Category Archives: Queer Interpretation

The Irony of Loving Monogamy

Wedding dress designed by John Galliano, worn by Gwen Stefani, 2002

“Certainly, to talk about monogamy is to talk about virtually everything that might matter. . . . Monogamy is a kind of moral nexus, a keyhole through we can spy on our preoccupations.” – Adam Phillips, Monogamy, ii.

“Nothing defeats us like success. It is always more baffling—more essentially ironic—than failure.” — Adam Phillips, Monogamy, #47.

“Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” — Paul of Tarsus, Romans 13:8

I.

I 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 now argue.

Monogamy is a sacred cultural norm, but as Adam Phillips, in a fascinating interview regarding his book, Monogamy (1996), observes, “the flawed relationship, or the relationship that doesn’t work, gets all the press.” We have a lot of interest in relational failure.

What we don’t have, according to Phillips, “is . . . very good language for celebrating good relationships. There’s a sense in which the good monogamous relationship . . . doesn’t have very good language to describe it. I think that is interesting.”

In the aforementioned interview, Phillips searches for good enough language to describe “what makes relationships between people work.”

I think what makes relationships work between people is extremely mysterious. I mean, we used to call it chemistry. And if it weren’t so silly, I’d want to go back to using words like that. Something really quite mysterious and unpredictable happens between people.

The “mysterious and unpredictable” quality of relationships between people is likely what inspires us to lean on the language of faith to describe relationships that work, as the “mysterious and unpredictable” quality of those relationships likely calls forth our, to use Julia Kristeva’s idea for my own purposes, “incredible need to believe.”

“Believing in monogamy,” Phillips writes, “is not unlike believing in God” (Monogamy, #1).

II.

Mechthild of Magdeburg offers us one interesting example of what it is like to believe in God. In Flowing Light of the Godhead (written between 1250-1280 CE), Mechthild seeks sex with God. Advised instead “to refresh [herself] in love” by bowing “down to the small Child in the lap of the eternal virgin,” she refuses (see Book I, §44).

Mechthild refuses to accept the blessed child as a proxy for her Lover/God. “That is child’s love, that one suckle and rock a baby,” she asserts. “I am a full-grown bride. I want to go to my Lover” (§44).

She is warned about how dangerous is such a direct approach to God: “Oh, Lady, if you go there / We shall go completely blind / The Godhead is so blazing hot” (§44). So warned, she goes directly to God.

Upon meeting her Lover, Mechthild is encouraged to take off all of her clothes. What follows is a kind of anticipatory silence between them. She discreetly alludes to what happens next: “What happens to her then—she knows— / And that is fine with me” (§44).

Mechthild and God enjoy a quickie. “[T]his cannot last long,” she observes. And they depart from one another “inseparably” (§44).  

The brief sexual meeting of Mechthild and God is described as taking place in secret: “When two lovers meet secretly / They must often part from one another inseparably” (§44). In seeking sexual intimacy with God through contemplation (the 13th-century virtual world?), the Beguine mystic secretly escapes her existing relationship to the world, including to the Church.

Mechthild’s theology is interesting because she explicitly includes sexual pleasure as a feature of what it is like to believe in God. “And about pleasure we are all mystics.” Or so Phillips argues. “We are all terrified of suffering too much of it. For some people the best solution to this is infidelity, for others monogamy. To each [their] own asceticism” (#71).

Mechthild’s asceticism is, I think, a form of infidelity. Infidelity, however, is not always what we think it is. In escaping her existing relationship to the world of people, she reveals the one with whom she is actually doing monogamy. She desires God. Infidelity is always intertwined with monogamy.

Infidelity, moreover, is not always as dangerous as we think it is. “People have relationships,” Phillips contends, “not because they want to feel safe—though they often think they do—but because they want to find out what the danger is. This is where infidelity can let people down” (#34).

Mechthild, warned about the danger of rawdogging God, ends up proving herself right: there is, in fact, no danger in having sex with God. Prior to hooking up with God, she argues: “A fish in water does not drown. / A bird in the air does not plummet. / Gold in fire does not perish. . . . / How, then, am I to resist my nature? / I must go from all things to God / Who is my Father by nature” (§44). Sex with God is, for Mechthild, the safest sex imaginable because it is sex with her very nature.

Her “nature” begins to take on meaning when she refuses the blessed Child. Her desire to go directly to God is about far more than an unwillingness to allow Jesus to fuck up her relationship with God. “Child’s love,” notice, is defined in parental, specifically maternal, terms. It is “child’s love, that one suckle and rock a baby.” In refusing the blessed Child, Mechthild is refusing to identify with the maternal figure of her love story. So “utterly formed to [God’s] nature, / not the slightest thing,” however, “can come between [her] and [God, her Father by nature]” (§44). Mechthild radically identifies with God the Father.

The meaning of her “nature” is also signified by the easy interchability of the main roles in her love story, Lover and beloved. Mechthild clearly defines God as the Lover of her story. Yet, she is the one who is obsessed with God. She is the one who knocks down the door to God’s bedchamber. She is the one who insists on sex with God. In this story, Mechthild is the Lover, or God (i.e., the subject of erôs)—and God is the beloved, or Mechthild (i.e., the love-object).

Sex with God is the safest sex one can think of because God is, at least in Book I, §44 of Flowing Light, Mechthild (and vice versa). Sex with God is the safest sex, the safest incest one can think of because it is not unlike masturbaton. “My sexual relationship with myself,” Phillips observes, “is a study in monogamy” (#60).

“The virtue of monogamy,” Phillips contends, “is the ease with which it can turn sex into masturbation [which Phillips also describes as “safe incest”]; the vice of monogamy is that it gives you nothing else. . . . The only truly monogamous relationship is the one we have with ourselves” (#101).

Believing in God is not unlike the incredible need to believe in ourselves.

Nonetheless, most people are not as faithful to God as is Mechthild. “Why,” wonders Phillips, “do we, at least apparently, [continue to] have sex with other people, why include them at all?” (#101). What is the danger?

III.

David M. Halperin identifies a surprising feature of sex that may account for why we want to include, apparently, other people in our sex lives. The danger of sex with an-other person is the promise of love.

In “What Is Sex For?” (2016), Halperin tries to make sense of why Adele’s hit song, “Someone Like You” (2011) is “blaring” from a gay bathhouse in Hanoi. To that end, he turns to Aristotle, specifically to Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, chapter 22 of part 2.

According to Halperin, Aristotle argues “that it is in the nature of erotic desire itself to seek—in and through sex, customarily—the experience of being loved. Love is the telos of erotic desire. It is not love that aims at sex as its goal or that seeks to express itself through the act of sex. It is sex that aims at love” (19, emphasis original).

To the subject of erôs, to the one inhabited by erotic desire (rather than by lust or by appetite), sex is, customarily, a means to love. I initially read Halperin’s summary of Aristotle to mean that sex mediates between erotic desire (or passion) and love: erotic desire, through sex, seeks love.

My initial reading of Halperin’s summary of Aristotle was a promising mis-reading, as it provoked thought about the space between erotic desire and love. However, as the last sentence of the summary above indicates, erotic desire is taking the form of sex in Aristotle’s argument. Erotic desire = sex.

Halperin goes on to significantly complicate Aristotle’s already subtle sexual logic. For example, he wonders if sex does, in fact, naturally seek love? Does erotic desire naturally seek what is beyond itself? Halperin does not directly answer that question in “What Is Sex For?,” but he does answer it in an earlier work, How To Be Gay (2012).

Sex, however, is not the subject of How To Be Gay. Erotic desire customarily, but not always, takes the form of sex. It can take other, cultural, forms. Erotic desire can take the form of an obsession with interior design or with feminine figures, like Joan Crawford. Halperin explores the cultural vicissitudes of erotic desire in How To Be Gay.

The lesson of How To Be Gay is that erotic desire does not, not naturally, seek love. Mechthild’s example teaches us the same lesson, but in a different erotic sphere: sex does not naturally seek love-objects: objects beyond the confines of its exacting criteria.

Erotic desire does not, not naturally, seek what is beyond itself. Its love-objects are always underwhelming. So, if what we want is to somehow love the objects of our desire, then we must learn to do something with our erotic desire.

If what we want is a loving monogamy, then we must learn to ironize sex.

IV.

In How To Be Gay, traditional gay male culture teaches its disciples how to re-direct erotic desire through irony, specifically through camp irony, to its love-objects. Describing camp irony may give us an example of how to ironize sex, of how to think of sex in terms of irony.

To that end, we may consult a promising section of How To Be Gay. Notice how camp and intimacy are intimately intertwined in the lengthy citation below. Moreover, camp and intimacy are linked in the context of explaining the lasting character of a monogamous relationship:  

Many years ago I asked a friend of mine in Boston, who had been living with the same boyfriend for a very long time, if it had ever occurred to them to want to get married. “Oh, no,” he said with a laugh, “we’d have terrible fights over who got to wear the wedding dress.” That witticism, if it had been directed against someone other than oneself, or against someone other than the person one loved, would have registered as merely demeaning in its implicit demotion of a man from the noble rank of male dignity to the lower rank of female triviality. And it would be doubly demeaning in the context of gay male love: since male homosexuality sees in masculinity an essential erotic value, to portray oneself or one’s partner as characterized by feminine identification to public mockery, would be to depreciate oneself or one’s boyfriend as a sexual object and vehicle of sexual fantasy.

. . . .

Leo Bersani conveys powerfully the sense of gay chagrin at the ineluctable failure of gay masculinity by citing “the classic put-down: the butch number swaggering into a bar in a leather get-up opens his mouth and sounds like a pansy, takes you home where the first thing you notice is the complete works of Jane Austin, gets you into bed and—well, you know the rest.”

Or in the unlikely event that, even after getting you into bed, he still managed to keep up butch appearances, all your remaining illusions would be shattered—according to the lead character of Armistead Maupin’s Tale of The City (1978)—when you eventually excused yourself to use his bathroom and discovered his supply of personal cosmetics.

. . . .

It is in this context that my friend’s remark about his boyfriend and himself coveting the wedding dress reveals its true significance. To utter it is to know oneself and one’s love-object as unworthy of the serious consideration that is masculine dignity’s due. It is to disclaim the presence to masculine authenticity, and the erotic credit that accrues to it, and to refuse in camp fashion to dignify oneself at the expense of someone else’s shame. At the same time, it insists that such inauthenticity is not incompatible with gay love. . . . On the contrary, it demonstrates that inauthenticity is not fatal to love, that seriousness does not have to prevail over irony in order for love to thrive and to endure.

To see through one’s own erotic illusions without withdrawing from one’s love-object its worthiness to be loved, to disclaim one’s entitlement to respect while continuing to assert it, to love and be loved without endowing one’s love with dignity; this is the possibility that traditional gay male culture holds out to its adherents. The supreme wisdom consists in living one’s life knowingly as melodrama—understanding full well (if not necessarily explicitly) that melodrama signifies both a degraded genre of literary discourse and a debased pragmatic genre of emotional expression: a despised, feminized, laughable, trivial style of expressing one’s feelings.

No wonder my friends from Boston could build a lasting relationship together while the gay baths and back rooms and sex clubs and online cruising sites thrive on the business of gay romantics, who prefer their own illusions, their fantasies of love, to actual people—people who, after all, cannot sustain those illusions, not at least for very long. That last remark is hardly intended as a put-down of those who frequent the baths . . . ; it’s just a reminder of what those unique gay male institutions are for. Which is not to help us live happily ever after, but to enable us to crowd as many anti-social thrills as possible into the moment and to provide us with a structured communal space in which to . . . discharge our romantic fantasies—without doing ourselves or our partners any lasting harm.

To live one’s life as melodrama, to do so knowingly and deliberately, is not of course to refuse to take it seriously—as any gay Joan Crawford fan . . . can tell you. But it is to accept the inauthenticity at the core of romantic love, to understand romantic love as a social institution, an ideology, a role, a performance, a social genre, while still, self-consciously and undeceivedly, succumbing to it.

In short, it is to do what is otherwise culturally impossible—impossible for normal folks, that is to combine passion with irony (291-294).

Participation in gay male culture enables the boyfriends from Boston to do what would otherwise be impossible, “impossible for normal folks, that is to combine passion with irony.” By putting on, if you will, a wedding dress, the boyfriends from Boston reveal their identification with a particular form of irony, with a particular fashion style, namely camp.

“Camp fashion,” as Halperin defines it above, is a refusal “to dignify oneself at the expense of someone else’s shame.” The specific object of its refusal is seriousness. Camp refuses to take masculinity seriously, as something other than a role, an ideology, a melodramatic performance. And at the same time, camp does not dismiss the erotic value of masculinity simply because it is a performance. To the contrary, camp enables one to “self-consciously and undeceivedly” enjoy it—and even to “[succumb] to it.”

It is camp fashion, camp irony, that enables the boyfriends from Boston to live their lives “knowingly as melodrama,” to embody both passion and irony at once—and it promises to make their relationship promising or lasting.

The couple’s participation in camp culture is contrasted in the citation above with gay male participation in sexual institutions like “gay baths and back rooms and sex clubs and online cruising sites.” All those gay male romantics wandering the halls of the baths, clothed only in simple white towels, indicate that there is nothing essentially ironic about (gay male) sex.

That is why Adele’s hit song, “Someone Like You,” blaring from a bathhouse in Hanoi, is so interesting. Like the wedding dress, the song alerts us to the (probable) presence of gay male culture. “[I]t is probable,” Halperin writes in “What Is Sex For?,” “that at least some bathhouse patrons, especially those of us who go often, have a further purpose in returning to those venues again and again . . . . Could we be in search of something that sex promises but does not, by itself, offer us . . . ,” namely “someone like you”?

Sex “promises” something that it cannot, “by itself,” deliver—and the (probable) presence of gay male culture reveals what sex requires to get to love: irony. Subjects of erôs must learn to “see through” their erotic illusions. Seeing through their erotic illusions, they are enabled to enjoy the “butch number” or the hot sex while also refusing to withdraw from the other person, on account of the sound of their voice, their obsession with Jane Austen, or their personal cosmetics (on account of their failure to perfectly live up to the exacting demands of erotic desire), their worthiness to be loved.

V.

We now recognize camp as an erotic style, a way of combining what is serious and unserious, sacred and profane, passionate and ironic. But we are trying to describe the erotic style appropriate to sex. Describing how camp camps—how, that is, camp manages to combine traditionally opposed, unequal social values—will help us more precisely define the erotic style appropriate to our sex lives.

What camp does is teach us how to demean erotic desire. “Gay may culture,” Halperin writes in How To Be Gay, “has . . . elaborated a distinctive, dissident perspective on romantic love [i.e., erotic desire], which straight people often regard as cynical. . . ” (294). Straight people regard it as cynical because “its irony . . . seems to them to undermine the seriousness and sincerity of love, and thereby demean it” (294, emphasis mine).

“Camp doesn’t preach;” Halperin observes, “it demeans” (191). It demeans the serious, the sacred, the masculine. In other words, camp sets erotic desire free; it breaks “the romantic monopoly on it,” making it “more widely available” for “social uses,” ending “the antagonism between love [i.e., erotic desire] and society, between love [i.e., erotic desire] and friendship, between the happy couple and the community.” It is this “camp sensibility” that, “at their wisest, gay male love [i.e., erotic] relationships exemplify and embody” (295).

Camp demeans erotic desire in a cultural context. In our sexual relationships, fucking is a word that registers something other than respectul, self-edifying coitus. In the sexual sphere, it seems promising to ironize erotic desire by fucking it.

By fucking erotic desire, the subjects of erôs, at least those who participate in gay male culture, are enabled to “see through” their erotic illusions, to see through what is taken as deadly serious, and to recognize it as a role that can be “undeceivedly” enjoyed. The aim is to end antagonisms (e.g., between the sacred and the profane, self and other), to make love (or friendship) with an-other a promising possibility.

VI.

The reason why fucking or demeaning erotic desire matters is latent in the idea of what it promises to make promising: the end of antagonisms, love of/friendship with an-other one. Fucking erotic desire (e.g., masculinity, the Sacred, monogamy, etc.) is a means of democratizing it (or, as Halperin also argues, desublimating it [294]). Fucking erotic desire is the erotic fashion of embodying what are traditionally opposed, unequal social values (e.g., fidelity and infidelity).

Again, a simple social practice, one we may playfully describe as drinking erotic desire, may help us to more clearly define what is at stake in fucking it: democracy or love.

In “Small Town Boy: Neil Bartlett Learns How to Be Gay” (2007), Halperin highlights power inequalities between differently aged gay men. The social practice proposed as a means of negotiating power disparities between said men is, now citing Bartlett, “that man buying his younger boyfriend (slightly embarrassed, but happily drunk) another drink.”

Bartlett cannot think the seemingly simple, everyday practice of an older man buying his younger boyfriend a drink without remembering “that man,” Oscar Wilde: “I remember the bizarre twisting of mythologies [i.e., romantic illusions] Wilde used to justify his adoration of young men,” Bartlett writes, “the mixing of a pastiche of Classical pederasty with a missionary zeal for the ‘criminal classes,’ the sense that they, not the boys he left sleeping in [his home in] Chelsea, were his true sons . . . .”  Remembering this history, “[o]ur history,” according to Bartlett, “becomes a way of understanding and exploring the change in our [present day] culture [i.e., of writing a history of the present], not simply of reading it as an ‘end.’”

From Bartlett’s perspective, an older man buying his younger boyfriend a drink “is not,” Halperin observes, “necessarily a mere recapitulation of archaic and unchanging forms of social hierarchy, upper-class sexual privilege and working-class sexual prostitution.” It is, at least potentially, now again citing Bartlett, “a new kind of relationship, an affair of the heart somehow appropriate to the meeting of two different men . . . .”

“Differences in age and wealth,” Halperin writes, “may actually be serving new, dynamic social functions, creating possibilities . . . among men who are asymmetrically situated according to conventional class hierarchies but are brought into approximate equality by the reciprocal exchanges of contemporary gay male life.”

Sex—well, at least understood from within the logic of Adele’s “Someone Like You”—may not be unlike that drink between an older man and his younger boyfriend (perhaps they are sitting at bar while Whitney Houston’s hit song, “How Will I Know?,” plays in the background?). That drink “may actually be serving new, dynamic social functions, creating possibilities . . . among men who” occupy differently valued social categories and by bringing them “into approximate equality.” Sex, like that drink, may become, to use Bartlett’s terms, “an affair of the heart somehow appropriate to the meeting of two different men.”

VII.

Monogamy/marriage can’t, as Phillips argues, be an affair—but it is possible that fucking sex may re-make it into a matter “of the heart somehow appropriate to the meeting of two different men,” two different women, two different people (#83).

Loving monogamy is not unlike dis-believing in God.

Un-faithfulness to God is not what we learn from Mechthild’s example. In Flowing Light, at least Book I, §44, we walk in on Mechthild masturbating; we witness Mechthild’s incredible need to believe in herself. She is both the subject and object of erotic desire.

Mechthild, however, is different from other subjects of erôs, such as the “romantics” we encountered in the lengthy citation from How To Be Gay. Romantics are constantly disappointed when their love-objects, recognized as distinct objects in the world, fail to conform to their erotic illusions. Mechthild is her own love-object.

Mechthild does not admit any space between her and her love-object. There is no room to hope for irony in Mechthild’s erotic life. She is “so utterly formed to [God’s] nature” that “not the slightest thing can be between [her] and [God, her Father by nature].”

Mechthild and gay male romantics do share one thing in common. They look up to the heavens. This is where fidelity can sometimes let people down.

Mechchild’s love story may prove promising, however, for the idea that God, the word par excellence for the deadly serious, the seriously masculine, the Sacred, wholeness/health, etc, is dtf.

The promise of a fuckable God, of a fuckable monogamy, a monogamy we learn to take im-personally or un-seriously, is what God’s fuckablity makes promising: a lasting, loving relationship with an-other, or a loving monogamy. Fucking God, we, at least potentially, empower an-other one, a different one, to excite us.

Significantly, fucking God does not come naturally to us. It is something we must learn to do. The irony is that being a participant in gay male culture is not unlike being a member of the Church. Halperin hints at this in How To Be Gay. The epigraph of the book, Albert Mollegen’s summary of Augustine’s theology, reads: “Let the Christians baptize and the pagans beget.”

Gay male culture, not unlike Christianity, entails enculturation. It is not a birthright. Gay male culture, not unlike monogamy, is unnatural. As such, anyone who finds it persuasive may participate in it. Which makes sense, as gay male culture, not unlike Christianity, not unlike monogamy, is an education in how to love who and what you erotically desire.

One, final irony: if a loving monogamy is what is desired, “it may be heterosexuals, nowadays . . . who need gay male culture more than gay men do themselves” (How To Be Gay, 456).

What does love want? Our in-fidelity.

Kylie Minogue, “All The Lovers” (music video still), 2010.

The music video of Kylie Minogue’s hit song, “All the Lovers” (2010) raises two questions for me: 1) What does love want? 2) What can we do about it?

Watch the video:

The video opens with a cup of coffee falling, splashing empty on the ground (and a man taking off his shirt); a container of milk drops, spilling out on the ground (and two more people take off their clothes), and white marshmallows light on the ground as Minogue sings to her beloved, to her love object: someone who is apparently skeptical of falling in (for) love.

She is the lover of a man who is rejecting movement. He is resisting her call to dance like a flame, to allow her to connect with him (to get inside his groove):

Dance, it’s all I wanna do, so won’t you dance?
I’m standing here with you, why won’t you move?
I’ll get inside your groove ’cause I’m on fire, fire, fire, fire1

Minogue sings “fire, fire . . . .” as a multi-racial, variously sexual group of people move, take off their clothes and let them drop to the ground. Each lover finds their beloved, and they start making out.

One lover’s briefcase opens, and the papers inside scatter to the ground. All the lovers seem to be doing the unbelievable: abandoning work, responsibility, respectability, and/or (financial) security in order to heed the summons of love. Risk is constitutive of love.

This sociality of love, Minogue acknowledges, hurts. Pain is a fact of falling, of loving, of intimacy or close proximity to an-other. Minogue does not redeem the character of love; she simply acknowledges it: “but baby it hurts.” Hurt is also constitutive of love.

Nonetheless, “[i]f love is good, you just want more.” We want more of the good, even if that means risking the pain of (the) fire(s of hell):

It hurts when you get too close, but, baby, it hurts
If love is really good, you just want more
Even if it throws you to the fire, fire, fire, fire

Now that we know love hurts, we are right to expect some indication of fear, some apprehensiveness about what is at stake for all the lovers. But we are surprised by images of joy and of peace (even of S/spirit): a black woman smiles, a multi-racial group lifts their hands in the air (as if in praise), and doves (symbol of peace and, for Christians, a symbol of the Spirit) are released as Minogue begins to be raised up, lifted by all the lovers below her.

“All the lovers” refers to all the people falling, spilling open, bouncing, scattering, letting go, and elevating one another and in the name love. “All the lovers” also names the reason that Minogue’s beloved is hesitant to move, to move even “a little bit more.”

Minogue’s beloved is hesitant to move, even just “a little bit more,” because he is all too aware of “all the lovers that have gone before.”

All the lovers that have gone before
They don’t compare
To you
Don’t be frightened
Just give me a little bit more
They don’t compare
All the lovers

We may read the blond-haired, white young man who takes off his shirt as Minogue sings, “Don’t be frightened / Just give me a little bit more,” as the object of her love. As she sings, “don’t compare,” he responds enthusiastically (like a sports fan cheering on his favorite team) to her encouragement to just keep moving, just a little bit more.

His doubts are somewhat allayed by Minogue’s alluring smile as she sings, “All the lovers that have gone before / They don’t compare / To you.” He seems comforted by the intensity of Minogue’s faith in him. Even so, he doesn’t take a single step toward her or the (Christmas) mass of all the lovers.

Why put everything on the line for what is not guaranteed? Is it reasonable to be an entrepreneur in the business of love? Is the risk worth the cost? What is the return on this kind of investment?

Minogue’s beloved seems to believe in monogamy. What he wants most of all is to be the one. And it his (and our) belief in monogamy that Minogue tries to re-think:

Feel, can’t you see there’s so much here to feel?
Deep inside in your heart you know I’m real
Can’t you see that this is really higher, higher, higher, higher?
Breathe, I know you find it hard, but, baby, breathe
You’ll be next to me, it’s all you need
And I’ll take you there, I’ll take you higher, higher, higher, higher.

Why does he (why do we) believe that the opposite of monogamy is openness, aliveness, feeling rather than closure, death, and numbness?

Why does he (why do we) believe monogamy is 1 rather than 1 + 1, more than 1?

Why does he (why do we) believe that the opposite of monogamy is unfaithfulness rather than faithfulness?

Why does he (why do we) believe that the opposite of monogamy is room to breathe rather than suffocating space? Maybe he is in the wrong song?2

Why does he (why do we) believe that the opposite of monogamy is in-dependence rather than dependance?

Minogue re-thinks monogamy both lyrically and aesthetically. Recall the resilience of the white, bouncing marshmallows. Think of the lightness of the floating white elephant. Remember the gallop of the white horse. We can’t forget the splashing white milk, the flying white doves, the wildy ascending white balloons. Each of these aesthetic choices call our attention to the hardness, heaviness, and immovability of his (and our) belief in monogamy.2

Love, Minogue contends, is soft. Love is light. Love is like liquid: un-predictable.

Love wants to dance. Love wants to take a leap of faith. Love wants to flow.

As the video suggests, we can look down at Minogue’s love. We can pray for “Love [to] lift us up where we belong / Where the eagles cry / On a mountain high / [higher, higher, higher] Love lift us up where we belong / Far from the world below / Up where the clear winds blow.”

We can, in other words, refuse Minogue’s love. We can hold firm in our belief in (suffocating) monogamy (can one breathe far from the world below, up where the clear winds blow?).

Or, we can come down to earth. We can enter into what Minogue offers: love’s undulations.

The melancholic vibe toward the end of the music video suggests that Minogue is unsure if her beloved (if we) will accept her love.

Is he (are we) so predictably faithful? Or, do we show signs of movement, signs of promise? And what does it mean to be(come) promising?

Consider the concluding aphorism (#121) of Adam Phillips’s book, Monogamy:

“Monogamy and infidelity: the difference between making a promise and being promising.”3

Is infidelity the opposite of monogamy? Perhaps.

It’s also possible to think the difference between them, a loving monogamy: a promise to an-other (“All the lovers that have gone before / They don’t compare / To you) that is always promising: a promise that moves, spills, bounces, responds to the pull of what is unpredictable, ungovernable, surprising, namely the presence of an-other.

Minogue may have been tempted to give up on her beloved (and on us). But she doesn’t give up on him (nor does she give up on us). Rather, Minogue gives him (and us) the Spirit.

Kylie Minogue, “All The Lovers” (music video still), 2010.

In the Christian faith, the Spirit pours out the lover’s love into the hearts of unsuspecting (undeserving even) beloveds. The Spirit is a promise that makes us all promising.

The Spirit makes in-fidelis of us all.

FOOTNOTES:

  1. Notice the QR codes on the falling objects. Some assert that when scanned, the word love is produced. There is no way of knowing if that is true, as we cannot scan the codes. I asked ChatGPT about the meaning(s) of the QR codes. According to ChatGPT, “the QR codes add to the video’s visual complexity and modern flair, enhancing the viewer’s experience through their design and the thematic associations they evoke.” ↩︎
  2. One way to understand the whiteness of the marshmallows, elephant, horse, etc. is as a kind of highlighter, enabling this critical theme to stick out from the multiracial, multisexual background of the sociality of love constructed by Minogue. ↩︎
  3. See a cool interview with Phillips re: Monogamy here: https://www.salon.com/1997/02/19/monogamy/

    From the interview:

    “[Q:] Here is the final aphorism from your book: ‘Monogamy and infidelity: the difference between making a promise and being promising.’ Why is this your exit line?

    [Phillips:] Because I think that when one is writing about relationships between people, one is writing to some degree about promise. About possibilities for the future and predictions about the future. To enter into a relationship is a kind of prophetic act — it implies a future even though it is an unknown one. And it implies a future in which there are certain kinds of pleasures possible. So I suppose I am interested in what people can give to each other, and what people imagine others can give to them. It’s something about that — the idea of being able to make a promise, and the idea of being promising in spite of the promises one makes as well as because of them. That’s what I am interested in.” ↩︎

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 kind of guy who prefers the company of women. He is with the women at the foot of the cross.

We know too that the relationship between Jesus and this man is one characterized by physical and emotional intimacy. And their intimate connection is no more pronounced—or obvious—than it is in this moment, in the final moments of Jesus’ life.

As he is dying on the cross, Jesus no doubt feels like a motherless child: ripped from the circle of maternal security, cursed and abandoned to the whims of colonizers. Maybe he is even second guessing himself. Why could he not just be normal, act like every other king? In his moment of despair, doubt, questioning—Jesus is concerned that his man learns the lessons that will ultimately result in his resurrection.

Jesus makes sure that the man he loves is adopted by the maternal figure. Jesus declares, “Woman, here is your son.” To his beloved he says, “Here is your mother.” The text tells us that Jesus’ beloved “from that hour took her into his own.” In other words, the man Jesus loved accepted being placed under the exclusive care of the one the narrator calls Jesus’ “mother,” the one Jesus calls simply “woman.”

This text—indeed, the Gospel of John—clearly reveals Jesus as a lover of another man, as one who is concerned in his final hour with the well-being of his boyfriend. Here at the end of Jesus’ life, we are once again reminded that Jesus is not like all the other boys, like all the other rulers and kings. We are reminded that Jesus is a “mama’s boy,” more like a queen than a king.

And that is what the Romans were getting at when they plastered, in the languages of both the colonized and the colonizer, “King of the Jews” above the crucified Jesus’ head. They were calling Jesus the F-word, the 6 letter homophobic slur. The message of Rome is clear: the cross is where not being like all the other boys, not being like all the other kings and rulers, the cross is where being queer will get you; the cross is where being a mama’s boy will get you.

Not much has changed. Consider how we are taught to think about a boy’s secure attachment to his mother.

There is a tradition that is made up of the writings of primarily white psychologists talking about white boys and their relationship to their mothers. Their fear is that a white boy left under the care of his mother will become chronically effeminate, a hopelessly effeminate boy, a monstrosity, one who lacks a positive masculine self-regard.

There is also a tradition of primarily white scholars talking about African American boys and their relationship to their mothers. In this tradition, the dangers multiply: African American boys cared for by their mothers become incapable men—not only gender deviant but also unable to take care of themselves and their families economically, and so end up in jail.

These are the white lies we are told about our secure attachments to the maternal—and their power should not be underestimated. They clearly tell us that if we are mama’s boys, we will be defined as monsters, demons, Satan himself. They teach us that our particular lives and loves are hellish and evil, cursed, and that we will be treated accordingly. Hell is for queers.

But as Lil Nas X has shown us, hell is not such a bad place—especially if you’re the King of it.

In his now in/famous music video, Lil Nas X, judged and condemned, descends—in fact, he slides down a stripper pole, into hell. He feigns interest in Satan before ultimately wringing Satan’s neck.

Lil Nas dethrones Satan and becomes the king of hell, Satan himself. Lil Nas X becomes what Rome said he should fear: the face of damnation itself.

In his music video, Lil Nas fully embraces what Rome names as a hellish lifestyle. He quite literally puts himself in Satan’s shoes. This is his liberation, his resurrection.

Lil Nas X perfectly understands his situation. He knows that he is not really a hellish creature. But he also knows that that is how Rome sees him—really.

And not just him. You will recall that when Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who killed Michael Brown, testified before a grand jury, he described the young African American man he killed this way: “It looks like a demon.”

Lil Nas X understands his situation. Like Jesus, he descends into hell, and he embraces fully what Rome condemns, tortures, and murders. In fact, Lil Nas X and Jesus may have learned this from their mothers.

As Hortense J. Spiller argues in her now classic essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” speaking specifically of the symbolic situation faced by African American women, an African American mother may “[actually claim] the monstrosity . . . which her culture imposes in blindness, . . . might rewrite after all a radically different text for a female empowerment.”

Hellish creatures: that is what we are to Rome, that is how Rome sees all of us who dare to defy its laws in the name of Justice. Why not claim it? We know the truth; we know the Gospel, that “now, apart from the law, Justice is revealed.”

But where we see Jesus, where we see Justice, Rome sees Satan.

Rome sees Satan, but to us, Michael Brown is a child of God.

Rome sees Satan, but to us, Lil Nas X is a preacher of the Gospel.

Rome sees Satan, but to us, Jesus is the Messiah.

Rome sees Satan, but to us, Jesus is the Word of God.

Rome sees Satan, but to us, Jesus is our Salvation.

What Rome thinks is foolish, we know as the wisdom of God.

To those of us being saved, Jesus Messiah is the wisdom of God. Jesus Messiah is the way, the truth, and the life.

And what he wanted for the man he loved is a secure attachment to the maternal figure. That is what he wants for all of us who love him: that we may be(come) what Rome fears most, the desecration of its power over us.

May it be so.

Amen.

Rest From Cruel Dominion: Embracing Mercy on the Sabbath Day

A Sermon Based On Deuteronomy 5:12-15 and Mark 2:23-3:6

[5/20/24: Sermon writing is a laborious process, and most clergy spend a lot of time, in the midst of hospital visits, countless meetings and emails, and other obligations, getting it just right. I posted my first draft of this sermon, to be given June 2nd, on May 15th. It has undergone a lot of changes, but I think I am hitting the right notes now. **Guiding statement: I propose to preach that we rest from cruel dominion, from thwarting animal justice and restoration, and to the end of becoming compassionate and merciful sovereigns of the earth.** We all need help with (sermon) writing well. Thomas Long is, in my opinion, the best help for writers of sermons.]

I.

Human animals rule the land. We rule the air. We rule the seas. We have dominion over the earth.

I completely agree with Matthew Scully, a Republican, when we argues in his eloquent and moving book, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy—I entirely agree with his argument that “[t]he term dominion carries no insult to our fellow [,non-human animal] creatures. We are all set forth into the world with different gifts and attributes. Their gifts, the ones their Creator intended for them, are good for many things—governing just isn’t one of them. Someone has to assume dominion, and looking around the earth we seem to be the best candidates. . . ” (12).

That truth doesn’t make us better or more valuable or less animal than, say, pigs, octopuses, cows, elephants or bats. Our dominion merely reflects our difference, our unique—yet completely animal—place in the world.

So the question we face today—and every day—is not whether we have dominion over the earth—we manifestly do—the question we face is a much more difficult one: What kind of sovereigns are we?

Are we merciful, compassionate, filled with wonder at the sheer diversity of life all around us and so are sovereigns committed to respecting and protecting the inherent dignity of all animal life?

Or, Are we cruel sovereigns, rulers who thwart animal access to justice and to restoration.

II.

We are so very often cruel sovereigns of the earth.

Our cruel reign is sometimes expressed through our faith in what Martha Nussbaum identifies, in her powerful and life-changing book, Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility—in what she identifies as our faith in a Romantic view of nature.

We enjoy Romantic thoughts of “Natural” spaces—and of “Natural” people, too. We love to imagine that there are, out there somewhere, pristine, self-regulated, balanced places and self-sufficient, rural people.

The Romantic idea of “Nature” intoxicates us, but when we sober up and actually observe nature, I think we start to agree with the 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill: “Nature is cruel and thoughtless.”

When we sober up, when we are truly in nature, I think we begin to learn what ecologists teach us: “balance of nature” is a nice slogan for fruit and veggie supplements, but no such thing exists in nature.

And rural poverty and isolation from needed resources, like quality healthcare, may be, from the Romantic point of view, the “Natural” order of things, but that is just another reason for us to sober up.

Our faith in “Nature” makes us neglectful; it enables us to ignore the suffering of our fellow creatures. But we are not always neglectful, are we? Sensing that our fellow creatures, including members of our own species, can serve the needs of some dominant group, we force them to serve the free market.

Consider the slaughterhouses throughout our county. Who works there? What do they do all day? And what creatures are killed there? How many are killed there? And how are they killed there? And what’s the big deal? For some answers, read a book like Steven Wise’s An American Trilogy: Death, Slavery, and Dominion on the Banks of the Cape Fear River.

If we open our hearts, we may feel the cries for mercy coming from slaughterhouses all over our country and from those allegedly pristine Natural places. Feeling those cries, we may even be persuaded to rest from our cruel dominion.

III.

God asked us, in the 4th Commandment we read earlier, God asked us to take a break from our cruel dominion. We are asked to rest from cruel dominion on the Sabbath and to remember that God liberated us from the regime of cruelty.

That’s nice—but carefully consider the logic of the Sabbath Commandment: Liberation from slavery in Egypt is the justification for pausing the institution of slavery among those liberated from it. You heard the text: Let your male and female slaves rest on the Sabbath day. I guess you can take the slaves out of Egypt but you can’t take the Egypt out of the liberated slaves—except, maybe, on the Sabbath Day.

But there is a reason the command to let female and male slaves rest on the Sabbath is repeated twice: cruel dominion is all too often the policy of the Sabbath Day.

The story we read from Mark teaches us that cruelty has become a Sabbath Day tradition. Consider this story, another version of the pious cruelty Mark critiques:

All of 17-years-old, I attended a winter church retreat in McCall, Idaho. I managed to get very sick while at the retreat.

I will spare you the details of all the ways my body was trying to expel the sickness.

Anyway, I ended up in hospital, stayed the night on an IV, and returned to the retreat in the morning, in time for breakfast. I walked into the cafeteria and nearly vomited at the sight and smells of sausages and bacon. I consigned myself to hunger.

Later that morning, we gathered for worship and for communion. The chunk of communion bread I ate was so satisfying that, after the service, I went back to the communion table, and I started to chow down on the huge loaf of leftover bread.

It felt so good.

As I was being restored, clergy So-And-So walked over to me and calmly, but with a tone, reminded me that I was eating the body of Christ—and he suggested I stop eating it like a wild animal, by which he meant I should just stop eating it altogether; communion was over.

Being a good teenager, I just completely ignored him. I was not going to be blocked from what I needed to heal.

I hope we have the courage to teach our youth that lesson: sometimes holy trouble will look like totally ignoring religious people. Sometimes, even as your hand is being swatted away by church folks, you just have to keep reaching out your hand and ripping off huge chunks of bread, of justice, of healing. Even on Sundays, in the name of Jesus, you may have to find the courage and tenacity to resist cruel dominion.

Cruel dominion, all the ways, through our inaction and action, we block animals from justice and restoration—cruel dominion is so often a Sunday tradition. But tradition is not destiny. We don’t have to be like clergy So-And-So, blocking people from food, from healing, from justice. We can do something different, if only for one day a week. We can obey the 4th Commandment; we can rest from our cruel dominion.

IV.

Some of you have may noticed a story about the Hurricanes a few weeks ago. I know we have Canes fans in here today. Maybe you saw a story about them entitled, in part, “Hurricanes Use Rest As A Weapon.”

What they did was refuse to practice early in the morning on game day. They went out of their way to get on the ice the day before the game, choosing to rest on the morning of the game. The Canes know what we all know: rest impacts how we perform.

Rest makes us smarter. Rest makes us stronger. Rest makes us patient. Rest makes us merciful and compassionate. Rest makes us woke. 

Woke just means that cruel dominion exhausts us. If we’re woke, that just means we want a break from all forms of cruel dominion.

Rested, we may wake up woke, ready to forsake all forms of slavery, all forms of cruel dominion.

Rested, we may even begin to hear that part of the 4th Commandment that asks us to give animals a rest. Rested, we may start to consider animals as something other than property to be used and as something other than food to be eaten. Rested, we may find it in ourselves to liberate animals from slavery to us.

V.

Philosopher Jeremy Bentham was right when he compared our treatment of animals to slavery. Our cruel dominion over animals can even be hidden in practices that are actually good from our fellow creatures. Think about some of the reasons we stop eating meat:

We stop eating meat to save rainforests, as our meat eating habits require more and more land to raise all those cattle. There are 1.7 billion cows on the face of the earth, and all those cows weigh more than all wild land mammals combined.

We stop eating meat because cows produce more greenhouses gases than our entire transportation sector, changing our environment.

We stop eating meat because it is not healthy for us.

We may even stop eating meat because we oppose cruelty to animals, and industrial farming is terribly cruel to animals. We have an intuitive sense that if we are cruel to animals, that if we support such cruelty, we will also be cruel to one another.

But notice: all that concern, it’s all about us.

Rested, we may realize what Aristotle did: animals like pigs, cows, and chickens “are self-maintaining systems who pursue a good and matter to themselves.” Rested, we may grasp that most animals, including all the ones we like to eat, are sentient creatures.

Sentience is about a lot more than feeling pleasure and pain. It also means that you have an opinion of yourself; you see yourself in a certain way, and you see others in your group, and other objects in the world, in a certain way. And you move accordingly, you move in a way that aligns with your sense of yourself and your sense of how the objects in your world conform to your understanding of what is good and what is bad for you.

Rested, we may grasp that the sow is sentient; she was not created to be food for us; she was created to pursue her goods: a long, satisfying life, and friendship, intimacy, family, nutrition, play, secure housing; rested, we may now understand that the sow desires to pursue her projects and to accomplish her goals.

Rested, the smell of sausages and bacon on the Sabbath may make us want to vomit.

Rested, we may come to this table and reach out our hands, not to kill and eat our fellow creatures, but to be restored by the taste of bread and of grapes.

VI.

Now, I understand if you were with me until that last bit about not eating sentient animals, like pigs. I get it.

I became a vegetarian just last November after I read Nussbaum’s book—and by the reactions of many family and friends, you would think being a vegetarian is the most weirdest thing to be in the world!

Yes, of course vegetarianism is weird, especially if the reason you are a vegetarian is rooted in animal studies, in the fact that most animals, including all of the ones we just love to eat, are sentient in the most expansive sense of the word.

Of course vegetarianism is weird; from day one we have been taught that justice is not a thing for non-human animals to enjoy.

Of course vegetarianism is weird; from day one we have been taught that justice is not a thing for non-human animals to enjoy. Humans animals are entitled to justice; cows, pigs, and chickens are entitled to ketchup.

Again, I completely agree with Matthew Scully. He writes, “I am betting that in the Book of Life ‘[They] had mercy on the creatures’ is going to count for more than ‘[They] ate well” (45).

Rested, we may even learn that it’s possible to forsake cruelty and to eat well!

VII.

On the sabbath day, just for one day, let’s rest from our cruel dominion; let’s eat more bread and drink more wine (I mean, grape juice).  And if you just can’t, there is good news for you: right now, in Singapore, synthetic meat is on the menu. It’s “real,” and it’s lab grown. And I imagine it will come our way soon.

For today, let’s start simple; let’s embrace the deepest truth of our faith: God liberated us from cruel dominion.

Today, let it be heard and believed that God gave the middle finger to cruel dominion: God delivered the Messiah Jesus, crucified, dead, and buried, from the grave. 

So today, let us really rest from cruel dominion; it’s just done day; it’s just one small act—but tomorrow, rested, you may wake up woke, ready to play the game of dominion differently, ready to become the human animals God created us to become: kind and merciful sovereigns of the earth.

May it be so.

Amen.

The Social Meaning(s) of Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot

*

Lori Lightfoot is, according Gregory Pratt, a political failure.

“Some of Chicago’s problems can be explained by forces greater than the mayor. . . ,” Pratt contends in his recent book, The City Is Up For Grabs: How Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot Led And Lost A City In Crisis, “[b]ut some are the result of [Mayor Lightfoot’s] poor leadership at City Hall, a story that hasn’t been told in full until now. . . ” (xii). Pratt continues, “In some ways, the past four years of Lightfoot’s tenure as mayor are a model for how not to lead a big city. Her failures weakened the office . . . ” (xv).

Pratt’s literary portrayal of Lightfoot is more complicated than it may first appear. His reading of Chicago’s first lesbian Black mayor exceeds his intended framing. In fact, Pratt’s (un)intended portrayal of Lightfoot as perfectly (ill-)suited to be Chicago’s mayor is compelling, comprehensive, and coherent, all of the qualities that make a book worth reading.

But why do I care about Lightfoot?

I was born and raised in Idaho, but I consider Chicago to be my birthplace. In 2002, a twentysomething, I moved to the city with a bar on every corner and bridges that (until weed was legalized in 2020) smelled like chocolate.1

I grew up in Chicago during the Daley regime. I moved to the East Coast during the first few years of the Emanuel regime. I entirely missed Lightfoot’s surprising rise to power, her 4 year reign, and her just as surprising fall from grace.

Nonetheless, I continue to care about Chicago, and I care about women in politics. More specifically, I am interested in how women in politics become political figures, how they (actual women politicians) get defined/portrayed in art (literature, film, etc.). Specifically, I care about Pratt’s artistic rendering of the former Chicago mayor and what it may tell us about how Chicagoans feel and what they want for themselves.

Pratt would likely reject the idea that his book is an artistic rendering of Lightfoot. Yet, the real Lightfoot refused to participate in his project (xv). So, whatever Pratt’s book is about, it is not about the real her. Nonetheless, and this is important to grasp, Pratt’s rendering of Lightfoot does tell us something true and accurate about how she is perceived as a political figure, a figure of what Chicagoans want and what they can do about it.

How is Lightfoot figured by Pratt? What is true about it? Why does it matter? 

**

What follows is a description of Pratt’s picture of Lightfoot. The quotes below are numbered to indicate groupings of interrelated texts that, when taken together, constitute Pratt’s figuring of the mayor. In the ensuing analysis of these texts, I refer to each grouping as a set (e.g., Set 1 = quotes 1[a-d]).

1(a): “Noticing a couple of ornate chess sets hand carved by members of a church in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, I asked Lightfoot if she played. She chuckled and responded that she’s more of a checkers player. Her brother tried to teach her, Lightfoot said, but she wasn’t able to get into the game. It showed over the next four years of chaos” (ix-x).

1(b): “[Mayor] Emanuel came out of the meeting boasting to staffers that [Lightfoot] said [she would not run against him for mayor]. Weeks later, she bought campaign websites . . . . It’s one of the top points Emanuel’s people make when they say she isn’t trustworthy. For her part, Lightfoot says she wasn’t running for mayor but wanted to keep her options open. It’s a level of hairsplitting that makes someone hard to trust” (28).

1(c): Jeanette Taylor, “heart and soul of Chicago’s left-wing City Council slate,” describing Lightfoot: “The difference is, Toni [Preckwinkle, President of the Cook County Board of Commissioners] will say, ‘Bend over, I’m about to fuck you.’ With Lori, you look up, and your ass is sore’” (86).

1(d): “Though the conversation [with Karen Lewis of the Chicago Teachers Union] was amicable, the aftermath worsened the dynamic between the mercurial mayor and street-fighting union” (108).

2(a): “Originally from small town Massillon, Ohio, Lori Lightfoot grew up working class” (4).

2(b): “But she made a big splash at the University of Chicago when she wrote an article about a Baker McKenzie law firm partner asking racist questions to prospective hires” (4).

2(c): “Contemporaries recall Lightfoot as a hard-charging prosecutor with a mean streak, in the courtroom and at the office. Everyone respected her intellect, but she was considered controversial for how she treated people” (5).

2(d): More aptly, she’s a corporate lawyer who appreciates the status quo for what it is while trying to change things around the margins. She appreciates order” (32).

3(a): “In one interview, Lightfoot promised not to be ‘window dressing,’ according to a Chicago Defender profile that praised her as ‘petite, apparently feisty and scheduled to take the reins [of the Chicago Police Department’s Office of Professional Standards]” (7).

3(b): “In truth, Lightfoot ran the agency in a way geared at protecting the system’s legitimacy and promoting the bad-apple theory of policing that most problems are isolated” (8).

4(a): “Like her denunciation of the Baker McKenzie racist interview, Lightfoot’s handling of the reform efforts after being appointed to the task force [publicly criticizing Emanuel’s ‘memorandum of agreement’ with the Department of Justice] was arguably her at her best (23).

4(b): “But it also highlighted a certain opportunism from Lightfoot, who was angry with Emanuel and lashed out. Channeled effectively, that sense of grievance and clarity of purpose could do a lot of good for the city” (23).

4(c): “Nothing really came from Lightfoot’s [negative] public comments [about the Chicago Police Superintendent], which meant the incident didn’t do anything other than piss people off and illustrate that her tough talk is often just bluster” (96).

5(a): “Years later, she gleefully recalled her relationship with Emanuel in a New York Times interview. ‘He supposedly once said to somebody about me, “I gave her a platform and a microphone, and she took it and shoved it up my ass” (31).

5(b): “While she attempted to portray herself as a progressive alternative to Emanuel, she didn’t embrace particularly left-wing policies . . . (32).

5(c): “Lightfoot spoke a big game about equity and underdogs, but it never jibed with her conservative views on spending and taxes, or her history as a corporate lawyer. ‘Frankly, you take the rhetoric about equity and racial justice out of what Lori Lightfoot says, and she’s a pretty neoliberal politician,’ Sharkey [a leader of the Chicago Teacher’s Union (CTU)] told me” (43).

6(a): “Depending on perspective, the story [a situation when Lightfoot was a prosecutor, being confronted by a bank robber in court] highlights Lightfoot’s loyalty to a friend [a fellow prosecutor, harassed by the bank robber for being a Jew] and her decency in the face of nastiness—or her tendency to suddenly wind up in a fight [Lightfoot responded to the robber, “That’s about enough, Mr. White]” (8).

6(b): “The confrontation [a press conference interruption by state representative Robert Martwick] has taken legendary status. . . . [I]t helped show people the best of her, standing up for herself and diagnosing a problem . . . .The only downside was the lesson it internalized for the candidate: that slapping rivals works. . . . [T]he occasional beatdown is fine, particularly when someone else starts it, but nobody wants to be around someone who’s in a daily brawl with a new opponent” (56).

6(c): Critics weren’t able to get anything to stick against Lightfoot, who kept the worst elements of her personality under control, though she showed flashes of it off camera” (61).  

7(a): “[After she won the election] [h]er treatment of people started to change. There was a growing sense among some in her circle that she didn’t think she needed anyone. . . . The victory went to her head” (69).

7(b): Describing an incident with the aforementioned Alderperson Taylor at a City Council meeting: “To me, the scene highlighted how Lightfoot didn’t fully understand her power. The mayor presides over City Council from an elevated dais. To speak with her, alderpersons must get permission to walk past security. It is, simply, a throne. And the king [Lightfoot reportedly claimed ‘to have the biggest dick in Chicago’] or queen never vacates the throne for a fight, particularly not one they then lose” (164).

8(a): “Lightfoot staff would tell [Gilbert] Villegas [floor leader of Chicago’s City Council], ‘She isn’t a politician.’ [Villegas] would respond, ‘When you become mayor of the third largest city, you’d better become a politician.’ It was a common refrain for Lightfoot and a recurring theme worsened by staffers who indulged her feelings rather than explaining that she was, in fact, a politician the moment she put her name on the ballot and won” (78).

8(b): “[Inspector General Joe] Ferguson had been optimistic about her potential to be a great mayor but was worried she had ‘completed the transformation’ into ‘politician who cares about things politicians care about” (100).

9(a): “Lightfoot felt like she was on higher ground due to her popularity and landslide victory. Lightfoot’s team would defend her to people who didn’t like her approach, saying she won the election by being demanding and prosecutorial. It fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the election win and the elusiveness of political popularity” (109).

9(b): “He [Lightfoot aide Michael Fassnacht] took a lesson from the memes [of Lightfoot during the Covid pandemic]: people liked Lightfoot and wanted to see her in authentic situations” (125).

9(c): Heading into more forums, Lightfoot faced a tough balance: Be tough, but not off-putting” (198).

10(a): “She made a decision [to shut down the lakefront] and stuck with it, even after it became clear that the [COVID] virus was less likely spread outdoors. Leadership requires resolution, but unwillingness to adapt to new facts is death” (125).

10(b): “Her early waffling about shutdowns and false threats to close businesses if cases spread in the fall highlight the indecision and lack of vision that plagued her administration” (129).

11(a): “Lightfoot can’t acknowledge fault” (155).

11(b): “Lightfoot addressed her broken promise to reopen Chicago’s mental health clinics shuttered by Emanuel in a rare example of successfully taking a change of mind head-on” (197).  

That’s Pratt’s artistic rendering of Lightfoot.

***

We now stand before Pratt’s figure of Lightfoot, but what are we to make of it?

Set 1 defines Lightfoot as lacking any interest in a game that requires strategy to win. At the same time, she is portrayed as a very strategic person: Taylor didn’t know she was being fucked by Lightfoot until it was too late. Lightfoot is not always blunt, but “mercurial,” assessing her opponent’s strategy. Like all political operatives, she does not wear her plans on her sleeve, refusing to give her opponents an opportunity to move against her objectives. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (un)strategic.

Set 2 situates Lightfoot in an unremarkable social position. She is from small town Ohio, and she grew up working class. Her hard work also earns her a spot at the University of Chicago Law School where she is said to make a “big splash,” calling out racism at a prestigious law firm. She is also a status-quo loving, wealthy corporate lawyer who doesn’t give a damn about people or meaningful change. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (anti-)elitist.

Set 3 paints Lightfoot as a true reformer. She is not “window dressing.” She is also, “in truth”, just that: a facade, another Chicago politician that gives cover to corruption. According Pratt, Lightfoot is (in)authentic.

Set 4 gives us a Lightfoot who speaks truth to power. At the very same time her words are self-serving. Her truth is also just “bluster.” According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (un)trustworthy.

Set 5 describes Lightfoot as the progressive alternative to moderate Democratic mayor, Emanuel. She is also a moderate politician in sheep’s clothing. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (im)moderate

Set 6 defines Lightfoot as either friendly or prone to picking fights. It is always unclear which Lightfoot one will meet: Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (un)predictable.

Set 7 presents Lightfoot as a loner, above the need for help. She is also criticized for not acting like a king or queen, for not understanding her power, improperly leaving her throne to seek help from Alderperson Taylor. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (un)democratic.

Set 8 offers us a Lightfoot who unwisely rejects the governing style of a politician. Lightfoot is also a politician, a politician who cares only about what politicians care about. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (a)political.

Set 9 reveals a Lightfoot liked for being herself: tough and demanding, a (grand)mom-like figure for the city. At the very same time, she is disliked for those very same qualities. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (un)likeable.

Set 10 is a Lightfoot who is decisive and unyielding. She is also “waffling” and without resolve. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (in)decisive.

Set 11 leaves us with a Lightfoot who is unable/unwilling to adapt to change or to admit the need to change. She is also someone capable of changing course and of explaining the need for such a change. According to Pratt, Lightfoot is (mal)adaptive.

To be fair, Pratt likely intended to portray Lightfoot in a singular way, as a political failure. In his figuring of Lightfoot, he places the emphasis on her negative qualities. In fact, he calls out what he believes are her good qualities only a few times, namely Lightfoot’s toughness, her champion spirit, and her sometimes willingness to take “a change of mind head on.”

Yet, as the final chapter of Pratt’s book, “Breaking Up With The Mayor,” suggests, he was once into Mayor Lightfoot. So, it is not surprising that his portrayal of her exceeds, like Lightfoot’s suits, his intended framing. In fact, I think Pratt’s (un)intended portrayal of Lightfoot as perfectly (ill-)suited to be Chicago’s mayor is compelling, comprehensive, and coherent, all of the qualities that make a body of art pleasing to a viewer.

****

Pratt figures Lightfoot as ill-suited for Chicago politics. But he makes little of her ill-fitting suits.

The City Is Up For Grabs begins with a cute story about four-year-old Idris Lockett dressing up as Mayor Lightfoot for Halloween: “[Idris’s] mother, Catherine, had picked Idris up from her cousin’s home and found him in a jacket that was way too large for his little frame. This visual reminded Catherine of the city’s new mayor, who often wore suits that exceeded the limits of her arms and legs” (vii).2

Pratt uses Lockett’s story to bookend Lightfoot’s single term as mayor, one that begins with her celebrating a cute kid who went viral for dressing like her and ends with her refusing to meet with him after he sat for hours at her last City Council meeting. But he makes nothing of Lightfoot’s fashion style. I don’t fault him for that, as many of us think style is trivial, unimportant, meaningless. But there is a reason Lockett went viral: Lightfoot’s style has social meaning.

And so the question arises: What is the social meaning of Lightfoot’s ill-fitting suits?

Lightfoot’s ill-fitting suits are what set her apart from another female politician who wears a kind of suit and is (in)famous for it: Hillary Clinton. Sketching the social meaning of Hillary’s pantsuits (a decades long topic of popular conversation) will hone our sense of what is relevant in our interpretation of Lightfoot’s suits.

I do not know if the real Lightfoot has shared why she wears ill-fitting suits, but we do know Hillary’s reasoning for wearing pantsuits. Hillary switched out skirts (the typical style of the First Lady) for pantsuits in the 1990s when photographers started taking (or attempting to take) up-the-skirt shots of her. Hillary started wearing suits to prevent these sexist violations of her bodily integrity.

But Hillary’s clothing style(s) did nothing to protect her from the normative male gaze. One cover of Spy Magazine, for example, reveals the gendered politics that framed Hillary as First Lady. According to the cover of Spy Magazine, what Hillary’s dress attempts to hide from public view is her dick.

Throughout the 1990s Hillary was portrayed as “the man.” And when you are a woman, being framed as “the man” is not a compliment. A masculine woman is a man-hating woman, an emasculating woman, a kind of dominatrix eager to stuff a man’s asshole with her cock. She is a monstrosity, at least from a normative male perspective.

Whatever the intentions of the real Hillary Clinton, the pantsuits actually called attention to her masculinity, to her dick. Suits are a fashion staple of professional males. Yet, the way she wears them (they are well fitting) and the way they are styled (usually elegant in their own way and/or colorful) help to feminize her masculinity.

Discerning the social meaning of Lightfoot’s ill-fitting suits requires attention to the same kinds of details we identified to make some gendered sense of Hillary’s suits, but those details must always be understood in their own right, in their own context.

To start, Lightfoot is a Black lesbian, and so she is (like Hillary but for different reasons) masculinized from the start, and (unlike Hillary) doubly so. Black women are gendered masculine. Ditto lesbian women. They are women who, according to a racist, homophobic, and sexist logic, depart from the norms of “proper” (i.e., white and straight) women.3

On the one hand, Lightfoot’s suits do not serve to feminize her. They don’t fit well, and they are not flashy. Lightfoot’s suits more closely resemble working-class(?) male fashion. Moreover, Lightfoot seems to enjoy publicly displaying her BIG dick. She reportedly claimed to have the biggest dick in Chicago. Lightfoot does not seem to care about downplaying her phallic prowess. Lightfoot’s suits, quite unlike Hillary’s, seem to masculinize her masculinity. Lightfoot seems to take pride in being “the man.”

On the other hand, Lightfoot’s suits exceed her masculinist presentation, highlighting the petite figure wearing the big suit. Her suits may invite us not to take her big dick too seriously. Lightfoot’s suits may (like Hillary’s but in a different way) ironize her masculinity.

Lightfoot’s ill-fitting suits correspond perfectly well to Pratt’s portrayal of her as ill-suited to lead the City of Chicago. Her suits reveal the social truth about her. And the reason for that is a whole host of social terms are, like Lightfoot’s suit, gendered.

Terms like (in)authenticity, (anti-)elitist, (a)political, and so forth are other ways of getting at what is masculine (and so legitimate) and what is feminine (and so trivial). Authenticity, elitism, and politics are all socially gendered as masculine, as they speak to what is taken socially as real and powerful. And so they speak to what “we” should desire.

Pratt’s figuring of Lightfoot, like the figuring of Hillary, confounds straightforward, normative political desiring. That is what Pratt’s book, perhaps unintentionally, helps us to grasp as the social meaning of Mayor Lightfoot.

*****

Pratt’s figuring of Lightfoot is but one instance of such cultural manufacturing. Each figure of Lightfoot should be understood on its own terms and in its own right. Although, I imagine there will be common themes across the different portrayals of Lightfoot.

But why does Pratt’s figuring of Lightfoot matter?

I think it matters not for what it teaches us about the real Lightfoot. “Feminine” political figures are obviously related to the real women who inspire them, but we should always mind the gap between social perceptions of such women and the women themselves. I think Pratt’s figuring of Lightfoot matters for what it may reveal about the distinctive subjectivity of Chicagoans, their specific way of feeling about the City of Chicago and what is possible in it.

Chicagoans once felt like the figure of Mayor Lightfoot, and might they feel it again?

And what does Pratt’s figure of Lori Lightfoot have to offer the real Mayor Lori Lightfoot? What do feminine political figures offer, if anything, to the women they are based upon?

I don’t have answers to those questions. But I think that if Chicagoans want Chicago to be(come) a uniquely great American city, then it is worth their time and the effort it takes to grasp the social meaning(s) of their first Black lesbian mayor.

END NOTES:

  1. See here, Act 3. ↩︎
  2. The story is cute, but the gendered dynamics of it could be read in less cute ways. For example, Pratt likely does not intend to define Lightfoot as a petulant little boy (especially during her last days in office), as that would be homophobic, sexist, and racist–but as we have already noticed, one’s writing often exceeds one’s conscious intentions. ↩︎
  3. e.g., see https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Spillers_Mamas_Baby.pdf ↩︎

The N*ew* in the Un*Holy*

*

In a recent dream, I was surprised by the appearance of the Greek word for S/spirit, πνεῦμα. It was a well-planned move, coming just after what was a disturbing scene.

Another surprise: the ν and εῦ of πνεῦμα reversed places.

A third surprise: the meaning of the new word, πεῦνμα, was explicitly spelled out in the dream. In the lexicon of the dream, πεῦνμα means companionship.

**

In dreams, unconscious thoughts are translated into consciously recognizable/acceptable forms. The goal of the dream is not to disturb consciousness (because the purpose of dreams is to keep us asleep). If consciousness is disturbed, the results are wakefulness and the end of unconscious communication.

Πνεῦμα is a positive, upbeat word, and its appearance in the dream, just after a bloody moment, was an attempt to soothe consciousness. Consciousness was getting ready to hit the wake up(!) button—and at just that moment, it was reminded to breathe. The strategy worked. A win-win. Consciousness was spared catastrophic disturbance and the unconscious received more time to makes its next move.

***

One way to make sense of the moving ν (nu) is to attend to how it sounds. When ν takes a back seat to εῦ, it makes πνεῦμα sound differently. Εῦ is a diphthong in Greek; it sounds like the eu in feud. The sound is subtle, so here is another way to get at it: when ν moves, we no longer hear newma (the pi is silent) but ewnma. The bloody scene prior to this wordplay was, indeed, ew.

We may also understand the moving ν more literally.

****

The dream is clearly emphasizing what is happening internally to, or in the context of,  πνεῦμα. So, we are right to focus there, on what is new about πεῦνμα.

I am an academically trained, Christian biblical theologian and ordained minister, so I was naturally curious about what the Greek of the Christian mythos may have to do with the new word, πεῦνμα, and with the dream’s translation of it as companionship.

Interestingly, there are only six words in the relevant Greek that begin with eun (allowing for a variously accented epsilon [for the sake of easy writing, I’ll be omitting accents throughout]; in any case, the unconscious makes meaning via chains of seemingly random associations). They are:

  1. Eunike: a female name
  2. eunoeo: to be well-disposed to make friends
  3. eunoia: a positive attitude in a relationship
  4. eunouchia: a state of being unmarried
  5. eunouchikso: to cause someone to emasculate another
  6. eunouchos: a castrated person

Again, I am surprised: these six words make perfect sense of all the yet undisclosed aspects of my dream. They are:

One figure in my dream was ambiguous, in terms of both sex and gender. It was this ambiguous figure that was being anally penetrated by a more typically masculine figure. This happens as a third person watches the scene unfold.

Each of those elements of the dream are related to the above string of words: a feminine male (combining words 1 and 6) being anally penetrated, roughly in fact, by another male (word 5), in a situation ménage à trois (words 2 and 4 if we allow both to mean something other than monogamy).

Yet, what are we to make of word 3? What is positive about the relationship(s) in the dream, especially between the ambitious [I meant to write ambiguous] bottom and the rough top?

What was disturbing about the sex scene was the aforementioned blood . . . gushing out of the ambiguous figure’s anus as they were being anally penetrated rather roughly (the cock was coming out fully, allowing for blood to gush out, before being thrust back in). It was the presence of blood itself that was disturbing and not all the rest. It was immediately following this scene that S/spirit appeared.

Interestingly, the gushing blood had the quality of gushing water from a fountain of water (rather than out of a traumatic wound). In the Christian mythos, S/spirit is associated with both blood and water (e.g., 1 John 5:6; John 19:34), each in turn is associated with redemption and baptism. The blood/water may have been a way of signifying redemption/baptism. But of what?

It would seem that the ambiguous figure was baptizing the top, or more specifically, the cock, as the blood was gushing from them as if from a baptismal font. The top is the object of baptism.

According to Paul of Tarsus, baptism is associated with a change of style, and one that results in the nullification of significant social distinctions, like male and female (Gal 3:27-28). The Trans* figure may be teaching the cock to be less aggressive, defensive, fearful (perhaps that is also the point of the nu’s detachment or fluidity–along with it’s moving to the “backside”). And herein is the positivity of the relationship: it is a scene of redemption, the nullification of immobile (hardened) masculinity.

*****

Πεῦνμα seems to signify something new, a new kind of relationship with masculinity. The dream, however, makes its own sense out of πεῦνμα: companionship.

There is a word in the Greek of the Christian mythos that gets at what we may think of as companionship: συγκοινωνός (see Phil 1:7; Rev 1:9). Sugkoinonos means “participant, partner.” Significantly, sugkoinonos is also one of three words that shares a similar “core.” The other two are:

  1. sugkoimaomai: to sleep with (also as in to have sex with)
  2. sugkoinoneo: to be associated with someone in an activity

Yet again, the chain of words makes sense of the described elements of the dream—but this time, these words add something that was not explicitly in the dream.

My dream manifestly includes a sex scene (word 1 above, but that mu makes it somewhat less significant at this point than the other two words, both hanging onto a nu as part of their “cores.” Yet, when the nu moves to the “backside,” it does link itself to a mu). It would seem that the dream’s translation of the new word πεῦνμα as companionship is also an invitation to participation.

The dream is calling out to the observer, to the voyeur (and maybe even calling into question the notion of voyeurism as participation) to join in the act . . . to join in as the object of baptism (?) or the subject of it (?) or both (?). This association is only strengthened if we follow the Greek to words beginning with koin.

******

What the dream wants to make common (see koinoo) is what is taken as defiled or impure: a gay masculinity. It is calling one to move, to transform, to become more fluid in one’s masculine comportment.

It is a S/spiritual calling. It is a calling born out of πνεῦμα.

Internal to S/spirit, to newma, is something new, what is often considered or taken as ewnma. The (un)holy work of the (un)conscious is to provoke a recognition of the new in the ew, of the holy in the unholy.