OrangeJackius

There exists in America an invisible fellowship of those whose lives have been impacted by cruel and unjustifiable violence. Among the earliest gifts that Old South Church received was a banner created by a UCC church near the site of the Oklahoma City bombing. And yesterday, a box containing one thousand folded paper cranes was hand-delivered to the church. They are a gift sent by the Newtown Congregational Church, UCC. Each crane is a prayer for peace lifted up for us by a community that knows the value of peace.

Yet this gift carries with it a responsibility as well, because the cranes did not originate in Newtown. They were sent to Newtown from Chardon, Ohio, where there was a school shooting in 2012. And Chardon, Ohio received them from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where the cranes were created in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. These cranes migrate, you see. So for now, and for what we pray will be a long long long time, the cranes belong to Old South Church in Boston, the church of the Finish Line.

There exists in America an invisible fellowship of those whose lives have been touched by violence, and we have been blessed by the prayers of that fellowship. In these cranes, we have in our possession a tender and mighty blessing, ready to be sent as a blessing for another church, should there ever be need again.

Gender Studies isn’t, as many people believe, the study of women or even feminism for that matter (even though both of those things are in some ways central to the discipline). Gender Studies is a critical discipline, and often times that critical lens is turned inward on itself. It interrogates structures of identity and ways of knowing. At its core, it is a discipline of undoing. This might seem very academic, but Gender Studies equipped me with the frameworks to tackle issues I faced daily. It gave me the tools to deconstruct the heteronormative drive I impulsively followed, embodied by my serial monogamist inclinations. It gave me the language to articulate my desire for other women, something I had suppressed since childhood. It gave me the political rhetoric to be both critical and engaged, to demand more of politics and myself. It gave me the tools to reflect on my own self-presentation, from my clothes to my hair, and recognize the importance of embracing my masculine side, or the subversive potential in my attachment to lipstick. As an anti-racist ally it gave me the framework to understand the assemblages of race, gender, sexuality, and so many other praxis of identity that interact with each other, forever troubling the category of woman.

But more than the coursework, Gender Studies provided a community of people that were interested in dissecting, thinking about and unpacking the world around us. These were people who challenged norms through their lives, their desires and their refusal to accept the world as it was.