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The No Purpling workshop |
“Boys are blue; girls are pink; no purpling!”
This commonly used adage is heard by untold numbers of youth
before church events and gatherings. The implications are clear: No sexual
activity, but, you know, we don’t actually want to talk about that. At the
Episcopal Youth Event 2014, three DioCal members presented a workshop entitled
“No Purpling,” in order to offer youth the tools to examine both the
assumptions underlying this cutesy expression, and the world around them more
broadly. Along with my co-presenters Grace Aheron and Grace Wilkins, I was
fortunate enough to engage with and be engaged by roughly 120
youth over the course of two 75-minute presentations. My presence at these
workshops was only possible due to the generosity of Oasis, which invested in
our work by sponsoring my ticket to Philadelphia.
To access the idea of normative perspectives, we began with
the idea of lenses. You wouldn’t wear sunglasses in a dark room, right? Or your
reading glasses to drive? Sometimes the lenses through which we see the world
are only helpful in certain contexts, and sometimes they’re cracked and dirty
and need to be updated. But we get used to the view lenses give us when we wear
them on our faces all day. If we make a shift to the theoretical, lenses
represent a set of assumptions, and we need a tool to help us pay attention to
these assumptions. We introduced “queering” as this tool, and then invited the
youth to engage with us in queering many of the stories and concepts we find
around us.
When paying attention to our lenses, it quickly becomes
clear that the phrase “no purpling” is built upon the assumptions of
heterosexuality in a binary gender system. But because “queering” means to
dissolve boundaries as well as to question assumptions, we took it a step
further and made an outrageous claim: God is queer(ing), and is revealing this
to us in Scripture and in our lived experiences. Dress-wearing Joseph of Egypt,
God’s naming of Godself in Exodus, the destabilizing nature of the Trinity, and
Jesus’ transgressive redefinition of the Sabbath all point us toward a God who
firmly undoes our ideas of limitation and calls us into the fullness of our
being.
