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.

Zombies: Better Than Sex

Dualism really gets on my tits. Black vs white, male vs female, gay vs straight – why do we still insist on framing everything as a binary opposition? It's the twenty-first century; can't we get beyond Thunderdome dualism?

The Kinsey scale, for all its flaws, has been a useful tool for getting people to conceive sexual orientation as a spectrum rather than a binary (even if much of the mass media continues to frame it as an either/or). In order to paint a fuller picture of human sexual identity, though, it would be useful to plot a few more axes.

What if we considered a spectrum for the having of sexual attraction at all? Borrowing the numbers from Kinsey, 0 = no interest in partnered sex, 6 = partnered sex is of paramount importance.

What if we considered a spectrum for feelings of romantic attraction? 0 = no interest in a romantic partner, 6 = a romantic partner is of paramount importance.

Our culture frames “normal” as a 6 on both scales. Even as Teh Gays are slowly eking out a modicum of recognition from mainstream culture (people of sexualities other than gay or straight, not so much), acceptance is still framed as the almighty Monogamous Marriage. You find a sexual and romantic partner, who will be the most important person in your life. If you don't find that person, it's a tragedy, because obviously this is what everyone wants.

Our culture is still flummoxed by the idea that anyone might not be a 6 on both the Sexual Attraction and the Romantic Attraction scales.

I was reminded of this the other night, when playing Zombies!!! with some friends. Being a massive zombie enthusiast, I got somewhat overexcited, and may or may not have been yelling, “DIE, ZOMBIE SCUM!” in between dropping some mad zombie knowledge on my chums: did you know that zombies didn't eat brains before 1985's Return of the Living Dead? That human beings weren't their food at all before 1968's Night of the Living Dead? That in its earliest iteration, starting with 1932's White Zombie, zombie cinema was a fascinating (and incredibly racist) expression of white people's postcolonial fears about being enslaved by their erstwhile slaves?

I know all this because I spent my teens watching zombie movies, rather than having relationships, getting laid, etc. like many of those around me. I made a self-deprecating jest to this effect, and one friend hastened to reassure me that I didn't miss much because teenage sex is pretty crap. Then I said that it's actually a good thing, because zombie movies had a much greater influence on my personality than any hypothetical teenage sex would have done.

“Wait a minute,” said D. “Did you just say that zombie movies are better than sex?”

At which everybody LOLs, grabs another fistful of cheese puffs, and rolls the dice to battle more ZOMBIE SCUM.

But now I have a chance to explain myself, so I will say:

Yes, D, I do think zombie movies are better than sex.

I could draw you up a list of things that I think are better than sex. It would include all-night MST3K marathons, books by China Miéville, frolicking in powerful ocean waves, having a hermeneutic revelation, breaking your fast at the end of Yom Kippur, playing a really great game of soccer...

What I'm saying is, I score really low on both the Sexual Attraction and the Romantic Attraction scales. I've been in relationships before, but friends and family members have always mattered much more to me, and at this point I feel I could happily go the rest of my life without having another romantic or sexual partner. For me, both partnered sex and relationships are a bit like skiing: yes, there are some thrilling moments, but those moments just aren't worth the expense, effort, specialized equipment, long lines, and risk of violent death. (N.B. Analogy may not be exact in every particular.)

Plenty of people love skiing. Good for them. Go for it, I say: ski to your heart's content, all day and all of the night, if that's what you want. Just don't assume that everybody else loves skiing as much as you do. Or even wants to do it ever. I'm bothered, not by skiers themselves, but by the culturally normalized expectation that everyone must think skiing is the apex of human existence (“the thing that makes us fully human” – thanks for the invalidation, favorite childhood author!), and that if you don't really care about skiing then there's something wrong with you.

Game of Thrones Season One

My most-viewed blog post, by quite a large margin, is Drinking Game of Thrones. (I enjoy the thought of hordes of unengaged people idly googling “game of thrones drinking game”, finding my post, and then getting slammed by the stealth anti-racism.)

That was eight weeks ago, though, and now the first season of Game of Thrones has come to a close. I suppose this means I should have five times as many thoughts as I did back then. Here are some of them.

As a whole, I liked the show. It has its problematic elements, natch. For one thing, I could honestly go the rest of my life without encountering another male-dominated story. It's gotten to the point where, if I pick up a book thinking it looks interesting but see that the protagonist is male, I put it down again. Only a really cool premise, a recommendation from someone I trust, or an author I love can make me read a book about a man. And yet (as we shall see) just because Game of Thrones is set in a male-dominated world doesn't mean it's necessarily a male-dominated story (see also: Boardwalk Empire).

For another thing, GRATUITOUS NUDITY. HBO has a fixation with this. The trouble is that US network TV is so puritanical, HBO goes too far in the opposite direction just because it can – like a teenager from a strict home who's away at university for the first time and goes a little wild. Maybe if the rest of US TV would just grow up a little, HBO wouldn't feel the need to shower its programming with BOOBIES. It's as if somebody said, “All these characters are a little confusing. Every other episode we need a scene where some man monologues for ten minutes about things the audience would already know if they'd been paying attention. But how to make this unnecessary exposition palatable? Ah yes, BOOBIES!” Honestly, it baffles me. We live in the internet age. Every viewer can see all the boobies they could possibly want at the click of a mouse. Why do we need gratuitous porn in our TV shows?

And, of course, lest they be accused of unequal-opportunity pornifying, the producers slung in a couple of dick shots as well. Wow. You know, I hate cats and have never seen an episode of The L Word, and if that ever makes me feel like Not A Real Lesbian, all it takes is one TV schlong to assure me that I couldn't be gayer if I threw out all my skirts and changed my name to Shane. Seriously, my straight and bi sisters? You're... you're really into that?

“But Anna,” you are yelling, “enough with the nekkidness already. You've written 400+ words, and you haven't even mentioned racism!”

Well, quit yelling; it's annoying your housemates. As you know, I have serious problems with the crass Orientalism of the Dothraki storyline, but I think it takes great strides toward redemption with that devastating scene between Dany and Mirri Maz Duur (here be spoilers, if I need to say it). Dany can't believe the woman she so nobly rescued would betray her; Mirri Maz Duur icily describes everything that happened to her before Dany's oh-so-noble white-woman intervention: “Look to your khal and see what life is worth, when all the rest is gone.” Unlike in the book, this scene is separated from the one where Dany suffocates Drogo. As such, it has the space to emphasize Mirri Maz Duur and to speak unarticulated volumes about the relationship between conqueror and conquered.

That was arguably my favorite moment in the season; but, gratuitous nudity notwithstanding, there were plenty of other things I liked too. For all my whining about male-dominated stories, I think the show did some pretty great things with its female characters. Both Catelyn and Cersei were much more engaging to me in the show than in the book. In Catelyn's case, it might have been the fact that I didn't have to listen to her inner monologue carp about Jon Snow, which was all she ever seemed to bloody do in the book; but both women, thanks to excellent performances from Michelle Fairley and Lena Headey, had real depth to their characters that allowed them to exist as much more than just mothers and wives.

Even Sansa had a moment in the final episode that made me think she's not quite as unutterably tedious as she'd been up to that point. In her case, witnessing her thought processes gave me a good deal more sympathy for her in the book than in the show; without them, her progression from vapid teenager to shrewd and desperate survivor isn't as clear. I have high hopes for her in the second season, though.

And need I even mention Arya, and the 52 varieties of ass she kicks?

What I like most, though, is that what Game of Thrones is really about is “cripples, bastards, and broken things”. All the most compelling and sympathetic characters are the ones who are disadvantaged in the dog-eat-dog world of Westeros: women, PWD, a dwarf, a eunuch, an illegitimate son. The powerful non-disabled male characters, who think they hold the reins, are either flat-out evil or fatally myopic, and it's the people they continue to underestimate – Arya, Cersei, Tyrion, Varys – who will make them pay.

I think there's an interesting contrast here with The Walking Dead. Oh, how I hated The Walking Dead. (When its second season starts in October, I plan to finish a long-overdue blog post about how much and why I hated it. Sneak preview: one of the reasons is racism!) It's not an entirely fair comparison, because my familiarity with the source material gives GoT an advantage in my affections, but for two high-budget, highly-anticipated, highly-acclaimed TV shows, I've had very different reactions. And I think it's because TWD sidelines its cripples, bastards, and broken things, while GoT actually, despite what “starring Sean Bean” might lead you to believe, foregrounds them.