The Tower Crumbles, but Now You Can See the Star: Queer Temporalities, Religious Affects, and Healing Through Tarot Practice

Abstract: This presentation explores the role that Tarot practice, as an alternative spirituality, can play in healing and imagining for queer practitioners. Bringing together scholarship from queer theory, temporal studies, and religious affect theory with two firsthand Tarot reading experiences as case-studies, this paper argues for the presence of a unique environment evoked by Tarot where the queer practitioner is able to negotiate pasts, presents, and futures simultaneously. This process, which involves both the semiotics of Tarot cards themselves and the discourse taking place within a reading, ultimately, is both freeing and healing for the queer subject.

Presenter bio: Destiny Magnett is a first-year MTS candidate at Harvard Divinity School, with an area of focus in religion, ethics, and politics. She completed her undergraduate degree in Religious Studies at Grinnell College (Grinnell, IA) and still has a strong affinity for the Midwest. Her most current academic interests include religious affect theory, temporal studies, queer theory, and the intersections of religion and conflict transformation. As such, her professional and academic work has centered on ‘lived religion’ and religion in the public sphere.

Presenter affiliation: Harvard Divinity School