[twocol_one]True Threat
Kit Apostolacus

The millennial generation is a threat to the workplace, but not because of any generalized traits or stereotypes. Instead, the millennial generation is a threat to the workplace because I have a faith in my peers to stand up for justice, even in the workplace.

The workplace is not abstracted from its interpenetration with a capitalist economy, ruled by corporations which effectively function as a monopoly. This reality, corporate capitalism, as it intersects with social policy, affords corporations personhood and necessarily contributes to the exploitation of the poor and inevitably also the continued enslavement of people of color, the working class, women (especially trans women), and disabled people to a coercive economy of capital.

I have faith in my peers to recognize the evils of capitalism and oppose them in every way they can—including the workplace. What will that look like? I am not exactly sure. It could involve protests and strikes; it could involve exploiting loopholes in contracts with corporations. All in all, we are a threat to the workplace because we have access to more information at a quicker rate than past generations, and thus we are earnestly pressed to be aware of the evils capitalism perpetuates.

How our threat to the workplace manifests is one we decide—both individually and collectively. If we truly care for the poor, we will stop putting band-aids on a cancerous tumor and, alongside them, revolt against the oppressive system called capitalism, which creates and benefits from “healthy” poverty. The workplace is an extension of the cotton fields, where work is compulsory if we desire to live; we do not fairly reap the benefits of our work. We are alienated from our work. We may create or provide something as employees, but we can never say “that is ours.”

One day we will create or provide things and be able to say “I did that” without the bourgeoisie usurping our agency for their own gain. In the words of Marx and Engels: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” I pray that work might one day be enjoyable, non-alienated, and not considered “work” in the same way it is today.

We are a threat to a threatening environment. Not only is capitalism a ubiquitous, omniscient demon (“All hail the Free Market!”), but the current social order fosters an inherently threatening workplace for entire groups of people—the poor are paid as little as possible, trans people are endangered by transphobia in the workplace, people of color are disproportionately paid less and face dangers as well, and women are still underpaid and stigmatized in the workplace. Our threat lies in our potentiality to rise up against the current social order and that is a very good and hopeful thing.
[/twocol_one] [twocol_one_last]Woefully Weak
Elliot Martin

Today, infinite knowledge lies within our finger tips, communication with almost anyone anywhere is instantly possible, the world can be circumnavigated in a few hours, and the limits of science appear endless. Yet, the majority of college graduates today are no more a threat to the workforce than any of the generations were before them.

To be a threat to the workforce, the millennial generation would have to offer something different than what is already in place, and this is not the case.

Yes, millennials are familiar with cutting-edge technology; yes, they can navigate through endless information; yes, they have attended a four-year university; yes, they have huge networks of connections; yes, they are highly creative, self-reliant and driven. But no, what they offer is nothing new.

Cultures have always prepared their young to replace the aging workforce. In the West, most people worked on farms, then they switched to factories, then to the service industries. Society creates new jobs and the young are raised to fulfill them. The analysis of the worker as a “cog in the wheel,” or a small part in a machine, characterizes this situation well.

Most millennials entering the workforce today are just cogs in the wheel. Yes, the context has changed but the characteristics of the worker are the same: they are raised to fulfill the jobs society has created. The problem is not necessarily the jobs themselves (though they may be an issue too), but they are taken without the worker ever stopping to ask: what is the point?

Motives are unexamined and ends are unconsidered, and the worker finds him or herself serving a system that lets them survive but never flourish, labor but never find meaning in their work outside of daily subsistence. Evidence for this general lack of purposefulness is seen in most college curriculums today. Students can graduate without ever reading a book from cover to cover during their time at school. They can get by through reading the bolded letters in the back of their textbooks and the notes in the margins of its pages. They are taught to memorize facts without ever considering the meaning of all their work.

What would really threaten the workforce today is a change of heart. Once the masses stop serving Mammon as their king, once the idols of careers, status, comfort and comparison are destroyed, then the social order will truly be threatened. Until then, it is like a wise man once said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” Until then, everything is vanity. Until then, all will be the same.
[/twocol_one_last]

On Saturday, September 27, Philadelphia hosted the March To End Rape Culture. Formerly known as the “Slut Walk”, the March to End Rape Culture was hosted by the Pussy Division, Hollaback Philly, Project SAFE, Factory Girls, PAVE Philly, Permanent Wave, Take Back the Night and Fireball Printing. The name was changed last year because certain groups were not comfortable or did not want to reclaim the slur “slut”. Having changed the name, it is estimated that participation in this year’s march nearly doubled that of years past.

Nabi De Angulo ('14 alum), Michelle Gutierrez ('15) and Jordan Float march in streets of Philadelphia to raise awareness about rape culture.
[/media-credit] Nabi De Angulo (’14 alum), Michelle Gutierrez (’15) and Jordan Float march in streets of Philadelphia to raise awareness about rape culture.
Every two minutes in the US, there is a rape. One in three women will be a victim of sexual violence at some point in her lifetime. One in six men will be raped before the age of 18. Sixty-four percent of trans people are victims of sexual violence. These statistics increase when the victim is a person of color.

According to the Facebook event page for the march, “Rape culture is a term used to describe a culture in which sexual violence is accepted as a part of everyday life. There are many different aspects of society that contribute to rape culture including victim blaming, rape jokes, transphobia, slut shaming, keeping survivors in silence, racism, the use of bodies as sexual objects, the sexualization of violence, lack of education around consent, intimate partner violence, homophobia, sexist media messages, the list is never ending.”

Many survivors, victims and supporters showed up to the event. After marching there were speakers and spoken word performances. Qui Alexander, Community Health Educator with the Mazzoni Center and advocate of Philly Stands Up!, reflected on the need for communities to be completely transformed, rather than just rehabilitating rapists. He called it “transformative justice” and contrasted it with what is commonly called “restorative justice.” His vision involved not just stopping rape, but transforming a culture that centers on violence, often sexual, against vulnerable people. This also means, according to Alexander, that to combat rape culture alone is not enough; we must also liberate ourselves from the multiplicitous intersecting structures of oppression also present in society: racism, misogyny, ableism, queerphobia, transphobia, transmisogyny, and classism, for instance. Alexander says that rape culture is not independent of all these other realities. For example, in reflecting on the recent hate crime in Philadelphia against two white gay cis (i.e. not trans) men, Alexander remarked, “Trans women of color get murdered every day but no one pushes for hate crime legislation.”

Alexander said that “when we prioritize vulnerable bodies, we make a move toward liberation,” which is precisely what Me Too does. Me Too is an organization that focuses on creating safe spaces for people of color to heal from the trauma of sexual assault and rape. Tarana Burke, a representative of Me Too, described Me Too’s goal: “to build a movement to radicalize healing for rape victims.” While Me Too focuses on people of color who are victims of sexual violence, they are not exclusivist. Their overall goal, as exemplified in their title, is to be a listening ear for victims of sexual violence without shifting the blame on them, regardless of race, sexuality or gender identity.

If you have been a victim of sexual violence, please tell someone you trust, call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-4673, or go online to www.rainn.org/get-help/national-sexual-assault-online-hotline.

Sources: Facebook; Woar.org; Rainn.org

In the previous issue of The Waltonian the front page headline read, “Duffett and Brigham Weigh In on LGBT Conversation.” As copy editor, I had to read that title multiple times and it made me pretty upset, yet I couldn’t quite pinpoint why. It had nothing to do with the content of the article (though I have my own reservations about Duffett’s signing and the task force); it was directed at the phrase “weigh in on LGBT conversation.” Privilege.

Duffett and Brigham have privilege, obviously, as influential figures in a university, but also as cisheterosexual people (meaning, straight people who identify as the gender they were assigned at birth). It should be said, of course, that it is not their fault they have privilege. So my critiques are less directed at them specifically and more directed at systems of oppression, matrices of domination and kyriarchy. They can choose to “weigh in” on this “conversation” or not to, whereas people such as myself cannot choose. I am–we are–perpetually aware of our subordinate and lowly position in society. We cannot choose, or even afford, to “weigh in on the conversation” because we bear the entire weight of the conversation itself.

It is indicative of a community that hates (in action, not necessarily in intention) transpeople for a straight cisperson to express their opinion and have it be heard campus-wide, get a front page article, and expect that people will want to hear their opinion when they decide to express it; whereas we have to put forth twice the effort to barely be heard, on top of all the other things we go through. But my life, my body, and my well-being are not platforms for public discourse. So I think it is most important for this upcoming “conversation” to recognize that this is not just a matter of people disagreeing. To anyone who isn’t directly affected by these issues, it may seem that way, but it is quite potently not for trans and queer people. Justice is not simply a philosophical argument; trans and queer people are not platforms for public debate.

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s concept of “kyriarchy” should not be ignored throughout this conversation. Sexual and gendered differences are filtered through each other and many other experiences, like class, race, ethnicity, and disability. So let us listen to the trans queers, the disabled women of color and the homeless non-binary Latino. To oppose marginalization is to let the marginalized speak for themselves.

Any suggestion that “queer people need to listen too” reflects a puerile reaction to our indignation. We need to listen?! We have grown up listening. We go to churches and listen. We attend, will attend or have attended an institution where it was made clear to us every single day that we are not welcome, that we are an embarrassment, that we are ignorant of human nature. Anyone who says that we need to listen is not listening. And if we are ever fighting fire with fire, we are fighting centuries of arson with a votive candle in each of our hands. With the encouragement of the vibrant Ivone Gebara, we plead for justice:

“All this is a sort of theopraxis, encounter with God in life, experience of God in the events that go to make up daily living. This love surpasses the law of any doctrinal systemization. It simply appears in the experience of living. It is there, often nameless, mixed up with all sorts of behaviors.”

Last Spring, Noëlle Vahanian, a philosophy professor at Lebanon Valley College, published The Rebellious No: Variations on a Secular Theology of Language. As a part of the literary series called “Perspectives in Continental Philosophy” with John D. Caputo as the series editor, this book finds itself among texts written by postmodern theology’s most recognized names, like Jean-Luc Marion Richard Kearney, and Jacques Derrida.

Vahanian’s approach to theology, especially as a secular discourse, is notably different from most other mainstream theology—namely in that she does not presume to convince anyone of anything. Her aphoristic style allows one to take in secular theology as a liberating discourse. Even if we are to say that “God is dead” in a truly Nietzschean sense (i.e. not as represented in the recent film God’s Not Dead), Vahanian does not think that this means we need to get rid of God, “because God is still a word. Faith—in all its trepidation—then becomes a lever of intervention, a rebellious no! to passive acceptance of a world that has stopped making sense and to patient waiting for some radical transformation to come” (2). But is that all we are rebelling from? “The main character of faith is,” she wrote, “rebelliousness against flat ordinariness, against the penchant to misplace concreteness and attach importance to abstractions—such as assigning undue credibility to normative constructs of the self, against the blind commodification of all values” (3).

The indifference of life is another potent analogy she uses. Life, as a personified figure, is indifferent to us. It couldn’t care less if we were happy or sad, loved or hated. Moreover, we often have no clue what life is about. “But while this much is clear, why should we cease to be amazed by the pleroma? Why should we cease to be puzzled, dumbfounded, awed, by the ground on which we walk every day? By the pavement and the streetlights? By lions and termites and bears and fish and water and snow and toes and nails and eyelashes and tongues and smells? Why should we hate and kill those who remind us to be puzzled? … Why should we, how can we be indifferent?” (42-43).

One should not read this text and expect to come out with answers. Vahanian’s hope in writing is that we “will have encountered the promise of a secular theology of language to rebel against so as to make real the borrowed words that come to signify our ordinary condition” (p. 134). In other words, her hope is that the reader has a real experience, such that we can go and love—love via our rebellious no to the current social order—which is confusing and illusory and disconcerting.

Parts of this work are noticeably academic—for instance, her reflections on Lacanian psychoanalysis. But these are not the crux of her work. Her work is best exemplified in its (theo)poetic elements. It is a work of art which may inspire us to “think to the limits” of thinking itself, such that “I am thrust against a wall, and in that collision, I am forced to recognize life—that it is more than me, more than human, and in that strange sense, more than mortal. Thinking is theological, because it holds the promise of the other” (122). Certainly she is a marginalized voice in an already marginalized sub-discourse of theology and philosophy, but this book is refreshing and contains a promise, or rather, points to an Event, where we might become love.

Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch is Eastern’s latest addition to the biblical studies department. Erudite and compassionate, Burnette-Bletsch feels very welcomed to the Eastern community. The youngest of three girls, she grew up on a tobacco farm in North Carolina with a Southern Baptist family. She is the first person in her family to graduate from college, and her life has been marked by curiosity and a thirst for inquiry.

Burnette-Bletsch graduated twice from Duke University: first with a Bachelor of Science in mathematics and religion, then with a Doctor of Philosophy in the Hebrew Bible. When asked about one of the most interesting things she’s heard since being at Eastern, she couldn’t pin anything down, but responded, “I am struck by how students help me interpret the Bible in new ways.” She never thought she would be a professor, especially of religion, but Burnette-Bletsch believes God has guided her life in such a way that she would find fulfillment and life in biblical studies.

Her husband, John Bletsch, is a part-time professor at Eastern in the biblical studies department, as well. The two met when Burnette-Bletsch was studying at Duke’s seminary. They have three sons and will be married for 20 years this coming May.

This semester, she is teaching Jesus & the Gospels and two sections of Nature and Meaning of the Old Testament, and next semester, The Life and Letters of Paul, Women in Scripture, and a section of Nature and Meaning of the New Testament. She has a particular interest in the reception of the Bible in history and in film, having written extensively in many journals, encyclopedias, and books. Burnette-Bletsch is also an editor of the Journal of the Bible and Its Reception and the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception.

“None of us comes to the Bible newborn,” Burnette-Bletsch said. “There is no final way of being Christian.” She describes Christianity as an unending conversation that starts with the biblical witness, which we never read abstracted from our social context. She notes, referring to Eastern’s honest amalgamation of faith and reason, that “not all schools are like this.”

On April 7th, Refuge and  MAAC  hosted a panel of trans and non-binary individuals from the Bryson Institute for Social Justice week.  The Bryson Institute is a branch of The Attic Youth Center that “supports individuals, communities, and organizations in effecting personal and organizational changes to build inclusive environments that recognize and promote the value of diversity.” They provide free support services to LGBTQIA youth including, but not limited to, therapy/counseling, youth programs, education, health care services, and workplace preparation. Located on 16th Street in Philadelphia, they are in close cooperation with multiple faith-based organizations and LGBTQIA community resources in the city. The presentation allowed each individual involved in the panel to share their personal experiences, and then opened up the floor to questions. Around 50 students and faculty were in attendance.

The main speaker, Evan Thornburg, provided a general introduction to what people often mean when they say they are “trans” or “gender-non-conforming.” She described three distinctions to help illustrate different manifestations of gender. First, Thornburg explained,“assigned sex,” which is “the gender you are given by the doctor when you’re born,” often based on one’s genitalia. “Assigned sex” is particularly problematized by the reality of intersex people. She also explained the phrase “gender identity,” which is someone’s “intrinsic feeling of who they are.” Lastly, she described “gender expression,” which is how someone presents themselves externally. None of these determines the other, according to Thornburg. For example, one’s assigned sex doesn’t determine one’s gender identity, and one’s gender identity does not determine their gender expression. The two panelists, Monica (a transwoman) and Hector (a genderqueer person), then told their stories. Monica and Hector declined to provide their last names.

Monica had never felt like “boy” or “male” described her well, yet whenever she would wear what she wanted to school—dresses, heels, makeup, etc.—she would be reprimanded by teachers.  At one point, she was suspended from school for not conforming to societal gender norms. Upon returning from suspension, her peers—in protest of her suspension and in support of her right to identify and express her gender how she pleased—all wore heels to school that day. Though she had support from many of her peers, she still experienced ongoing discrimination for her gender identity, even in things as simple as filling out a form at the doctor’s office. She, like 41% of the trans/gender-non-conforming population according to the LA Times, has attempted suicide at least once. However, she has found a community that supports her at The Attic.

Hector, a genderqueer person who uses feminine pronouns, was in the process of transitioning “from female to male” when the hormones she was taking started having adverse effects on her skin. She was born with neither  female nor male anatomy. Instead, she was coercively assigned female at birth (CAFAB). She was born with ambiguous genitalia which her parents and doctor decided to “correct.” This did not change the fact that she also has other non-binary characteristics about herself. There are over 80 different ways a person can be classified as intersex and, statistically, 1 out of every 1,000 to 1,500 people is intersex. Like many in the community, Hector has had a mixture of experiences and interactions when people learn that she is gender non-conforming.

Towards the end of the presentation, Thornburg said that the best way to react if someone “comes out” to you, whether it is in regards to sexuality or gender identity, is to ask, “Is there anything I can help you with?” It is simultaneously welcoming, yet non-invasive.

Feedback from attendees of the panel was largely  positive. Refuge anticipates hosting many more events like this next year, including another with the Bryson Institute. If you are interested in more information or stories from LGBTQIA people, keep on the look out for these events or go to Refuge’s weekly Tuesday meetings at 7:30PM in HHC 106.

Sources:

http://www.atticyouthcenter.org/bryson-institute/impact

http://articles.latimes.com/2014/jan/28/local/la-me-ln-suicide-attempts-alarming-transgender-20140127

Scroll to Top