons & Dragons, devotion to cult TV series, paperback doorstoppers with dragons on the covers – is an adolescent pursuit we should all outgrow by our mid-twenties, what does that say about those of us who are lifelong geeks?

You're never supposed to admit this, but I haven't always been devoted to Firefly and Mystery Science Theater 3000 and China Miéville. These things are merely the current trappings of geekdom. Being a geek is a lot like being gay: anybody can latch onto the external behaviors and signifiers of the subculture, but externals do not a geek make. Geek is something you always have been and always will be, whether you like Star Trek or not.

Geekdom is the eight-year-old who sneaks away from the birthday party to spend the afternoon hiding in a closet with a book. It's the kid who works so hard in school that even the teachers write “Swotticus mingicus” on her report card (that's neo-British-East-African for “Dorkus malorkus”). It's the teenager who enjoys exams and spends her free time writing a novel.

Geeks are, I think, almost all introverts. It's not that we're friendless social misfits, though many of us have been at some point in our lives, but we thrive on our own company. The defining characteristic of geekdom is a love of minutiae and depth – the enjoyment of overthinking for its own sake – and that necessarily entails time spent alone with one's interests.

That's why we're all internet-diagnosed aspies (I score 34 on the AQ Test, yo), and that's why we all love Dr. Sheldon Cooper. The Big Bang Theory is probably the most popular mainstream representation of geek culture, and Sheldon is its best character by a parsec *audience laughs because I geekified a common idiom*. The other characters engage in the recognized cultural currency of geekdom – they read comic books, play videogames, watch sci-fi shows – but none of them displays that single-mindedness that is the hallmark of being a geek.

I realize that watching people be introverted would make for terrible TV, but there's no indication that Leonard or Howard or Raj gives to anything the time and attention that Sheldon gives to his work and his fandoms. Of course, in his single-minded devotion to his own interests, Sheldon frequently misses social cues and acts like an ass to people, but we like him because we wish we could do that too.

The Big Bang Theory, for all its claims to be representative of geeks and geek culture, buys into the idea that geekery is adolescent. Although lately it's improved its portrayal of women, adding several strong (and geeky!) female characters to the regular cast, the show is still beholden to its initial premise of laughing at the geeks' failures to interact with the pretty normie girl. Just last week, Priya (the other pretty normie girl) spoke disparagingly of her brother's nerdy hobby from when he was little, “but not as little as you'd want him to be.”

This coding of geek activities as immature plays directly into the heteronormative patriarchy. Yeah, I just wrote that sentence, and I believe it. Because “you'll outgrow geek culture” sounds to me a lot like “you'll get broody before you're thirty”. It's a way of delegitimating non-mainstream identities and assuming every life has to follow the traditionalist model of “growing up” – leaving behind all your interests and ambitions in order to have a spouse and children and a house in the suburbs and Tupperware parties and a mortgage. Which is fine if you want it, but not everyone does.

People tell me that one day I'll want to “settle down” and bear children; people tell me I'll “outgrow” my geeky interests. I say: God, I hope not.