Thank you. Both my weddings included invocations to the Goddess.

Nice job, sarah (and jessica for the apology). We all need to keep working on being respectful of all things. [From an old b-town friend]

I've always found it's actually more offensive for someone who does not believe in a deity to invoke them because it's somehow "spiritual" or "politically correct" that way. I know I would not want someone in a wedding who I knew was not Buddhist to have a Buddhist invocation, unless they were active in the Buddhist community or something that made the religion important to them-- the religion, not the idea of multiculturalism or politically correct. The only religious aspects of weddings should be those which the couple personally believes in or is deeply connected to.

Maybe it's just me.

I know what you mean about having to try and explain your beliefs to people who get their entire knowledge of Wicca from shows like Charmed and movies like The Craft :S

Jessica, I was also troubled by the apparent need to defend your relationship/wedding choices at the expense of those against whom you want to differentiate yourself. But I realize it's near impossible to cover all your bases at once or get everything right all the time, and I appreciate your apology.

On another but similar note, I wanted to address your more recent article "Radicalizing Love." I'm also, like many others, concerned by your use of that title, given that it seems a sort of misappropriation of an ethic under which women of color have been organizing, theorizing, and shaping their lives and movements. And your article doesn't really adequately address or reflect or acknowledge this work, which makes it read in a way that is extremely hurtful and dismissive.

You write:
"Women's and gender studies classes have a familiar canon. Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks. Books about love as a form of capitalist enslavement and adultery as a radical political act -- with pictures of lingerie-clad women on the cover, to boot -- don't often make the cut. But of all the feminist literature I've read, from Judith Butler-style high theory to photocopied 'zines, it is Laura Kipnis' Against Love: A Polemic that most profoundly changed the way I think about politics."

I'm not sure if this is how you mean for this to read or not but it sounds as though you are suggesting that the other women you cite take an uncritical view of love.

I won't link any of the criticisms of your article here, you may be aware of them already, and maybe you have addressed this elsewhere, in which case I apologize for rehashing. But maybe there is some other background behind your title that I am missing and the seeming misappropriation is inadvertent? Though it just seems unlikely since I'm assuming you are fairly well read and up to date with what is going on in the blogosphere, outside white corners, that is. Anyway, I don't mean any disrespect, but I just found it really troubling and disconcerting to reduce radicalized love to such trivial things as refusing to buy wrinkle cream. I mean there's a place sure for the kind of radical self-love that refuses wrinkle cream and I don't mean to trivialize that altogether, I just think there is an awful lot missing here and I'm troubled by such casual and seemingly unreflective use of terms like radical love.

The first page of Google results for "radical love" gives only two entries related to the WOC-generated notion. Indeed, a further search for the term indicates its prominence in Catholic thought, rather than anti-racist organizing. The term is evidently general enough that no one thinker/movement can own it entirely.

The critiques at BFP's blog centered on the privileged perspective of Kipnis's polemic. Involved here are

1. the problematic assumption that only upper-class white women are affected by broad social trends related to marriage;

2. the always demagogic, thus exploitative, invocation of the non-privileged by those purporting to speak for them on the basis of shared identity;

3. the troubling derivation of "white skin embodying and reproducing privilege" from the ideological repertoire of twentieth-century totalitarianism, most of which originated in European thinkers: Rousseau, Hegel (cf. interwar fascist notions of authenticity, Stalinist show trials, Khmer Rouge attacks on "intellectuals," cities, bourgeois decadence, etc.).

Finally, it's just as racist, indeed a particular form of middle-class white liberal racism, to simply defer to the objections of individuals who claim to speak for or be identified with women of color, as if this identification (like all identifications, agential and socially constructed) could confer an automatic validation on their ideas. This is condescending and infantilizing; to treat someone as an equal is to honestly weigh and respond to their arguments.

I read the original article in The Guardian. I am a man (crikey!) and found the article quite funny - it confirmed what I suspected about Guardian Readers: they are a strange breed and Feminists are ever so serious ("...I blogged about the struggle Andrew and I had getting engaged in the same month that California overturned same-sex marriage rights. We had actually discussed not getting married until everyone could..").

The comments above, however, also confirmed my other suspicions: Feminists can be *so* humourless! Relax, girls: life is too short to take offense at off-the-cuff remarks that mean no harm.