Talking to the dead

As writers of queertheology, the authors believe that processes of talking to the dead destabilize both the notion and impact of boundaries and open the reader all up to the reconceptualization and subsequent praxis of engaging a wider scope of living entities, identities, and cosmologies. And, because the people believe that the dead are not dead and instead live still within their shared cosmos, the practice of talking to the dead allows and perhaps forces the reader to disavow the idea of death as punishment for perversion. Studying the physical world and the cosmos gives the reader the opportunity to "listen" to ways that the universe talks back and interrupts the people assumptions about what is and what is not alive, including "the dead", as they have already said. This chapter is oil on foreheads and an altar built and adorned.