A Visual Representation of What I Have Learned: Conclusion
I wanted to, as a final piece, create a representation of what I learned over the course of this semester. This is also the photo I chose to use for the blog’s profile picture, so it may already look familiar to you. After sitting with some of the course materials, and combining what I learned from them with what I have learned in past queer theology courses, I decided to challenge myself to draw what I envisioned to be a representation of queerness that honors wisdom and perspectives of the tradition that I have been studying. To me, understanding queer perspectives requires a dedication, at least for me and possibly others of you coming from a western context, to decentering power. This is true on several levels - I needed to decenter my privileging of Western theology, the language and labels I was affixing to people and concepts, my biases, and so much more in order to be able to take in the information I was receiving in this course.
The square should be viewed starting in the top, left corner, with just four circles bubbled in. I wanted to illustrate both my own limited understanding of other perspectives and provide a visual example of what it looks like to exclude more diverse voices from a conversation. As you progress from top left to top right to bottom left and then finish in the bottom right corner, you not only walk with me on my journey outside of myself to a more inclusive understanding of queer liberation theologies throughout the world. You also get to see how much more interesting the picture looks when you add different voices and perspectives to the conversation. I hope that, after reading this blog, you feel better equipped to engage with and understand theologies across cultures and traditions and, further, are excited to do so!