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 is seen as a threat to feminism? We argue (to the degree that bimbos can string ideas together) that...

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 undeniable truth. In what ways does this insight effect our ability to create solidarity with one...

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. Obvious contradictions arise here that can be extrapolated to better understand the entire...

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 special bonus review of Rob Jabbaz's exquisite 2021 Taiwanese pandemic body horror film “The Sadness”...

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 the fictive so as to stir up the unconscious and trouble simplistic dualities such as normative...

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 mythosymbolic realm that it reveals to us. The film's dream logic defies reduction to rational...

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 radically, what political potentialities can we find within the experience of self shattering as a...

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 terrified of trauma, rational subjects looking both to shield ourselves from any possible experiences...

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 importantly, the ways in which understanding queerness as being always built up and against perversion is...

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 importantly, the ways in which understanding queerness as being always built up and against perversion is...

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 renders it unintelligible and unspeakable by recontextualizing Medusa, the figure Cavarero uses to...

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 and outro: White Christmas as performed by the Ink Spots Get access to full bonus episodes, an...

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 countless leatherqueers for its perverse romance. What does it mean for a movie to be "problematic"?...

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 countless leatherqueers for its perverse romance. What does it mean for a movie to be "problematic"? How does Mary Gaitskill's original much darker short story inform our understanding of the film? What does it mean to want something that everyone says is bad for you? How does desire open up ways outside of the well trod narrative paths of the...

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 the ego like an overworn condom, or even make us stare into the abyss of our own dissolution—now we...

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 abuse of power should come as no surprise! The fact that right wing pundits gleefully argue that...

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 and practices of leatherfolk. We focus in on the system that seems to love hatred of sex the...

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 into the easier to deal with bounds of identity. We talk about porn wars, detransitioners,...

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 build and the flags we plant—amongst all this hatred, what does it mean to insist that sex is...

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, most importantly, pleasure. Through Haraway's figure of the Cyborg we explore the leaky fusions...

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 is Death” and available to patrons at any tier. CW: the infinite horrors of fascism End Notes: "In...

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 is Death” and available to patrons at any tier. . CW: the infinite horrors of fascism Get...

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 mess of erotocism all along. Show Notes: "Fascinating Fascism" in Susan Sontag's "Under the Sign...

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 direct descendent of Nazi aesthetic far more than queers dressed in leather could ever be. The thing...