Drunk Church – Details, episodes & analysis

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 cultivated, refined, and strengthened before being released into the body politic. We ask why universities are uniquely positioned as incubators for these movements, and whether the illness we’re witnessing is a contamination from outside, or a symptom of something already rotting within the ivory tower itself.

Is resistance enough if the presence of leftist academics risks shoring up the very institution they critique? If the ivory tower collapses under the weight of its own decay, is that necessarily a bad thing? And are there ways not only to resist this plight, but to refuse it altogether—to stop allowing ourselves to be used as hosts for campaigns that thrive on our engagement and our silence? In what ways can we contain the onslaught of this plague?

This episode marks a first in Drunk Church history: an anonymous interview with a professor who has witnessed firsthand how the university sets instructors up to fail their students. Their testimony offers a cautionary tale of how administrative pressures quietly conscript academics into enforcing bigotry and fascism—and how attempts at institutional “neutrality” allow real, material harm to spread unchecked like a virus through classrooms and across campuses. In the end only you can choose whether it's time to walk away.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 more relevant than ever.

In place of confessions, we share the submissions we received after our "Trauma & Taboo: The Unspeakability of Sexual Violation" episode from when we created an anonymous space for people to share their own unspeakable or unsayable experiences of violation.

If you would like to listen to the full episode on a patreon only RSS feed, sign up for Drunk Church on Patreon.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 represent the horror she evoked on others, as a rape victim herself.. The figure of Medusa exposes how when faced with victims and their narratives we overt our eyes and choose not to see, preferring to villainize them instead. Looking straight on has a freezing effect, as to do so would force us to confront the horrifying extent to which we are implicated in perpetuating the negative effects of sexual violence.

We apply this critique to a wide range of issues ranging from interpersonal harm, plagiarism, sex work and transness—asking ourselves what it means to engage with the messy intelligibility of violation regardless of the horror, and to see the human face behind the gorgon's mask.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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"? 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 family? What is "good representation" anyway? We discuss all of these things rolled up in the ooey gooey romance of it all!

Intro and outro song is "Bless You" by the Ink Spots.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 will stretch those limits as far as they can go.

Will we hide from desire—repress it and hope it goes away instead of coming back someday in even more monstrous form—or do we open ourselves up to it even in all its horrific power, and take the ultimate leap of faith? In the end, the choice is yours and yours alone.

Show notes:

"Story of O" by Pauline Réage

"Leash" by Jane DeLynn

This week we asked you for things you desire but are scared of on Instagram—these are shared in place of confessions.

Intro and outro song is "Bless You" by the Ink Spots

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 the age of consent should be dramatically lowered and rape should be taken less seriously while at the same time inciting violence against trans and queer people by equating them to groomers for the mere fact of their existence is not a result in a lapse of logic. None of this is a mistake—it is fundamentally rooted in the logic of a hatred of sex. 

Following Oliver Davis and Tim Dean, we lay Attachment Theory bare, exposing it as as a thinly veiled attempt to make the messiness of inner experience and sex administrable to produce the proper white middle class subject. Attachment Theory's commitment to producing docile bourgeois subjects has led into the entire field of traumatology which equates all conflict to abuse, thus reducing abuse as a category and further obscuring the very experiences it initially sought to render less opaque. "Hatred of Sex" rests on the bold claim that "there is no escaping sexual inappropriateness, even when sex is pleasurable and consensual, and thus no escaping our inclination to hate it". What matters then is what we do with sex from here—keep trying to hide the mess, or get filthy and shattered by its unbinding potential?

Show notes:

"Hatred of Sex" by Oliver Davis and Tim Dean

"Governmentality" by Tania Murray Li

"Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy" by Jessica Fern

"Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personalities and the Sciences of Memory" by Ian Hacking

"Trauma and Recovery" by Judith Herman

"Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975" by Michel Foucault

"Foucault, Feminism, and Sex Crimes: An Anti-Carceral Analysis" by Chloë Taylor

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 most—the security state—tracing how it functions to perpetuate carcerality by co-opting the efforts of feminists and other activists to confront harm within our legal system. Helped along by regressive patriarchal forces with much less good intentions, bureaucracies of risk tighten and the most marginalized are cracked down on even more than they already were. Davis and Dean write, "this scrambling messiness of sex can never be entirely covered over by hating it—or for that matter by trying to love it", and we concur—we're here to get dirty.

Show notes:

"Hatred of Sex" by Oliver Davis and Tim Dean

"Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personalities and the Sciences of Memory" by Ian Hacking

"Studies on Hysteria" by Freud & Breuer 

"Case Histories I: 'Dora' and 'Little Hans' " by Freud

"Governmentality" by Tania Murray Li

"Histories of the Transgender Child" by Jules Gill-Peterson

You're Wrong About, "The Victims' Rights Movement"

Gretchen Felker-Martin's Twitter Thread

Intro song is "Bless You" by the Ink Spots

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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, intersectionality, Freud, consent, the AIDS crisis, pushing bodies beyond their limits, and so much more. Come with us and, as Leo Bersani would say, embrace sex in all its deplorability—after all, we are here “not just to come, but to come undone.”

Show notes:

"Hatred of Sex" by Oliver Davis and Tim Dean

"Thinking Sex" by Gayle Rubin

"Kimberlé Crenshaw on Intersectionality, More than Two Decades Later"

"Is the Rectum a Grave?" by Leo Bersani

"The Gay Science" by Michel Foucault

"Relocating Marie Bonaparte’s Clitoris"

"Erotism: Death and Sensuality" by Georges Bataille

Intro song is "Bless You" by the Ink Spots

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.