Exploring the F-word in religion at the intersection of scholarship, activism, and community.
Photos from the author’s collection from the historic first driving Dyke March, May 15, 2020, Long Beach, CA.
In these United States and across the world we are in quarantine. Lockdown.
Shelter in place. We’re alone together.
And I miss it all: restaurants, coffee shops, movies, hanging out with friends in real time,
But mostly I miss hugs—and I live with my wife and we hug a lot
…but I miss hugs from friends and even sometimes strangers.
I’m a hugger.
I miss handshakes and whispers and rubbing shoulders and close smiles.
Are we embodied beings? Does the body need other bodies?
What is a “crowd of something called” is always my favorite thing to look up:
a pandemonium of parrots, a swarm of eels, a fever of sting rays,
a cauldron of bats, a gaggle of women,
a herd of sea horses, a clutch of vampires, a clowder of cats,
an army of frogs, a crash of rhinos, a business of ferrets,
a passel of possums….
It’s all mythical now, for humans anyway, groups and crowds.
We might as well be mermaids.
And if mermaids were fish, a group of us would be called a school.
If we were human mermaids, we would be a tribe.
And if we were sea mammals, like dolphins, we would be a pod.
I’m missing my pod,
my school, my tribe.
Like whales or manatees, or dolphins—we need a pod.
We are social creatures. We zoom our pod on social media.
And I worry for the elderly in my pod that they do not use this technology that keeps us whizzing
into each other’s homes.
Zooming in– in Brady Bunch boxes.
Here we are! Open your mic!
Toasting the edges of my Brady Bunch box with my glass of wine—Cheers!
Did God mean for us to need each other in bodies? As bodies.
In the same space?
What does it mean that we are here spinning on the planet in embodied forms?
Our experience and our consciousness of being in bodies—
the phenomenology of what it means to be in a body with other bodies.
We are bodies first I think; we are bodies.
Human bodies. A crowd of them, a group… a family, a band, a community,
a nation, a city, a town…a party.
So– I miss hugs, and handshakes and close spaces and smiles and whispers.
I miss sitting tight next to strangers at a sold-out play, a concert, a movie….
I miss crowded events, parades…a club where I am jostling my drink
across the floor to meet my friends.
I miss waiting for a table and making small talk with the other patrons
and chatting up the maître de.
I miss laughing with clerks at the convenience store and talking
to everyone. In person.
And I miss hugging. I’m a hugger.
And I miss, oh I miss
my pod.
–Marie Cartier
April 2020
Photos by the author: from the “sheltering at home” collection
Marie Cartier has a Ph.D. in Religion with an emphasis on Women and Religion from Claremont Graduate University. She is the author of the critically acclaimed book Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall (Routledge 2013). She is a senior lecturer in Gender and Women’s Studies and Queer Studies at California State University Northridge, and in Film Studies at Univ. of CA Irvine.
For this month’s blog my wife, the poet Kimberly Esslinger, and I have written a joint poem—
Walking in Moonlight Before the Pandemic
and what is done to the least of these….
Where is the god of woman. Of cats. Of dead cats?
Of wives. Of midnight walks with dogs and the normalcy of silence.
And day becoming more like night in this stillness. All the crowded spaces. Open.
Empty. A bag floats down at night. A grocery bag. Onto the hood of a
speeding hatchback. Not a bag. But now a cat. Someone’s cat. Dead.
Just like that. A hatchback. And yes, here I was, with my dogs, wanting to believe
it was alive. I start to call her, she. Did she just move? Did you see her move?
My wife has gloves. A box. A plan. But I push her away.
I believe in god. And she could heal this cat.
She would. She would if I would wait long enough. Continue reading “Walking in Moonlight Before the Pandemic by Marie Cartier and Kimberly Esslinger”
In these United States we are wondering
if a woman is electable.
Is she likeable enough?
I donate to a woman candidate and I have put a sign
on my front lawn with a woman’s name on it.
I’m a woman. My wife is a woman.
Over half of my students are women. I teach over two hundred
students a semester. I see that women can.
We do and we can. But…
Can a woman lead? A headline asks.
Is she likeable enough to get elected? Another asks.
I was born from a woman.
All of us get here through the legs of a woman.
Women hold up half the sky. Continue reading “Poem: In These United States is a Woman Electable? by Marie Cartier”
Here we are at the fourth now annual Women’s March. I have done a photo essay of the March every year for Feminism and Religion (FAR), the first two from the Los Angeles March, and the last two from Orange County.
I’m taking a break this month from the series “In These United States” poems I have been delivering to FAR (back with more poems next month) to showcase some of the activism, commitment, humor, and courage that showed up at the March I attended in Santa Ana in Orange County, California, January 18, 2020.
In this part of these United States the marchers chanted, danced, laughed, and were very serious. Santa Ana is a densely populated city where almost 62% of the population is Mexican. This evidenced itself in the March where for the first time I saw ballet folkloric by a company dressed in traditional folkloric costumes, in suffrage colors. Continue reading “2020 Women’s March by Marie Cartier”
Make America Kind Again was my favorite poster slogan of every Women’s March.
We’ve had three and will have a fourth soon, January 18. I’ll be there and hope I see this sign again.
It’s a sign that maybe it will happen –America will be kind again.
It will be a place where we don’t put kids in cages
Or gouge people’s health care
Or ban Muslims from entering our country
Or kick transgender people out of the military
Or threaten voting rights for Blacks
Or remove registered voters from the polls
Or… fill in the blank
Continue reading “Poem: Make America Kind Again by Marie Cartier”
My neighbor gets up at 2 a.m. and is at work by 3:30 a.m.
Six days a week.
She works hard for the money*
She works at a grocery store. She has two dogs and I have two dogs.
Our dogs like each other and we talk about going to the dog beach
together, but who can plan that? We’re lucky to run into each other in our own neighborhood.
“Hey, how are you?” “Tired. You know.”
So hard for the money
I do know. I teach six classes at two universities. My wife works freelance for an overseas company
in artificial Intelligence designing for humans to be obsolescent.
In the meantime, she has no time to sleep.
My neighborhood is all plumbing trucks, gardening trucks and vehicles that go to work.
People leave in the morning to make the world turn. And they come home late at night.
So hard for it honey. Continue reading “Poem: She Works Hard for the Money and a Working Class Dream by Marie Cartier”
We protect ourselves by saying it wasn’t that bad.
It only happened once, twice, when I was little, when I was older, when I was drunk, when I was the only one not drinking, when I was alone, when I was out with friends, when I was in the break room at work, when I was in the military, when I was unemployed, when I asked for a raise, when I was silent, when I…
When you can’t change it, you change yourself. Because it’s better than thinking you can’t change anything. It’s epidemic, people say. So it’s better than thinking it’s epidemic—the abuse of women.
So, you think, if I blame myself, maybe there’s hope.
That things will get better. Because I can change—me. Continue reading “Prose Poem – Rape is Robbery and We Want All of Our Stuff Back by Marie Cartier”
*with thanks to Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
In The Handmaid’s Tale women don’t
have their own names anymore.
They whisper them to each other
in order to re-member who they are:
June, Moira… maybe even Lydia
Their bodies aren’t their own.
If you are fertile, you are used to breed.
If you are infertile, but clever, you can be a Martha
and cook or clean for men, and their families.
Women don’t have families; they are part of a man’s family.
Or they could be an Aunt, someone who trains
the other women to be docile. To be afraid. To give in. To give up.
Not everyone will get the message, or be able to follow it:
Don’t let the bastards get you down.
The author, Margaret Atwood, made the choice
to not include anything in the novel that had
not happened in real life. Most especially Continue reading “The Maiden Tale of “It’s Happening”* by Marie Cartier”
Continue reading “#GunControlNow: While We Still Have Now by Marie Cartier”
Feminism and Religion 