Drunk Church

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 another across different experiences? Given that disability is a fundamental condition to being human, what does it mean to reject notions of cure and instead demand conditions for our own flourishing? Utilizing Susan Sontag's "Illness as a Metaphor" as a point of departure, we lay out our own personal histories of disability to show how our relationship with disability is inextricably linked to our understanding of the self. The lens of disability exposes the urgent need to confront the eugenic specters that loom large over every aspect of our lives in order to truly care for one another.We asked listeners to share their experience with disability with us by telling us ways that disability has influenced the way they experience the world, and at the end of the episode we share a selection of them with you.Happy Halloween and god bless all the goth mommies and daddies of the world!

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 structure of how easily signs are twisted and power is inverted to justify the horrors of imperialist and colonial power, as well as how our marginalized identities are used against us in an attempt to turn us against the most marginalized for the lie of our own meager benefit.It’s no mistake that “terrorism” is only used to describe violence committed by politically disenfranchised actors in the absence of state sanctioned power. State power commits much more violence, but naturalizes and invisibilizes it as necessary and normal. Only resistance to the state is terrorism, which is why terrorism is such a powerful idea in order to confound where power actually lies—it seems as if it is suddenly the disenfranchised who inflict the greatest horrors, the oppressed made oppressor and the oppressor made oppressed. If you don’t believe in violence, instead of condemning the disenfranchised you should be steadfastly in solidarity with oppressed peoples in their struggle for liberation from the tyranny of state power, which constructs, commits, and excuses the vast majority of violence. If saying you don’t believe in violence leads you to be on the side of colonial and imperialist power, all you really believe in is the comfort, stability, and privilege of the status quo.Free Palestine

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” as we answer the call of the void and embrace the the depth of our depravity, exploring the thin line between everyday kindness and cruelty, self preservation and the death drive, and the dynamic relationship between sadism and masochism. At the end of the world there is a certain peace to be found in finally not having to pretend you will be saved.Aren’t you tired of ignoring all those intrusive thoughts?This episode was in production longer than any other and its release marks an important milestone for us. A combination of audio issues, chronic illness, and mental health struggles really kicked our ass over the past many months and kept us from doing the work that we love. Adjusting our work habits and being patient with ourselves has been a difficult but rewarding process. On a much brighter note, this also marks our first episode since Drunk Church’s one year birthday back in July! Thank you so much to those of you who have kept with us and our chaotic process—we couldn’t do it without you.Intro and outro is "Bless You" by the Ink Spots

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 understandings of Eros and Thanatos? How could a form of ethical sadism serve to guide our erotic relations so as to enable us to flirt with danger and play with limits? Come with us and play with fire in our third installment of Avgi Saketopoulou's “Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia”.Grab a copy for yourself from NYUPress to follow along!Intro & outro song is "Bless You" by the Ink SpotsSign up as a Drunk Church patron for access to a community discord, a private RSS feed with a selection of extended and bonus episodes, discounts on Drunk Church merch, and more!

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 understanding—indeed, such attempts would strip away its very essence, the power that renders it so profoundly affecting as it pulls us deeper and deeper into its unraveling horrors.We ask: What does it mean to be possessed? And how do we, in turn, seek possession of others and ourselves? In horrified fascination, we witness the characters' frenzied pursuit of various forms of possession, only for them to realize the multifaceted ways in which they themselves are possessed—not merely by desires like lust and jealousy, but also by institutions such as family and state. Our unsettling revelation lies in the disconnection between self-mastery and possession, leading us to contemplate whether, under these totalizing circumstances, reclaiming a sense of self necessitates surrendering to a kind of possession. Could it be that in order for us to truly experience ourselves authentically we must let ourselves become vulnerable to a possession that un-masters us, gives ourselves over to others, and risks the very same sense of self that we are so desperately in pursuit of?From escapades in espionage to the many tentacled eldritch horrors of the erotic unconscious, we trace the intricate anatomy of a breakup and the dissolution of the family, arriving at both terrifying and potentially liberating conclusions.Also featured: cosima’s dog and her dog’s dog friend who demandingly took center stage throughout recording in such a way that editing them out seemed in bad taste.Embrace the arcane journey with us as we explore these depths!Intro/outro song by "Bless You" by The Ink Spots

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 force that detranslates the stubborn meanings of the ego? We hope you continue to enjoy delving into this difficult text with us to challenge even some of our most dearly held notions.

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 that could create it and to heal and eliminate any of it that has already gotten inside us. Avgi Saketopoulou presents us with an alternative: subjects that are always opaque to ourselves and with trauma that is never inert or erased, for whom experiences of overwhelm can open ourselves up to confrontations with that opaqueness in us, and with them strange new possibilities. We could not be more excited to submit ourselves to this incredible work and see what arises from the encounter in the weeks to come.Grab a copy of “Sexuality Beyond Consent” for yourself from NYUPress to follow along!Into song is "Bless You" by "The Ink Spots"