XPost: talk.politics.guns, alt.atheism, alt.checkmate
XPost: alt.politics.homosexuality
From: pox.the.faggots@disney.com
In article
Pierre wrote:
>
> If we're not going to fix them, just kill the fucking faggots.
> Transform them and when they realize the truth, they'll kill themselves.
>
Activists have insensitively taken a prized 17th-century
painting of the martyrdom of St. Agatha and made it about ‘the
queer experience.’
Visitors to museums often rely on the explanatory caption panels
placed beside exhibits to make any real sense of them. Pity poor
visitors to York Art Gallery in England, then, many of whom may
have been unaware of the precise historical context surrounding
the institution’s prized 17th-century oil painting by Italian
Old Master Bernardo Cavallino, depicting the martyrdom of St.
Agatha. Staring ecstatically up toward heaven, Cavallino’s dying
St. Agatha seems to await imminent acceptance into the welcoming
bosom of the angels.
Gallery-goers are not told Agatha’s (partly legendary) story, in
which the young maiden was put to death by a cruel Roman prefect
named Quintianus for bravely refusing to sleep with and then
marry him. Punished first by being forced to work in a brothel,
she was then tortured to death, with the culminating horror of
having her breasts removed with sharpened pincers while still
alive. In Cavallino’s depiction, St. Agatha discreetly covers
her chest wounds with her hands and dress, leaving her
disfigurement to the viewer’s imagination. Just looking at it,
it is by no means obvious what is going on.
Reading the plaque next to the painting, visitors would have
been none the wiser about Agatha’s cruel fate, as its author
appears to be not an actual qualified art historian, but a
random “transmasculine” pundit — that is to say, a woman play-
acting at being a man via acts of voluntary, rather than
enforced, self-mutilation of her own chest — who had been
engaged to give a personal self-absorbed perspective on the
painting thus:
St Agatha is usually shown with her severed breasts on a plate
to represent her martyrdom. Here, however, she covers her newly
flat chest and looks towards Heaven in ecstasy. This reminds me
of the gender euphoria I felt the first time I, as a
transmasculine person, wore a chest-binder. It hurt my ribs, but
I finally saw myself the way I wanted to be. I see myself in
androgynous Agatha. Euphoric, despite being tormented for simply
being ourselves. Artworks of saints like this speak to the queer
experience of pushing against social norms to live euphorically
as ourselves.
While it certainly makes a nice change to see an LGBT cultist
actually praising a Christian figure for once, the acclamation
of a woman who has just had her breasts forcibly torn off by her
intended rapist as being an “androgynous” and empowered icon of
gender-bending is simply grotesque.
Breasts of Burden
The insensitive and celebratory attitude of this unnamed
neurotic navel-gazer toward St. Agatha’s shorn mammaries is
deeply creepy. On account of her grisly doom, Agatha is Roman
Catholicism’s patron saint of both breast-cancer and rape
victims alike, some of whom still pray to her for intercession
today. How might such genuine victims react to having their
actual sufferings conflated with the solipsistic, self-inflicted
pseudo-problems of the anonymous “transmasculine” art critic?
According to the gallery, such notices are intended to “invite
respectful discussion from differing perspectives.” In that
case, in a spirit of genuine plurality of opinion, perhaps they
might like to combine their present caption with one from a so-
called “gender-critical feminist” arguing back that she objects
most strenuously to the idea of having her biological and social
identity as a woman being systematically erased by the twisted
actions of state-sponsored trans activists, as symbolically and
aptly represented here by the forced removal of St. Agatha’s
shredded breasts?
[continued in next message]
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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