Queer Theology and Quilt Squares

 Now that I've turned in my final project for Queer Theology class, and now that it's been graded, let me write about it here.  One of our options was to write a curriculum of some sort, and then an accompanying paper to talk about how the class influenced our creation/creative process.

I wanted to create a curriculum for people who are open minded, but perhaps confused by the topic of queerness, especially the issue of people changing genders.  My theory is that it's hard to have these conversations when they revolve around people's sexual desire and people's genitals.  Many of us are queasy about these things.

So I came up with the idea of using quilt squares to discuss these things.

Above you see a variety of squares, all of them created with roughly the same pattern, and a lot of the same fabrics, but in different patterns.  If one of those quilt squares wanted to change one strip of fabric for another strip of fabric, would it make that big a difference to how we see the quilt?

The quilt square could represent a human.  The strip of starry fabric on the outside that gets exchanged for a teal one could be a secondary sex characteristic or it could be hair color or it could be weight loss/gain or it could be implants (breast implants or a pacemaker or a new kidney).  Which of these changes would be impossible for us to accept?

I also thought about this in terms of relationships.  Here's an arrangement of quilt squares--we could determine which square is which gender, if we wanted:

If we make changes, here's a different look:

And again:

At some point, we'd talk about what this means for humans.  Does it really matter to the larger quilt if one square is with another, instead of a different square?  If it's true of a quilt, does the same hold true for humans?  If quilt squares could have children and families, would our answers change?

What I've included here is just a short overview of the curriculum that I created--the curriculum document is over 15 pages, but I'd be happy to share the whole thing with anyone who is interested.  It does not include Bible passages primarily because I believe that if we take passages out of context from a book that is thousands of years old, then those passages don't really have much to say about a complicated subject.  Doing a deep dive into a Bible study wasn't what I wanted to do for my final project--I wanted to explore a possible way to talk about these issues using quilt squares instead of real lives.

In the near future, I'll write a blog post about the theological issues raised in this curriculum.  I think that in addition to finding an interesting way to talk about issues of sexuality, gender, and society, I've created an interesting way to talk about God.