The Argonauts Read Online Free PDF

issue, we are in favor of celebrating homosexual behavior in its proper context: marriage…. We hold to the already stated standards of Biola that premarital sex is sinful and outside of God’s plan for humans and we believe that this standard also applies to homosexuals and other members of the LGBTQ community.
    What kind of “queer” is this?
    Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wanted to make way for “queer” to hold all kinds of resistances and fracturings and mismatches that have little or nothing to do with sexual orientation. “Queer is a continuing moment, movement, motive—recurrent, eddying, troublant” she wrote. “Keenly, it is relational, and strange.” She wanted the term to be a perpetual excitement, a kind of placeholder—a nominative, like Argo , willing to designate molten or shifting parts, a means of asserting while also giving the slip. That is what reclaimed terms do—they retain, they insist on retaining, a sense of the fugitive.
    At the same time, Sedgwick argued that “given the historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions against every same-sex sexual expression, for anyone to disavow those meanings, or to displace them from the term [ queer ]’s definitional center, would be to dematerialize any possibility of queerness itself.”
    In other words, she wanted it both ways. There is much to be learned from wanting something both ways.
    Sedgwick once proposed that “what it takes—all it takes—to make the description ‘queer’ a true one is the impulsion to use it in the first person,” and that “anyone’s use of ‘queer’ about themselves means differently from their use of it about someone else.” Annoying as it might be to hear a straight white guy talk about a book of his as queer (do you have to own everything?), in the end, it’s probably all for the better. Sedgwick, who was long married to a man with whom she had, by her own description, mostly postshower, vanilla sex, knew about the possibilities of this first-person use of the term perhaps better than anyone else. She took heat for it, just as she took heat for identifying with gay men (not to mention as a gay man), and for giving lesbians not much more than an occasional nod. Some thought it regressive that a “queen of queer theory” kept men or male sexuality at the center of the action (as in her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire ), even if for the purpose of feminist critique.
    Such were Sedgwick’s identifications and interests; she was nothing if not honest. And in person she exuded a sexuality and charisma that was much more powerful, particular, and compelling than the poles of masculinity and femininity could ever allow—one that had to do with being fat, freckled, prone to blushing, bedecked in textiles, generous, uncannily sweet, almost sadistically intelligent, and, by the time I met her, terminally ill.
    The more I thought about Biola’s doctrinal statement, the more I realized that I support private, consensual groups of adults deciding to live together however they please. If this particular cluster of adults doesn’t want to have sex outside of “biblical marriage,” then whatever. In the end, it was this sentence that kept me up at night: “Inadequate origin models [of the universe] hold that (a) God never directly intervened in creating nature and/or (b) humans share a common physical ancestry with earlier life forms.” Our shared ancestry with earlier life forms is sacred to me. I declined the invitation. They booked a “story guru” from Hollywood in my place.
    Flush with joy in our house on the hill, we were startled by some deep shadows. Your mother, whom I’d met but once, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Your son’s custody remained unsettled, and the specter of a homophobic or transphobic judge deciding his fate, our family’s fate, turned our days tornado green. You knocked yourself out to make him feel happy and held, set up a slide for him in