Re: This Martyr's Breasts Were Severed As An Act Of Torture, But LGBTQIA+ Trans Activists Are 'Queering' Her

In article <[email protected]>
Pierre <[email protected]> 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?

It is perfectly possible to have an intense and subjective 
response to a work of art that is worthy of expression in a 
personal essay or other written work, as with Fyodor 
Dostoyevsky’s raptures in front of Hans Holbein the Younger’s 
“Dead Christ,” providing the partial inspiration for his novel 
“The Idiot.” But hanging this particular scribbled Post-It note 
up in York seems akin to the Uffizi or the Louvre galleries 
displaying essays from those more harmless lunatics who claim to 
see UFOs in Renaissance paintings (they’re actually discs of 
holy light emanating from the clouds of Heaven) as being valid 
interpretations of what is actually displayed within their gilt-
edged frames.

Recently, I watched an otherwise instructive BBC documentary 
about the centenary of James Joyce’s Dublin-set 1922 novel 
“Ulysses” that was ruined by the bizarre implication that the 
final words in the character Molly Bloom’s famous concluding 
monologue, “yes I said yes I will Yes,” were somehow a reference 
to the “Yes” vote in Ireland’s referendum on gay marriage, which 
took place almost 100 years later. It seems these monomaniacal 
obsessives are seeing the gay equivalent of UFOs in paintings 
all over the place these days. Just because Picasso’s “Les 
Demoiselles d’Avignon” resemble certain unfortunate contestants 
on Ru Paul’s “Drag Race,” it doesn’t mean they actually are; 
just because the artist himself once had a Blue Period, it 
doesn’t make him a “person who menstruates.”

False Mammary Syndrome
The offending anti-explanatory caption was created as part of a 
project termed “Queering the Burton” (a specific wing of the 
gallery) designed in conjunction with a local gay group aimed at 
transforming the taxpayer-funded gallery into “a more welcoming 
and inclusive space for the LGBTQI+ community” at the expense of 
systematically alienating everyone else. The consequent queer 
responses to these works, displayed on the walls, are filled 
with blatant anachronisms. They are said to “creatively draw on 
lived experience,” but that is a mere euphemism for trans 
agitators making these paintings all about themselves rather 
than their actual subjects; they should have been asked to craft 
captions for paintings of Narcissus, not St. Agatha.

Naturally, some of the so-called Queering Group’s projects are 
aimed at brainwashing children, with a school-holiday-period 
“Curious Takeover!” of the gallery targeting 4- to 7-year-olds. 
The building’s contents were repurposed to “celebrate families 
of all shapes and sizes,” although perhaps not any normal ones 
consisting of a happily married mother and father. Meanwhile, 
the invaluable lecture “How To Queer a Museum With Matt Smith” 
promises a “how-to guide” account of how the curator in question 
has “subverted museum displays” across the nation to make them 
gay.

But how can you make exhibits gay when in actual fact they 
simply aren’t? “How Curators Are Queering Art History,” an 
online interview with Stanford University Professor in Art 
History Richard Meyer, author of the book “Art & Queer Culture,” 
gives a good idea of the most efficient tactics to pursue. Why 
not simply seek out certain chance old items that happened to 
have been created by long-dead homosexuals (or presumed 
homosexuals), such as photographs and yellowing scrapbooks of 
news clippings of women dressed a bit like men, then just 
arbitrarily reclassifying them as somehow being art, even though 
their creators “would never have called [themselves] an artist,” 
and replacing all the boring old non-queer paintings and 
sculptures in our museums with them instead, regardless of their 
actual aesthetic worth?

“I like the idea that sometimes queer history is invented 
history,” Meyer explained. “I love that about queer culture. 
It’s not all based in factual claims, but the power of the 
imagination to create things that weren’t there in the moment.” 
Or, indeed, that simply were never there at all. When will these 
tedious people finally stop making such a public exhibition of 
themselves?

https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/29/this-martyrs-breasts-were-
severed-as-an-act-of-torture-but-trans-activists-are-queering-
her/