#queer resource

Human Personality, Simone Weil, 1942-3

Simone Weil was born into an affluent life in Paris in 1909.  Very early, she demonstrated a strident, uncompromising compassion when she gave up sugar in solidarity with French soldiers in the First World War. While still a schoolgirl, she declared her solidarity with the communist left. Though uncompromising in her persona at school, she was also brilliant and had the best education France could offer in languages, classics and philosophy.  While at the École Normale Supérieure, her tutor set her focus on the problem of man as an active being.  To address this she took Plato as her master and Descartes as her antagonist.  These influences remained touchstones in her intellectual life.  Despite the spiritual writings for which she is best known, her training and approach was that of a philosopher. For the few years of her working life, she taught philosophy in secondary schools.  Weil’s compassion and strongly-held opinions led directly to a life of activism, which often scandalised the towns in which she taught.  Initially, her interests lay in the labour movement as well as pacifism.  Her judgment of the political weakness of the labour movement and more generally of social causes led to the qualification of her views on pacificism.  Violence, she then thought, could be a defense for human dignity against the Fascism that diminished it.  However, her exposure to the Spanish Civil War led her to contradict herself.  Force, she thought, could never be righteous.  Allowing that someone was the legitimate object of force inexorably nurtured tribalism, making murder seem natural.  Force controls those who would use it, an insight she saw in *The Iliad* which treated Greeks and Trojans alike as victims of force itself. Her views on force were a singular example of how her developed perspective was at odds with received pieties in Western Culture, both those of the establishment and those who opposed it.  She denied the importance of political rights; of justice by due process; of state or private ownership; private choice in life; and legitimation by collective, public will. Instead she elevated as primary response to affliction; the inestimable significance of a human being; the needs of the soul as the basis for government; meaningful labour; and good and evil. Weil was unafraid of intellectual isolation, nor did she seek fellows—though she did publish her essays in intellectual journals. She was not celebrated in her lifetime, though the force of her intellect was known. Many gave her a wide berth, because of her uncompromising manner, which was also evident in how she lived.  While working for the Free French in London on a manifesto for a transformed government in post-war France, her unyielding manner of living overcame her always-fragile health.  She died in Kent at 34.  Her celebrity came posthumously when her notes on Christian spirituality were published, influencing those within and without the Church.  Subsequently, her philosophical works have attracted a modest following among intellectuals and academics. (D. Levy)

I'm attaching the essay again here:

https://lib.tcu.edu/staff/bellinger/rel-viol/Weil.pdf

And, to be sure, Dr. David Levy's suggested and further readings, via The Integrity Project. The page also contains a short lecture from Levy, available as an mp3:

https://integrityproject.org/projects/portraits-of-integrity/simone-weil/

Levy has lectured on the Philosophy of Simone Weil at the University of Edinburgh and the course guide for 2017/18 can be found here.

Whilst the document is primarily intended for students, it provides a massive list of general and additional texts on or written by Weil - like, 8 pages worth. It also includes a list of prospective exam questions, which may be interesting to some.

https://www.ed.ac.uk/files/atoms/files/the_philosophy_of_simone_weil_course_guide_2017-18.pdf

Here is an online library that holds some of Weil's texts in their original French (among 1000s of other works):

http://classiques.uqac.ca/

Finally, a lovely long essay from academic, educator, and organiser Riley Valentine, An Impersonal Liberalism: Simone Weil and the Sacred, for Epoché Magazine.

First of all, I completely expected to be out of commission for at least a week, in enough pain that I’d have to be pretty drugged up to be comfortable. But even the day after my surgery I had so little pain that I wasn’t taking more than the anti-inflammatories that they prescribed me, so I was pretty coherent the entire time after I was brought out of anesthesia. The thing that hurt the most about this entire process was my jaw and my throat due to the intubation during the procedure (which they do because the anesthesia puts you out so much that your lungs forget to work, which is spooky but neat). 

The procedure itself was pretty straightforward on my part. I sat around in the hospital and waited, and then my surgeon came and took me into a spare operating room to have me stand up while she drew measurements all over me in sharpie (since everything sits differently while standing vs lying down, so they need to do it before you’re anesthetized). After that they go through your health record with you (for a third time) and then hook you up to all the machines. Once they start the anesthesia you’re out pretty quick, and I woke up in the recovery room right after. 

Nurses fed me ice chips, water, juice, and a popsicle because I was complaining a lot about my sore throat from the intubation. After that my surgeon came and wrapped me in not one but TWO tensor bandages, which fucked me up since I know better than to bind with them. She told me to keep them on until I got my modified binder (just my old binder cut open in the front with a zipper put in so I don’t have to lift my arms above my head) but she’d done them up a little too tight, so I was having trouble breathing deeply enough because I was still sleepy and lazy from the anesthesia. I wound up being in recovery for 3 whole hours instead of 1 because my oxygen levels kept dropping until I finally told the nurses to loosen the bandages. My breathing was fine within minutes, because at that point I was lucid enough to be able to figure the problem out just fine. 

So I had to wear a modified binder 24/7 for a whole month after the surgery to hold everything together so it healed properly, and under that I had the dressings which didn’t come off at first for a week after the surgery. The first week is a lot of sleeping even without needing heavy meds because you’re recovering and need rest, and my mom hovered constantly and wouldn’t let me even get up to pee without freaking out. At one week, when my surgeon took the bandages off, it looked like this: 

The steri-strip tape stays over the incisions for a few weeks before it starts to come off on its own, and you trim it off as it goes (or so my surgeon suggested). Now, I got a bilateral mastectomy with free nipple grafts and my surgeon performs some contouring in order to achieve a more natural ‘masculine’ look. Due to this, I basically have nicely defined pecs (and noodle arms). 

The grafts look really gross for the first while, they’re black and red and nasty and wet for a while and you keep band-aids over them. But when they take, they start to look completely normal. For the first few weeks I had no complications, just had to take it easy and lie around a lot and not lift heavy things. Pretty easy. After about 2 1/2 weeks I noticed that one of my nipple grafts was looking a little gross, so I e-mailed my surgeon and went to my family doctor. The symptoms were a lot of seeping, a bad smell, and the whole thing was very... gooey. It was gross. It looked like this, so skip if you don’t want to see a bit of a wound:

(you can even see where the seeping was staining the steri-strip below)

Turns out the left graft got a little infected, so I was given antibiotics and I was sent to a wound clinic to clean it up every few days and check in on it to make sure it was healing okay. In the end I lost the centre part of the graft, so it looks a bit more like a burn scar than a nipple, but that’s not the kind of thing that really bothers me. Looks like this now: 

Not the prettiest thing, but not something that bothers me at all. For me, as long as there are two vaguely nipple-shaped things there I don’t care. They don’t have to hold up under scrutiny, just not draw any attention on a beach or something. 

This picture was taken today, 7 weeks post-op. The incisions are healing spectacularly, and the right nipple looks pretty normal, just a little more pink than they will be in a few months. You can’t really see the left one in this picture, but you can see that it’s flat as opposed to having the actual nipple part sticking out. The areola is fine, but there’s a divot in the middle of it where part of the graft was lost. 

Overall I’ve found the healing process to be incredibly easy and even with the complications I’m absolutely thrilled with the results, and now I’m free of all bandages and binders and I couldn’t be happier. Take it easy and pay attention to your body and you’ll recover just fine. If your  grafts look weird, talk to your surgeon asap. Don’t be stupid about it and everything will go just fine, as strange as some effects may seem (such as your grafts being black from the beginning) your body does amazing things and healing happens eventually. 

Lovers at the Castro Street Fair, June 1983

“The Castro Street Fair is a San Francisco LGBT street festival and fair usually held on the first Sunday in October in the Castro neighborhood, the main gay neighborhood and social center in the city. The fair features multiples stages with live entertainment, DJs, food vendors, community-group stalls as well as a curated artisan alley with dozens of Northern California artists. 

Abstract Sex, Luciana Parisi, 2004

Abstract Sex investigates the impact of advances in contemporary science and information technology on conceptions of sex. Evolutionary theory and the technologies of viral information transfer, cloning and genetic engineering are changing the way we think about human sex, reproduction and the communication of genetic information. Abstract Sex presents a philosophical exploration of this new world of sexual, informatic and capitalist multiplicity, of the accelerated mutation of nature and culture.

(duke.edu)

Luciana Parisi is Reader in Cultural Studies and Director of the PhD programme at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths University of London. Her research focuses on philosophy and science to investigate potential conditions for ontological and epistemological change in culture, aesthetic and politics.

Specifically engaging with cybernetics, information theories, and evolutionary theories, her work analyses the radical transformations of the body, nature, matter and thought led by the technocapitalist development of biotechnologies and computation.

In 2004, she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum). She has also written within the field of media philosophy and analysed the bionic transformation of the perceptive sensorium triggered by digital media, the advancement of new techno-ecologies of control, and the nanoengineering of matter.

She has published articles on the cybernetic re-wiring of memory and perception in the context of a non-phenomenological critique of computational media vis a vis strategies of branding and marketing. Her interest in interactive media has also led her research to engage more closely with computation, cognition, and algorithmic aesthetics.

In 2013, she published Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and the Control of Space (MIT Press).

(monoskop.org)

Here is the link again:

And here is a recent lecture Parisi presented at Stanford Humanities Center on The Negative Aesthetic of AI:

Glory on the Site: Binary Breakers (blessedarethebinarybreakers.com)

Avery Arden created this wonderful site that collates interpretation frameworks, timelines, and resources for queer and disabled christians. The site is brilliant in its density and a lovely beacon for everyone interested in queerness in history and theology.

The site began as a Tumblr blog in 2015, which I will tag below. They also share their work across Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and almost every site that streams podcasts! Avery published their debut poetry collection The Kin-Dom in the Rubble in 2018.

Many thanks, Avery!

Queer and trans people experience barriers in the work place so we have a series of events to provide services designed specifically to make queer and trans people successful. 

Event info here:

Drop in Resume Review with Intel and PGE

1/26 1-3 pm in USB 402

https://www.facebook.com/events/204549613218122/

Representatives from PGE and Intel will be at ACS to offer 1:1 resume review sessions. Sessions are limited. Sign up through Career Connect by searching for either Intel or PGE and clicking on the link to their interview schedules. Sign up for an open time slot, and submit your resume today!

CHOMP Lunch with PSU Alumni

1/27 12-1 pm in the QRC (SMSU 458)

https://www.facebook.com/events/1655088771408662/

Join friends and PSU alumni for a lunchtime social hour at the Queer Resource Center, SMSU 458. We provide the snacks and you provide the fun!

*OUT at Work Employer Conversation and Networking

1/27 5-7 pm SMSU 296/298

https://www.facebook.com/events/1735549799999443/

Hear from queer professionals about being out at work. A panel of professionals representing various industries will be available to chat, network, and share their perspectives.

QCW Know Your Rights with SLC

1/28 2:30-3:30 SMSU 327

https://www.facebook.com/events/1725484624347592/