Arbitrary Marks

Click on the image to view a brief message from me about the Take Back the Blog! Blogswarm. I’d love to hear your thoughts on women bloggers, bloggers of color, lesbian bloggers, blogging anonymously, etc. Leave ‘em below or at YouTube. I’ll be back with more Sunday evening–I’m taking today off.

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There are few books which I stop reading because they are too a) incomprehensible b) poorly written or c) not worth my time to continue.  Undoing Gender by Judith Butler is one of those few books which meets all three criteria.  I got up to chapter five (”Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual”) out of eleven [...]

I found this message board, called “The Puritan Board”, through a Christian blogger writing about the Federal Vision controversy in the PCA.  Out of curiousity, I did some scanning around comment threads by keywords.  This one is about hermaphroditism, but the topic was quickly dropped once the predictable joking was over.
There’s no robust theological discussion of the problem that [...]

If you win a silver medal these days you must submit your body for verification. Santhi Soudarajan, breathless from running 800 meters, wraps herself in a sterile paper gown and waits. The verdict comes, after gynecological exams, endocrine samples and DNA tests.
“You are not a woman,” the judges conclude, “Santhi, you have too [...]

“The people who are transgendered, the people who are in homosexuality, I would venture to say from personal experience, that they’re not at peace and that true love isn’t able to be found in those types of relationships.” - Alan Chambers. (From Good As You)
A few questions for Mr. Chambers, who claims to be [...]

This therapist, who works with men and women who want to change their sexual orientation, or learn to live in ways more amenable to their ethical views (broadly known as the ex-gay movement), dispels some of the myths about the mental health of gay men and women.  Dr. Throckmorton is a professor at Grove City [...]

Here’s what I’m working on. It’s my attempt at being a “continental” philosopher, something I haven’t tried to do since my seminary days (and then only very badly). I’m striving to avoid the worst of the tradition–extreme self-referentiality, jargon and hysterically unnecessary wordplay. Pardon the font…it’s a Word document copy-paste.
Friedrich Nietzsche’s attitudes towards [...]

I’m always seeking to find ways to “try on” philosophy in the current goings-on of the outside world.  If philosophy can’t shed interpretive light onto what I hear on the radio and read in the newspaper, I have to wonder what good it is.  In that vein, then, an excerpt from Michael Foucault’s A History [...]

An Australian Imam is coming under fire for saying this, in the context of sexual assault on women:
“If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside… and the cats come and eat it… whose fault is it, the cats’ or the uncovered meat?” he asked. The uncovered meat is the problem, he went on [...]

My next paper for my Nietzsche class will be to tackle the problem of the philosopher’s characterization of women.  For a “lesbian activist” (as I’ve been labeled by a few websites), I’ve spent very little energy on either queer or feminist theory.  Since I’m studying at a primarily analytic department, I won’t be dipping in too deeply, but [...]