More Than a Zoom Box on Legs: Locating Women of Color in Virtual Learning Landscapes of Theological Education

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic that came to center stage in the spring of 2020, learners across the globe were thrust into a new landscape of digital and online engagement. Four years later, the pandemic is ongoing and the digital way of life has also persisted, despite violent attempts to return to “normal” ways of learning, preferring physical bodies in physical classrooms (Creamer, Hemenway 2021). Disability activists call an act of violence considering the current rates of transmission, long COVID symptoms, and death (Mingus 2022). However, while online learning offers a safer alternative, it does not guarantee an experience free of violence. The digital landscape is no great equalizer; in fact, virtual bodies are still susceptible to power dynamics of the physical realm. Online theological education is no exception to this violence, despite the theological commitments of institutions that uphold justice and the dignity of all persons. In light of these tensions, this paper considers how the virtual bodies of women of color are located, perceived, and acted upon in the digital landscape of theological education and the embodied pedagogical implications for online learning experiences.

Utilizing Latina Feminist thinker, Mariana Ortega, and her world traveling approaches, I position women of color theological educators as multiplicitous and ambiguous subjects that navigate the virtual landscape in opposition to binaries and stereotypical subject making. Extrapolating Ortega to the virtual landscape as an analytic makes visible the multiplicity in which the bodies of women of color appear. This paper then explores how racial and gendered meaning-making occurs online and impacts how women of color are perceived and acted upon by engaging Lisa Nakamura’s concept of digital visual capital and Shoshana Magnet’s critique of binary-coded biometrics. According to Lisa Nakamura, the temptation of the Internet is to erase race, but she proposes that the way bodies are racialized and sexualized online contributes to the development of “digital visual capital,” with varying implications for different bodies (Nakamura 2007, 15-16). In addition to digital visual capital, biometrics are used to read and respond to women of color online. Shoshana Magnet elaborates on this concept and notes, “Biometric science presupposes the human body to be a stable, unchanging repository of personal information from which we can collect data about identity” (Magnet 2011, 2). Since we know that human beings are more dynamic and contextualized than can be binary-coded, biometrics often fail. And what happens those that are outliers to the binary code? Magnet claims they are excluded from the services and benefits that digital technology is supposed to afford them. I identify this as an entry point for theological education to employ embodied pedagogies that see and honor all learners, especially those rendered vulnerable in both the digital and physical world.

This paper then wonders how, despite the dynamics stated above, the virtual learning landscape can be harnessed by women of color theological educators to allow them to show up as their multidimensional and multiplicitous selves and learn alongside other members of the community. Though online, they are still embodied and can employ an engaged pedagogy that resists the mind/body split entrenched in dominant models of education. In _Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom_, bell hooks argues that engaged pedagogy is "more demanding than conventional critical or feminist pedagogy" and that "teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well-being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students” (hooks 1994, 15). Embodiment in the digital classroom occurs through dialogue and passion, which hooks says “enhances our overall effort to be self-actualizing” and generates “energy in a classroom setting in ways that invigorate discussion and excite the critical imagination” (hooks 1994, 195). I share from my experience as adjunct faculty and workshop facilitator how learning in this way disrupts the binaries and hierarchies that characterize digitality and education.

Recognizing that to show up as one’s full self is to become vulnerable to violence, this paper concludes with an invitation to what Michelle Mary Lelwica calls pedagogical promiscuity, an embodied learning approach that aims toward liberation for all learners (Lelwica 2020, 18). This approach can be messy and chaotic, but it makes room for the realities of the lived experiences each learner brings. I argue this is a necessary shift for online theological education as the violence of the pandemic, along with other attacks on marginalized groups, rage on.