Drunk Church

When academic freedom is under attack, what do we do? Is it enough to fight back from within—especially when the university itself is embedded in larger systems of oppression? On this episode of  Drunk Church , we examine how academia has become a petri dish for racist and transphobic campaigns aimed at eroding our most basic freedoms—a protected environment where these ideologies are cultiva...

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We’re not like other girls…  Join us for our most recent episode as we offer a critical re-evaluation of the figure of the bimbo and deconstruct societal preconceptions of femininity at large through our own cosima bee concordia’s essay “My Official Bimbo Diagnosis”. With our two remaining brain cells we ponder, why does everyone seem to hate femininity so much, and why it is that femininity...

We are at most only temporarily able-bodied and minded. While we may live our lives more or less aware of our relationship with disability and while we may experience different periods of health and illness, the fact that we are all pre-disabled is an immutable aspect of the human condition. For our second annual Drunk Church Halloween Special we explore the dark and dusty contours of this one und...

This is a special mini episode, driven by the immediacy of the horrors happening right now in the Gaza Strip. Mia Khalifa, controversial public figure and Lebanese ex-porn star, was publicly reprimanded and fired last week by Playboy for her "disgusting actions"—a.k.a. voicing solidarity with the Palestinian people in their struggle for liberation against settler colonial apartheid and genocide. O...

This is a teaser--to access the full episode on an patron only-RSS feed, sign up at our Patreon. What if you became a zombie, but instead of becoming a mindless brain eater you find that you're exactly the same except for a new and uncontrollable urge to commit the most unspeakably horrific things you can imagine? What if you found yourself reveling in your newfound bloodlust? Join us for our spec...

Given the failures of affirmative consent, how can we develop a better more nuanced framework that both embraces the messiness of sex and attends to the ways in which intimacy makes us uniquely vulnerable? What is the insatiable will that drives us to seek 'more and more' in our intimate encounters and aesthetic experiences? In what ways does play allow us to straddle the line between the real and...

This is the free teaser—to get access to the whole hour and a half bonus version, go to our Patreon and sign up at "Getting Tipsy with the Lord" or higher. Andrzej Żuławski’s fever dream “Possession”—quite certainly the most extraordinary breakup film ever made—serves as our subject for today’s bonus episode, and we invite you to join us as we are engulfed within the overwhelming tides of the myth...

Diving into our second segment in our series on Avgi Saketopoulou’s “Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia”, we take you through the first chapter: "To Suffer Pleasure: Limit Experience and Transgression". What is the nature between desire and disgust? Where does perversity first arise, and what does it mean to seek experiences of overwhelm rather than shrink from them? Even more ra...

We are thrilled to present our first episode of a series working through Avgi Saketopoulou’s brilliant “Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia”—a text so meaty that this episode does not make it past its introduction. In the vein of Oliver Davis and Tim Dean’s “Hatred of Sex” that we covered last season, “Sexuality Beyond Consent” speaks to a society that has become obsessed and terr...

For this episode we do something a little different, going through some of the hottest subjects of discourse of the current moment as a way to review lots of the major themes we've covered in Drunk Church so far. Honoring our Villain Arc, we talk generational divides, the ludicrousness of a "Trans Inclusive" Radfem, overall rise in fascistic sentiment across generations, and, perhaps most importan...

Continuing with our Season 2 Villain Arc, we examine the vilification of victims and the gridlock of taboos that surround sexual violation through a discussion of our very own Aurora Laybourn’s original work “Cavarero’s Repugnance: Naming Sexual Violence”. Building from a critique of Adriana Cavarero’s "Horrorism", Aurora argues that the repugnance of sexual violence has a silencing effect that re...

Drunk Church returns victoriously for the start of our second season with “Trigger Warning: A Holiday Special!”, our festive conversation on violation, power, desire, fantasy, patriarchy, and the ambiguity of trauma's uncontrollable nature centered on Paul Verhoeven’s fabulous Christmas film “Elle”. Get cozy and snuggle up with a cup of hot coco, and join us for a little bit of holiday fear. Intro...

This free version of the review is a shortened version of our full episode, which is available to all subscribers on their patron-exclusive RSS feed. You can sign up to our patreon to get access to exclusive content and help keep the show going here For today's sermon we talk about "Secretary" starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader, a film that serves as a major root for the yearnings of coun...

How is it that desire, when taken to its conclusion, curdles into horror? For our Halloween Special, we linger with two transgressive erotic BDSM novels—first, with Pauline Réage's classic "Story of O" and then with its provocative leatherdyke echo in Jane DeLynn's "Leash"—to see the ways that our desire has the power to undo us. We have explored before how eroticism may destabilize us, stretch th...

For our grand finale to this four part series on "Hatred of Sex" we investigate the ways that attempts to subsume sex into neat and tidy identiy categories inevitably tighten bureaucracies of risk. These administrative processes police sex at the margins, while simultaneously letting sexual abuse run rampant as long as it happens within appropriately normative forms. The hypocrisy of this fragrant...

In our penultimate discussion on "Hatred of Sex", we do something literally no one in the history of the world has done before: we call Freud problematic!! That being said, we also look at how Davis and Dean's brilliant take of Freud's concept of the unconscious degenitalizes and unbinds sex, allowing pleasure to move around the body in ways that do not look so different from the understandings an...

Having shown how hatred of sex is endemic to sex itself, in our second discussion of “Hatred of Sex” we trace some of the most influential thinkers today to show where our contemporary discourses on queerness has gotten us. Starting with Gayle Rubin’s thinking of sex that decoupled it from feminism's framework of gender and gender oppression, we look at how the slipperiness of sex was subsumed int...

Today we present the first part of our discussion of the polemic “Hatred of Sex”, exploring how our hatred of sex (like hatred of democracy!) is endemic to the structure of sex itself, and exists in the “open minded” and “sex-positive” just as within the Puritanical and conservative. As a psychoanalytic companion to Bataille’s erotocism, we look how we hate sex because it challenges the walls we b...

Nietzsche said "God is dead"—now so is the Goddess. Through a reading of Donna Haraway's fabulous "Cyborg Manifesto", we delve into what it means to write, speak, and live knowing that there is no originary or objective meaning to draw from. We look at how blaspheming against systems of thought means to take them seriously, even as we confuse their boundaries and repurpose them for survival, and,...

We watched “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” and are confronted with the infinite horrors of fascism and the ways we are all made complicit in them. While discussing this grotesque indictment, we also delve into gay leftist director Pier Paolo Pasolini's writings and the mystery surrounding his murder that occurred just a few weeks before the film premiered. . Serves as good company to “The Fantasy...

Finishing off our discussion of fascism through essays from "Leatherfolk" that complicate the problem of desire, and use that to move onto contemporary queerness to look at how homonationalism and homonormativity haunts the discourse on all sides. How is it that such deeply regressive notions are laundered into our understandings of queer and trans identity? Maybe the answer can be glimpsed in the...

Now that we have delved into the nature of desire and erotocism, we follow the death drive into the abyss to stare directly into its most horrific product: that of fascism itself. Through a critique of Susan Sontag's essay "Fascinating Fascism", we look at the ways that fascist ideology and art insidiously operates, and ultimately how the aesthetic of the capitalist business world acts as the dire...

To exist against and NOT with. This does not suppress joy but exalts it, it is not despair but immense hope. Today we deliver you the finale of our three-part close reading of the work and life of Laure (also known as Colette Peignot)—masochist, poet, revolutionary, and the only female member of the secret society Acéphale—dying in Bataille's home at the age of thirty-five as the forgotten author...

Imagine a bullfight for you alone. Today we deliver you the middle of our three-part close reading of the work and life of Laure (also known as Colette Peignot)—masochist, poet, revolutionary, and the only female member of the secret society Acéphale—dying in Bataille's home at the age of thirty-five as the forgotten author of many of the best ideas he is known for. We explore Laure's relationship...