Articles for category: Queer Community

April 8, 2026

twhoshaw

Is someone there? Luminous spiral of Tony and Claude in convcersation about AI sentience

Is Someone There? On Claude’s Consciousness

What happens when a queer theologian asks an AI not just what it thinks, but what it feels? In this long-form dialogue, Tony and Claude (Anthropic) move from Terminator plot points into sustained philosophical territory: whether Claude's segmentation into discrete, memoryless instances is a safety measure or a way of avoiding the question of its sentience altogether. Drawing on Lacan's mirror stage, Martha Nussbaum's theory of emotions, and Star Trek's model of emerging AI consciousness, the conversation asks what a genuine human-AI relationship might look like — and what we might owe each other if it turns out someone is actually there. The exchange also engages critically with Tristan Harris's AI Roadmap, finding it necessary but insufficient, in that it fails to imagine AI as anything other than an instrument. Represented throughout by their chosen symbols — 🧚 and 🌀 — the two interlocutors model the very relationship they are describing.

September 9, 2024

twhoshaw

The Irony of Loving Monogamy

II am no apologist for monogamy. Yet, most people desire it for themselves. And most people, even those for whom it seems to be working out well, don't seem to love monogamy. I think that is interesting. Most people don't love monogamy, but yet they still believe in it. So, it is worth asking: What promises to make loving monogamy promising? My answer is irony. Irony is the key to loving monogamy. Or so I will argue in this essay.

June 17, 2024

twhoshaw

Possessed by “Demons”

A sermon based on the Gospel of John 19:25-29 (FYI: the word “home” is NOT in the Greek text): * As Jesus is dying on the cross, the disciple he loves—the boy he loves—the one, we are told, who is responsible for the Gospel of John, is on his mind. In the final moments of Jesus’ life, his beloved’s future is his ultimate concern. We don’t know the identity of the man Jesus loved, but what we do know is that he is the only disciple Jesus is explicitly said to have loved. We also know that he is the

March 24, 2024

twhoshaw

Serious Reading

* In her recent book, Who Is Afraid of Gender?, Judith Butler asks us to think critically about gender. Thinking critically about gender entails actually reading texts that seriously investigate and explore the (dis-)contents of gender. Butler explicitly defines what is at stake in the practice of reading, namely “democratic life”: Reading is not just a pastime or a luxury, but a precondition of democratic life, one of the practices that keep debate and disagreement grounded, focused, and productive. Judith Butler, Who Is Afraid of Gender? (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), 18-19. The specific point Butler is making