Feminist Theologies: Interstices and Fractures (Decolonizing Theology) 9781978712393, 9781978712409, 1978712391

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Feminist Theologies

Decolonizing Theology Series Editor: Jione Havea This series aims to demonstrate the character and shape of the future of theology, which is a diversity of theologies “decolonized” of Western captivity and influence. Each volume of the series, as such, will highlight and explore indigenous expressions of Christian theology from a thickly contextual perspective. At the heart of the project is the goal of providing readers an array of theologies from around the globe, many unknown or often overlooked by Western audiences, as a way of demonstrating the availability of non-Western Christian development and de-centering the study and methods of Christian theology from Western domination and standards.

Titles in This Series Feminist Theologies: Interstices and Fractures, edited by Rebekah Pryor and Stephen Burns Theology as Threshold: Invitations from Aotearoa New Zealand, edited by Jione Havea, Emily Colgan, and Nāsili Vaka’uta Cuban Feminist Theology: Visions and Praxis, by Ofelia Ortega Resisting Occupation: A Global Struggle for Liberation, edited by Miguel de La Torre and Mitri Raheb Theologies on the Move: Religion, Migration, and Pilgrimage in the World of Neoliberal Capital, edited by Joerg Rieger Theological and Hermeneutical Explorations from Australia: Horizons of Contextuality, edited by Jione Havea

Feminist Theologies Interstices and Fractures

Edited by Rebekah Pryor and Stephen Burns

LEXINGTON BOOKS/FORTRESS ACADEMIC

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic Lexington Books is an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 9781978712393 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781978712409 (ebook) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

List of Figures

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Wild, yes.ix Rebekah Pryor Introduction: With All Due Respect Stephen Burns

1

1 Against Innocence: Feminism and Original Sin Peter Kline 2 Standing at the Corner of Sin and Grace Shannon Craigo-Snell 3 “Because of the Angels” (1 Cor. 11:10): Ancient and Contemporary Threats to Women Sally Douglas

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4 In Spite of the Angels: Reading Paul and Freedom Struggle Jin Young Choi

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5 Mother Language, Mother Church, Mother Earth Cristina Lledo Gomez

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6 The Veil of Mother Marie-Elsa Roche Bragg

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7 “You Don’t Understand Me”: Serena Williams, Christology, and Non-Identity Janice McRandal v

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Contents

8 Why Misunderstanding Matters: Whiteness Made Visible to White Eyes Jenny Daggers 9 With All Due Respect, He Ain’t My Husband: Gender, Sexuality, and Theology in the Episcopal Church’s Rites of Marriage and Partnership Bryan Cones

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10 Partner, Husband, Friend?: The Sacramentality of a Same-Sex Relationship 123 Joseph N. Goh 11 Common Ground: The Gift of Womanist Theology in the Midst of the #MeToo Era Marguerite Kappelhoff

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12 This Is My Body: Re-Making the Maternal Image in Terms of Divine Relation and Difference Rebekah Pryor

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13 Encounters Among Strangers: Bodies, Marys, Arts Stefanie Knauss

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14 Deterrence: Crucified People Stephen Burns

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15 Pink Crosses in Ciudad Juárez David Tombs

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16 Hinterland is Intersection: Talking Back to the Exodus Blockade 209 Jione Havea 17 Asian Immigrants’ Hinterland Choi Hee An

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Index235 About the Contributors

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List of Figures

On the cover Wild, yes. By Rebekah Pryor, 2017 (detail). Used with the kind permission of the artist. Figures 6.1–6.7 The Veil of Mother 1‒7, by Marie-Elsa Roche Bragg, 2020. Charcoal and wax on paper Figure 12.1 Triptych, by Rebekah Pryor, 2014, acrylic and gold leaf, 25 × 20 × 5 cm Figure 12.2 Performing the Icon (choreographic notes 1–12), by Rebekah Pryor, 2015 (installation view) Figure 12.3 Performing the Icon (detail 1). Paper collage, 29.7 × 42 cm Figure 12.4 Performing the Icon (detail 2). Paper collage, 29.7 × 42 cm Figure 12.5 Performing the Icon (detail 3). Paper collage, 29.7 × 42 cm Figure 14.1 Deterrence, by John Tansey (installation view, 2014). Used with the kind permission of the artist Figure 14.2 Deterrence, by John Tansey (female figure; 2014). Used with the kind permission of the artist

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Wild, yes. Rebekah Pryor

Yer baby is wild. That’s what the chalky blue text on the studio wall read. It was autumn, and I was artist-in-residence at a historic precinct southeast of Melbourne.1 They’d put me in a building behind the main house: a solitary structure made of red brick and opening out onto the lawn and surrounding gardens. It was a cold space at that time of year, but its rough, lime-washed walls and worn floor suited my practice. The studio had once been Coach House to the grander Laurel Lodge, itself constructed in 1869 and first operated as a private boarding school for girls—a “Ladies’ School . . . replete with every comfort” and delivered under the leadership of Principal Miss Matilda Shaw.2 It was clear from the beginning that the writing on the wall was something I couldn’t ignore. The statement—left by a previous artist (unknown, at least to me)—seemed to speak so daringly to the history of the space and to my own art’s inquiry: the sexed, gendered, classist, and colonial nature of patriarchal social orders and orthodoxies, and the defiant, untameable and relentlessly hopeful gesture of preserving, even cultivating, one’s own difference in relation to different others. With this statement, time and histories and matters melded into some crystalline point of provocation and possibility: that wildness persists as an option capable of unsettling even the most well-watered conventions. The garden seemed the only place where wildness was not (or at least not inevitably) always constricted or altogether obliterated; where it was, rather, celebrated in all its human-boundary-breaching chaos. I was inspired by this orderly resistance and excess. The gardener had given me permission to use as many piles of garden off-cuts as I needed, and so I began to explore the nature of wildness in relation to the condition of cultivation. After a series of failed artistic experiments, I returned in the end to the building itself, using ix

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its own gaps as potential sites of wild growth and as points from which to critique the constructs and constrictions I felt in language and culture. Yer baby is wild. Wild, yes.  (2017) was my reply. The artwork responded to the statement materially, through the installation of found textile fabric into existing openings in the walls, and textually, with prose.3 In this way, Wild, yes.  not only drew on the particularities of the Coach House, especially in relation to its history of use and occupation by women, but also continued my critique (after Luce Irigaray and others) of the cultural construction and related constraint of sexuate bodies. Yer baby is wild What do you mean wild? Wild, yes, if by wild you mean belonging to no one but herself. Wild, yes, if by wild you mean springing up and flourishing outside the borders of cliché and cultural expectation. Wild, yes, if by wild you mean unable to be contained. Wild. Yes.

The series of accompanying images suggests a garden exceeding the limits of cultivation in order to grow, even through brick. A reminder of the morethan-human earth that resists the devastations of human mastery to somehow persist. A reminder too of the nature of time, and of each new or repeat developmental event (evolutionary or otherwise) that “contracts an immense history into itself. Into its kairos”, as Catherine Keller observes.4 All of the difference, the conflict and possibility—“the very mess of our history”— come together, condensing then opening out to make this moment critical and affect all moments thereafter.5 Temporalities entangle6 and all matter vibrates: every thing, even human being, vital, sonorous and reverberating through every other thing.7 Whether human, vegetal or otherwise, matter is, according to Jane Bennett, highly agential: “as [much] force as entity, as much energy as matter, as much intensity as extension”.8 Having identified the “thing-ness” of matter, she asserts that “things” have agency, even over their own construction—including, in human terms, their social construction. Moreover, the world itself is activated when things, in all their energetic variety and difference, come together as assemblages: “ad hoc groupings of diverse elements . . . living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within.”9 As Bennett identifies,

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assemblages—like all arrangements of difference—“have uneven topographies” since they are impacted and shaped by inequalities of power, privilege, growth, and damage sustained over time.10 Some things in some assemblages thrive in such conditions, of course. Sometimes, if not all of the time, other things do not. Unsurprisingly, totalising narratives (of life, death, the divine, etc.) are completely unworkable over such terrain. There are too many living, breathing things involved; too many possible iterations of “thing-ness”; too many situations that demand and make for change; too many woven, “meaningful lived connections for sustaining kinship, behavior, relational action” at work.11 Many and much more complex, varied and disparate stories of human and other being exist to be told. Feminist theology, allied as it is with liberation, ecological, postcolonial, queer and other theologies, has long interrogated the “cycles of construction and deconstruction of religious Grand Narratives” that systematically forget, ignore, tidy up or flatten out the ground occupied by real subjects and experiences.12 Whether through raging refusal of inherited or enforced theological ideas that help perpetuate abuse, inequity and other injustice, or out of conflict or disappointment with other feminist positions, feminist theology emerges, wild and unwieldy. At its best, it speaks of things divine fearlessly, wholeheartedly and from a multitude of topographies and real, bodily and embodied experiences. It leans in to hear the wisdom and challenge of Althaus-Reid’s “indecent” lemon vendor, Hagar and Williams’ other “sisters in the wilderness”, Oduyoye’s “daughters of Anowa”, Meo’s “Weavers” and Keller’s “swallowed, walled and wordless women”, among an assemblage of others.13 It reads Grand Narratives like cautionary tales and relentlessly attempts, in its many and varied ways, to generate better worlds, rejecting and resisting the problems, oppressions and omissions hegemonic theologies past have wrought along the way. This necessary persistence, combined as it is with an equally important absence of uniformity, is uneasy and wearying at times. But it remains a critical way of respecting and tending to our selves and our vital entanglements—our “living, throbbing confederations”—with each other. Might feminist theological discourse helpfully then be imagined and even imagine itself in terms of assemblage? Not as a gathered assembly (as if capable of maintaining a common cause or shared idea), but as a vibrant assemblage? One in which we who participate attend to our thing-ness: practice bumping into each other energetically and with respectful authenticity; notice the unevenness of the terrain we tread; become alert to others’ energies and stay with it, even when it seems to trouble us or change our pace? There is, of course, little predictability or certainty about such an approach; besides its theological (and political) potential, the only certainties are its inevitable mystery and difficulty.14 But when feminist theological discourse

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is conceived of in this way, the commonplace interstices and fractures that emerge as a result of difference, unevenness, ignorance or wrong have potential to be gaps that hold us as we speak and listen together, as we do the work of justice, confession, grace, restoration and newness together. Instead of being places of ongoing lack, violence or denial, they might become interposing sites where theology vibrates with desire, imagination, ambiguity and the kind of generosity and openness that welcomes the approach of “unprecedented” things.15 Sprouting as it does then, out of interstices and fractures, feminist theology thus invites and empowers us (for the first time and again) to feel what it’s like to push past prescribed limits, even of familiar theologies, doctrines and conventions; what it’s like to live and grow resonantly, with and despite everything; what it’s like to persist and flourish, even out of gaps in walls. Feminist theology reminds us that the (new) adage is true: yer baby is wild. Wild. Yes. NOTES 1. Heritage Hill Museum and Historic Gardens, Dandenong, Victoria, Australia Artist Residency, April to June 2017. 2. The Argus, “Advertising: Educational,” The Argus, January 27, 1873, 2. https://trove​.nla​.gov​.au​/newspaper​/article​/5847017 3. Wild, yes. © Rebekah Pryor, 2017. Refer to cover to view Wild, yes. (Detail 1) (2017) and artist website for others in the series: www​.rebekahpryor​.com​/wildyes . 4. Catherine Keller, Political Theology of the Earth: Our Planetary Emergency and the Struggle for a New Public, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 61. 5. Keller, Political Theology of the Earth, 61. 6. Elaine Gan, “The World is Dead. Long Live the World.” Social Text, March 8, 2015. https://socialtextjournal​.org​/periscope​_article​/the​-world​-is​-dead​-long​-live​-the​ -world/ 7. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010). 8. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 20. 9. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 23-24. 10. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 24. 11. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 91. 12. Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000), 7. 13. Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology, 1; Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1993), 108; Mercy Ambo Oduyoye, Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1996), 9; Lisa Meo, “Weaving Women and Theology,” The Pacific Journal of Theology II, no.

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15 (1996): 11; Catherine Keller, “Of Swallowed, Walled, and Wordless Women,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 65, no. 3 (1982): 328-339. 14. See Catherine Keller’s discussion of “apophatic assemblage” in relation to the political in Keller, Political Theology of the Earth, 163-166. 15. Heather Walton, “Creativity at the Edge of Chaos: Theopoetics in a Blazing World,” Literature and Theology 33, no. 3 (2019): 337.

Introduction With All Due Respect Stephen Burns

A number of the chapters that follow were imagined, written, and first voiced on Wurundjeri land belonging to one of the First Peoples groups that comprise the Kulin nation, which reaches around the area now more widely known as metropolitan Melbourne. These lands have never been ceded by their “traditional owners,” the First Peoples and, like the rest of Australia, the lands are marred by a history of massacres in which both First and “settler” peoples suffered, but in which the former were by far worse afflicted.1 This background—one with plenty of present-day after-shocks2—points to the kinds of wounds with which this collection on theological interstices and fractures is in part concerned. Essays unfolding in these pages encompass the likes of Australia’s dreadful detention system, racially motivated hate crimes, and different kinds of discrimination. Foci in the essays include those with which feminist theology, as other modes of theology, have not always intersected. Moreover, some of what follows is, in Marcella Althaus-Reid’s phrase, “unfitting” in the sense of “distressed,” concerned with disharmony. It is, again in Althaus-Reid’s terms, “fearful and wild.”3 While injustices engaged in what follows are uncomfortable and disturbing, difficult to face, other intersections in these pages are sometimes, mercifully, happier—particularly in fête of the arts (though it is not by any means the case that every image displayed or discussed here is easy). Visual arts are especially prominent, and there is also a self-designated “contemplation” (chapter 6) in a mode which, as well as involving visuals, smudges lines between prose and poetry. To mention another feature that is not often central to theological reflection, not easily “fit”: one of the following chapters centers on sport. If that seems strange, points of resonance with more familiar nodes of a so-called “systematic agenda” are also to be found—and notably, creation, theological anthropology, Christology, and Mariology all appear along the way. At the 1

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same time, too, aspects of Older and New Testament provide biblical foci at different junctures—though to re-employ Althaus-Reid’s terms, explorations of texts and thinking-foci may be expressed as distress. Whatever the connection with familiar themes and sources in Christian theology, it will quickly become apparent that the feminist theology which is represented in what follows is not of a narrower kind—that is, comprising only white women and white others’ thinking as opposed to womanist, Latina, Mujerista, and other modes. Rather, it is a polyvocal feminist wisdom that is being sought and celebrated here. Likewise, attempts are being made to turn that wisdom to matters of gender—as well as to other much-needed justice. In their concern for gender justice as it intersects with wider awareness of needed change for the better, some chapters may be considered akin to what Ann Loades denotes as “enlarged feminism.”4 The chapters emerged in a pattern. The first to be written were those by “Australian” authors (that is, Burns, Cones, Gomez, Havea, Kappelhoff, Kline, McRandal, and Pryor),5 though in fact Australia-born authors number just two, while the rest are of British, Canadian, Filipino, Tongan, and American heritage, though all but one of these are now either joint citizens or permanent residents in “multi-cultural” Australia.6 These first contributions to the collection were then each sought a “pair”—a corresponding chapter from further afield whose author was asked either to make a response to their Australian counterpart’s work or to offer something related to themes that appealed to them in that Australian contribution, but consciously from another context so as to be juxtaposed alongside the Australian piece. (So: Bragg, Choi, Choi, Craigo-Snell, Daggers, Goh, Tombs). Though the pattern is fractured insofar as one author was unable to complete their chapter, leaving one Australian contribution standing alone, we hope that in this method of inviting conversations across feminist concerns,7 we have fostered the beginnings of creative dialogue, dialogue that itself allows for crisscrossing of feminist perspectives from different cultural locations, touching a range of settings with their particular travails. As it happens, these non-Australian authors wrote from four countries, across four continents, and are themselves of British, German, Korean, Malaysian, and American heritage. Among the travails faced by the various authors included here were sickness and grief near at hand, and the looming Covid pandemic, with reflection on the latter appearing in these pages. The editors are grateful to the authors for their perseverance to keep working away on their contributions and for their patience as one another’s work emerged. It is worth adding that beyond the exigencies of the time, the construction of the book is also a conscious, small, attempt to unsettle a dynamic familiar in theology in Australia, where theology is often found responding to, following, or struggling to appropriate, theologies coming from North Atlantic settings. The theological cultures of the North are undoubtedly more dominant

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than where they may be read, if they migrate, “Down Under.” So in beginning with many Australian perspectives, this book attempts to dishevel the commonplace of theology in Australia being imported from elsewhere,8 with at least, for the most part, the immediate impetus for this current work arising not from the prevailing production sites of English-speaking theology, but circumstances closer to “home.”9 Finally, as a challenge to the reader, whomsoever and wheresoever they may be, the collection closes with an emphasis on “hinterland”—a reminder, we hope, that whatever one’s familiar environs, there is always a larger view to which one might seek to learn to attend. As this draws one beyond one’s accustomed setting, and may do the same with respect to discourse (e.g., womanism or “whitefeminism”), or form (e.g., poetry or prose)—whatever these might be—one might also hope to discover that (again in the words of Marcella Althaus-Reid): “Unfitting theological elements are precious things because they carry with them the possibility of breakthroughs.”10

NOTES 1. https://c21ch​.newcastle​.edu​.au​/colonialmassacres​/map​.php 2. Here are some bald statistics from government sources: “Indigenous Australians have a shorter life expectancy than non-Indigenous Australians and are at least twice as likely to rate their health as fair or poor. Compared with non-Indigenous Australians, Indigenous Australians are also: • 2.9 times  as likely to have long-term ear or hearing problems among children • 2.7 times as likely to smoke • 2.7 times as likely to experience high or very high levels of psychological distress • 2.1 times as likely to die before their fifth birthday • 1.9 times as likely to be born with low birthweight • 1.7 times  as likely to have a disability or restrictive long-term health condition Explaining the Indigenous health gap Differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in three key areas help explain the well-documented health gap: • Social determinants: Indigenous Australians, on average, have lower levels of education, employment, income, and poorer quality housing than nonIndigenous Australians • Health risk factors:  Indigenous Australians, on average, have higher rates of smoking and risky alcohol consumption, exercise less, and have a greater risk of high blood pressure than non-Indigenous Australians

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• Access to appropriate health services:  Indigenous Australians are more likely to report difficulty in accessing affordable health services that are nearby than non-Indigenous Australians.” (https://www​.aihw​.gov​.au​/reports​/australias​-health​/australias​-health​-2018​-in​ -brief​/contents​/all​-is​-not​-equal) 3. Marcella Althaus-Reid, “In the centre there are no fragments: Teologia Desencajades (reflection on unfitting theologies),” in Public Theology for the Twenty-first Century: Essays in Honour of Duncan B. Forrester, edited by William F. Storar and Andrew R. Motion (London: Continnum, 2004), in which Althaus-Reid writes of theology “desencajado”: “out of harmony, fearful, wild,” 369. 4. With reference to her explorations of the contributions of Mary Wollstonecraft, Josephine Butler, and Dorothy L. Sayers, feminist forebears involved in various kinds of reform, Ann Loades proposes the category of “enlarged feminism,” a hoped-for means of prevention from “narrow self-referential” thinking toward “legitimate concern” for others. See Ann Loades, Feminist Theology: Voices from the Past (Oxford: Polity, 2001), 1. 5. Some of the papers emerged from an Australian Collaborators in Feminist Theologies project “With All Due Respect.” 6. Australia was an early adopter—second only to Canada—of the official selfdesignation of “multicultural”—as of 1973, though it should be noted this was within three years of it dropping a decades-long “White Australia” policy. 7. The phrase “conversations across feminist concerns” features in the subtitle of a forthcoming publication associated with Australian Collaborators in Feminist Theology: Together in One Place: Conversations Across Feminist Concerns, edited by Monica Jyotsna Melanchthon and Stephen Burns, where the process is reversed. In that book, Australian authors respond to contributions from North American contributors closely associated with the Society of Biblical Literature. 8. We note with appreciation the work of one of the current contributors, Jione Havea, in so actively fostering countervailing theologies. Note among other work: Indigenous Australia and the Unfinished Business of Theology: Cross-cultural Engagements, edited by Jione Havea (New York: Palgrave, 2013), Postcolonial Voices from Down Under, edited by Jione Havea (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2017) and Theological and Hermeneutical Explorations from Australia: Horizons of Contextuality, edited by Jione Havea (Lanham: Lexington, 2020), with collections with Australia as a focus finding their context in wider circle attentive to Pasifika, for example: Talanoa Ripples: Across Borders, Cultures, Disciplines, edited by Jione Havea (Palmerston North: Massey University Press, 2010), and Sea of Readings: The Bible in the Pacific, edited by Jione Havea (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015). 9. We are nonetheless grateful to our publisher, Lexington, set in the North, whose location enables the Australian voices here to travel. A dynamic of dominant North Atlantic theology, and its market (a matter in which Marcella Althaus-Reid would press investigation), is that work from Australian contexts may rarely be encountered by readers from the North. 10. Althaus-Reid, “In the centre there are no fragments,” 373.

Chapter 1

Against Innocence Feminism and Original Sin Peter Kline

Theological feminists have been wrestling for some time with the challenge of being intersectional. “Intersectional,” as I use it here, refers to a practice of critical analysis that highlights the mutually conditioning nature of power dynamics related to gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, ecology, and more. For example, in her book, Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference: Subverting the Race/Gender Divide,1 Ellen Armour uses the term “whitefeminism” to signal the ways in which race is often elided within feminist theology and so becomes the structural “outside” over against which the category of “woman” obtains its coherence and stability. The whiteness of whitefeminism asserts itself by letting its whiteness go unmarked, an unmarking that betrays its assumption of a normative and universal subject position. The task, for Armour, is to find strategies for subverting the exclusion of race to the outside so that feminist theology can step out into an intersectional landscape where gender is also always a matter of race. “Intersectional” and “intersectionality” are now buzzwords, which means that what they signify can become too easy. “Being intersectional” can now rhetorically signify, “I’m interested in race, too,” or in disability, or in ecology, or whatever. However, the challenge of intersectionality is not just that there are more things and more dynamics to think about on any given issue. The challenge of intersectionality as a critical practice of thinking is this: it undoes any normative center from which one could comprehend or make authoritative judgments about the total field of human difference. There is no single organizing problem or oppression, and so no single organizing solution. There is only the irreducibility of problems and therefore the nonfinality and incompleteness of all our attempts to name and address them. Intersectionality decenters everyone, which is what I take to be its greatest promise.2 5

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In this essay, I briefly explore the possibility of thinking intersectionality together with a particular Christian doctrine. Perhaps counterintuitively, I turn to a doctrine that has often been the target of feminist theology, namely, the doctrine of original sin. This doctrine, I will venture, can become a powerful source of intersectional alertness and vigilance. If intersectionality undoes any normative center of the structural dynamics of oppression, the doctrine of original sin can be mobilized to make a parallel move. “Sin” is that theological concept that points to the malformed or distorted nature of human existence, a malformation that goes beyond the inherent brokenness or finitude of mortal existence. “Original sin” is a concept that makes (at least) two further claims: (1) that no human life is innocent of ongoing participation in sin and (2) that no particular sin organizes the total network of sinful human behavior. It is this second point in particular that I want to develop. Original sin names a universal embeddedness in networks of violence, exclusion, and attempted self-mastery that infect every layer of existence—networks that weave together the myriad ways in which human beings attempt to master ourselves, our neighbors, and our environments rather than entrusting ourselves to the God who creates and redeems beyond exclusion. One consequence of the “original” nature of sin—that it is internal to human being—is that no one can name sin from a position outside of sin. Only God names us from beyond sin. We cannot so name ourselves. Every naming of sin itself participates in the universal condition of sin, and so no naming can claim innocence or righteousness or finality outside of the universal solidarity of sinners in which find ourselves. As Paul puts it in Romans 2:1: “You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things.” What such solidarity requires is that theological discourse on sin become vigilant about its own tendency to disavow participation in sin precisely in the moment of naming sin, a tendency present in all theological positions, conservative, liberal, moderate, radical, and so on. This does not mean that sin is not to be named. It does mean that the primary and encompassing form of that naming is to be confession, rather than accusation. Accusation attempts a directness and form of mastery. Confession, when thought away from something like self-accusation, is a gesture of indirection and unmastery. It enacts a trust in the grace that alone can name us from beyond sin. The upshot of this for theological discourse is that sin is not a category that can be grasped directly or put to use to distinguish “us” from “them” in any ultimate way. Sin—the doctrine of original sin is meant to secure this point— names not isolated acts of wrong-doing that perhaps I commit and you do not, or that they commit and we do not, but the world as a whole bound together in alienation from its divine source. There is therefore no point of view from within the world in which sin can be grasped or named over against some other

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part or group of the world. Attempts to do so enact a disavowal of one’s participation in sin, which more often than not entails unloading the shame and unintelligibility that is the result of our alienation onto despised others. The logic of such disavowal has operated pervasively and violently throughout theological history. Women, sodomites, non-Europeans, Jews, queers, and countless other despised groups have often been made to symbolize the shame and unintelligibility of our fallen creation by dominating discourses and groups seeking the intelligibility, normativity, and innocence of their own positions. It is precisely this unjust and unequal distribution of the effects of sin that the doctrine of original sin counters—or so I want to argue. The doctrine blocks our attempts to disavow responsibility for the distortion and shame of the world and its history.3 This, in turn, opens onto my central claim: attempts to name and reckon with the personal and structural reality and effects of sin, as feminist theology has always wanted to do, cannot be gathered around and limited to a single signifier, such as a gender or sexuality or power or even violence. In Sexism and God Talk,4 Rosemary Radford Ruether claims that patriarchy is the original sin. While I agree with her that sin should be thought of first and foremost as a structural reality, and only secondarily as acts of individuals, I want to resist naming original sin with any single logic or signifier. Original sin names the impossibility of any “transcendental signified” when it comes to sin, an impossibility that undercuts attempts at a totalized discourse on sin or efforts to establish epistemological mastery, which are always efforts to establish epistemological innocence. Conceived in this way, the doctrine of original sin is precisely what demands intersectional theology—a theology that can never settle down into any self-possessed logic that secures the stability of its mapping and naming of the world. The doctrine declares the non-innocence of every naming of and position within existence and therefore opens onto the necessity of never-ending confession, the never-ending work of acknowledging and resisting the slide toward mastery and disavowal that infects all that we do, think, and feel, including our theologies. In other words, original sin demands a vigilance that keeps the multiplicity of our signifiers, those of gender, race, sexuality, ability, class, and so on, open to each other. Another word for this is intersectionality. Ultimately, I want to claim that such recognition frees theological discourse from the burden of trying to name and overcome sin—a human impossibility. What it frees theology for is the work of naming and resisting the damaging effects of sin, including the effects of disavowing sin, in local and concrete ways. Sin never manifests as an abstracted totality, under the mastery of a single signifier. In a way, sin never manifests as such. What we register as the malformation of human existence are the effects of sin’s untraceable operations. Sin cannot therefore be resisted or overcome in any grand, totalizing gesture. Sin operates through local and contingent structural

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realities in which its damaging effects are spread differentially and unequally across the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, and so on. What theology ought to attend to at these intersections is not who is innocent and who is not, but rather who suffers—often as a result of normative visions of the human being claiming innocence and righteousness for themselves. Recognizing this and freeing itself from the desire to secure innocence, either for itself or for others, theological discourse can give way to concrete intersectional sites and the works of justice and compassion. In doing so, it can become what I want to call pragmatics of solidarity and resistance. My main inspiration for this line of thinking is the work of the Australian feminist theologian Janice McRandal. In her book, Christian Doctrine and the Grammar of Difference: A Contribution to Feminist Systematic Theology,5 McRandal sketches a minimalist reclamation of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin. She does so by turning to Augustine’s early account of original sin in his Confessions rather than his later and more influential account in The City of God. Acknowledging the deeply problematic inheritance that Augustine bequeathed to Western theology in his later, deeply patriarchal account, McRandal turns instead to Augustine’s earlier account in which there is a striking absence of any literal or historical Adam and Eve. She writes, “If Confessions can .  .  . coherently affirm universal and personal sin coupled with the original goodness of creation, then I suggest it is equally possible to ignore the literalism Augustine later brings to the biblical creation and fall narratives.”6 It is Augustine’s early account, for McRandal, that opens the possibility of a doctrine of original sin that is universal without being totalizing, that is, that does not gather around one problem, such as sexuality or masculine pride. The problem is not original sin as such, or even its association with sexuality, but rather the desire to master sin by reducing it to a single logic. “Discourse concerning original sin becomes problematic .  .  . whenever it tries to move beyond universal claims about creation and fall to definitions of the root of sin or the primary sin that holds all other sins together. These attempts nearly always flatten difference.”7 If something is to be named about the universal nature of sin, for McRandal, it can only be a minimalist naming of the fear and intolerance of difference. “Therefore we might say humanity’s totalizing desire to overcome difference and to homogenize toward sameness is at the interior of sin’s complicated web. Seen in this perspective, sin says something (as Susan Thistlethwaite suggests) about the ‘depth of human intolerance of difference.’”8 This leads McRandal to her conclusion that the doctrine of original sin can become a means of affirming difference rather than its collapse into sameness: Original sin .  .  . [is] .  .  . a universal doctrinal claim that names the proliferation of sin—individual, social, structural, relational, and all the ways in which

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we have come to understand how sin injures creation. If discourse concerning original sin can resist the temptation to introduce totalizing categories, then the cultural particularities of creaturely difference are not threatened by the universal scope of the doctrine; indeed the doctrine points to difference (103) . . . Original sin becomes a means by which the sins against difference . . . can be named in universal and catastrophic terms.9

What I want to highlight here is how McRandal’s account turns on holding open an uncollapsible difference between original sin and all determinate “sins.” It is only through an affirmation of such uncollapsible difference that determinate sins can be recognized as part of a universal web or network in which particular offenses, such as sexism, are never reducible to themselves, but always intersectionally open to a multiplicity of other offenses, such as racism. That there is no primary or root sin means that no one sin is able to provide the transcendental logic of every other sin. All we can trace are its multiplicitous and intersectional effects. To invoke a Derridian distinction, original sin is not so much original, as in an original presence, but originary, which can be thought only through its traces, and so never finally or fully thought. What this means is that the doctrine of original sin supplies theological warrants for styles of ideological critique such as Derridian deconstruction and Foucauldian genealogy. The reality of sin disallows the metaphysical innocence we assume with our concepts and discourses and allows us to trace something like Foucauldian “power” operative at every layer of existence and its historical formations and de-formations. But I think even more than either Derridian deconstruction or Foucauldian genealogy, the doctrine of original sin can push theology to think and intervene in intersectional directions. This is because the doctrine is unabashedly universalizing. It declares the solidarity of the human race, all of us bound together in the universal malformation of sin. To pull on one thread of that catastrophe will always mean that one has to reckon with the intersections of the whole fabric. To think patriarchy is to think racism is to think ecological violence is to think heteronormativity is to think colonialism is to think misogyny . . . and on and on. Furthermore, as McRandal emphasizes, the doctrine of original sin rests on a vision of the originary goodness of creation, a goodness that lies precisely in difference, the goodness of creaturely difference in all of its wild and unmasterable proliferation. To reckon with sin is to reckon with our fearful intolerance of this difference, and so it leads to a confession of the originary goodness of difference that remains despite the catastrophe of sin. To confess sin is also to confess the goodness of difference that we have failed to honor. Another feminist theologian who reworks the doctrine of original sin for constructive purposes is Linn Tonstad. In her essay, “Everything Queer,

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Nothing Radical?”,10 Tonstad sketches a “Sodomitical Theology” that argues for the preferability of identifying as a sinner rather than a saint. “We should accept shared sinfulness as a theological basis for human solidarity between the different.”11 The problem with forging human solidarity around a shared innocence or righteousness, especially the righteousness of denouncing the evil in another, is that such solidarity depends on the creation and maintenance of despised, unworthy outsiders: The hope of a fully unified community becomes an alibi for the violence directed against whomever stands in for “the obstacle destabilizing every unity.” The one whose very insistence bespeaks non-integration, the one who cannot be tolerated within a program devoted to tolerance and unity, to the flourishing of all, is variously symbolized, to name just a few examples, in the Western imagination by the Islamist radical, the devout Muslim refugee, the Mexican immigrant rapist, the separatist lesbian feminist, or the Jew. But once upon a time in Western Christendom, the obstacle destabilizing every unity was the Sodomite.12

A sodomitical theology begins with non-integration—of the self, of the community, of theology—in order to reframe a vision of sociality not organized around the distinction between good and evil. Rather than start from such a distinction, “we should place ourselves on the side of the sinful, accepting that we need to arrange socioeconomic and political orders in ways that benefit all of us, without requiring people to be virtuous, good, or respectable in order to be the beneficiaries of shared social goods.”13 Tonstad goes on to propose an identification with Lot’s wife as she looks back on the destruction of Sodom. To take up the position of Lot’s wife, to see with her eyes, is “to see the consequences of . . . marking the loved off from the unloved, and the bad off from the good.”14 The transformation of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt becomes for Tonstad an icon of staying with those who the righteous would destroy for the sake of the integrity of the city. Rather than the mobility and endless transformations of patriarchal power that flees the destruction it enacts, Lot’s wife represents a stubborn refusal to leave the scene of the crime: So let us place ourselves with the filthy, underserving, sinners; let us stay with the Sodomites and accept the fixity of Lot’s wife—the fixity of feminism, which does not get over gender—rather than, like Abraham or Lot, bargaining with God about the number of the righteous that outweighs a city of sinners as we seek to escape into the hills to repeat the order of the fathers.15

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Tonstad is not concerned here directly with intersectionality, but her sodomitical theology can easily become a resource for the kind of intersectional attention I am trying to think. Lot’s wife does not represent the possibility of naming or seeing sin in its totality. She does not put herself beyond sin but turns to look at the damage done by those who do. In that looking, perhaps we might imagine her seeing another woman who turned her back on Abraham in order to survive the terrors of righteousness, namely, Hagar. Lot’s wife and Hagar are not the same, and what each opens to sight need not be collapsed into the other’s vision. One is a wife, the other a slave and surrogate. We need simply to attend to both and let each decenter our sight again. So how might such a vision of original sin open onto what I have called pragmatics of solidarity and resistance? By pragmatics, I do not mean to invoke the “pragmatism” of Reinhold Niebuhr and its connection to the account of original sin he develops. As James Cone points out in The Cross and the Lynching Tree,16 Niebuhr’s pragmatism never allowed him to confront the racial violence at the heart of American society. I am using pragmatics here in a loosely Derridian sense to mark a shift from a metaphysical style of politics that trades on categories of pure and impure to a style of political thought and action that embraces the contingent, local, and always impure struggle to welcome a justice that banishes exclusion. If to confess sin is to confess also the goodness of difference that we have violated and failed to live into, then the confession of sin can never be abstract, just as it can never reduce to a single master logic. Confession of sin is truthful rather than ideological only when the concrete and historical violations of the goodness of difference are what come to speech. Confession of sin will always be a local, historicized matter, a coming to terms with how in this time and place, which is shaped by the complexities of its particular histories, concrete violations of difference have occurred and continue to occur among us. No one violation of difference can assume the position of a master logic, even if certain kinds of violation assume dominance within particular histories. But these are not metaphysical namings that attempt to provide a totalizing framework for all other sins, which likewise must be named in their time and place. The doctrine of original sin presses for both a recognition of the universal solidarity of the human race and simultaneously the necessity of naming localized evils in their historical complexity. Even though original sin has often been used as a way to dehistoricize sin and retreat from the pragmatics of naming concrete oppressions and their intersectional dynamics, I am arguing that original sin is precisely that doctrine that demands ever-renewed attention to history’s victims. It is a doctrine that mobilizes discipleship and the works of love, mercy, and justice.

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Resistance to sin and its damaging effects, what Christians call the working of grace, will therefore be rooted in the dangerous memories of concrete bodies and their suffering. Attention to victims, however, is not premised upon their innocence, as if such attention were simply another path to purity. It is rooted rather in the theological confession of the goodness of every created difference and the harm of denying to any creature the time and space to grow into that difference—with all the complexity, messiness, and unpredictability that entails. Such confession is made possible by the memory of Jesus, who through his life and death reveals the horrifying depths of our fear and desire for control, and in his resurrection opens a new creation in which our exclusions no longer determine what is real. It is a confession that positions us concretely before the very particular violations of difference in our midst, never letting us rest in any presumption of innocence.

NOTES 1. Ellen Armour, Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference: Subverting the Race/Gender Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 2. For an account of intersectionality that moves along similar lines, see Jennifer C. Nash, Black Feminism Reimagined: After Intersectionality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). 3. My thinking on original sin has been deeply shaped by Geoffrey Rees, The Romance of Innocent Sexuality (Eugene: Cascade, 2004). 4. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). 5. Janice McRandal, Christian Doctrine and the Grammar of Difference: A Contribution to Feminist Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014). 6. McRandal, Christian Doctrine and the Grammar of Difference, 100. 7. McRandal, Christian Doctrine and the Grammar of Difference, 102. 8. McRandal, Christian Doctrine and the Grammar of Difference, 102 n. 78. 9. McRandal, Christian Doctrine and the Grammar of Difference, 104. 10. Linn Tonstad, “Everything Queer, Nothing Radical?” Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 92 (2016): 118–129. 11. Tonstad, “Everything Queer, Nothing Radical?”, 127. 12. Tonstad, “Everything Queer, Nothing Radical?”, 123. 13. Tonstad, “Everything Queer, Nothing Radical?”, 126. 14. Tonstad, “Everything Queer, Nothing Radical?”, 128. 15. Tonstad, “Everything Queer, Nothing Radical?”, 129. 16. James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (New York: Orbis, 2013).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Armour, Ellen. Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference: Subverting the Race/Gender Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Cone, James. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. New York: Orbis, 2013. McRandal, Janice. Christian Doctrine and the Grammar of Difference: A Contribution to Feminist Systematic Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2014. Radford Ruether, Rosemary. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993. Tonstad, Linn. “Everything Queer, Nothing Radical?” Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 92 (2016): 118–129.

Chapter 2

Standing at the Corner of Sin and Grace Shannon Craigo-Snell

Feminist theology has a complicated relationship with the doctrine of sin. In his eloquent essay, Peter Kline brings together the doctrine of sin and the need for intersectionality to advocate for an approach to sin that does not try to precisely “name and overcome sin,” but focuses “on naming and resisting the damaging effects of sin, including the effects of disavowing sin.”1 Writing from the social perspective of a white woman in the Reformed tradition in the United States, I will locate Kline’s constructive proposal within the broader context of feminist reckonings with the doctrine of sin. I argue that the doctrine of sin always requires talk of grace, and therefore names intersectionality at the heart of Christian identity. Kline summarizes the doctrine of sin as a theological concept identifying the distorted nature of human existence. The affirmation of original sin means that “no human life is innocent of ongoing participation in sin” and “no particular sin organizes the total network of sinful human behavior.” Kline aims to think about sin through intersectionality, which he defines as “a critical practice of thinking . . . [that] undoes any normative center from which one could comprehend or make authoritative judgements about the total field of human difference.” In addition to being a remarkably clear description of intersectionality, this definition points to both the problems and promise that Kline sees in the doctrine of sin. The problem involves the temptation to identify one particular form of oppression as the total logic of sin. The promise is that the doctrine of sin, in itself, should be decentering and induce epistemic humility.

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NAMING THE PROBLEM Kline articulates one set of issues that feminist theologians have identified in various permutations of the doctrine of sin: the category of sin is effectively weaponized. These can be thought of as third-person doctrines of sin (they are sinful). In a pattern of projective othering, sin is associated with another group of people, and the way for faithful Christians to avoid sin and preserve innocence is to control and subjugate this group. Drawing upon the work of feminist theologian Linn Tonstad, Kline diagnoses this use of sin as a cause of suffering. This pattern of weaponized sin-talk is easily observed through a lens of sex and gender. When sin was associated with Eve eating the fruit in the garden, women were associated with sin. Augustine, whose discussions of sin continue to be pervasively influential, linked sin and sex decisively. Building on a foundation of pre-existent patriarchy, Christian authors and artists depicted women as an extra-special kind of sinful that tempts otherwise-innocent men. The fixation on sin as sexual was critical to institutionalizing Christian misogyny, while contributing to and buttressing other forms of domination and oppression. This pattern continues into the twenty-first century, when talk of sin in the United States is almost exclusively related to sex in some fashion. Socially conservative Christians deploy “sin” as a blunt instrument and a political tool, primarily in relation to women, same-sex love, strict enforcement of gender binaries and social roles, reproductive health, and abortion. Augustine ghost-writes letters from the high school principal telling Alicia that she cannot come to school in a top with spaghetti straps, because it will distract the boys in class. Meanwhile, a lawyer with a dog-eared copy of The City of God ghost-writes legislation to grant legal personhood to embryos. Feminist theology rejects the association of sin with sex and, instead, names sexism as the sin in this story. Furthermore, theologians note that third-person doctrines of sin have been used against many groups of people, not just women. In various times and places, sin has been associated with poverty, disability, melanin, and a variety of other characteristics and conditions. Kline acknowledges the damage done by such third-person doctrines of sin that ultimately place humanity in a hierarchy. He goes further, however, noting that people who are actively rejecting such hierarchies sometimes replicate them, declaring that this particular hierarchy is the root of all others. For example, naming patriarchy as the original sin actually continues the prioritizing of some over others for which third-person sin-talk is critiqued. Kline values the universalizing reality of Christian doctrines of sin (we are all sinful) but rejects totalizing doctrines that specify precisely what sin is primary (e.g., all sin is rooted in patriarchy).

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Feminist theologians have identified another set of problems with the doctrine of sin that fall outside the purview of Kline’s essay. These are issues with first-person doctrines of sin, which are confessional, self-descriptions of human sin. Like third-person doctrines of sin, they are universalizing. The “we” in first-person doctrines is intended to be everybody. Yet, similar to third-person doctrines of sin, they can be totalizing in ways that replicate other hierarchies. A number of prominent Protestant theologians in the twentieth century, including Reinhold Neibuhr, characterized sin as fundamentally an issue of pride. This was powerfully refuted by Valerie Saiving Goldstein, who argued that this was inadequate to the lived experience of women.2 Judith Plaskow continued the conversation, pointing out that male theologians such as Neibuhr and Paul Tillich were generalizing from their own experiences. While pride might be the temptation of many men, self-abnegation might more accurately describe the experience of women.3 Hearing that one ought not be prideful might sound different to someone who has been affirmed by society as a powerful agent than to someone who has been denigrated by society as someone not meant to be powerful at all. Furthermore, Christian communications (including preaching) against the sin of pride might exacerbate the oppression of women. Both types of sin discourse—third-person and first-person—have difficulties. Third-person theologies of sin rely on understanding an “other” who is inherently sinful. They pave the way for demonization and miss the messy solidarity of recognizing our common sinfulness. First-person theologies of sin run a different risk—of looking inward only and focusing on one’s own shortcomings without offering a strong critique of the sinful nature of oppressive social structures. The benefits of solidarity in sinfulness can make it harder to recognize when a group is not just sinful but sinned against. And both third- and first-person theologies of sin can be harmful when one form of sin is identified as primary in a totalizing way. Kline suggests a way forward that balances a first-person doctrine of sin with intersectionality. This path is cleared by feminist theologian Janice McRandal, who chooses to inherit Augustine’s reflections on sin in his Confessions rather than The City of God. McRandal effectively avoids the Garden, and snips the ties between sin and sex, while holding on to Augustine’s insights into sin as both person and universal, always paired with the original goodness of creation.

NAMING THE NEED Why continue with a discourse so fraught with possible misuse and harm? In the context of predominantly white, mainline Protestant churches in the US,

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many church members would rather not hear the word. The harm done by weaponized third-person sin-talk, particularly around sexual orientation and gender identity, can make the doctrine of sin seem unredeemable. However, this doctrine is desperately needed to make sense of reality in the US in the twenty-first century. The dominant discourse regarding wrongdoing in the contemporary US is the language of innocence and guilt, shaped by a highly problematic justice system. This system is big business in the US, employing 2.8 million workers in 2020.4 It’s also big entertainment. Half of the ten most-watched scripted broadcast primetime shows in the 2019–2020 season were focused on the justice system.5 The discourse of criminal justice pervades life in the US—in daily work, television, movies, politics, and more. The basic structure of this discourse is a dichotomy between innocence and guilt. In a judicial context, innocence and guilt pertain exclusively to individuals. Only an individual can be found guilty and, ideally, only if that individual freely chooses to engage in behavior they know breaks the law or could result in significant harm. Furthermore, a guilty verdict ideally requires significant, concrete evidence. Finally, the US criminal justice system responds to guilt with punishment. Having innocence and guilt, cast through the lens of the criminal justice system, as the dominant shared discourse about wrongdoing severely limits the collective ethical imagination in the US. The categories of innocence and guilt are inadequate to the realities of systemic injustice and structural wrongs. For example, when addressing racism, white people in the US often: (1) frame racism as something an individual does wrong, rather than a systemic reality; (2) declare their innocence based on lack of free choice and lack of evidence; and (3) fear that any movement toward racial justice would necessitate punishing whites. For those white people who begin to see the larger systemic injustice of racism, they often respond by feeling guilty, which fundamentally enforces racial divisions rather than empowering movements of solidarity. The doctrine of sin provides a far better framework for understanding generational, systemic wrongs.6 Traditional Christian doctrines of sin affirm that humanity is collectively broken. Sin is a state in which we exist. Coming to be in this context, each of us becomes distorted so that we commit particular acts that are sinful. These sinful acts contribute to the collective state, which then inexorably leads to more sinful acts. Thus, Schleiermacher writes that sin is “in each the work of all, and in all the work of each.”7 As a white woman in the US, I do not choose racism. Yet I was born into a profoundly racist society and, no matter how I reject racism, I still reap the benefits of being white in this world. Furthermore, the distortion of racism does not remain external to me; from before my first breath, racism has shaped my

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cells and my perceptions, my beliefs and my biases. I act in ways that continue racism. I do not choose racism, yet I cannot escape it. I am in bondage to it, to use traditional sin language. More importantly, perhaps, than providing this conceptual framework is the other work the doctrine of sin can do. Sin doesn’t travel alone. Sin always, always rides with grace.8 It is only in the reality of grace that sin can be committed or conceived. “T’was grace that taught my heart to fear and grace my fears relieved.” Grace is the freely given gift from the God of creativity and love. Following theologian Karl Rahner, I understand grace to be a vocation. It is what we are called to, and this calling constitutes our most fundamental identity. The call is reiterated simply throughout the Bible: we are called to love God, neighbor, and self. (And note: there is no reason to interpret neighbor in exclusively human terms.) One of the many Greek words in the Bible that is translated as “sin” means “missing the mark.” The most common Hebrew term in the Bible that is translated as “sin” means simply “missing the mark.” In the most rudimentary terms, sin is when we miss the mark we are called to, when we get off the track that leads to love of God, neighbor, and self. Because sin rides with grace, the response to sin is not punishment but recalibration. It is to get back on track. The process for this is one many Christians practice weekly: confession (to tell the truth about sin) and repentance (to course-correct toward our vocation).

THE PROBLEM OF NAMING In this brief account of sin, have I committed the theological misstep diagnosed above, creating a totalizing generalization of sin that replicates hierarchies? Probably. As Kline writes, “Every naming of sin itself participates in the universal condition of sin, and so no naming can claim an innocence or righteousness or finality outside of the universal solidarity of sinners in which find ourselves.” Yet, as Kline himself notes, the discourse of sin is too valuable to abandon the enterprise. He follows McRandal in describing sin as “the fear and intolerance of difference.” His naming resists a single, totalizing logic of sin in two ways. First, Kline emphasizes the “uncollapsible difference” between original sin and actual sins. This means that while sins can be recognized by their instantiation of the larger description of sin, this must always happen in a way that recognizes the particularity and multiplicity of actual sins. Second, Kline attempts to address sin in an intersectional way by operating in the form of confession, which always identifies the speaker as sinful. This genre recognizes that our naming is also distorted by sin. Kline says that confessional language about sin “is a

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gesture of indirection and unmastery. It enacts a trust in the grace that alone can name us from beyond sin.” However, we can learn from Saiving Goldstein and Plaskow that confessionality is not enough. First-person sin discourse can be totalizing, too, and can make it difficult to name when a person or group is sinned against. While I am convinced by Kline’s argument that Rosemary Radford Ruether’s naming of patriarchy as the original sin is problematic, it is still vitally important for women to name patriarchy as sin. For black people to name racism as sin. For people with disabilities to name systemic exclusion as sin. In my very local context of Louisville, Kentucky, when Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by police officers in her own apartment, continuing a long history of the murder of black and brown people by police or security personnel, many Christians took to the streets. People marched and protested for months, even though many were tear-gassed, assaulted, and jailed for doing so. Black clergy were leaders in this justice struggle, and they named the sin of white supremacy in the third person. Like sin language itself, third-person sin discourse is dangerous but necessary. PRESUMPTION OF GRACE Kline uses these two methods—emphasis on the difference between original and actual sin and the use of confessional language—to reach the proximate goal of resisting a singular logic of sin. However, the ultimate goal of his essay is not to discipline sin-talk, but to reject the theological appropriation of innocence. Our sin-talk is problematic when we use it to “disavow” our own sinfulness. This disavowal can be blatant or subtle. For example, if I, as a white woman, claim that patriarchy is the original sin, I am at least disavowing the root of sin, even if I admit I have been caught up in its branches. Kline wants to infuse life into sin-talk in order to defuse claims of innocence. Yet innocence is not the necessary counterpart to sin. Grace is. Sin-talk requires no one to be innocent; it requires the sinner to also be the recipient of grace. While innocence and guilt are binary opposites, grace and sin are not. They are two identities that can only be ascribed to the same set of people, even as these identities are in tension with one another. Early in his essay, Kline suggests that it might be “counter-intuitive” to think intersectionality together with the doctrine of sin, given how often this doctrine has been critiqued by feminist theologians. However, the doctrine of sin has always required intersectional thinking, in that it challenges each and all of us to see ourselves at the intersection of sin and grace.

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NOTES 1. References to Kline are to the essay which precedes my own in this volume. 2. Valerie Saiving Goldstein, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion, 40:2 (1960): 100–112. 3. Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women’s Experience in the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Washington: University Press of America, 1980). 4. Jacob Whiton, “In Too Many American Communities Mass Incarceration Has Become a Jobs Program,” Brookings (June 18, 2020). https://www​.brookings​.edu​/ blog​/the​-avenue​/2020​/06​/18​/in​-too​-many​-american​-communities​-mass​-incarceration​ -has​-become​-a​-jobs​-program/ 5. Will Thorne, “Cop Shows Under the Microscope: ‘We Need Different People Writing Different Cop Shows,’” Variety (June 16, 2020). https://variety​.com​/2020​/tv​ /features​/cop​-shows​-under​-microscope​-1234635929/ 6. This is explored in more detail in Shannon Craigo-Snell and Christopher Doucot, No Innocent Bystanders: Becoming Allies in the Struggle for Justice (Louisville: WJKP, 2017), 56–62. 7. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 288. 8. This is explored in more detail in Shannon Craigo-Snell and Shawnthea Monroe (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 96–100.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Goldstein, Valerie Saiving. “The Human Situation: A Feminine View.” Journal of Religion, 40:2 (1960): 100–112. Plaskow, Judith. Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women’s Experience in the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Washington: University Press of America, 1980. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. The Christian Faith. New York: Harper and Row, 1963.

Chapter 3

“Because of the Angels” (1 Cor. 11:10) Ancient and Contemporary Threats to Women Sally Douglas

To be embodied as a woman is political. Debates about women—their bodies, their clothing, their speaking and silence—pervade cultures and religions. Predominantly, records of past debates preserve only the voices of men. While it is recorded across the gospels that Jesus transgresses cultural and religious expectations in his engagement with, and affirmation of, women, earliest Jesus communities continued to be embroiled in such debates. Exemplifying this, within the Second Testament text of 1 Corinthians it is argued that women should cover their heads and men should not (1 Cor. 11:2–16).1 One of the reasons offered for this imposition on women is “because of the angels” (1 Cor. 11:10). While some Christian traditions continue to observe the call for women’s heads to be covered, in contemporary context the majority of Western Christian communities sidestep these words altogether. However, ignoring such passages runs the risk of allowing power to be accrued to them. Through research spanning biblical studies and theology, this chapter investigates 1 Corinthians 11:10 and does so from three distinct perspectives. The first perspective invites readers into a closer analysis of the passage. Through excavating biblical, intertestamental, and early church evidence it is demonstrated that the claim that women’s heads should be covered “because of the angels” (1 Cor. 11:10), is grounded in first-century cosmology. The second perspective is offered by stepping back from the biblical text to consider the potential implications of re-engaging with this ancient worldview. It is argued that because women continue to face malevolent powers that diminish their personhood, safety and flourishing, as exemplified in the constructed male gaze, a surplus of wisdom may be discovered in this archaic imagery. The third, and final, perspective is offered 23

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through the invitation to turn inward. Here it is proposed that Christian mystical traditions offer liberating resources, as the gaze of Christ has the potential to supplant the objectifying gaze of others. It is hoped that this multifocal approach to the ancient angels will stimulate discussion and contribute to ongoing experiments in being free.

FIRST PERSPECTIVE: BECAUSE OF THE ANGELS Within 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 Paul, or the author of this passage,2 asserts that, unlike men, people who are women should cover their heads. The central justification for this assertion is that people who are women are ontologically inferior to people who are men: For a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image and reflection of God; but woman is the reflection of man. Indeed, man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man. For this reason a woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head. (1 Corinthians 11:7–9).3

Justification for this theology of the human person is constructed by bypassing the first creation account in Genesis that celebrates the ontological equality of women and men who are together, both, made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27). In 1 Corinthians, Paul, or the author of this passage, relies upon the second creation account (Gen. 2:4–24) to assert that women are ontologically inferior to men. Relying on this blinkered reading, the scaffolding becomes available for the argument that women’s heads should be covered.4 Despite making the bold assertion that people who are women are ontologically inferior to people who are men, the author of 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 still feels the need to strengthen the assertion that women should be veiled. The author employs the weaponry of shame, rather than evidence, in this endeavor: “For if a woman will not veil herself, then she should cut off her hair; but if it is disgraceful for a woman to have her hair cut off or to be shaved, she should wear a veil” (1 Cor. 11:6). At the conclusion of the passage, the author resorts to arguments about cultural norms: Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him, but if a woman has long hair it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering. But if anyone is disposed to be contentious—we have no such custom, nor do the churches of God. (1 Corinthians 11:14–16)

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Sandwiched between the argument that people who are women are ontologically inferior to people who are men, and the argument that norms demand that women adhere to cultural expectations, another argument is made. Without offering any further explanation, the author refers to angels: “For this reason a woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels” διὰ τοὺς ἀγγέλλους (1 Cor. 11:10).5 In the pages that follow, attention will focus on this claim and the potential implications of parsing this ancient cosmology for utility within a contemporary context. In Second Testament studies, the brief, unexplained reference to the angels in this passage is interpreted in a variety of ways. For some this reference to the angels is understood as an affirmation of the (patriarchal) structure of creation in which the angels are protectors of this order, and therefore women must display their inferior position within this system.6 Others argue that these angels are linked with worship. Drawing on the work of Morna Hooker,7 C. K. Barrett summarizes the view that because a woman is the glory of man (1 Cor. 11:7): “If she were to pray or prophesy with uncovered head, she would not be glorifying God, but reflecting the glory of man.”8 Joseph Fitzmyer also draws from the work of Hooker to affirm this view.9 However, Fitzmyer seeks to expand this argument by utilizing Qumran material. Reflecting on guidelines found in instructions for worship in Essene communities that state that “unclean” people—those with a “bodily defect”— cannot be present in worship (1QSa2.3–9), Fitzmyer argues that women with uncovered heads were understood as defective and therefore disallowed.10 Drawing conclusions about a theological understanding of women in 1 Corinthians 11:10 based upon disconnected texts from an Essene community writing about people with disabilities is deeply problematic.11 Richard Horsley interprets the reference to angels in a different way. Horsley seeks to link the prophetic gifts of women in Corinth with reference to the angels, stating that: If we consider the angels along with the “authority” woman has on her (own) head, then these passages may be an allusion to a claim by certain women that they have “authority” to be uncovered because in their prophetic inspiration they are already like the angels (cf. “speak in the tongues of . . . angels,” 13:1).12

While presenting an interesting possibility, Horsley’s suggestion is based on an imagined scenario about what some of the women in Corinth may have been claiming. It therefore cannot be relied upon for interpretative purposes. The causal connection between women and the angels in 1 Corinthians 11 is obtuse for twenty-first-century audiences. Thus a multiplicity of interpretations is spawned. However, what can be gleaned from the passing reference to the angels is that the author assumes that first audiences understand who

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these angels are and how they relate to women.13 There is good reason, therefore, to attend to widespread understandings of angels in the Common Era. As has been excavated in more recent decades, understandings of cosmic forces are a significant feature of religious life in the time between the writing of the First and Second testaments.14 Multiple copies of Enochian texts, that speak at length of evil angels, have been discovered in the Qumran library, in turn, this evidence has assisted in increased recognition of references to these traditions in the Second Testament and early church texts.15 Within the Second Testament, including in Paul’s writing, cosmic forces are understood as a real and ongoing threat (e.g., Gal. 1:3–4; 4:8–10; Eph. 6:10–18; Col. 1:13–14; 2:15–20; 2 Thess. 2:9–12; Jas 4:7; 1 Pet. 5:7–10; 1 Jn 1:13–14; 3:8–10; Jude 8–9, 23). In addition to this broader biblical evidence, Paul specifically indicates mistrust of angels (see Gal. 1:8; Rom. 8:38–39). In light of the accumulative first-century, Second Testament and early church evidence, there is a strong likelihood that the angels referred to so briefly in 1 Corinthians 11:10 are understood in relation to the evil angels preserved in Enochian and Genesis traditions.16 Before attending further to this evidence and its potential implications, the story of these violent angels must first be sketched. In Enochian and Genesis traditions, these angels gaze upon women, lust after them, descend to earth and rape women. The consequence of this mass rape is that the women give birth to giants who bring disaster and destruction to the earth (1 En. 6:1–2; Gen. 6:1–6).17 In Enochian traditions, while the giants are destroyed, evil spirits emerge from their bodies and continue to cause pain to humanity (1 En. 15:8–12; see also 1 En. 16:1–2). The language of the giants taking “wives,” commonly utilized in translations of Enochian texts, is misleading.18 While a patriarchal interpretation can portray this tradition as a tale (only) about women being married to the “wrong” men, this is a story about an imbalance of power and mass rape.19 In this tradition, the consequences are dire for women, men, and the very earth.20 The assertion that Paul, or the author of 1 Corinthians 11:2–16, is referring to Enochian evil angels is not popular in contemporary biblical scholarship.21 However, while understandings of evil angels may appear preposterous in contemporary context, early church fathers wrote at length about the Enochian evil angels and were conversant with their dangers. Justin Martyr, one of the first Christian apologists, writing between the 130s CE and 160s CE, draws heavily from Enochian traditions and states: But the angels transgressed this order, and were captivated by love of women, and produced children who are called demons. And besides they later enslaved the human race to themselves, partly by magical writings, and partly by fears and punishments which they occasioned, and partly by teaching them to offer

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sacrifices and incense and libations, which they needed after they were enslaved with lustful passions; and among people they sowed murders, wars, adulteries, intemperate deeds and every evil. (Second Apology 5)22

At various points in Justin’s apologetic writing, he clearly indicates that he believes that the power of these demonic evil forces continues to be a real and menacing threat (e.g., First Apology 26; 56; 57; 58; Dialogue with Trypho 82). The early church father Tertullian explicitly interprets 1 Corinthians 11:10 as a reference to the Enochian evil angels. Writing around 208 CE, Tertullian states: “In fact, if [it is] ‘on account of the angels’—we read plainly that they have fallen from God and from heaven because of their desire for females” (On the Veiling of Virgins 7:2).23 While Tertullian’s worldview does not prove that the angels referred to in 1 Corinthians were originally understood in this way, this contextual evidence adds significant weight to this reading. While perhaps confronting for contemporary Western sensibilities, the accumulative early church evidence indicates that when the author of 1 Corinthians 11 refers to the angels, this author is referring to the evil angels. Justin warns against these forces, and Tertullian presumes that this is the case. SECOND PERSPECTIVE: EVIL ANGELS AND THE CONSTRUCTED MALE GAZE The reality that an ancient cosmology of evil forces may lie behind the reference to angels in 1 Corinthians 11 may lead some to argue that the most appropriate response to this text is to push it to the margins and ignore it as an embarrassing remnant. However, there may yet be a surplus of wisdom embedded within this ancient cosmology.24 It must be underscored that no attempt is being made to argue that evil angels are an ongoing threat to women. The inherent tension in seeking to re-engage with this first-century cosmic worldview for the making of meaning in contemporary context is also acknowledged. That said, because we are shaped by the stories we tell, I would like to propose that retrieving the construct of evil angels may assist in recognizing the systemic powers that continue to threaten women’s safety and flourishing. Furthermore, this imagery may also offer resources for thinking about the kinds of protection that may be needed in our own contexts. It would take several volumes to address the multiplicity of threats to women’s flourishing and safety that currently exist.25 Instead, acknowledging my privileged position as a white, Western woman born into a rich and democratic country, in the confines of this chapter, attention will be drawn to only one issue. It is an issue that shares symmetry with the story of the evil angels. Just as in the Enochian myth where the evil angels gaze upon women as

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objects to dominate and exploit, for women today the constructed male gaze is a malevolent force that continues to objectify and control. As graphically caricatured in the ancient myth, in contemporary context women are systemically construed, not as people, but as objects and more specifically as disposable objects of, often violent, desire, via the tool of the constructed male gaze. Not all men participate in this oppressive stance. However, for both women and men the internalization of the constructed male gaze, including in some Christian traditions, has served to legitimate the oppression of women. Simultaneously, in some Christian traditions, following the trajectory of the author of 1 Corinthians 11:10, this oppression has been recast as a magnanimous expression of protection. Within various contexts, versions of the constructed male gaze dominate, to the detriment of both women and men. The malevolent power of the constructed male gaze is evidenced in the ideology of religious traditions, including in some Islamic, Jewish and Christian contexts, that argue that women bear the responsibility for male desire. From this perspective, women must dress, and embody their personhood (including, at times, veiling), in ways that reduce the risks associated with the male gaze. Summarizing research in this field, Chelsea Blackwell states that in some Christian communities “modest dressing is perceived to be important for women so they do not cause men to lust after them due to clothing choice. This view implies that women are somewhat responsible for keeping men from lusting after them.”26 Within this construct, women are no longer autonomous people but objects that are responsible for the, often violent, desires and actions of men.27 This religious framing of the constructed male gaze has been monetized in recent years in Christian circles, with “modesty clothing” becoming a rapidly growing industry.28 It may be tempting for some to argue that the dismantling of religious influence in society is the only path to the liberation of women. However, the destructive power of the constructed male gaze is also evident in Western, secular contexts. Through the power of advertising, social media and the rapid expansion of porn culture, women are constructed (again) as the objects of male desire. Within this context, women are no longer construed as the shameful source of male desire, but instead as the obligatory object of male pleasure.29 It is a tragic irony that as people in so-called “developed” countries champion the rights of young girls in “developing” countries to not be subjected to female genital mutilation, simultaneously in the West, young women are increasingly choosing to have their genitalia surgically changed so that it looks more pleasing to the constructed male gaze.30 Perhaps because of the innumerable ways in which the lives of women have been controlled by men, a common Western, liberal feminist response to the thorny issue of how women might dress and comport themselves, is that this is a matter of choice for individual women. While sharing sympathy with

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this view, this response is insufficient. It is insufficient because oppressive powers continue to threaten women’s safety, flourishing, autonomy and personhood, and contaminate the possibility of choice. While people in Western, contemporary context may not subscribe to a cosmology of evil angels, it is still the case that we do not inhabit neutral territory. When we do not name oppressive powers that threaten women, such as the constructed male gaze, we leave ourselves and others vulnerable to ongoing mistreatment, diminishment, and abuse. It is not being disputed that individual women have the right to make their own choices about their attire and their bodies. To fall into such thinking would only be to re-inscribe the current threat in a different guise. Nor is it being denied that individual women may feel liberated by their choices; for example, to wear a veil or to have genital cosmetic surgery. However, while the constructed male gaze continues to dominate societies, often without critique both in religious and secular settings, it is insufficient to argue that women’s embodied reality is merely a matter of choice for individual women. The oppressive, dehumanizing, and systemic power of the constructed male gaze needs to be recognized and named in both religious and secular contexts, in order for any choice to begin to be free.

THIRD PERSPECTIVE: THE GAZE OF CHRIST For Christians, when the malevolent force of the constructed male gaze is recognized, the question emerges, “What is a faithful response?” Or, to put this another way, “What might safeguard women and women’s flourishing from destructive forces in contemporary context?” Proof texting particular biblical passages about dress codes which (re)inscribe greater or lesser freedoms to women will do little to name or disrupt this oppressive power or promote the flourishing of people who are women, and thus the wider society. Instead for Christians, a christological response to this threat offers the most promising and faithful way forward. For people, both women and men, who are Christians, it is Christ Jesus who warrants primary allegiance and sustained attention. To put this more pointedly, it is the gaze of Christ that supplants the gaze of all other powers, empires, systems, and people. Indeed, for women and men who claim Christ, allowing any other gaze, including the constructed male gaze, to take precedence before the gaze of Christ is idolatrous. To speak of the gaze of Christ as a form of protection is to risk being misunderstood. In part, this is because the Christian faith is persistently distorted by the powers of white supremacy and patriarchy. At the outset of this exploration of a christological response, the obvious must be stated. The blue-eyed gaze of the pietistic white, male Jesus of Christendom (and

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Sunday School) is not being invoked. Instead, I am referring to the gaze of the holy, human, one who is proclaimed across earliest Christian sources.31 Across these sources, Christ is understood in expansive, pre-existent terms, as the one “from the beginning” (see Jn 1:1–2; Col. 1:18), through whom “all things” exist (see 1 Cor. 8:6; Heb. 1:3; Jn 1:3; Col. 1:16), who becomes incarnate in the body of a brown Middle Eastern Jew, who is nonviolent, and who is killed in a state execution (see Col. 1:15–20). These earliest Christian understandings disrupt white, imperial constructions of the Divine. However, there is even more at stake in these sources. Across these earliest liturgical fragments, Wisdom christology is proclaimed. That is, as increasingly recognized by scholars, across these texts Jesus is celebrated in the language and imagery of the female Divine. She is ‫ המכח‬Hokmah in Hebrew and σοφία Sophia in Greek and in this chapter I refer to her as Woman Wisdom.32 Grounded in this Second Testament and early church evidence, the invitation to gaze upon Christ is discovered to be the invitation to gaze upon the God One in whom gender (and other) binaries are dissolved (see also Gal. 3:28). As Elizabeth Johnson states: “The combination Jesus Christ/Sophia leads to a healthy blend of female and male imagery that empowers everyone and works beautifully to symbolize the one God who is neither male nor female, but creator of both, delighting in both, saviour of both, and imaged by both together.”33 Having established what it does not mean to gaze upon Christ, I would like us to consider how we might engage with the possibility of gazing upon Christ, as a faithful and protective response to the systemic violence of the constructed male gaze. Christian mystical traditions offer rich resources for this exploration, and the writings of Paul are of particular pertinence. Paul writes about his own mystical experiences (for example see: 2 Cor. 12:1–10; 1 Cor. 11:23–26). Paul also writes about early Jesus communities’ collective mystical experiences (for example see: 1 Cor. 12:1–13:1–14.25; Gal. 5:22–25). In one passage of Paul’s mystical writing, he begins by speaking of veils. In this passage, Paul is not interested in women wearing veils. Rather here Paul reflects on Moses’ veiling and speaks of the Christian community together being unveiled before the Lord (2 Cor. 3:12–18). Paul goes on to make the astonishing claim that, collectively, the Jesus community is being inwardly illuminated by the face of Jesus Christ who is “the image of God” (2 Cor. 4:4).34 Paul states: “For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). Earlier in this passage, Paul argues that this reciprocal gazing actualizes transformation: “with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror

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[we] are being transformed in the same image from one degree of glory to another . . . ” (2 Cor. 3:18). Paul is making assertions about what happens theologically, spiritually, and experientially when Jesus’ communities allow the gaze of Christ to be their source of understanding and identity. People are changed by Spirit Paul says, becoming more and more like Christ (2 Cor. 3:18). Paul links this process of becoming, which is made possible through Spirit, with increasing freedom (2 Cor. 3:17). Here, followers of Christ Jesus are invited into a reconfigured reality in which, as they learn to gaze on Christ, and be gazed upon, they are liberated from the power of all other toxic and death-dealing forces (2 Cor. 4:3). Understanding the transformative reality of gazing upon Christ is not limited to Paul. Epiphanius perseveres the experiences of second-century women priests, stating that either Priscilla or Quintilla, has the following experience: “Christ came to me dressed in a white robe .  .  . in the form of a woman, imbued with wisdom . . . ” (Panarion 49:1, 2–3).35 Julian of Norwich details her own experiences of gazing upon Christ: And at that time that I saw a bodily sight, our Lord showed me a spiritual vision of his familiar love. I saw that for us he is everything that is good and comforting and helpful. He is our clothing, wrapping and enveloping us for love, embracing us and guiding us in all things, hanging about us in tender love, so that he can never leave us. And so in this vision, as I understand it, I saw truly that he is everything that is good for us.36

In a delightful happenstance, Julian’s theological imagery is of Christ “wrapping and enveloping us for love.” To imagine being “wrapped” or “clothed in Christ” (see also Gal. 3:27), takes on fresh, symbolic importance when brought to bear upon the cosmology of evil angels and the ongoing threat of the constructed male gaze. In highlighting Second Testament and theological texts that speak of experiencing visions of gazing on Christ, an elitist spirituality predicated on visions, is not being advocated.37 The ways in which contemporary Jesus communities may seek, like Paul, the Corinth community, Priscilla, Quintilla and Julian, to gaze upon the face of Christ in their worship and spiritual practices will be diffuse. The rich, varied, and often ancient practices of contemplative prayer offer verdant resources for those wishing to engage seriously with the possibility of gazing upon Christ in their own lives.38 The christological and mystical invitation to gaze upon Christ Jesus has the potential to disrupt the stranglehold of oppressive forces that seek to dehumanize, objectify, and oppress women via the constructed male gaze. This movement toward Christ invites women and others to inhabit a thicker

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reality than that offered by patriarchal religious and secular contexts. From the experience of reflexively focusing on Christ, being compassionately seen by Christ and wrapped in Christ’s guarding presence, we may then make a variety of choices about how we dress and embody our personhood. Over time, through processes of ongoing transformation and experiences of greater internal freedom (2 Cor. 3:17–18), it is hoped that these choices will no longer be controlled or influenced by the malevolent forces of the constructed male gaze, or made in reaction to this power. Instead, such choices will be made from the knowledge of being a beloved of the source of all. CONCLUSION In 1 Corinthians, it is argued that people who are women should cover their heads and people who are men should not (1 Cor. 11:2–16). Within this argument, without further explanation, the author asserts that this is necessary “because of the angels” (1 Cor. 11:10). This chapter has offered a multifocal approach to this obscure reference. The first perspective has demonstrated that the biblical, intertestamental, and early church evidence indicates that the angels referred to in this passage are the evil angels of Genesis and Enochian traditions. The second perspective has argued that, while it may be tempting to discard this text and its ancient cosmology as an embarrassing remnant, this cosmic worldview may yet offer wisdom. This is because malevolent forces continue to threaten women’s flourishing, autonomy and safety, as exemplified in the constructed male gaze in both religious and secular contexts. The third perspective has offered a christological response to this threat via the mystical experiences of Paul, the Corinth community, Priscilla, Quintilla, and Julian of Norwich. It has been posited that in light of the myriad ways in which the lives and bodies of women are politicized, judged, consumed and controlled, the challenge to turn away from the toxicity of the constructed male gaze and to turn to Christ, Jesus-Woman Wisdom, offers a liberating and life-giving alternative. In gathering these perspectives together, I would like to conclude with a dare. Perhaps in learning to adjust our eyesight to the radiance of Christ, we may discover that freedom is a little more possible. NOTES 1. The categories of “Old Testament” and “New Testament” have the unfortunate inference that the “New” Christian text replaces the “Old” Jewish text. While not unproblematic, the language of “First Testament” and “Second Testament” is utilized. These descriptors seek to honor the earliest church’s convictions that beliefs about Jesus emerge from within Jewish sacred texts and understandings.

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2. As Raymond Collins notes “The passage is so problematic and employs so much vocabulary that is not used elsewhere in Paul’s undisputed letters that various scholars in the modern history of the interpretation of the text have suggested that the passage was not written by Paul.” Raymond Collins, First Corinthians. Sacra Pagina Series, ed. Daniel Harrington, vol. 7 (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1999), 393. Within the confines of this article, debate about the authorship of this passage will not be engaged with further. Instead, by holding open the language of “Paul” and “the author,” the inconclusive nature of the authorship is acknowledged. 3. Unless noted otherwise, all biblical quotations are taken from the NRSV. 4. It is important to note that while this theological move has been replicated by various church fathers in order to negate the leadership and active role of women in the church, this has not been the universal approach. In the first century, orthodox church text 1 Clement, a letter authored by the church in Rome to the church in Corinth, the first creation story is quoted and the ontological equality of women and men, both made in God’s image, is underscored (1 Clement 33). Furthermore, within this letter the prophecy of women is celebrated (1 Clement 12) and the faithful leadership of women, who are active agents in God’s salvation, is proclaimed (see 1 Clement 55). For detailed examination of the role of women in 1 Clement see my chapter “Jesus’ Impact on Understandings of Gender: Attending to First Century Dialogue,” in The Impact of Jesus of Nazareth: Historical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspectives (Sydney: SCD Press, 2021), 155–78. 5. The language at the beginning of this verse may be translated in a variety of ways. The NRSV notes it may also be read a woman: “ought to have freedom of choice regarding her head.” C. K. Barrett translates the verse thus: “For this reason a woman ought to have authority on her head on account of the angels.” C. K. Barrett, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, Black’s New Testament Commentaries, second edition (London: A&C Black, 1986), 253. Hans Conzelmann translates the verse: “For this reason a woman must have a power on her head, because of the angels.” Hans Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians: A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, Hermenia—A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible, translated by James Leitch (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975), 181. 6. For discussion of this view see: Conzelmann, First Corinthians, 189. 7. Morna Hooker, “Authority on Her Head: An Examination of 1 Cor. Xi 10,” New Testament Studies 10 (1963–64): 410–16. 8. Barrett, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, 254. Again following Hooker, Barrett goes on to suggest “it is likely that it was the men of Corinth, rather than the angels, who were attracted by the women’s uncovered locks, and that it was in this way that attention was being diverted from the worship of God.” Barrett, First Epistle to the Corinthians, 254. In light of the discussion below, this is an interesting assertion. 9. Joseph Fitzmyer, First Corinthians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, The Anchor Yale Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 419. 10. Fitzmyer claims that for women in worship “the uncovered head is for him [the author of the Corinthian passage] the equivalent of a shorn or shaved female

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head, which would be like a defect for the Essenes.” Fitzmyer, First Corinthians, 419. 11. See also: Conzelmann, First Corinthians, 190. 12. Richard Horsley, 1 Corinthians, Abingdon New Testament Commentaries (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 155 (brackets original). 13. As reflected in other Second Testament passages, when authors assume that audiences will not understand references, they offer further explanations (e.g., Mk 7:3–4, 7:11; Jn 21:19). 14. As Archie Wright summarizes: “By the turn of the Common Era there was in place a world-view within Judaism in which the activity of autonomous or semiautonomous evil spirits was regarded as a reality. This view is exemplified, for example, in the ministry of Jesus as described in the Synoptic Gospels of the NT. By contrast, there is little evidence in Jewish literature during the earlier biblical period for such evil spirits.” Archie Wright, The Origins of Evil Spirits: The Reception of Genesis 6:1–4 in Early Jewish Literature, Wissenshcaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2. Reihe, 198 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005), 1. 15. Within 1 Pet. 3:19, 2 Pet. 4, and Jude 14, Enochian texts and traditions are referred to. For further discussion of the influence of Enochian traditions in the early church see, for example, George Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1–36, 81–108, Hermeneia—A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 82–83; Annette Yoshiko Reed, Fallen Angels and the History of Judaism and Christianity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 56–57; Wright, The Origins of Evil Spirits, 12–13; Loren Stuckenbruck, The Myth of the Rebellious Angels, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, vol. 335. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 161–325. See also Sally Douglas, “A Decoding of Evil Angels: The Other Aetiology of Evil in the Biblical Text and its Potential Implications in Our Church and World,” Colloquium, 45.1 (2013): 46–47. Robert Parkinson argues in detail that the demons in the gospels share striking resemblance to the spirits of the Enochian giants. R. Parkinson, “Angels, Humans, Giants and Demons: Genesis 6:1-4 and the New Testament” unpublished Masters dissertation (University of Manchester, 2009), 83–143. 16. Conzelmann also asserts this interpretation: Conzelmann, First Corinthians, 188–89. Here Conzelmann follows the ontological theology of the author of 1 Corinthians and argues that a woman needs greater protection because “she is God’s image only in a derivative sense.” Conzelmann, First Corinthians, 189. 17. It is commonly accepted that the fleeting reference to the Nephilim (Gen 6:2) and Enochian traditions about evil angels are interwoven. For further discussion see: Yoshiko Reed, Fallen Angels, 53; Philip Alexander, “The Enochic Literature and the Bible: Intertextuality and Its Implications” in The Bible as Book: The Hebrew Bible and the Judean Desert Discoveries, ed. Edward D. Herbert and Emanuel Tov (New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 2002), 57. 18. As Wright indicates, the translation “wives” in Genesis 6:2 and in the Book of the Watchers may not have been the intended meaning in either text. Wright, The Origins of Evil, 132–36.

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19. For further discussion, see Douglas, “A Decoding of Evil Angels,” 50–51. 20. In the Enochian traditions, these angels and the giants that are produced are responsible for environmental disaster in the world (1 En. 7:1–6). 21. Horsley dismisses this possibility without offering any rationale: “The view that the angels are the ‘sons of God’ who lusted after the daughters of men (Gen. 6:2), should be rejected along with the unjustified ‘veils’ reading of the passage with which it fits.” Horsley, 1 Corinthians, 155. Commenting on the possibility that the angels referred to are the evil angels, Barrett raises the objection: “It is not however clear how the wearing of a veil while they [women] pray or prophesy can serve their purpose [of protection]” Barrett, First Corinthians, 253. This objection is based on two questionable assumptions: (1) Ancient cosmology should make sense in contemporary context. (2) Paul, or the author, believes that the angels are an actual threat, rather than a theological rationale for a misogynist cultural norm. 22. Translation by Leslie Barnard, Ancient Christian Writers‒‒The Works of the Fathers in Translation: Saint Justin Martyr: The First and Second Apologies (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1977). 23. Translation by Geoffrey Dunn Tertullian: The Early Church Fathers (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004). 24. Within Wilda Gaffney’s discussion of the limitations of white feminist theology and the importance African American Womanist theology, Gaffney highlights the crucial work of wrestling with difficult texts, stating: “Womanists at the intersection of biblical scholarship and religious faith and practice engage the Scriptures of our communities as members of those communities. No matter how misogynistic, how heavily redacted, how death dealing, how troubled, troubling, or troublesome the text, womanists who teach and preach in the black church do not throw the whole androcentric text with its patriarchal and kyriarchal lowlights out of our stained glass window because of its Iron Age theology. We wrestle with it because it has been received as Scripture. Our wrestling should not be taken to mean that we affirm texts that do not affirm us.” Wilda Gaffney, Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Thone (Louisville: WJKP, 2017), 9. 25. For discussion of the diverse and life-threatening issues facing Indigenous Australian Women and Indigenous women’s christological responses see Lee Miena Skye, “Australian Aboriginal Women’s Christologies,” in The Strength of Her Witness: Jesus Christ in the Global Voices of Women, ed. Elizabeth A. Johnson (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2018), 162–71. For discussion of the threats to women’s flourishing in Asia and Asian women’s theological responses see: Chung Hyun Kyung, “Who is Jesus for Asian Women?” in The Strength of Her Witness: Jesus Christ in the Global Voices of Women, ed. Elizabeth A. Johnson (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2018), 103–119. 26. Chelsea Blackwell “Dressed for Respect? An Investigation of Religiosity, Body Image and Modesty Among Christian Women,” unpublished PhD Dissertation (Ohio State University: 2016), 15. https://etd​.ohiolink​.edu/​!etd.​​send_​​file?​​acces​​sion=​​ osu14​​61168​​061​&d​​ispos​​ition​​=inli​​ne, Accessed 22 May 2019. 27. Curiously, this kind of Christian theology runs in direct contrast to accounts of Jesus’ teaching. In the Sermon on the Mount, the Matthean Jesus declares that the person who is responsible for looking at a woman lustfully is the man who objectifies

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a woman in this way (Mt. 5:28). The Matthean Jesus goes on to explicate that if men act in this way they must bear responsibility for their behavior and apply brutal selfcorrection to their own bodies (Mt. 5:29–30). 28. As stated on the “modest clothing” website modli​.c​o: “Modest fashion is a new trend in women’s fashion in which women are wearing less skin-revealing clothes, especially in a way that aligns with their spiritual and stylistic requirements for reasons relating to faith, religion or personal preference. Modest fashion has become a movement, with its own ‘Modest Fashion Week’ and popular models. It’s now a huge industry, racking up over $250 BILLION in 2018. (WOAH!)” https://modli​.co​/au​/ blog​/what​-is​-modest​-fashion (accessed 22 May, 2019) brackets original. 29. In secular, capitalist, porn culture in which women are reduced to commodities who should present themselves in particular ways in order to elicit the erotic approval of men, the inherent value of women is again displaced. For a summary of contrasting, secular feminist responses to porn culture and the constructed male gaze see: Amia Srinivasan “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” London Review of Books 40.6, 22 March 2018: https://www​.lrb​.co​.uk​/the​-paper​/v40​/n06​/amia​-srinivasan​/does​ -anyone​-have​-the​-right​-to​-sex (accessed 23 June, 2020). From Christian perspective, this linking together of inherent worth with the approval of “the other,” smells distinctly of a secularized “salvation by works” theology. 30. In an article by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the significant increase in the number of young women seeking genital cosmetic surgery in the last decade is discussed. Within the article, Dr. Magdalena Simonis, author the RACGP’s guidelines on female genital cosmetic surgery, notes: “The internet plays a large part in forming women’s perception about what is ‘normal’ . . . . What we do know is that there is no such thing as a normal vulva . . . . A lot of young women are being told there is a particular normal appearance and normal is also what is equated with desirable.” Neelima Choahan, “New Research Aims to Examine Why More Girls Seek Genital Surgery,” RACGP (2 July 2018), https://www1​.racgp​.org​.au​ /newsgp​/clinical​/new​-research​-aims​-to​-examine​-why​-more​-girls​-seek-g (accessed 22 May, 2019). 31. Liturgical fragments are embedded within Second Testament texts and are recognized as the earliest written sources of the Jesus movement. These include the Colossians hymn (Col. 1:15–20), 1 Corinthians 8:6 and Hebrews 1:3–4, and the Johannine prologue (Jn 1:1–18). Across these sources of very early worship, the risen crucified Jesus is celebrated in cosmic terms as the one “from the beginning,” through whom “all things” are made and “the image of God.” For further discussion see Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 147–48; Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies in on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 127–39. 32. For investigation of First Testament, intertestamental, Second Testament, and early church evidence of Woman Wisdom and Wisdom christology see: Elizabeth A. Johnson “Jesus, the Wisdom of God: A Biblical Basis for Non-Androcentric Christology,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 61 (1985): 262–94; Martin Scott, Sophia and the Johannine Jesus (Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 1992); Sally Douglas,

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Early Church Understandings of Jesus as the Female Divine: The Scandal of the Scandal of Particularity, LNTS, vol. 557 (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016), 15–69. 33. Johnson, “Jesus, the Wisdom of God,” 294. For further discussion see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1990), 132–36; Denis Edwards, Jesus the Wisdom of God: An Ecological Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1995), 51–63; Douglas, Early Church Understandings of Jesus as the Female Divine, 179–85. 34. This passage spanning 2 Corinthians 3–4 is infused with Wisdom christology. For further discussion see Douglas, Early Church Understandings of Jesus as the Female Divine, 166–67. 35. Epiphanius, a heresy hunter, records these women’s experiences as he seeks to condemn them and their communities because of their theological view that women may be ordained. The irony is that his writing preserves this early church evidence. Epiphanius, translated by Frank Williams, The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis: Books II and III, Nag Hammadi and Manichean Studies (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994). For further discussion see Douglas, Early Church Understandings of Jesus as the Female Divine, 113–16. 36. Julian of Norwich Revelations of Divine Love, trans by Elizabeth Spearing (London: Penguin Books, 1998), chapter 4. 37. Disappointingly, from the outset Christians have tended toward competitive spirituality, as indicated in Paul’s frustration regarding this tendency (for example: 1 Cor. 12–13). However, this human proclivity to compete does not necessitate that mystical traditions be eschewed. Rather Christians must continue to guard against ego-driven agendas that corrode even spiritual practices. 38. Further exploration of contemplative prayer practices may be found in the work of the following authors, though of course, is not limited to them: Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer (New York: Doubleday, 1996); Henri Nouwen, The Way of the Heart: Desert Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry (London: DLT, 1984); Joan Chittister The Breath of the Soul: Reflections on Prayer (New London: Twentythird Publications, 2009); Rowan Williams The Dwelling of the Light: Praying with Icons of Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). For an Indigenous perspective on prayer and Christian theology, see Denise Champion Yarta Wandatha (Adelaide: UCA Mission Resourcing, 2014).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, P. “The Enochic Literature and the Bible: Intertextuality and Its Implications.” In The Bible as Book: The Hebrew Bible and the Judean Desert Discoveries, edited by Edward D. Herbert and Emanuel Tov. New Castle. DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2002. Barnard, Leslie, trans. Ancient Christian Writers‒‒The Works of the Fathers in Translation: Saint Justin Martyr: The First and Second Apologies. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1977. Barrett, C.K. The First Epistle to the Corinthians. Black’s New Testament Commentaries, Second Edition. London: A&C Black, 1986.

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Bauckham, R. Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies in on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. Blackwell, Chelsea. “Dressed for Respect? An Investigation of Religiosity, Body Image and Modesty Among Christian Women.” PhD Dissertation, Ohio State University, 2016. Collins, Raymond. First Corinthians. Sacra Pagina Series, ed. Daniel Harrington, vol. 7 Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1999. Conzelmann, Hans. 1 Corinthians: A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians. Hermenia—A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible, translated by James Leitch. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975. Douglas, Sally. “A Decoding of Evil Angels: The Other Aetiology of Evil in the Biblical Text and its Potential Implications in our Church and World.” Colloquium 45.1 (2013): 42–60. ———. Early Church Understandings of Jesus as the Female Divine: The Scandal of the Scandal of Particularity, Library of New Testament Studies, vol. 557. London: Bloomsbury, T&T Clark, 2016. ———. “‘Jesus’ Impact on Understandings of Gender: Attending to First Century Dialogue.” In The Impact of Jesus of Nazareth: Historical, Theological and Pastoral Perspectives, 155–178. Sydney: SCD Press Publication, 2021. Dunn, Geoffrey, trans. Tertullian: The Early Church Fathers. Abingdon: Routledge, 2004. Edwards, D. Jesus the Wisdom of God: An Ecological Theology. New York: Orbis Books, 1995. Epiphanius. The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis: Books II and III. Translated by Frank Williams. Nag Hammadi and Manichean Studies. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994. Fitzmyer, Joseph. First Corinthians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Gaffney, Wilda. Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Thone. Louisville: WJKP, 2017. Hooker, Morna. “Authority on Her Head: An Examination of 1 Cor. Xi 10.” New Testament Studies 10 (1963–64): 410–16. Horsley, Richard. 1 Corinthians. Abingdon New Testament Commentaries. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998. Hurtado, L. Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2003. Johnson, Elizabeth A. “Jesus, the Wisdom of God: A Biblical Basis for Non-Androcentric Christology.” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 61 (1985): 262–94. Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love. Translated by Elizabeth Spearing. London: Penguin Books, 1998. Wright, Archie. The Origins of Evil Spirits: The Reception of Genesis 6:1–4 in Early Jewish Literature. Wissenshcaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005.

Chapter 4

In Spite of the Angels Reading Paul and Freedom Struggle Jin Young Choi

As anti-Asian hate crimes have been on the surge during the COVID-19 pandemic, I have experienced how a malicious gaze can be a threat. However, the pernicious gaze upon Asian and other foreign bodies, especially females, in the Western society is nothing new. Such a gaze is related to Orientalism as the way the West perceives the East, in which the exotic other is a constant threat to the West. Noting the West identified itself as the superior civilization by constructing the other as inferior, Andrea Smith defines Orientalism as “a pillar of white supremacy.”1 When the Western norms of gender identity are applied to this logic, Asian women become the object of fetishization and hyper-sexualization by Western white supremacist culture.2 Considering my immediate sociocultural context, I find Sally Douglas’ essay discussing three gazes—of angels, male, and Christ—incisive. The gaze of the powerful, represented by the first two, is ominous. First, she engages the enigmatic phrase “because of the angels” in 1 Corinthian 11:10, which is understood as referring to evil forces according to ancient cosmology. Second, she appropriates this first-century cosmic worldview to the contemporary context in which the “constructed gaze of male” threatens women’s safety and flourishing. Last, she proposes the gaze of Christ as a source of protection for women. In my response, I shall follow these three frameworks, engaging the biblical text and her interpretation from a postcolonial feminist perspective. THE GAZE OF ANGELS AND EMPIRE Douglas observes that the phrase “because of the angels” (1 Cor. 11:10b) is placed between Paul’s two other arguments for claiming that women’s heads 39

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should be covered: (1) the ontological inferiority of women (11:7–10a); and (2) nature (φύσις) and custom (συνήθεια, vv. 14–16). In contrast to the scholarly views of the “angels” as protectors of the patriarchal order of creation or signifying women’s prophetic authority, Douglas contends that the angels refer to evil forces that gaze “upon women, lust after them, descend to earth and rape women” according to Enochian and Genesis traditions.3 She also refers to Justin Martyr and Tertullian to support the argument that this ancient cosmology, in which the evil angels are perceived as an actual threat, was prevalent. While the angelic imagery can be understood as malevolent in light of ancient cosmology and earliest receptions of the passage as in Tertullian, I am struck by the immediate literary context where Paul himself implies the gaze of angels: For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, as though sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to mortals. (1 Corinthians 4:9)

It is God who exposes to view (ἀπέδειξεν) the apostles as a spectacle (θέατρον) unto the world, angels, and humans. As Christ’s body was exhibited on the cross (1:13, 23; 2:2, 8), they are viewed as criminals “sentenced to death” (ἐπιθανατίους) in public. David Tombs argues, “Physical force is only part of the strategy used by regimes that wish to terrorise people into fatalistic submission. Crucifixion in the Roman Empire was not just physical pain but also about public shame.”4 As naked victims become the object of the public gaze, crucifixion is a “ritualized form of public sexual humiliation.”5 As such, the state-sanctioned terror of the Roman Empire was both totally exposed to public view and exhibited as a well-composed piece of theater. In this theater of institutional terror, Christian martyrdoms became spectacles. Perpetua and Felicitas, martyrs at the beginning of the third century in Carthage, were thrown to the wild beasts in an amphitheater. In this story, the public gaze of a crowd sitting in rows penetrates the two women’s stripped bodies. Paul clearly sees himself with other apostles as objects of the public gaze in the theatrics of terror as he continues in 1 Corinthians 4:11: “To the present hour we are hungry and thirsty, we are poorly clothed (or naked, γυμνιτεύομεν) and beaten and homeless.”6 What is important here is that while the Roman Empire ritualized this form of public sexual humiliation, angels are included in those who gaze on the humiliated bodies of the subjects. Another significant point is that Paul uses his imitating of Christ crucified to shame the Corinthian believers, as one who acts as a father to them (4:14–21). The pairing of the world (κόσμος) and angels (ἀγγέλοις) is mentioned again in 6:2–5 when Paul argues that the believers will judge the world and angels to their “shame” (v. 5).

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If we read the phrase “because of the angels” in this literary context, its cosmological or mythological understanding cannot be separate from the imperial context in which Paul mimics the imperial logic in dealing with power dynamics in the early Christian community. First Enoch—Douglas’ primary source to understand the angels in 1 Corinthians 11:10 as evil forces—was written in the period of Greek imperial rule and displays apocalyptic features. While imperial powers are addressed using various names such as rule, authority, power, and dominion, “cosmic powers” and “spiritual forces of evil” are aligned with the earthly powers (e.g., Col. 1:16; Eph. 1:21; 6:12). While, however, I generally agree with Douglas’ view of the angels as cosmic forces, I argue that the mythological view cannot be separated from the imperial politics and body politics at work in the Corinthian church. The issue is, then, how the imperial logic intersects with the patriarchal structure and gender hierarchy that Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians 11.

INTERSECTION OF IMPERIAL AND GENDER POLITICS In her second approach, Douglas examines the potential implications of the first-century cosmic worldview of the angels in the contemporary context. She parallels the evil angels’ gaze upon “women as objects to dominate and exploit” in the Enochian myth with the systemic powers that continue to threaten women’s safety and flourishing today. She calls the latter “the constructed male gaze” that objectifies and controls women. The transfer from the gaze of the evil angels to that of male needs explanation. If women are systemically construed as “objects of, often violent, desire, via the tool of the constructed male gaze,” how is it that this gaze “constructed” rather than biologically given? Also, how are women “constructed” as the objects of male desire? Douglas argues that religious traditions impose the responsibility for male desire upon women, as well as that oppressive powers in secular societies, include “the power of advertising, social media and the rapid expansion of porn culture.” She also contends that the Western liberal feminist response to men’s control over women by advocating women’s autonomy is deficient, considering the power imbalance in the global economy. Her critique provides room for further discussion of the construction of women as objects and commodities in neoliberal global capitalism. Neoliberal feminists understand subjectivity as obtaining individual freedom, autonomy, and the ability to care for the self.7 They do not challenge the patriarchal system but instead uphold women’ inclusion in existing social structures and competition in the capitalist marketplace.8 I am more concerned with the politicization of the angels’ gaze rather than mythologizing the constructed male gaze that continues to threaten women’s

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safety and well-being. Thus, I argue that his use of “because of angels,” which reveals women’s vulnerable sexuality threatened by malicious spiritual powers, should not obscure the rhetorical power that Paul executes. Paul seems to have particular women in mind. He says in 1 Corinthians 11:16, “But if anyone is disposed to be contentious—we have no such custom.” Who are these women who are “contentious” (φιλόνεικος)? Antoinette Clark Wire and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza have argued that Paul employs his rhetoric, which establishes the hierarchical order of God-Christ-Paul-other male leaders-women, to suppress the Corinthian women prophets.9 Paul appears to control those spiritually empowered women by asserting not only that they must be veiled in worship, but also that they should maintain their marital relationships, rather than continuing their ascetic practices (1 Cor. 7:1–11). Reading 1 Corinthians 4:6–21 and chapters 7 and 11 together, womanist biblical scholar Angela N. Parker demonstrates that Paul employs the rhetoric of shaming by constructing “his Jewish masculine body as an enslaved body over against the claimed freedwoman status of the Corinthian women prophets.”10 While his feminized shaming resembles the Corinthian women prophets’ sexual shame “because of the angels,” he reverses his shame by exerting “patriarchal power with mimetic language.”11 As Douglas argues that “the oppressive, dehumanizing and systemic power of the constructed male gaze needs to be recognised and named in both religious and secular contexts,” we can demythologize the angels’ gaze by naming those structural powers. What is less ambiguous than the angelic imagery is Paul’s rhetorical strategy of shaming the Corinthian women by appropriating gender and racial hierarchies and dynamics in the imperial context. The rhetorical power of sacred texts and their interpretations should also be addressed in today’s imperialist, capitalist, white supremacist, and heteropatriarchal context.

GAZES, VEILS, AND FREEDOM The last perspective in Douglas’ argument is to turn the imagery of the negative gazes in the ancient and the present to “resources for thinking about the kinds of protection that may be needed in our own contexts.” She finds liberating resources in Christian mystical traditions in which “the gaze of Christ has the potential to supplant the objectifying gaze of others.” Since the gaze of Christ does not allow “any other gaze, including the constructed male gaze,” its function is iconoclastic. While she is aware that “the gaze of Christ as a form of protection” could invoke a distorted view if it is claimed under powers of white supremacy and patriarchy, she contends that “the gaze of the holy, human, one who is proclaimed across earliest Christian sources” disrupts white, imperial constructions of the Divine.

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Two concepts in early Christian writings are particularly of significance. First, Christ’s expansiveness and preexistence unsettle all powers, including empire, system, and people (Col. 1:5–29). Second, wisdom christology empowers all people, as it combines the male Jesus Christ and the female Sophia. However, as we have observed the power of Paul’s rhetoric, early Christian texts are not purely theological or ideologically innocent. The cosmic imagery of Christ and church and the language of supremacy and subordination can reinscribe the imperial/colonial logic.12 While feminist scholars affirm and celebrate the presence and character of the feminine Sophia, Schüssler Fiorenza critiques this emphasis on the female gender of the divine Sophia as sanctioning the patriarchal imposition of cultural femininity that is reflected in the image of the White Lady.13 I have argued that the elevation of Sophia as the extraordinary female character or the feminine deity is an ideological construction which, through translation and interpretation, essentializes white women’s experience while erasing other female figures or feminine attributes from the text.14 Highlighting the cosmic Christ and the female Sophia is not necessarily liberating for the colonized, women of color, and gender non-conforming people. Douglas’ argument regarding the gaze of Christ, who is cosmic and embodies Woman Wisdom, shifts the direction to our gaze upon Christ “as a faithful and protective response to the systemic violence of the constructed male gaze.” Christian mystical traditions, particularly Paul’s mystical experiences, provide resources for gazing upon Christ. She draws on Paul’s reference to gazing, which is reciprocal because the believers can see the glory of the Lord “with unveiled faces” and be “transformed in the same image” (2 Cor. 3:18; 4:6). Douglas states, “Paul is not interested in women wearing veils” in these passages, but instead her reading highlights the imagery of “wrapping and enveloping” in mystics’ writings such as Julian of Norwich who illustrates her vision of gazing upon Christ. Such a vision and imagery symbolically protect women from the gaze of evil angels and the threat of the constructed male gaze. Yet, it is the same Paul who invites the believers to turn to the Lord for the veil to be removed (2 Cor. 2:16), while suppressing such spiritual experiences of women and imposing veils on their heads. The contemplative practice of gazing upon Christ who transcends gender binary and the engaging of mystics’ visionary experiences may soothe wounds and anxiety from the malicious male gaze. While Douglas points out the inadequacy of the possibility that individual women can choose to protect themselves because of the systemic nature of oppression, she argues in the end that women can make “choices about how we dress and embody our personhood” but “such choices will be made from the knowledge of being a beloved of the Source of all.” It seems that women can choose to be free by gazing upon Christ.

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Interpreting 2 Corinthians 3:12–18 in the contemporary context of social struggle regarding racial reconciliation and trans-Atlantic slavery, Brad R. Braxton acknowledges that “the deeper issue in 2 Corinthians is epistemology.”15 He reads Paul in the way that reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:17–21) is impossible without a transformation in the ways we know and think. The veil is the “epistemological obstacle that must be removed,” as well as “an instrument of oppression.”16 He defines the texture of the veil in terms of fabrics of colonialism and fundamentalism. His reading affirms the necessity of lifting the veil of colonialism and colonial Christianity, but he also warns that the claim that “the veil is raised only through Jesus Christ” becomes an instrument of fundamentalism. In contrast to Douglas’ christocentric reading, Braxton finds the “Spirit of the Lord” as the source of freedom: “the Sacred Spirit who wants to inspire freedom and flourishing for the creation and all its inhabitants” (2 Cor. 3:17).17 CONCLUDING REMARKS Douglas acknowledges her social location and privileges, which helps understand her interpretation and reappropriation of “because of the angels.” Her exploration of the gazes of threatening forces in the ancient and present is pertinent and poignant in the current situation in which bodies of women of color are targeted, especially as Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s objectification has been heightened. Yet, women of color struggle against veils of colonial and cultural impositions, as well as gender oppression. As a person from a formerly colonized country now living in the periphery of the US empire, I resist imperial/colonial logic and practice in the text and interpretation by demythologizing their ideological assumptions. My postcolonial feminist perspective leads me to engage the intersection of patriarchy and empire and be critical of a christological construction focused on the cosmic Christ and Jesus/Sophia. Indeed, minoritized people need to experience internal healing and freedom from traumas of white supremacist violence, but such freedom is attained only through fighting for justice, which includes removing veils of inter-structuring domination. NOTES 1. Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing,” in The Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology, ed. Incite! Women of Color against Violence (Cambridge: South End Press, 2006), 66–73.

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2. The objectification of Asian women in this way manifested in the Atlanta shootings on March 16, 2021 in which six of eight victims were women of Asian descent. https:// www​.cnn​.com​/2021​/03​/17​/us​/asian​-women​-misogyny​-spa​-shootings​-trnd​/index​.html 3. References to Douglas are to the essay that precedes my own in this volume. 4. David Tombs, “Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 53 (1999): 96. 5. Tombs, “Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse,” 100–101. 6. Similarly, Paul cries out in Romans 8:35, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness (γυμνότης), or peril, or sword?” In Acts 19:23–41, the uproar and threatening Paul experienced in Ephesus is depicted as happening in an amphitheater (εἰς τὸ θέατρον). 7. Tristana Dini, “Politics of Care vs. Biopolitical Care? The Feminist Cut on Neoliberal Saturation,” Soft Power 4.2 (2017): 227–38. 8. Catherine Rottenburg, “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism,” Cultural Studies 28.3 (2014): 419. 9. Antoinette Clark Wire, The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction through Paul’s Rhetoric (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991); Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “Rhetorical Situation and Historical Reconstruction in 1 Corinthians,” in Christianity at Corinth: The Quest for the Pauline Church, ed. Edward Adams and David G. Horrell (Louisville: WJKP, 2004), 145–60. Regarding the language of imitation that sets up the hierarchy, see Elizabeth A. Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power (Louisville: WJKP, 1991). 10. Angela N. Parker, “Feminized-Minoritized Paul?: A Womanist Reading of Paul’s Body in the Corinthian Context,” in Minoritized Women Reading Race and Ethnicity, ed. Mitzi Smith and Jin Young Choi (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020), 75. 11. Parker, “Feminized-Minoritized Paul?” 72, 76–77. According to Liew, Paul’s body-building project is founded on the crucified Jewish body of Jesus in the Corinthian community in which the believers experience the reversal of their status when becoming the followers of the Jewish Messiah within the Roman imperial system. Tat-siong Benny Liew, “Redressing Bodies at Corinth: Racial/Ethnic Politics and Religious Difference in the Context of Empire,” in The Colonized Apostle: Paul through Postcolonial Eyes, ed. Christopher D. Stanley (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), 127–43. 12. Jin Young Choi, “A Decolonial Reading of Ephesians: Resisting the Postcolonial Empire,” in Scripture and Resistance, ed. Jione Havea (Lanham: Lexington Book, 2019), 89–101. 13. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Sharing Her Word: Feminist Biblical Interpretation in Context (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 177. 14. Jin Young Choi, “Phronēsis, The Other Wisdom Sister,” in Reading Wisdom: Asian and Asian North American Women Leaders, ed. Su Yon Pak and Jung Ha Kim (Louisville: WJKP, 2017), 105–114. 15. Brad R. Braxton, “Paul and Racial Reconciliation: A Postcolonial Approach to 2 Corinthians 3:12-18,” in Scripture and Traditions: Essays on Early Judaism and Christianity in Honor of Carl Holladay (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 419. 16. Braxton, “Paul and Racial Reconciliation,” 419, 422. 17. Braxton, “Paul and Racial Reconciliation,” 426.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Braxton, Brad R. “Paul and Racial Reconciliation: A Postcolonial Approach to 2 Corinthians 3:12-18.” In Scripture and Traditions: Essays on Early Judaism and Christianity in Honor of Carl Holladay, edited by Patrick Gray and Gail R. O’Day, 411–428. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Choi, Jin Young. “A Decolonial Reading of Ephesians: Resisting the Postcolonial Empire.” In Scripture and Resistance, edited by Jione Havea, 89–101. Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019. ———. “Phronēsis, The Other Wisdom Sister.” In Reading Wisdom: Asian and Asian North American Women Leaders, edited by Su Yon Pak and Jung Ha Kim, 105–114. Louisville: WJKP, 2017. Dini, Tristana. “Politics of Care vs. Biopolitical Care? The Feminist Cut on Neoliberal Saturation.” Soft Power 4.2 (2017): 227–38. Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler. Sharing Her Word: Feminist Biblical Interpretation in Context. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. Liew, Tat-siong Benny. “Redressing Bodies at Corinth: Racial/Ethnic Politics and Religious Difference in the Context of Empire.” In The Colonized Apostle: Paul through Postcolonial Eyes, edited by Christopher D. Stanley, 127–43. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011. Parker, Angela N. “Feminized-Minoritized Paul?: A Womanist Reading of Paul’s Body in the Corinthian Context.” In Minoritized Women Reading Race and Ethnicity, edited by Mitzi Smith and Jin Young Choi, 71–88. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2020. Rottenburg, Catherine. “The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism.” Cultural Studies 28.3 (2014): 418–437. Smith, Andrea. “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing.” In The Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology, edited by Incite! Women of Color against Violence, 66–73. Cambridge: South End Press, 2006. Tombs, David. “Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 53 (1999): 89–109.

Chapter 5

Mother Language, Mother Church, Mother Earth Cristina Lledo Gomez

“Laudato Si, Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us,” sings St. Francis in his Canticle of Creatures. However, this powerful image of our Sister, Mother Earth, is not one that sits comfortably with many Catholics today. In the Catholic religious imagination, the word “mother” is most closely associated with Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and this is telling of how Mariology has hijacked and narrowed the concept of motherhood in Catholic discourse. But the Christian tradition is rich in diversity with mothers from our biblical and ecclesial traditions. Before the image of Mother Church became associated with Mary, the motherhood of the church referred to the martyrs whose witnesses gave birth to the growth of the community, and then the faithful within the community by birthing Christ through their deeds and proclamation of the Good News. God and Jerusalem are also imagined as a mother, as Isaiah 66:13 says, “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you. You will be comforted in Jerusalem.” This word of consolation came at a time when destruction and exile seemed to be the common experience of the Israelite people.1 Why then is “mother” in the Roman Catholic tradition often singularly associated with Mary? Does this picture of Christian motherhood affect our imagination of the earth as our mother? I have two goals for this chapter: First, to open up the questions in terms of the use and reclamation of “mother” as a diverse and more complex image for Christian discourse. Second, to discuss how a revision of our view of the earth as a particular kind of mother has implications for how we might interact with the earth as well as inform healthy imaging of women and male interactions with females.

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“MOTHER” RHETORIC IN CATHOLIC DOCUMENTS I have noticed that while some female scholars tend to avoid the language of “mother” and “mothering” whenever possible, papal and conciliar texts are unafraid and continue to utilize them. To give an example of this avoidance of the “mother” language by women, I recall a conversation I had with an eminent biblical and feminist scholar, whose aim in the deliverance of one of her lectures was to teach readers of the Bible to read with an ecological eye. Her perspective was that we have been accustomed to reading the Bible in a human-centered way such that we neglect the other elements in the story— the animals, plants and surroundings, which at times are actually placed center stage in the stories, poems, and other texts within the Bible and yet our focus remains on the human characters in the story. This perception then transfers onto our approach to the earth and all other creation—they become marginalized and therefore are more likely to be exploited for the benefit of those at the center, the human beings. It was an eye-opening lecture about another way that an unquestioned approach has detrimental and yet unintended ramifications. I then asked this scholar about her own thoughts on Mother Earth, thinking she might bring some insights into the way mothers are ignored and pedestalized at the same time, just as Mother Earth is also ignored and romanticized at the same time. But surprisingly, the scholar’s immediate response was to say: “I know I should probably go there but I just don’t. It’s too problematic. I avoid the language and going into that area whenever possible. I just don’t want to put myself in a corner.” For this feminist scholar, as for several other feminist Christians I have encountered, to engage in “mother” language is to eventually enter into that area where women are tied to motherhood in an essentialist way. By avoiding the mother language and putting forward other metaphors such as sister, or gender-neutral terms and concepts, feminist Christian scholars communicate, even if implicitly, their desire to deemphasize that long-time emphasis on women as essentially mothers, and to highlight that there are other more rich metaphors to be utilized. Meanwhile, popes and church documents seem to liberally use “mother” when it comes to describing the church or woman, and impose upon them their own conceptualizations which are not necessarily reflective of the realities of mothers and women all over the world. In regard to the earth, the word “mother” is used sparingly, as seen in Pope Francis’ Laudato Si (LS), where he refers to the earth as a mother only three times and always alongside the metaphor of sister for the earth.2 This may be a cautious approach, a discouragement, against any leanings toward a form of pantheism or ancient worship of the mother goddess.3 In contrast, Pope Francis has said his favorite image of the church is as a mother and he has used this liberally throughout his

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papacy. For example, “The Church is woman, she is mother, and this is beautiful”4 or “The Church is Mother, by teaching her children works of mercy”5 and “The Church loves all her children, like a loving mother.”6 On the ideology of the motherhood of the earth, Francis imagines the maternal earth’s threefold task as sustaining, governing, and creating. Quoting St. Francis of Assisi, he says in the first paragraph of Laudato Si: “Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs.” (LS, n.1) A PHILOSOPHICAL-PSYCHOANALYTIC VIEW OF MOTHERING In comparison to Francis’ eco-maternal ideology, philosopher Sara Ruddick describes the threefold task of mothering as about protection, nurturance, and training. She says despite differences in cultures and perspectives, all societies would see mothering as about these three—protecting a child from harm, nurturing it for growth, and training it for acceptability into a particular society. This view of mothering is more expanded than Christian views for example of motherhood imposed upon the church wherein her members are seen as infants who never develop into adults and are rather eternally dependent upon her. In this picture, motherhood is limited to birthing, breastfeeding, and caring.7 I will pause here to remind us of the task at hand. That is, to acknowledge some of the ways “mother” has been used or avoided in Catholic discourse in regard to the earth, the church, and woman. In acknowledging this discourse (or lack thereof in some circles), the aim is to critique some of these uses and reclaim the “mother” language. Moreover, it is the use of mother equated with the nature of women, which I wish to untangle. For the popes and councils who have used the mother language, the dissonance between reality and conceptualization lies in the fact that these men speak of motherhood from the perspective of a child. Due to their celibacy, the primary experience of women for many of these clerics was their own mothers before they entered seminary and priesthood, often at a young age. That is, they can only speak of motherhood as they have been or wish to be mothered. But this, the perspective of a child, is very different from the perspective of a mother, as Sara Ruddick points out: to a child, a mother is huge—a judge, trainer, audience, and provider whose will must be placated. A mother, in contrast to the perception her children have of her, will almost always experience herself as relatively powerless. In the best of social systems she is beholden to the workings of “nature” whose

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indifference—most poignantly evident in illness, death and damage to a child or his or her closest loved ones—can frustrate her best efforts.8

While children perceive their mothers as powerful, mothers may themselves feel powerless to various external factors. As Ruddick explains: From a mother’s point of view maternal powerlessness is very real indeed. Yet adults are not hallucinating when they remember their mothers as having immense power over their physical activities and emotional lives. . . . A mother dealing with the daily exigencies of her own and her children’s lives may not feel powerful. There are many external constraints on her capacity to name, feel and act.9

While a mother can feel quite powerless to external factors beyond her control, Ruddick also argues that even the most powerless woman can experience an element of power. She feels her power in being in charge of the organization of her children’s lives. She will teach them what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. She will show what is worth crying over and what requires little of their attention. She will expose them to what she believes is important and hide from them what she believes will do little if any good in them at all. There is then in mothering both power and powerlessness and such complexity is not necessarily communicated in the image of a mother who simply births, breastfeeds, and endlessly gives of herself. Meanwhile, the Catholic tradition continues to elevate an idealized, childish conception of motherhood as the epitome of perfect womanhood.

A TRADITIONAL CATHOLIC VIEW OF MOTHERING—AN INFANT’S PERSPECTIVE In 2013, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the promulgation of John Paul II’s Mulieris Dignitatem (MD), Pope Francis reinforced the special role of women as mothers, wherein they are called to a “special entrusting” as also expounded in MD. Francis said: What does this “special entrusting,” this special entrusting of the human being to woman mean? It seems evident to me that my Predecessor [John Paul II] is referring to motherhood. Many things can change and have changed in cultural and social evolution, but the fact remains that it is woman who conceives, carries and delivers the children of men. And this is not merely a biological fact; it entails a wealth of implications both for woman herself, her way of being, and for her relationships, her relation to human life and to life in general. In calling woman to motherhood, God entrusted the human being to her in an entirely special way.10

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Then Francis warned of two dangers, presenting a wider view of woman in his first point but then reiterating a limited view in his second. He says the first danger: is to reduce motherhood to a social role, to a task which, though regarded as noble, in fact, sets the woman and her potential aside and does not fully esteem her value in the structure of the community. This may happen both in civil and ecclesial circles. And, as a reaction to this, there is another danger in the opposite direction, that of promoting a kind of emancipation that, in order to fill areas that have been taken away from the male, deserts the feminine attributes with all its precious characteristics.11

So while Francis rejects a devaluing of woman such that her full potentiality is ignored in order that she simply fulfills a social role, he reiterates Pope John Paul II’s teaching from MD, by referring to special feminine attributes that are precious and belonging only to women, saying: “Woman has a particular sensitivity to the ‘things of God,’ above all in helping us understand the mercy, tenderness and love that God has for us.” (n.30) This is very much a reflection of John Paul II’s concept of the “feminine genius.” For John Paul II, a woman is ordered to have physical motherhood or virginity and this in turn lends to a specific character in her. That is, she is, according to Article 30 of MD, “the one who provides to others a moral and spiritual strength.”12 John Paul II’s description of woman as having a sensitivity to the things of God is then contrasted with “a gradual loss of sensitivity for man” (n.30) because of scientific and technological progress. John Paul II’s idealization of the woman reaches its heights when he describes the perfect woman, saying: the “perfect woman” (in reference to Proverbs 31:10) becomes an irreplaceable support and source of spiritual strength for other people, who perceive the great energies of her spirit. These “perfect women” are owed much by their families, and sometimes by whole nations. (n. 30)

The general message from MD is that it is up to women to save the world from itself or, more pointedly, to save men from themselves, because women have certain beneficial characteristics that belong solely to their nature, because by their biological makeup, they are essentially mothers. In these idealizations of the woman as a mother, as one who will save the world by her feminine genius, surely the theories of early attachment or early infantile development play a significant part. The next section shows key points relevant to aspects of this discussion.

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EARLY INFANTILE ATTACHMENT AND PROJECTION OF “MOTHERHOOD” ON FEMINIZED FIGURES As it is commonly known, the infantile years are quite foundational in terms of moral and relational development of a person. Nancy Chodrow particularly argues that an infant’s earliest experiences with its primary caretaker, often the mother, not only determines its sense of self and ways of relating within the world but also “provides a foundation for expectations of women as mothers.”13 When a human is born, it is not guided by instinct and it does not yet have adaptive ego capacities to act instrumentally in the world. The primary caretaker thus acts as the infant’s external ego, mediating and providing the infant’s total environment until such time when the infant develops adaptive capacities. To develop these capacities, an integrated ego must develop. This integrated ego is developed through a type of parental care—one that is consistent and free from arbitrariness. This care also determines the growth of the self and the infant’s basic emotional self-image (that is, his or her sense of good or bad, right or wrong). The absence of overwhelming anxiety and the presence of continuity—of holding, feeding, and a relatively consistent pattern of interaction—enable the infant to develop “confidence” (Benedek) or “basic trust” (Erikson). This is the beginning of self or identity.14

When there is a major discrepancy in these early stages between needs (material and psychological) and care (which includes attention and affection), a person “develops a ‘basic fault,’ an all pervasive sense, sustained by enormous anxiety, that something is not right, is lacking in her or him.”15 It is in Chodrow’s perspective formative in regard to a person’s fundamental nature and may be partly irreversible. The early dependence on the primary caretaker, often the mother,16 makes this relationship crucial to one’s sense of self. The infant initially does not experience itself as separate from the mother and depends upon her for care and nourishment. In fact, an infant will either deny or employ other techniques to cope with a mother’s separation from itself. But dependence is only experienced when the mother separates from the child. Otherwise, the infant experiences the mother’s ongoing presence as if that is how things have always been and should always be. An infant’s total dependence on the mother lends to an absolute primary narcissism and lack of awareness of a mothering agent. But the maternal care here is important as it “protects the infant and gives the illusion that the infantile ego is stable and powerful when in fact it is weak.”17 It is only when an infant has experienced this protection consistently that it can develop away from this complete dependence and a true sense of self can emerge. A

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true sense of self according to pediatrician and psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, “is the ability to experience oneself as an effective emotional and interpersonal agent.”18 A child is able to exist separately and does not depend on the primary caretaker as it develops its relations with others. In contrast, a false self, according to psychologist, Harry Guntrip, is reactionary, toward an unsatisfactory environment. The false self aims at “survival in minimum discomfort, not full vigorous spontaneous creative selfhood. The result is either tame goodness or criminality.”19 Therefore, with the growth of the self and differentiation from the mother comes the lessening of dependence and reactionary responses to its environment. Chodrow says that once absolute dependence is mitigated, the mother is no longer interchangeable with any other provider of care. She says, “the developing self of the infant comes to cathect its particular mother, with all the intensity and absoluteness of primary love and infantile dependence.”20 The mother becomes the object of primary love and her uniqueness is increased when the infant discovers the entire world does not provide the same care as its own mother does for itself. The father as a person with whom the mother relates with is often seen as enabling an infant’s differentiation of self but does not necessarily assist in differentiating an infant from its mother. It is the relationship with the mother that the infant must work out and transform in the early years of childhood—his or her attachment to her and a growing ability to take her interests into account will act as “a prototype for later attachment to other objects experienced as separate.”21 For many analysts, this is the most important aspect of relational development. As Chodrow says of this fundamental experience in infancy, “people come out of it with the memory of a unique intimacy which they want to recreate.”22 Do Chodrow’s theories on early infantile attachment and relational development give food for thought for how persistent presentations of women as particular types of mothers continue to exist and are transferred onto feminized figures such as the Church or the Earth? It seems to me the person drawn to the image of the woman who exists to endlessly birth, sustain, hold, feed, care, and provide affection and attention to him or her even when he or she grows into an adult, remains an infant in one sense all of his or her life. If so, instead of utilizing the female Church or Earth to sort early attachment issues, should this important work be taken into the psychotherapeutic relationship? Yet, in Indigenous mothering, this picture of women as mothers endlessly birthing and nurturing exists, as part of their collective and ancient wisdom, tried and tested for a millennia. Indigenous women are seen as mothers whether biological or not and the act of mothering can sometimes be a synonym for “parenting” for some communities such that both men and women join in the act of “mothering” a child. Is there a difference between the woman seen essentially as a mother endlessly birthing and nurturing like

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the Virgin Mary and Mother Church, a dominantly white-European Christian perspective, and the Indigenous woman imagined endlessly birthing and nurturing people or a nation, like Mother Earth? The next section explores aspects of Indigenous mothering within the context of the reality of a history of colonization.

NATIVE AND INDIGENOUS MOTHERING (IN COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL CONTEXTS) Just as women can be imagined idealistically from the perspective of a child, essentially (or at least potentially) as “good mothers” without individualities and complexities, so can Indigenous mothering be similarly imagined. But Devon A. Mehesuah, a native woman of Choctaw nation, explains that no one native woman could represent all Indigenous women: Because of vast differences in tribal cultures and personalities, in addition to identity issues .  .  . no one Indigenous woman can speak for all of us, and it is not possible for any one feminist theory or thought to summarize Native women. Native women do share historic oppression, but the cultural, racial, and economic variations among Native women render any sort of national coalition virtually impossible. . . . Our needs and wants may be similar, but they are not the same.23

But as Meshuah points out, historic oppression is something shared by Indigenous women all over the world and the expression of oppression set out below will have resonances with them. Anishinaabe-kwe native, Renée Elizabeth Mzinegiizhigo-kwe Bédard says the historic oppression of Indigenous women is the context in which they mothered in colonial times and the context in which they continue to mother today—a mothering that “has been constructed within the context of control, conquest, possession, and exploitation,” its foundations in “White, male-centred Christian fundamentals.”24 This was how white European colonizers also saw lands and the earth, as things to be conquered, possessed, controlled, and exploited. To the colonizer, the Indigenous mother “symbolize[d] the bounty and richness [of the unconquered land] they witnessed.”25 Rayna Green, a descendant of the Cherokee peoples, in a parallel way explains the romanticization of the Indigenous woman of America on the one hand, and the view of her as wild and in need of taming on the other, paralleling the approach to rich unconquered land to be possessed and plundered: “She was the familiar mother-goddess figure—full bodied, powerful, nurturing, but dangerous— embodying the wealth and danger of the New World.”26

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This view of the earth and lands as “women” to be possessed, tamed, and even plundered (depending on one’s view of women) aligns with views going back to ancient times when cities were also imagined as women: “[to] be desired, conquered, protected, and governed by men.”27 In conjunction, just as mothers could be regarded as endlessly providing “nourishment, shelter, security, instruction, and identity,” so were cities to be depended upon to nourish, shelter, secure, and give instruction and identity to the people contained within its walls.28 Jerusalem, in the Judaeo-Christian story, is a central character in the salvation history of both Jews and Christians and this city is viewed also as people and a nation in the form of a woman—who when good was the loving mother or dutiful daughter, but when “naughty” was the whore who broke the holy relationship, the holy covenant, with a male merciful God who would purify her from her digression.29 That Christian mindset set in early patriarchal times has informed and continues to inform male abuse of females, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, from pre- to post-colonial times, exposing women to violence and justifying that violence given it is modeled in a male God in relationship with a feminized people. When women are not “good mothers” and “good daughters,” they could be “corrected” by men, in the same way that the male God reprimanded and corrected Jerusalem for “whoring” herself to pagan gods (Ezekiel 16). Whereas in the Western Christian context, women have been pitted at the extremes—either as the Virgin Mother Mary or as Eve, wife of Adam, seductress and whore30—white male European-Christian colonizers have pitted Indigenous women also at extremes: either as Earth-Mother Goddesses/ Indian Queens/Indian Princesses on the one hand or “easy squaws”/virgins “waiting to be won and conquered”/oversexualized temptational figures on the other. Bédard explains the manipulation of Indigenous female imagery by white colonizers, aligning with the abuse of “virgin” lands and the exposure of Indigenous women to vulnerability to abuse: Indigenous women’s femininity was manipulated into erotic and promiscuous symbols. She became the icon of virginity waiting to be won and conquered. The equation of indigenous woman with “virgin land” open to consumption and possession, created a dangerous archetype of Indigenous women’s femininity based on profit, violence, and men’s pleasure.31

Bédard further explains her frustration at the perpetuation of harmful portrayals of Indigenous women in popular culture: Currently, we are burdened with the oversexualized projections that taint the images of our mothers, sisters, aunties and grannies. I do not see the faces of the women who raised me in Disney’s half-naked animated film, Pocahontas,

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or . . . The New World, where Captain John Smith is portrayed as lusting after a very young Pocahontas. I am saddened and sickened that these images continue to be viewed by Canadians. These are not the role models of womanhood and motherhood that I want to see projected of Anishinaabe women.32

What kind of mothering does Bédard then wish to promote? The view she presents aligns the woman with Mother Earth, who she describes as her first and true mother: Mother Earth is cherished and honoured because she sustains us with beauty and nourishment. Mother Earth continues to be bountiful, sustaining all beings. Despite all the changes that are going on around us, the earth continues to give life. This consistency is a promise to the future, to those yet to be born. She shows generosity by giving and giving to us. She is like our own birth mother. Just as a mother gives birth to a child. Mother Earth nourishes her children, holds her child in her arms. She gives her child a place with her to live, safe and warm. She may give birth to other children, but to all she will give food, care, and a home. . . . Mother Earth remains whole, indivisible, and enduring into the future. As beneficiaries of their mother’s care and love, children are obliged to look after their mother in her illness and decrepitude.  .  .  . The Aanishinaabe ideology of mothering and motherhood holds that, like Mother Earth, we have a responsibility as women to foster and nurture the next generation and to allow others to assist in this process, such as aunties and grannies.33

While the mother in this picture is “cherished and honoured” rather than someone to be possessed and plundered, the picture of the endlessly giving mother is concerning. Furthermore, Indigenous women are made synonymous with Indigenous mothering. Bédard provides great insight into the deleterious effects of white European-Christian colonization, but she does not seem to be concerned with the dark side of mothering, the mother who deals with powerfulness and powerlessness as I have discussed in a previous section. Fortunately, Cree/Métis woman Kim Anderson explains that the respect for the woman as a mother, as one with incredible power to create and to nurture is “not understood to be a selfless act of infinite giving.”34 She shows how the native principle of reciprocity “prevented an endless taking” from the first mother, the Earth: If mother was to continue to provide, so the logic went, she must be nurtured in return. . . . Life was understood to be sustained through cyclical processes of rebirth and renewal, in which men and women played distinct roles. Women had the power of menstruation. . . . Giving birth was understood to be the “sacred work” of women and this allowed them to act as intermediary between heaven and earth through their bodies.35

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Furthermore, “puberty rites and ceremonies such as berry fasting . . . offer an opportunity to instill a sense of [native women’s] power in pubescent girls.”36 These practices show a real honoring of women and enable them to grapple with power and powerlessness in mothering—practices and beliefs steeped in ancient wisdom which support women from infancy to adulthood and beyond. Bédard in fact speaks of principles taught to Aanishinaabe girls to help them grapple with their power to birth as adult women, but also the responsibility and support that comes with that power: Aanishinaabe girls or young women are told about the importance of understanding and living the values of respect, responsibility, reverence and reciprocity. The foundations of respecting a woman’s ability to bring forth life with her body are vested in those four principles.37

It was the introduction of a certain kind of Christianity, white patriarchal Christianity, into native communities, which removed women’s power and placed them in roles as mothers without context. That is, as women without support in ritual, beliefs, and community, in transitioning to womanhood, in existing as women and mothers. A woman was simply expected to be a mother who served everyone else abundantly and without end. Devon Mihesuah laments the Christian conversion of Indigenous peoples which served to disempower native women: Among those who preferred to try and “civilize the savages” were Euro-American missionaries, who pressured Natives to convert to Christianity, which, among other things, included them accepting the concept of the male god and thus reinforcing the superiority of males.38

Anderson further details the disempowerment of women by the introduction of the male God of Christianity in native communities: When “God the father” took over from “mother the creator,” sin was introduced to Indigenous women’s bodies. Menstruation became the curse, and “illegitimate” birth had the potential to be a source of shame. Ceremonies that legitimated women’s lifegiving powers went underground, female spirits were considered evil and women were no longer recognized as spiritual leaders.39

This shows there is much to learn from the acts of violence enacted in the past upon Indigenous peoples as well as on “uncolonized” lands. Native peoples could provide insight into how the world can heal from a type of Christianity which has at its foundations patriarchalism, patronism, power-mongering, and a colonizing-consumerist mentality. In this way maybe violence against women could become unthinkable, women could reclaim their worth as

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powerful in their ability to share in the act of creation just like God, and women could reclaim their place as spiritual and community leaders, sharing the roles of leadership with both worthy men and women. Women and mothers would not only be respected in Christian ritual and teachings with their individual characteristics and complexities but also be empowered and supported. In the same vein, the earth as a mother could be treated with respect and support, seeing her as powerful in her ability to create and sustain life but also caring for her as she undertakes the cycles of birth and death, the seasons, throughout her lifetime.

A TURN IN THE CATHOLIC VIEW OF WOMEN, IN THE EMBRACE OF INDIGENOUS WISDOM In October 2019, the leaders of the Catholic Church in and around the Amazon region, mainly Catholic bishops from South America, led by Pope Francis, met for a synod to “participat[e] in an ecclesial event marked by the urgency of the theme that calls for opening new paths for the Church in the territory [the Amazon]” (Final document, no.1).40 The result was the publication of a document called Final Document—The Amazon: New Paths for the Church and for an Integral Ecology. Apart from Laudato Si, this was the only other document in Catholic history, at the time, at the Vatican level, to address Indigenous peoples. Moreover, it was the first time Indigenous wisdom was highlighted and put forward as part of the solution in the concern for “opening new paths for the Church in the territory” (n.1). As the document states: The search of the Amazonian indigenous peoples for life in its abundance takes the form of what they call “good living,” buen vivir, which is fully realised in the Beatitudes. It is a matter of living in harmony with oneself, with nature, with human beings and with the Supreme Being, since there is intercommunication throughout the cosmos; here there are neither exclusions nor those who exclude, and here a full life for all can be projected. Such an understanding of life is characterized by the interconnection and harmony of relationships between water, territory and nature, community life and culture, God and various spiritual forces. For them, “good living” means understanding the centrality of the transcendent relational character of human beings and of creation, and implies ‘good acting.’ This integral approach is expressed in their own way of organizing that starts from the family and the community, and embraces a responsible use of all the goods of creation. Indigenous peoples aspire to better living conditions, especially in health and education. They want to enjoy sustainable development that they themselves choose and shape and that stays in harmony with their traditional ways of life, in a dialogue between their ancestral wisdom and technology and the new ones acquired. (n.9)41

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Here the values Bédard describes as the values taught to Aanishinaabe girls, of respect, responsibility, reverence and reciprocity, are very evident. The document too presents the great wisdom of Indigenous thinking and approaches by acknowledging its great contrast with Western thought and practice: The pattern of thinking of indigenous peoples offers an integrated vision of reality, capable of understanding the multiple connections existing throughout creation. This contrasts with the dominant current of Western thought that tends to fragment reality in order to understand it but then fails to articulate the relationships between the various fields of knowledge. The traditional management of what nature offers is expressed in what we now call sustainable management. We also find other values in native peoples such as reciprocity, solidarity, the sense of community, equality, the family, their social organization and their sense of service. (n.44)

It is in this light that the document makes various suggestions, including a call for the valuing of women, giving them a voice, “recognizing their fundamental role in the formation and continuity of cultures, in spirituality, in communities and families,” respecting the “multifaceted work” they do “in both the indigenous and western worlds,” “consulted” in decision-making processes and even promoted to key positions in “the heart of the Church,” including “in positions of governance” (n.101). The document also showed the valuing of respect and reciprocity for women from an Indigenous perspective, stating a commitment to “defend [women’s] rights,” recognising women as “protagonists and guardians of creation and of our common home,” showing a commitment to training women for leadership roles through theological education, and wanting to strengthen family ties, that is, ensuring the support networks for women are in place (n.102). The basis for the imaging of women in paragraphs 101 and 102 was the imaging of the earth as a mother with her “feminine face” and the respect and care given to her by Indigenous peoples (n.101). It may be that a renewed respect and care for the earth as Indigenous people do who imagine the earth as a female, might be the roundabout way of teaching respect and care for women and mothers. Rather than simply honoring her individual characteristics and complexities, her ability to create and destroy, her power and powerless, in order to respect the woman in front of us, there might be a need to turn to, for example, the Aanishinaabe values (reverence, respect, responsibility and reciprocity) which could be taught to both men and women. CONCLUSION This chapter sought to open up the questions in regard to the use and reclamation of “mother” language, in Catholic documents in particular, for

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the purpose of cultivating respect for women, instead of their neglect and relegation to endless mothering without support, a result of centuries of Western-Christian imaging and silo-ing of motherhood, a result even which is connected to early attachment issues projected then onto the Church, Mary, and the Earth. I sought to reclaim “mother” language by calling for the reimagination of motherhood through real mothers’ eyes, in their diversity and complexity. That is, mothers who do not necessarily fit the “good mother” image: the perfect, white, middle- class, heterosexual married mother, but rather mothers who experience both powerfulness and powerlessness, or the mother in front of us rather than the abstract “mother.” The chapter also hoped that with a new respect for all women in their individual uniqueness, one’s relationship with the earth, imagined also as a mother, could exemplify greater respect and care and even assist in understanding the complex rather than romanticized Mother Earth, one who can both create and destroy (especially entire towns and regions as recently evidenced in the devastating summer bushfires of 2019–2020 in Australia). But like any human being, Mother Earth suffers from the effects of structural sin and the sin of peoples as they ignored her. Her floods, bushfires, tornadoes, and droughts have also killed people and demolished entire towns. Mother Earth like all peoples is in need of Christ’s redemption—not only the need for her to reconcile with those who have used, abused, and ignored her but also her need to reconcile with those she has destroyed within her life cycles that involve both creation and destruction. By viewing the Earth as this complex mother, the concept of mothering as this formidable ever-giving, ever self-sacrificing role which does not care for the needs of the mother could be dethroned. But also we are able to see the Earth as our sister, one whom we journey with to God for healing, reconciliation, and transformation. And yet in the exploration of Indigenous mothering, the chapter found that through a renewed respect for Indigenous peoples, their ancient wisdom, and their views of mothering which have at their basis the earth as mother, the first and true mother of all, one might be able to transform the patriarchal white Western colonizing culture which remains both inside and outside of Christianity. A recovery of the respect for women in their power to birth in the same way as a recovery of the respect for Mother Earth might be the very thing that can initiate the healing this world desperately needs—healing for women who question their self-worth, healing for women who have been abused, healing for the church, healing for our plundered earth, healing for climate refugees and other refugees, healing for the Indigenous peoples, and healing for white men with their white fragility. The interconnected nature between all life means what affects one affects others. So, an imbalance such as denying the leadership of women and Indigenous and offering them only to men schooled in white Western culture has ramifications for the entire

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creation. We are called toward an integral approach which gives equal respect and voice to all as seen in Laudato Si (2015), the Final Document on the Amazon Synod (2019), Querida Amazonia (2020), and Fratelli Tutti (2020). We pray to God our loving Mother, Father, Sister and Brother to. . . . . .Teach us to discover the worth of each thing, to be filled with awe and contemplation, to recognize that we are profoundly united with every creature as we journey towards your infinite light. . .42

NOTES 1. “The City as a Woman, Faith as a Mother,” in Cristina Lledo Gomez, The Church as Woman and Mother (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2018), 7, 10. 2. Pope Francis, Laudato Si: On Care for our Common Home, Encyclical Letter 2015, at http://www​.vatican​.va​/content​/francesco​/en​/encyclicals​/documents​/papa​ -francesco​_20150524​_enciclica​-laudato​-si​.html 3. There has been a long tradition inside and outside of Christianity of being ambivalent toward nature and creation. For example, belief in the goddess Cybele, the ancient Phrygian Mother of the Gods, associated with rituals connected with the Earth, was seen as anti-Christian. Therefore, the male God, represented in the Father and Son replaced the female goddess and her encouragement of worship with the Earth. At the same time, early church fathers, including Irenaeus, fought the Gnostics who wished to promote that only those with special knowledge were to be saved and that the body and creation are to be hated. For Irenaeus as well as subsequent church fathers such as Augustine and Ambrose, the body and soul are united and thus the body cannot be hated or rejected. Irenaeus in particular taught that the creation of God is to be celebrated. Unfortunately, suspicion of the body and of nature endures to this day—one reason being Catholicism’s underdeveloped theologies of sexuality and the body, at least as expressed in formal papal teaching and councils. For further discussion on Catholicism’s underdeveloped theologies on sexuality and gender, see Tina Beattie’s work such as The New Catholic Feminism: Theology, Gender Theory, and Dialogue (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006) or “The End of ‘Woman’ and the Ends of Women: A Reflection on Women’s Rights in the Context of Catholicism and the Abortion Debate,” in Religion, Gender and the Public Sphere, ed. Niamh Reilly and Stacey Scriver (New York: Routledge, 2014). 4. Pope Francis, Address of Pope Francis to Participants in a Seminar Organized by the Pontifical Council for the Laity Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of Mulieris Dignitatem, Clementine Hall, Vatican City, October 12, 2013, at https://w2​.vatican​.va​ /content​/francesco​/en​/speeches​/2013​/october​/documents​/papa​-francesco​_20131012​ _seminario​-xxv​-mulieris​-dignitatem​.html

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5. Pope Francis, General Audience, St Peter’s Square, September 10, 2014, at http://www​.vatican​.va​/content​/francesco​/en​/audiences​/2014​/documents​/papa​-francesco​_20140910​_udienza​-generale​.html 6. Pope Francis, As a Loving Mother, Apostolic Letter 2016, at http://www​ .vatican​.va​/content​/francesco​/en​/apost​_letters​/documents​/papa​-francesco​_lettera​-ap​ _20160604​_come​-una​-madre​-amorevole​.html 7. See Lledo Gomez, The Church as Woman and Mother. 8. Sara Ruddick, “Talking about Mothers: From Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (1989),” in Mother Reader: Essential Literature on Motherhood, ed. Moyra Davey (New York: Steven Stories Press, 2010), 191. 9. Ruddick, “Talking about Mothers,” 192. 10. Pope Francis, Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of Mulieris Dignitatem. 11. Pope Francis, Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of Mulieris Dignitatem. 12. Pope John Paul II, Mulieres Dignitatem: On the Dignity and Vocation of Women on the Occasion of the Marian Year, Apostolic Letter, 1988, at http:// www​.vatican​.va​/content​/john​-paul​-ii​/en​/apost​_letters​/1988​/documents​/hf​_jp​-ii​_apl​ _19880815​_mulieris​-dignitatem​.html 13. Nancy Chodrow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 57. 14. Chodrow, The Reproduction of Mothering, 58–59. 15. Chodrow, The Reproduction of Mothering, 59. 16. While fathers and non-biological mothers such as grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts, uncles etc . . . can be primary caretakers of children, it is still the case that mothers are often the primary caretakers. See Australian Bureau of Statistics, “Work and Family Balance,” in 4125.0 Gender Indicators, Australia, September 2018 report, at https://www​.abs​.gov​.au​/ausstats​/abs@​.nsf​/Lookup​/by​%20Subject​ /4125​.0​~Sep​%202018​~Main​%20Features​~Work​%20and​%20Family​%20Balance​~7. See also World Health Organisation, Gender Equality, Work and Health: A Review of the Evidence 2006 report, 3, at https://www​.who​.int​/gender​/documents​/Genderworkhealth​.pdf. Note though that Chodrow’s comments do not apply to fathers as her perspective comes from mothers as the primary care givers wherein there is something particular about the mother and child relationship, fostered from a mother carrying a child in her womb for ten months. 17. Chodrow, The Reproduction of Mothering, 60. 18. Donald Winnicott in Chodrow, The Reproduction of Mothering, 60. 19. Harry Guntrip in Chodrow, The Reproduction of Mothering, 60. 20. Chodrow, The Reproduction of Mothering, 68. 21. Chodrow, The Reproduction of Mothering, 72. 22. Chodrow, The Reproduction of Mothering, 57. 23. Devon A. Mihesuah in D. Memee Lavell-Harvard and Jeanette Corbiere Lavell, “Thunder Spirits: Reclaiming the Power of our Grandmothers,” in “Until Our Hearts Are On the Ground”: Aboriginal Mothering, Oppression, Resistance and Rebirth, ed. D. Memee Lavell-Harvard and Jeanette Corbiere Lavell, 2. 24. Renée Elizabeth Mzinegiizhigo-kwe Bédard, “An Anishinaabe-kwe Ideology on Mothering and Motherhood,” in “Until Our Hearts Are On the Ground”:

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Aboriginal Mothering, Oppression, Resistance and Rebirth, ed. D. Memee LavellHarvard and Jeanette Corbiere Lavell, 68. 25. Bédard, “An Anishinaabe-kwe Ideology,” 68. 26. Rayna Green in Bédard, “An Anishinaabe-kwe Ideology,” 68. 27. Maggie Low, Mother Zion in Deutero-Isaiah: A Metaphor for Zion Theology (New York: Peter Lang, 2014), 73. 28. Cristina Lledo Gomez, The Church as Woman and Mother, 9. 29. See “The City as a Woman, Faith as a Mother,” in Lledo Gomez, The Church as Woman and Mother, 7–28. 30. The classic text that explains this is Marina Warner’s Alone of All her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, first printed in 1976 and most recently in 2016 by Oxford University Press, Oxford. This book refers to Mary as virgin mother who is alone able to be portrayed as both virgin and mother all at the same time. More importantly, Mary was held up by Christianity for centuries (and continues to today in some cultures) as an impossible ideal for all women. 31. Bédard, “An Anishinaabe-kwe Ideology,” 68–69. 32. Bédard, “An Anishinaabe-kwe Ideology,” 69. 33. Bédard, “An Anishinaabe-kwe Ideology,” 73. 34. Kim Anderson, “Giving Life to the People: An Indigenous Ideology of Motherhood,” in Maternal Theory: Essential Readings, ed. Andrea O’Reilly (Toronto, Ontario: Deemeter Press, 2007): 766. 35. Anderson, “Giving Life to the People,” 766–767. 36. Anderson, “Giving Life to the People,” 767. 37. Bédard, “An Anishinaabe-kwe Ideology,” 71. 38. Devon Mihesuah in Anderson, “Giving Life to the People,” 767. 39. Anderson, “Giving Life to the People,” 767. 40. Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon, Final Document—The Amazon: New Paths for the Church and for an Integral Ecology, October 2016, at http://www​ .sinodoamazonico​.va​/content​/sinodoamazonico​/en​/documents​/final​-document​-of​-the​ -amazon​-synod​.html 41. Pope Francis consequently wrote Querida Amazonia (2020) and Fratelli Tutti (2020) which too addressed indigenous peoples. 42. Prayer extract from Pope Francis, “A prayer for our earth,” in Laudato Si (2015), at http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papafrancesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, Kim. “Giving Life to the People: An Indigenous Ideology of Motherhood.” In Maternal Theory: Essential Readings, edited by Andrea O’Reilly, 761–781. Toronto, ON: Deemeter Press, 2007. Bédard, Renée Elizabeth Mzinegiizhigo-kwe. “An Anishinaabe-kwe Ideology on Mothering and Motherhood.” In “Until Our Hearts Are On the Ground”: Aboriginal Mothering, Oppression, Resistance and Rebirth, edited by D. Memee

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Lavell-Harvard and Jeanette Corbiere Lavell, 65–75. Toronto, ON: Demeter Press, 2006. Chodrow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Lavell-Harvard, D. Memee, and Jeanette Corbiere Lavell. “Thunder Spirits: Reclaiming the Power of our Grandmothers.” In “Until Our Hearts Are On the Ground”: Aboriginal Mothering, Oppression, Resistance and Rebirth, edited by D. Memee Lavell-Harvard and Jeanette Corbiere Lavell, 1–10. Toronto, ON: Demeter Press, 2006. Lledo Gomez, Cristina. The Church as Woman and Mother. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2018. Low, Maggie. Mother Zion in Deutero-Isaiah: A Metaphor for Zion Theology. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. Pope Francis. Address of Pope Francis to Participants in a Seminar Organized by the Pontifical Council for the Laity Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of Mulieris Dignitatem, Clementine Hall, Vatican City, October 12, 2013. https://w2​.vatican​.va​/ content​/francesco​/en​/speeches​/2013​/october​/documents​/papa​-francesco​_20131012​ _seminario​-xxv​-mulieris​-dignitatem​.html ———. As a Loving Mother, Apostolic Letter, 2016. http://www​.vatican​.va​/content​ /francesco​/en​/apost​_letters​/documents​/papa​-francesco​_lettera​-ap​_20160604​_come​ -una​-madre​-amorevole​.html ———. General Audience, St Peter’s Square, September 10, 2014. http://www​.vatican​.va​/content​/francesco​/en​/audiences​/2014​/documents​/papa​-francesco​_20140910​ _udienza​-generale​.html ———. Laudato Si: On Care for our Common Home. Encyclical Letter, 2015. http://www​.vatican​.va​/content​/francesco​/en​/encyclicals​/documents​/papa​-francesco​ _20150524​_enciclica​-laudato​-si​.html Pope John Paul II. Mulieres Dignitatem: On the Dignity and Vocation of Women on the Occasion of the Marian Year. Apostolic Letter, 1988. http://www​.vatican​ .va​/content​/john​-paul​-ii​/en​/apost​_letters​/1988​/documents​/hf​_jp​-ii​_apl​_19880815​ _mulieris​-dignitatem​.html Ruddick, Sara. “Talking about Mothers: From Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (1989).” In Mother Reader: Essential Literature on Motherhoo, edited by Moyra Davey. New York: Steven Stories Press, 2010. Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon. Final Document—The Amazon: New Paths for the Church and for an Integral Ecology. October 2016. http://www​.sinodoamazonico​.va​/content​/sinodoamazonico​/en​/documents​/final​-document​-of​-the​-amazon​ -synod​.html

Chapter 6

The Veil of Mother Marie-Elsa Roche Bragg

Creation waits like a damned river behind the veil. “What, will no-one watch with me?” The divine has touched the earth and calls to be seen. There is pressure in the presence of the unseen. Mary fled to Egypt and in every step, she was pregnant with Ayin, En Soph. There was nothingness in her eye, endlessness in her palms. She was pregnant with Aur; the One and the Three; they fled. Christ’s blood was her blood was our blood. The ever-Word in her womb.​

She held the open tomb; felt, fed, and nourished the tomb. Three flames alight in an orb and again three flames in a staff while chrism dwelt in the earth.

We turn with Mary, toward silence; pray to find the grace in our wedding veil.​This is my body, given for you. Live this in remembrance of me. The branches of the Tree of Life are also its roots.​

Mary received the Word, followed the Word, breathed the Word, prayed the Word, challenged the Word, doubted the Word, was inspired by the Word, exhausted by the Word, gave the Word, witnessed the Word, was betrothed to the Word, felt the piercing pain of the Word, loved, fell, died and rose with the Word, received the Word, followed the Word, breathed the Word

And the sound lingers brilliant in its whisper; Bat Kol: daughter of the voice, Temple and Church. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was in the same soil as the Tree of Life.​A web of ancient roots. We took them both into our bodies: one bite of flesh and seed. Ever after, they remained companions. There is nowhere we travel without knowledge and life in our bodies. Knowledge woke us to question and answer, to hide and be found. I see you. I know you. Life showed us we are naked; naked and “the beloved.” There is no soul without seed and no greater challenge or gift. When Mary was pregnant, she was a seed of God, womb of God, flesh of God, child of God, sister of God, friend of God, mother of God, lover and bride of God, there was no relationship that she was not.​

We choose, we listen, we place our souls with or without reaching to touch the hem. We are blown into storms where the voice seems too small to hear above the waves. Our bodies and hearts bear wounds that seem to reach further than the cross. This is sacred ground, there is no more, no less. Our clay feet walk with divine breath. Creation and destruction are opposite poles: sovereign and crucified. Peace holds the balance. Resurrection holds the balance. Listen, mothers have been invisible and father’s sold. Both search for home. For belonging; the sacred clay of their feet discarded. To control is to not believe. To use is to turn away from gift. Tree, bird, soil, rock—all have soul and their song calls us home, listen.

And when the altar has been found warm and ready in the ash of hearth, the Church​roof will be visited for prayers at night while candles are lit in the cave. We are all pregnant with Christ; all Mary: men and women. We, I, All, One. To believe is to love. To love is to feel the thirst of soil and quench of river. To be seed, womb, root, branch, knowing we are in full and naked embrace. May the veil be drawn back.1

NOTE 1. It may be of interest to the reader to note that this contemplation emerged during a time when I was teaching a course on Jewish and Christian mysticism. The course included the Merkabah and Hekhalot Mystics (100 BCE–1000 CE), who looked to the first and second Temple and utilized the chariot in Ezekiel’s vision of God (Ezek. 1), as well as the work of Moses ben Jacob Cordovero (1522–1570), who, while living with his family’s legacy of exile from Spain (1492), found the devotion to write a cohesive system for what was by then known as “Kabballah.” Alongside these, the course also addressed early theologians such as Irenaeus of Lyons (130–202 CE) and mystics such as St. Teresa of Avila. In addition, I had been reading Carl Jung’s Red Book (New York: Norton, 2009) and Black Books (New York: Norton, 2020). The latter shows a vulnerable time of spiritual retreat, but I was especially struck by a comment in the former, as I was contemplating the modern need for liberation theology: “The nearness of God makes people rave.” While contemplating this chapter, I also wrote an article for Standpoint magazine (December 2020: https://standpointmag​.co​.uk​/hibernating​-with​-mary​-and​ -helene/) on Mary and the abstract art of Helene Aylon (1931–2020), a Jewish Orthodox artist from Boro Park, Brookyn. The images in this contribution are my own work, made with charcoal and wax in the dark hours before dawn prayer.

Chapter 7

“You Don’t Understand Me” Serena Williams, Christology, and Non-Identity Janice McRandal

Christology—so often prompted with call and response to Jesus’ question “Who do you say I am?”—has traditionally sought to articulate dogma concerning the personhood and identity of Jesus the Christ. As a project traditionally driven by a need to determine stable metaphysical categories related to the divine-man, contemporary christology is often found wanting by the polygonal relation of human subjectivities, identity politics, bio/medical agency, and post-humanist categories in current discourse of the human person. In this respect, the pursuit to abstract stable ontological categories related to the identity and personhood of Jesus are not only problematic in light of current debate surrounding the very categories of personhood and identity themselves but also potentially harmful in terms of Christian discipleship. That is, for those who would seek to be like Jesus, or to be in Christ, such stable categories easily reify and reproduce normative notions of human personhood used to exclude and control, such as maleness or masculinity. If christology is to be thought away from the pursuit of abstracted ontological categories, an approach animated beyond the bounds of identity must be sought. In this chapter, I explore the hermeneutical practices of accounting for Serena Williams and arguing that these practices can bring into focus why and how Christological theories can shift toward more comprehensive and inclusionary interpretations of what has been typically described in theological scholarship as personhood. In doing so, I will argue for a christology of non-identity, a christology that does affirm the place of identity politics, especially regarding the Christ, but one that is always on the way to nonidentity. Here the pattern of discipleship—the formation of believers into Christ—gives room for the illegibility of existence, and for a non-identity that 75

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can be experienced as faith, or discipleship, through the very performative non-identical repetition of Jesus’ non-identity. ON SPORT AND DOCTRINE As a social phenomenon, sport is now widely considered alongside religion. Though a definitive classification on sport’s religious content remains contentious, the association probably does not seem so strange to us: “Each offers its receptive adherents a ritualistic tradition, a compliment of suitable deities and a dedicated time and space for worship.”1 As J. Mangan argues: Without exaggeration, sport is a mirror in which nations, communities, men and women now see themselves. That reflection is sometimes bright, sometimes dark, sometimes distorted, sometimes magnified. This metaphorical mirror is a source of mass exhilaration and depression, security and insecurity, pride and humiliation, bonding and alienation. Sport, for many, has replaced religion as a source of emotional catharsis and spiritual passion, and for many, since it is among the earliest of memorable childhood experiences, it infiltrates memory, shapes enthusiasms, serves fantasies . . . blends memory and desire.2

While in recent decades scholars have spent considerable time establishing comparative frameworks between sport and religion, the structural overlaps between cultural institutions are not what interest me. Rather, it is the modes through which sport might help us identify the mechanisms by which doctrine is imagined, performed, and subverted, in the service of dominant social arrangements that have long been secured by religion. That is, I am assuming that sport is an ideological practice, and as such, it provides a lens through which we may draw conclusions about processes of socialization,3 processes that are, in the age of globalism, always already beholden to a complex, varied, and long lineage of the Western Christian tradition. In one form or another, “Sports have been understood as a safe arena that has [at times] replaced religion as a location for ritual enact[ments] . . . that provide a necessary catharsis for society.”4 In relation to these intermingled connections of religion, doctrine, bodies, and sport, I want to read the reception history of Serena Williams and christology alongside each other. Various theologies can and have been read through sporting performances and in and through sports fandom: liturgical theologies, theologies of time and eschatology, doctrines of creation and ecclesiology, are examples.5 Of course, the use of technical terminology here is necessarily loose, representing both the complex nature of religious impulses, and the confused and synchronistic use of religious dogma in the

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secular—but in the now measuring tens of thousands of public discussions around who Serena Williams is, the current collapsing notion of Western personhood, and indeed christology, is laid bare. Perhaps here, I am suggesting, some way forward in reimagining christology is made apparent.

WHO IS SERENA WILLIAMS? If there are stable facts we can simply offer up in an account of another subject, then Serena Williams was born in the September of 1981, the youngest of five sisters in a tightly knit family. At age three, the family moved to Compton, California, where the duo now known as The Williams Sisters, began playing tennis. The move to Compton needn’t be, but it is, a piece of biographical data that comes to take on significant currency in the future narration of Williams’ life and identity. As Josh Sides quipped, by the 1980s Compton had become “a metonym for the urban crisis.”6 Given the exaggerated rhetoric around crime and violence in Compton7 and the excessively aggressive practices of the LAPD in targeting the predominantly black children of Compton,8 the story of Serena Williams has come to be framed around the dominant idea of Compton. For example, in a 2002 Savoy interview held in a LA hair salon, sports journalist Roy Johnson inexplicably opens with, “You grew up light years away from all this in Compton.” In what would become the typical Serena Williams response, she quickly returns, “Not really.”9 Offering a hint at how she would consistently unsettle the identity being written onto her, Williams went on to discuss her broad experiences and views of the world. And yet the racist, geopolitical assumptions remained the framing question: “Can anything good come from Compton?”10 As a tennis player, Serena William’s holds too many records to mention, including 23 grand slam singles titles—the most of any player in the open era. If we were to be consistent in the ways we measure such things, it can easily be said that Serena Williams is one of the greatest athletes of all time. It is precisely this caveat that reveals that way identity is always already construed across raced and gendered lines. As Williams recently said herself: “If I were a man, I would have 100 percent been considered the greatest ever a long time ago.”11 But Serena Williams is not a man, and inasmuch as public discourse attempts to extract an identity from her, normative boundaries are placed around how it is even possible to conceive of her in terms of personhood. Researchers have consistently shown how the bodies of black, female athletes have been overwhelmingly portrayed both as hypersexual on one hand, and hyper-muscular and “manly” on the other.12 It is a development that McKay and Johnson show sits squarely within “the historical context

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of black women’s enslavement, colonial conquest, and exhibition as ethnographic grotesquerie.”13 The modern re-conception of sport, therefore, is not coincidentally stacked in favor of white bodies: muscular Christianity, the organized Victorian movement established to sure up white masculinity in the nineteenth century, leading to groups such as the YMCA, emerges at precisely the same time as outworking’s of social Darwinism develop into biological reductionisms of race, mobilizing into full-blown theories of white supremacy. Lingering forms of such scientific racism are made most apparent with black athlete’s talent repeatedly reduced to natural ability, or the “innate physicality of the Black body.”14 An assumption held in contrast to white athletes who presumably bring intelligence and discipline into the sporting arena. Consider the case of Althea Gibson, a largely unknown tennis player. Gibson was the winner of multiple tennis grand slams, and the only other African American winner of Wimbledon (1956). While the US State Department chose Gibson to travel globally as a “race ambassador,” improving international impressions of American race-relations,15 she was only allowed to play on the American tour after she was forced to take a chromosome test to confirm that she was indeed female.16 From the onset, Williams’ public life was likewise marked by an incessant need to narrate and identify what kind of body/person she was and is. The obvious signifiers for mainstream media have always been her race and gender. As a black woman, Williams occupies that conflicting space of being marked simultaneously too manly and too sexual, a form of what Deborah King famously called multiple jeopardy.17 However, this is not a de-historicized identity; it is particularized under the broad aims of the neo-liberalist, capitalist project in which the tennis player Serena Williams, a black woman, is first and foremost a commodity. And she has most certainly been critiqued for forgetting the limitations capital seeks to place on her. From the earliest stages of their careers, both Williams sisters sought to explore multiple and varied interests, including opening businesses and pursuing careers far outside the tennis world. The media, tennis commentators, and especially former players such as Chris Evert18 and Martina Navratilova19 have reproached Serena for not caring enough about tennis, for having too many interests, and ultimately, for not settling her identity solely as a tennis player. The refusal to accept Serena Williams as a not-to-be-possessed-subject, as a woman with agency, is obvious in the recurrent anxiety expressed around Williams’ outside-of-tennis life, powerfully demonstrating the “ideologies and social structures that have encouraged a black presence in sport but not in other realms of social life.”20 It has often been Williams’ ambivalence about playing tennis that causes the most outrage, revealing a primary mode through which the commodification of sports stars works in public discourse. By establishing a kind of double bind—the athlete must remain myopically focused on their sport while also publicly proving how

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essentially fun and privileged their activities are—we are exposed to the “systemic erasure of the labor and agency of athletes, and in particular, of black women.”21 If Serena Williams has been received in the global market as a particular kind of identity, the demand is for an identity that serves the broader aims of patriarchal white supremacy. And yet for the most part, Serena Williams seems largely nonplussed about her inability to achieve the personhood demanded of her. At times, she has taken on the mantle of certain forms of identity politics in regard to her race and gender (an identity politics broadly conceived as that critical interjecting work of decentering ideologically oppressive discourses) using identity politics strategically and fluidly. A 2005 episode of the ESPN show The Life, for example, documents Williams’ work with black communities, disrupting the narrative of her alleged frivolous outside-of-tennis life, and placing her work within a localized expression of subversion and activism. More recently, Williams’ postpartum body has been a near universal site of general maternal empowerment and health,22 but while Williams’ fecundity become the opportunity for discourses of empowerment for all mothers everywhere, the sudden and racist backlash to Williams’ dispute with the umpire at the 2018 US Open,23 shows how her “capacity to speak multi-vocally as both black mother and as a ‘the mother of us all’ could be quickly and violently foreclosed.”24 Williams has done little to defend herself against these multiple charges of identity transgression, and often seeks to push back when interviewers try to concretely name her as a particular body or a particular identity. Responding in 2016 to a journalist’s repeated attempts to define her as a crusader, Williams elusively shrugged, “I’m just doing me.”25 It is this Serena that we are told mystifies tennis commentators. Despite all the attempts to narrate her life, we have been unable to extract a settled, stable identity from Serena Williams. And one gets the sense that Williams knows that she inhabits this slippery space of personhood in the public square, one that cannot be fully grasped by any public discourse. It is not surprising, then, when she turns to (entirely sympathetic) essayist Claudia Rankine during an interview and impatiently declares, “You don’t understand me.”26 Simply put, Serena Williams has confounded the tennis world. For two decades now, journalists of sport and pop culture, along with tennis commentators, have struggled to come to terms with an identity that simply cannot be rendered stable. Many questions have been raised in terms of an identity politic Williams may assume, with race and gender consistently intermingled. These persistent interrogations often give way to more overtly racist questions pertaining to Williams’ personhood, exposing a lingering social Darwinism that calls into question the fullness of humanity within the body of Serena Williams. Her body becomes the site of a suspected failure of normative human categories and we are unable to confidently abstract identity

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from her, for it is precisely her black-woman’s body that has always been “out-of-place in professional tennis.”27 Williams fails to attain the fullness of being appropriate to proper tennis-playing subjects. Such failure to obtain personhood imposed upon Williams, I will suggest, might be considered an ideological effect of how ideal personhood has been normed in the West through the ideal personhood of Jesus.

TRADITIONAL ACCOUNTS OF THE PERSONHOOD OF JESUS Christology has been driven by a need to claim something of personhood, specifically, the personhood of Jesus the Christ. The early centuries of Christianity disclose a palpable pressure to establish some parameters around right christological talk, and though the particular technical distinctions that are made in what we come to receive as the synoptic gospels, in patristic texts from Irenaeus to Cyril, and from Nicaea to Chalcedon, with each seeming to include apophatic gestures, the work of traditional christology has largely sought to define in positivist terms the boundaries around Jesus’ personhood, and indeed, provide something like an account of his identity. Clearly this is an ambiguous objective in medieval theology, but it is a project that in the age of enlightenment assumes both a sense of urgency and epistemological confidence: not only have we sought to know all of who Jesus was in a historical sense—what did Jesus really say and do?28—we have now attempted through myopic forms of spirituality and discipleship, to reduplicate his very actions: to be like Jesus. What much christology has produced through a strongidentity christology, is the most centered of all Christo-centric christology, a christology that won’t let Jesus move, that won’t let Jesus declare “you don’t understand me.” Such insistence upon strong-identity christology nurtures a number of problematic gestures within Christian theology. The first is the ongoing question of Christ made in our image. As we know well, talk of God or the divine-man has become increasingly problematic, especially in the West. For many, the German Ludwig Feuerbach hammered what seemed to be a final nail in the coffin: “God did not, as the Bible says, make man in His image; on the contrary, man, as I have shown in The Essence of Christianity, made God in his image.”29 And yet, if christology is now also partially understood as a phenomenon of humanist projection drawn from the ideals of Greek philosophy and given an anthropological explanation, one might be forgiven for not noticing. In the ongoing, endlessly detailed attempts to define the personhood and identity of who Jesus is and was, very little attention is given to the kind of Feuerbachian projection games still in play. Instead, such attempts continue to hold an epistemological confidence in the

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project of traditional christology. Consider the Princeton Center for Theological Enquiry project Seeking the Identity of Jesus, which was conducted during the early years of the new millennium. The editors of the culminating volume made the project’s intentions clear: “The contemporary marketplace offers an astonishing, even bewildering, variety of interpretations of the identity of Jesus. The problem for seekers of Jesus is to sort out what is genuine from what is spurious.”30 One answer has been to multiply the image repertoires available when it comes to thinking christology. The effect of such non-normative images of Christ is undoubtedly powerful, opening christology toward a multiplicity of persons. British artist and sculptor Edwina Sandys’ 1975 bronze sculpture of a female Christ titled Christa is an infamous example. More recent works include Janet McKenzie’s African American Jesus of the People, Colombian figurative artist and sculptor Fernando Botero’s paintings of “fat Jesus,” or Cuban photographer Erik Ravelo’s photographs titled Los Intocables (The Untouchables) depicting children hanging from the cross-shaped bodies of soldiers, surgeons, priests, and Ronald McDonald.31 As signifiers of Jesus that broke open settled identity makers, such as the maleness of Jesus, these images have the capacity to disrupt the meaning-making mechanisms that have historically produced the identity or personhood of Christ. Yet insofar as the strategy of multiplication still appeals to the attractive power of identity— or pleasure of identity gained, as Foucault described it—the move inevitably enforces legibility and normativity upon the self, inadvertently creating the conditions of exclusion, even when what is being imaged is what was once excluded. There is always somebody, or some nobody, who falls outside of the normed frame. Identity, whenever settled and possessed, needs excluded others. A second problem is the commodification of the Jesus of christology. On the surface are the obvious modes in which identities attached to Jesus become themselves identity markers of capitalist consumption: I know which Jesus I’d rather buy, and I if I’m honest, I also know the one I am selling. But at a deeper, more noxious level, plays out an economy-of-logic, and a logic-of-economy, to which much Christian theology is enmeshed. If the traditional questions of christology relate to Jesus’ personhood and identity, we can be sure that this will be an identity that we can put to work, to construct productively, to bank on the returns of investment. It is a logic that goes all the way down. As Devon Singh has shown, the development of christology occurred during a historical period in which the missional work of the church and the advancement of Rome become one oikonomia. Thus it is an economic logic that helps us see how the “heavenly Logos and administrator, associated with precious material resources, the image of God and the redemption of the material world, will become the stuff of economy itself as its chief

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currency.”32 Singh goes on to demonstrate how this divine currency—Jesus Christ—produces the economic logic of salvation at the core of colonialism and continues to shape financial institution and market practices in the West.33 As we can see in the case of Serena Williams, commodified identities are never ultimately constructed simply for a cause, like liberation; they will always be put to work within an economy, and our current economy is the neoliberal, teleological objections of patriarchal white supremacy. Here emerges a further problem in terms of discipleship-driven sublimation. As I have suggested earlier, if Serena Williams has failed to obtain or submit to the personhood imposed on her, she has likewise failed to cede to the ideology of normed personhood in the West. Again, this can be read through the ideal personhood of Jesus. In ascribing personhood through logos, a totalizing, and in-gathering claim of absolute sensibility comes to bear on christology. Certainly, logos could be read differently, but bathed as it is in the deep river of patriarchal white supremacy, logos stands still as the immutable man-god of classical metaphysics. The glaringly obvious difficulties in relating this metaphysical One to the bourgeoning discourses of human subjectivities in psychoanalysis, queer theory, identity politics, bio/medical sciences, and post-humanist studies are skipped over in contemporary discussions of Christian discipleship, and the existential realities of the human life so easily sublimated into Christ. It is an ironic move, given the elusive identity and even confusing body of Jesus portrayed in the gospels,34 but it has been a sustaining move nonetheless. Christology has sought to project metaphysical notions of identity onto the body of Jesus, and in doing so, it has sought to gather in, and to sublimate, all identity. This is the strange dance of the contemporary disciple, called and gathered into this immutable identity, painstakingly seeking to give over a self into the One in whom all subjectivity is quite clearly understood.

A CHRISTOLOGY OF NON-IDENTITY Perhaps the historically dominant interpretation of priesthood as exclusive to men demonstrates the way a stitched-up identity has functioned in terms of christology. Certain identity markers are read in universalist and stable terms so as to define how and who you and I can be. Normed ideas about what it is that might make a man or make Jesus a man have been awarded a logic, a metaphysic that, even when making little sense empirically—claims that break down in the face of the difference/plurality of human bodies—are projected upon bodies so as to be identifiable, so as to make an identity. We could also think of women counseled to submit to violent husbands, husbands who, just as Christ heads the church, serve in headship over women’s relational

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being. These are some of the obvious, oppressive, exclusionary consequences of strong-identity christology that has worked on flesh throughout the history of the Christian church. But as I’ve argued, the problem sinks more deeply into common assumptions about personhood in general, especially in regard to the demanded coherent, economic logic of a stable identity. Given these oppressive connections, the question I am posing is regarding the possibility of a christology of non-identity. A christology of non-identity could be understood in terms of contemporaneity. For Kierkegaard, contemporaneity forms the context and possibility of discipleship. The task of discipleship is not rooted in a timeless call into a stable identity—such as Christ—but emerges only within the disciple’s contemporary situation. As Kierkegaard writes in the invocation to Practice in Christianity, “contemporaneity is the condition of faith, and more sharply defined, it is faith.”35 If we can know Jesus, and the epistemological possibility here is simply another name for relationality, we come into relation with Jesus in the moment of ethical decision. Embracing a christology of non-identity does not simply refuse enlightenment systems of knowing, but releases subjects to act in deeply historicized and particularized ways. If Jesus’ identity is only repeated contingently—as an identity without identity—and performed through non-identical repetition, then the possibility of a multiplicity of ethical acts emerges without the strictures of totalizing discourse. A second way to move toward non-identity is though multiplicity. As a strategy, multiplicity certainly has its limits, which I’ve hoped to show. However, the presence of multiple identities, multiple bodies, and multiplicity everywhere, remains an often-hidden reality overshadowed by a normative center. What I’ve argued on this point is twofold: (1) the rhetorical moves involved in the quest for a strong-identity Jesus smother multiplicity by constructing notions of personhood that sublimate all identities in the normative practices of discipleship and (2) multiplicity already exists within any single subject, and even when the public has strong motivations to reduce a subject to a single discourse of identity—such as in the case of Serena Williams—whereby identity slips, and our carefully constructed narratives fail. Multiplicity then, could be used as a strategy not simply to extend the possible signifiers of multiple subjects, but as a conception of personhood itself.36 A christology loosened toward such multiplicities of personhood is not only then able to engage with contemporary discourses of human subjectivities in psychoanalysis, queer theory, identity politics, bio/medical sciences, and post-humanist studies, but also able to re-frame Christian discipleship away from coercive normativities. Finally, a christology of non-identity requires work toward the reeconomizing of christology. To re-economize means not only to reckon with the inexorable relationship between Christianity and capitalism,37 but

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to interrogate the ways in which theology has systematized economic teleologies of identity across the whole range of human experience. Within a christology of non-identity, re-economizing work means the abandonment of productivity, of productive christology. If, in historicized and particularized contexts, christology then answers the question: “Who do you say that I am?”, a response is never given in the hope of getting a job done. Christ cannot be yet another commodity to be used up. A CHRISTOLOGY OF NON-IDENTITY—A FAILURE Such non-identity points to a kind of apophatic christology, a christology that recognizes that the patterns of discipleship are already marked by unknowing dispossession; a christology that remembers and forgets who Jesus is;38 a christology that acts toward liberation and is not yet understood. It is a christological approach that, like Serena Williams, remains defenseless against the failures of normative categories of identity. Instead, the failure of personhood or identity in Christ is given over as faithfulness to the movement of a body, the body of God incarnate who exceeds all identity. Such failure is a queer art, to be sure,39 but against a long history of economized, productive logic, it might be failure that finally lets Jesus move. NOTES 1. Tara Magdalinksi and Timothy J.L. Chandler, With God on their Side: Sport in the Service of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002), 1. 2. Cited in J. A Mangan and Boria Majumbdar, “Series Forward,” Sport in the Global Society (New York: Routledge). 3. See Magdalinksi and Chandler, With God on their Side, 4–5. 4. Rebecca T. Alpert, Religion and Sports (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 33. 5. In a forthcoming monograph, I will attend to each of these theological themes in relation to sport. See Janice McRandal, Theology Contested: Bodies, Sport, and Motion (Minneapolis: Fortress Academic, forthcoming). 6. Josh Sides, “Straight into Compton: American Dreams, Urban Nightmares, and the Metamorphosis of a Black Suburb,” American Quarterly 56.3 (2004): 583–605. 7. As the 1982 Rand led Department of Housing and Urban Development study, “Troubled Suburbs: an exploratory study” demonstrated, Compton was no more “troubled” than numerous other suburbs surveyed, and by the department’s own measuring tools, far less troubled. See Magdalinksi and Chandler, With God on their Side, 596.

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8. Mike Davis describes the Police chief Daryl Gates’ approach during this period: “kids are humiliatingly forced to ‘kiss the sidewalk’ or spread-eagled against police cruisers while officers check their names against computerized files of gang members. There are 1,453 arrests; the kids are processed in mobile booking centers, mostly for trivial offenses like delinquent parking tickets or curfew violations. Hundreds more, uncharged, have their names and addresses entered into the electronic gang register for future surveillance.” Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Evacuating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, second edition 2006), 268. 9. Roy S. Johnson, “Sister Slam: interview with Serena Williams by Roy S. Jonson,” Savoy 2.9 (2002): 50–56, p. 50. 10. A narrative projected on both Venus and Serena Williams and described by one scholar as the “ghetto-to-US Open final” narratives. Nancy E. Spencer, “From ‘child’s play’ to ‘party crasher’: Venus Williams, Racism and Professional Women’s Tennis,” David L. Andrews and Steven J. Jackson, Sports Stars: The Cultural Politics of Sporting Celebrity (London: Routledge, 2001), 98. 11. “Serena Williams sits down with Common to talk about race and identity,” The Undefeated, Dec 19, 2016. https://theundefeated​.com​/features​/serena​-williams​ -sits​-down​-with​-common​-to​-talk​-about​-race​-and​-identity/ 12. See the extensive analysis of related research in Jaime Schultz, “Reading the Catsuit: Serena Williams and the Production of Blackness at the 2002 U.S. Open,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 29.3 (2005): 338–357. 13. James McKay and Helen Johnson, “Pornographic Eroticism and Sexual Grotesquerie in Representations of African American Sportswomen,” Social Identities 14.4 (2008): 493. 14. D.L. Andrews. “The Fact(s) of Michael Jordon’s Blackness: Excavating a Floating Racial Signifier,” in Michael Jordon, Inc.: Corporate Sport, Media Culture, and Late Modern America, ed. D.L. Andrews (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 121. 15. Bud Collins and Zander Nollander, Bud Collins’ Modern Encyclopedia of Tennis (Detroit: Visible Ink, second edition 1994), 695. 16. William C. Rhoden, “The Unpleasant Reality for Women in Sports,” New York Times, April 9, 2007. https://www​.nytimes​.com​/2007​/04​/09​/sports​/09rhoden​.html 17. Deborah K. King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology,” Signs 14.1 (1988): 42–72. 18. In a Tennis Magazine open letter, Evert wrote, “You’ve become very good at many things, but how many people would trade that to be great at just one thing? I don’t see how acting and designing clothes can compare with the pride of being the best tennis player in the world.” Chris Evert, “Chrissie’s Page: Dear Serena,” in Tennis Magazine, 2005, retrieved from http://www​.tennis​.ireneeng​.com/​?p​=12790 19. Navratilova was clear and directs “Tennis has to be the only thing in your life. You can have a hobby that you do last thing at night if you like but you can’t be scheduling your tennis around your hobbies. You can have outside interests but tennis has to be firmly No 1. It has to be the most important thing and I don’t get the feeling that it was for either Venus or Serena.” Martina Navratilova, “Williams has lost her

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aura of invincibility and may not find it again,” Guardian, June 26, 2004. Retrieved from https://www​.theguardian​.com​/sport​/2004​/jun​/26​/wimbledon2004​.wimbledon6 20. Delia D. Douglas, “Venus, Serena, and the Inconspicuous Consumption of Blackness: A Commentary on Surveillance, Race Talk, and New Racism(s),” Journal of Black Studies 43.2 (2012): 131. See also C. Richard King and Charles Fruehling Springwood, Beyond the Cheers: Race As Spectacle in College Sport (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). 21. David J. Leonard, “Serena Williams: Ain’t I a Champion,” The NewBlackMan (in Exile), January 12, 2012. Retrieved from https://drdavidjleonard​.com​/tag​/serena​ -williams/ 22. See for example, Christine Brennan, “Serena Williams Steps up as a superhero to New Moms,” USA Today, May 30, 2018. Retrieved from https://www​.usatoday​ .com​/story​/sports​/columnist​/brennan​/2018​/05​/30​/serena​-williams​-new​-mom​-fierce ​ -candid​/655546002/ 23. At its worst in the Australian Herald Sun publication of a flagrant, racist cartoon. 24. Jennifer Nash, “Black Maternal Aesthetics,” Theory and Event 22.3 (2019): 565. 25. “Serena Williams sits down with Common to talk about race and identity,” The Undefeated, Dec 19, 2016. https://theundefeated​.com​/features​/serena​-williams​ -sits​-down​-with​-common​-to​-talk​-about​-race​-and​-identity 26. Claudia Rankine, “The Meaning of Serena Williams,” in The New York Times Public Profiles: Serena Williams (New York: Rosen Publishing Group, 2019), 206. 27. Jennifer Nash, Black Maternal Aesthetics, 560. 28. I am thinking in particular of the various quests for the historical Jesus, along with the Jesus Seminar. 29. Ludwig Feuerbach, “Lecture XX,” Lectures on the Essence of Religion, translated by Ralph Manheim (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 187. 30. Beverley Roberts Gaventa and Richard B Hays, Seeking the Identity of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 1. 31. I have written about this elsewhere. See Janice McRandal, “Embodied Gods: Anthropomorphism and Subjectivity,” in Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender—‘God’, ed. Sîan Hawthorne (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2017), 63–77. 32. Devin Singh, Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West (Stanford: California: Stanford University Press, 2018). 33. Singh, Divine Currency, 204, 205. 34. See for example the alternative conception of Jesus that appears identity-less, in Manuel Villalobos, Abject Bodies in the Gospel of Mark (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012). 35. Soren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Kierkegaard’s Writings, Vol. 20 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 9. 36. This is an approach taken up in numerous ways throughout others discourses, but especially in queer theory and in terms of fragmented identity, performativity, and multiple identification. For example, Elspeth Probyn examines the way

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these multiplicities produce new modes of personhood, the way in which what she describes as outside belonging “operates now not as a substantive claim, but as a manner of being.” Elspeth Probyn, Outside Belonging (New York: Routledge, 1996), 8. 37. A recent attempt at this kind of project is Kathryn Tanner, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). 38. See Matthew 25. 31–40. 39. As queer theorist Jack Halberstam argues, “there is something powerful in being wrong, in losing, in failing. . . . The concepting of practicing failure perhaps prompts us to discover our inner dweeb, to be underachievers, to fall short, to get distracted, to take a detour, to find a limit, to lose out way, to forget, to avoid mastery, and, with Walker Benjamin, to recognize that ‘empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers.’ All losers are the heirs of those who lost before them. Failure loves company.” Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 120, 121.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alpert, Rebecca T. Religion and Sports. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Andrews, D.L. “The Fact(s) of Michael Jordon’s Blackness: Excavating a Floating Racial Signifier.” In Michael Jordon, Inc.: Corporate Sport, Media Culture, and Late Modern America, edited by D.L. Andrews, 107–151. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Baldwin, James. James Baldwin: Collected Essays, Volume 2, edited by Toni Morrison. Volume 98 of Library of America. London: Penguin, 1998. Collins, Bud, and Zander Nollander. Bud Collins’ Modern Encyclopedia of Tennis. Second Edition. Detroit: Visible Ink, 1994. Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Evacuating the Future in Los Angeles. Second Edition. London: Verso, 2006. Douglas, Delia D. “Venus, Serena, and the Inconspicuous Consumption of Blackness: A Commentary on Surveillance, Race Talk, and New Racism(s).” Journal of Black Studies 43.2 (2012): 127–145. Feuerbach, Ludwig. Lectures on the Essence of Religion. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. Kierkegaard, Soren. Practice in Christianity, edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Kierkegaard’s Writings, Vol. 20. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. King, Deborah K. “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology.” Signs 14.1 (1988): 42–72. Magdalinksi, Tara and Timothy J.L. Chandler. With God on their Side: Sport in the Service of Religion. New York: Routledge, 2002. McKay, James, and Helen Johnson. “Pornographic Eroticism and Sexual Grotesquerie in Representations of African American Sportswomen.” Social Identities 14.4 (2008): 491–504.

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Nash, Jennifer. “Black Maternal Aesthetics.” Theory and Event 22.3 (2019): 551–575. Probyn, Elspeth. Outside Belonging. New York: Routledge, 1996. Roberts Gaventa, Beverley, and Richard B Hays. Seeking the Identity of Jesus. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008. Sides, Josh. “Straight into Compton: American Dreams, Urban Nightmares, and the Metamorphosis of a Black Suburb.” American Quarterly 56.3 (2004): 583–605. Singh, Devin. Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018. Spencer, Nancy E. “From ‘child’s play’ to ‘party crasher’: Venus Williams, Racism and Professional Women’s Tennis.” In Sports Stars: The Cultural Politics of Sporting Celebrity, edited by David L. Andrews and Steven J. Jackson, 87–101. London: Routledge, 2001.

Chapter 8

Why Misunderstanding Matters Whiteness Made Visible to White Eyes Jenny Daggers

This opportunity to respond to Janice McRandal’s essay is much appreciated, as we share a mutual concern with reimagining Christian doctrine to reveal and challenge its long-standing subversion by dominant power relations. McRandal offers refreshing and heart-warming insight into discipleship as “performative non-identical repetition of Jesus’ non-identity,” “marked by unknowing dispossession.” In a different historical moment, this response might have profitably engaged closely with McRandal’s piece. However, I read this work during 2020, amid the solemn, energetic, and hope-inspiring push for justice by Black Lives Matter, in Brexiting Britain, with the COVID19 pandemic laying bare gross inequalities within multiethnic British society. I found myself unable to let go of an implicit imperative embedded in Serena Williams’ words, “You don’t understand me”: it is high time that white British persons of colonizer and slaver heritage endeavor to better understand how that heritage has shaped our past and present, and what this means from the perspective of those who share our national life, but whose heritage is one of British colonial occupation, including those of African slave descent. In particular, white persons need to make our cultural whiteness with all its entitlements and lingering assumptions of white superiority as visible to ourselves as it is to persons of color. This matters urgently for white liberals, as we too often assume that we are not the problem. McRandal makes a cogent case for the Christological potential in failure of normative categories of identity. Whiteness as a normative category is already failing wherever black consciousness uplifts and affirms black history, black subjectivities, and a future beyond white supremacy and cultural whiteness. However, the ongoing problem of normative whiteness must become visible to white eyes too, before it can “fail” more widely, and in failing make possible a different future for humankind. 89

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Paradoxically, if dominant cultural whiteness is to cede the center ground, white identity needs to assume greater visibility, even (temporary) fixity. Those of us who are beneficiaries of cultural whiteness need to relinquish our privileges, if the shameful yet persistent legacy of racism is to be dismantled, so that human relations come to reflect more fully God’s peaceable kingdom. As Mukti Barton puts it, “Unless the over-privileged give up something, the under-privileged cannot get what is due to them.”1 This short reflection by a white British author who is beginning to see whiteness speaks directly to white British readers, but indirectly to a wider readership.

INVISIBLE WHITENESS Amid a broad spectrum of British Christian Feminist activity during the 1980s, a Quaker Women’s Group publication, Bringing the Invisible into the Light,2 made a feminist challenge to the Society of Friends. The authors’ aim was to make visible previously invisible sexism. The comparable task of making whiteness visible to white eyes has been set for a generation. However, despite a growing literature on whiteness by postcolonial authors of color, white reception to this instance of “bringing the invisible into the light” has been slow. My own intellectual journey as a feminist theologian was always in the company of black feminists and womanists—in the early days, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and black British writer, Hazel Carby. Susan Thistlethwaite’s Sex, Race and God led me to think of myself as a “recovering racist.”3 However, looking back in light of whiteness made visible, I see that I placed womanist struggles in parallel with my own, rather than as any kind of challenge to me; further, I succumbed to an implicit liberal white British notion that it is really North American white feminists who need to recover from racism. I was slow to recognize that I need to interrogate my own privilege derived from cultural whiteness. What took me so long? Looking back, I reach the uncomfortable recognition that white feminist preoccupations are writ large in my previous theological research interests. I have enjoyed the intellectual gymnastics of white feminist theory, and reveled in reappropriation of the “grand” traditions of classical and modern European thought and theology by and for white women thinkers. A white organizing perspective persisted even in my critique of Eurocentrism and of the entanglement of European Christianity in the colonial project.4 This is evident, given that I pursued this line of enquiry without recourse to the body of black British theology that was growing alongside my own work, and without giving due consideration in my account of Christian

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theology and colonialism to the British slave trade from Africa to the New World, and to British-instituted chattel slavery. Both deficiencies became apparent following the publication of my book, Postcolonial Theology of Religions.5 My project of “disentangling” Christianity from colonialism requires two things: a more adequate critical account of colonial Christianity as white Christianity, which persists in post-imperial form; and receptive engagement with the critique of whiteness articulated by black theologians. Based on this recognition, I conclude that white research preoccupations generate their own intrinsic criteria for selecting research sources. Frequently overlooked are sources authored by black theologians, with their own inherent concerns, as these often do not furnish what the white researcher is seeking. WHITE EYES LEARNING TO SEE WHITENESS So what is to be done? My brief discussion here draws on black British theology, with particular focus on the story told by black British women,6 to identify three necessary steps for the myopic white reader: first, engage the critique of whiteness; second, reappraise British history in light of recovered black history; and third, decenter or displace whiteness. The Challenge Valentina Alexander calls the emergence of black Christian consciousness, “an epistemology that challenges whiteness.”7 The challenge is a matter of life or death, and the fruit of hard labor. Its primary purpose is that black persons may breathe, survive, and thrive. As Kate Coleman testifies, her emergent womanist consciousness empowered her to recognize in the experience of black women within British churches a “crisis of validity,” where their talents and vocations go unacknowledged, and a “crisis of invisibility,” given that “theological voices of significant Black British men and women were never heard” during her theological training.8 As Lorraine Dixon observes, racism in British mainstream churches is expressed in the exclusion of black persons from positions of authority; further “the structures that make us invisible in our own churches are the results of history and White supremacist practices that promote Black inferiority.”9 To address the invisibility of black persons in British churches, this problematic whiteness needs to become visible to white eyes, so that the challenge to whiteness is received, and white persons can take responsibility for the ongoing effects of an insufficiently acknowledged racist heritage. It is clear that the primary purpose of the challenge to whiteness, or critique

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of whiteness, is to uphold black persons, by working through black history, education, and culture to push back against the inferior positioning of black persons that is implicit, and sometimes explicit, in dominant white culture. However, the critique of whiteness is available for white readers to access, so confronting us with our otherwise invisible whiteness. Black agency comes first, but the challenge to whiteness opens the way to new possibilities for white culture and the future of humanity. As Debra Washington neatly puts it, (African American) womanist theology is “primarily concerned with the liberation of black women and black people from white oppression, the liberation of white oppressors from themselves and the reconciliation of humanity.”10 History Reappraised Reappraisal of British history in light of recovered black history makes whiteness more widely visible. This can never be merely an addition to what we already know, but rather it demands a dismantling of cultural whiteness, so that the ongoing effects of the historical actions of our British ancestors may be urgently addressed in the present day. In competition with other European powers, British colonialism was in the making from the sixteenth century, including the slave trade of Africans to colonies in the Americas and Caribbean.11 White Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, sanctioned this process. In these “offshore” locations, Britain developed efficient colonial economies that produced commodities, and augmented existing global markets for British-made and British-traded goods. The slave labor of Africans was crucial for this economic system, with the associated devastating impact of the slave trade that lasted over two and a half centuries on the African continent and peoples, the cruel and careless loss of African lives during transit from home to plantation, and the reduction of human beings to the status of chattels to be bought, sold, and exploited without constraint. From Britain’s Eurocentric viewpoint over this period, the slave trade and slavery took place mainly “off stage,” as part of a colonial process where the wider world was seen as ripe for exploitation by whichever European power could gain the upper hand. The full impact of the slave trade and slavery on Britain’s wealth creation is slowly emerging into white sight: the wealth created by the slave trade and slave labor financed industrialization “at home,” while compensation paid to slave owners when slavery was abolished provided significant new funds for investment in Britain. Wealth accrued through slavery was also bequeathed to the British people through philanthropic projects that enriched British cultural life. No compensation was paid to the freed slaves themselves to assist them in their transition to a new form of life. The incontrovertible direct link

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between the brutal “overseas” reality of slavery and the prosperity generated in Britain’s industrial revolution has been obscure to white eyes.12 As European modernity unfolded, in exact step with the centuries of slave trade and with wider colonial expansion, the defining feature of cultural whiteness took shape: European belief in the superiority of white civilization. This belief found expression in explicit theories of white superiority and white supremacy, fostering white blindness to the human sophistication of different cultures and a paltry justification for denying to Africans and other people of color the human rights and freedoms that marked modern Europe. Rather cultural whiteness gained strength in the notion of colonialism as a white civilizing mission, with white Christianity as a major tool, and the figure of white savior, so removing from white sight the oppressions of slavery and colonialism. Those of us who identify as (white) liberals distance ourselves from this overt white supremacist racism. We tend to place ourselves in the heritage of abolitionists of slave trade and slavery; not as its beneficiaries. In this narrative, we white British were among the first to abolish the slave trade, and then slavery. There are two major problems here. First, the white savior complex denies black agency both in slave uprisings, and in arguing for abolition on grounds of the human dignity of African-descended slaves. This denial remains deeply embedded in white British culture. Thus Coleman gives as an example of significant black British voices that went unheard in her ministerial training, theological arguments against slavery and slavers by Olaudah Equiano, published in 1788.13 I note Equiano makes direct reference to “the oppressive white,”14 so articulating a critique of whiteness that is absent from the words of white British abolitionists. Coleman’s example takes us to the second problem, which is the British tendency to consider the matter dealt with once slave trade and slavery were abolished, to be replaced by benign colonial rule in the Caribbean, and eventually political independence of Caribbean nations. Theological complicity with this state of affairs is revealed when Anthony Reddie laments “the continued paucity of theological texts written by White British theologians that address the legacy of slavery, colonialism and racism.”15 To address this, we need to recognize our white British forebears as architects of a modern slave trade that lasted over 250 years to 1807, and colonial plantation reliant on slave labor that persisted until 1834. We need to heed postcolonial critique that identifies “the oppressive white” at work in British colonialism and in imperial Christian mission. We need to acknowledge the ongoing effects of the enforced African diaspora and subjugation of Africans through slavery, and particularly of the related cultural assumption of whiteness as central and whiteness as a norm that derives from self-justifying Eurocentric notions of white superiority. When we as beneficiaries of cultural whiteness learn to

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value the challenge of whiteness and become receptive to it, we can appreciate, welcome, and support the repair of this long-standing and continuing damage. Displacing Whiteness Given this history, it is unsurprising that cultural whiteness is deeply embedded in our national institutions and culture, including our historical denominational churches. One shameful example is the racism experienced by Windrush immigrants from the colonial Caribbean, including the recent scandal of those deprived of their rightful status in Britain due to lack of newly required documentation: a side effect of our Home Office “hostile environment” to illegal immigration. Liberal legislation in terms of “race relations” then “equal opportunities” has been insufficient to counter these forms of cultural whiteness. British institutional racism is grounded in the ongoing cultural whiteness that assumes white superiority, a problem exemplified in European theology and church. Thus Robert Beckford identifies white supremacy in English Christianity as “an implicit methodology, practice and belief that elevates European and Euro-American thought above all others.”16 As A. D. A. France-Williams shows, with a graciously light touch, black priests have been grappling with persistent institutional racism within the Church of England over a thirty-year period.17 Despite institutional racism, black British cultures are ascendant. The norm of cultural whiteness tends to homogenize all those it excludes as black, or people of color; more positively, “the experience of oppressive and discriminatory practices with a uniquely British flavour” fosters solidarity in a diverse black British milieu.18 Coleman points to active identity formation by black British persons from “increasingly complex and developing ethnic minority communities,” which effectively brings problematic whiteness into focus through “agential articulation in many different contexts,” capable of building a coalition between groups when challenging whiteness.19 This vibrant diversity is also given exuberant expression by Bernadine Evaristo in her Booker award novel, Girl, Woman, Other.20 Displacing now visible whiteness (with its associated Euro-classical and totalizing Eurocentric theology) makes space for the postcolonial woman subject to move from margin to center.21 Alexander states that her encounter with Afrocentric and black theologies was like looking in the mirror and seeing her own image reflected for the first time.22 For white persons to assist, as opposed to resist, the displacing of whiteness we need to understand its racist origins, and the harm it continues to visit on “global majority people.”23 As Tessa Henry-Robinson puts it, the Black Lives Matter movement invites individual white persons “to challenge and change

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what White identity has come to represent in its relationship to Blackness.”24 Theologically, as Desmond Tutu suggests, “Black identity represents the Imago Dei in which God redeems White identity.”25 For Dixon, taking the incarnation seriously requires black Christians to share the treasures of black identity:26 whiteness as a norm is necessarily displaced—and so redeemed— for such sharing to be a possibility. Coleman comments on her research subjects—black British women in ministry—as ready to build alternative identities including persons from other communities, both ethnic minority and even white, “emerging out of shared locale, concern and commitment.”27 She thus points the way beyond displaced whiteness to new creative possibilities. France-Williams suggests that we need to distill what is of value in white culture, tip the rest away, and then add the distillation into a larger postcolonial pot.28 Displacing whiteness means being ready to tip away some elements of our white heritage, and to enjoy new (always fluid) forms of British identity. White feminists who resist heteropatriarchal displacement, can be ready to adjust their position as the critique of whiteness moves from margin to center. The former empire has done us the honor of “returning home.”29 Despite lingering “apparitions of a British imperial yesteryear,”30 the “cultural effects”31 of this return with its inherent challenge of whiteness, revealing the preposterous notion of white superiority as foundation, are that whiteness as center cannot hold. In this failure, driven by a “redemptive vengeance”32 which is the redemption of whiteness, new possibilities of a common good appear. Michael Jagessar speaks of “displace theologizing,” in answer to his question as to “how, given our diversity, do we renegotiate belonging together around a common table?”33 Rather than grieving for what must be tipped away, we learn to delight in the ever-changing manifestation of the kingdom of God among us and the shared eschatological feast that awaits humankind “after whiteness.”34 NOTES 1. Mukti Barton, “Reflecting on the Story of Ruth,” in Black Theology in Britain: A Reader, ed. Michael N. Jagessar and Anthony G. Reddie (London: Equinox, 2007), 237. 2. Quaker Women’s Group, Bringing the Invisible into the Light: Some Quaker Feminists Speak of their Experience (Ashford: Headley, 1986). 3. Susan B. Thistlethwaite, Sex, Race and God (London: Chapman, 1990). 4. Jenny Daggers, Postcolonial Theology of Religions: Particularism and Pluralism in World Christianity (London: Routledge, 2013). 5. Meeting black British theologian Michael Jagessar at Episcopal Divinity School in 2014—for the conference that led to Kwok Pui-lan and Stephen Burns, eds., Postcolonial Practice of Ministry: Leadership, Liturgy, and Interfaith Engagement

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(Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016)—led me to question how I had previously missed his contribution to British theology. A question in the same year from African American graduate student at Emory University, Jeania Ree Moore, as to why there was no consideration of the slave trade and slavery in my book, led me to consider the impact of this omission. 6. In “Black Theology and Black Liberation: A Womanist Perspective,” Kate Coleman addresses black British women, saying that rather than over-relying on African American womanist theology, “We too have a story to tell,” Black Theology in Britain: A Journal of Contextual Praxis 1 (1998): 68, 69. 7. Valentina Alexander, “Afrocentric and Black Christian Consciousness: Towards an Honest Intersection,” Black Theology in Britain 1 (1998): 3. 8. Kate Coleman, “Black Theology and Black Liberation,” in Black Theology in Britain, ed. Jagessar and Reddie, 60, 61, 62. 9. Lorraine Dixon, “bell hooks: Teller of Truth and Dreamer of Dreams,” in Black Theology in Britain, ed. Jagessar and Reddie, 126. 10. Cited by Kate Coleman, “Black Theology and Black Liberation,” 66. 11. My brief account here draws on David Olosuga, Black and British: a Forgotten History (London: Macmillan, 2016), also BBC 2 series of the same title. 12. These economic and cultural benefits of slave trade and slave labor profit did not benefit all British people equally: poverty persisted within the British working classes of the industrial revolution, and it persists to this day. 13. In Coleman, “Black Theology and Black Liberation,” 62, citing Equiano’s letter to the Public Advertiser. 14. Coleman, “Black Theology and Black Liberation,” 62. 15. Anthony Reddie, Theologising Brexit: a Liberationist and Postcolonial Critique (London: Routledge, 2019), 91. 16. Robert Beckford, ‘“Doing’ Black Theology in the UKKK,” Black Theology in Britain 4 (2000): 56. 17. A. D. A. France-Williams, Ghost Ship: Institutional Racism and the Church of England, (London: SCM, 2020). 18. Kate Coleman, “Another Kind of Black,” Black Theology: An International Journal 5.3 (2007): 298. 19. Coleman, “Another Kind of Black,” 285, 287. 20. Bernadine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019). 21. Coleman, “Another Kind of Black,” 302. 22. Alexander, “Afrocentric and Black British Consciousness,” 4. 23. I take this phrase from Gus John, cited in France-Williams, Ghost Ship, 1. 24. Tessa Henry-Robinson, “Blackness, Black Power and God-Talk: a Reflection,” Black Theology: An International Journal 15.2 (2017): 124. 25. Cited by Henry-Robinson, “Blackness, Black Power . . . ,” 123. 26. Dixon, “bell hooks,” 37. 27. Coleman, “Another Kind of Black,” 292. 28. France-Williams, Ghost Ship, 8. 29. Beckford, “‘Doing’ Black Theology in the UKKK,” 54. 30. The phrase is France-Williams’, Ghost Ship, 8.

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31. Beckford, “‘Doing’ Black Theology in the UKKK,” 54. 32. Beckford, “‘Doing’ Black Theology in the UKKK,” 60, referring to constructively channeled black anger in response to everyday racial terror in Britain. 33. Michael Jagessar, “Dis-Place Theologizing: Fragments of Intercultural Adventurous God-Talk,” in Black Theology: An International Journal 13.3 (2015): 261. 34. See Willie James Jennings, After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020) for an in-depth articulation of the damage caused by whiteness as norm in theological education in the United States, with its endless reiteration of the master-slave relation, which nonetheless always joyfully anticipates human relations “after whiteness.” See also Beverley P. Smith, “The Eucharist as a Liberation Praxis,” Black Theology in Britain 2 (1999): 66 for a vision of the Eucharist as a celebration that “presupposes the mending of all rents in the tissue of society,” through structural reconciliation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, Valentina. “Afrocentric and Black Christian Consciousness: Towards an Honest Intersection.” Black Theology in Britain: A Journal of Contextual Praxis 1 (1998): 11–19. Barton, Mukti. “Reflecting on the Story of Ruth.” In Black Theology in Britain: A Reader, edited by Michael N. Jagessar and Anthony G. Reddie, 236–238. London: Equinox, 2007. Beckford, Robert. “‘Doing’ Black Theology in the UKKK.” Black Theology in Britain: A Journal of Contextual Praxis 4 (2000): 38–60. Coleman, Kate. “Another Kind of Black.” Black Theology: An International Journal 5.3 (2007): 279–304. ———. “Black Theology and Black Liberation: A Womanist Perspective.” Black Theology in Britain: A Journal of Contextual Praxis 1 (1998): 59–69. ———. “Black Theology and Black Liberation: A Womanist Perspective.” In Black Theology in Britain: A Reader, edited by Michael N. Jagessar and Anthony G. Reddie. London: Equinox, 2007. Daggers, Jenny. Postcolonial Theology of Religions: Particularism and Pluralism in World Christianity. London: Routledge, 2013. Dixon, Lorraine. “bell hooks: Teller of Truth and Dreamer of Dreams.” In Black Theology in Britain: A Reader, edited by Michael N. Jagessar and Anthony G. Reddie, 122–135. London: Equinox, 2007. Evaristo, Bernadine. Girl, Woman, Other. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019. France-Williams, A. D. A. Ghost Ship: Institutional Racism and the Church of England. London: SCM, 2020. Henry-Robinson, Tessa. “Blackness, Black Power and God-Talk: A Reflection.” Black Theology: An International Journal 15.2 (2017): 117–135. Jagessar, Michael. “Dis-Place Theologizing: Fragments of Intercultural Adventurous God-Talk.” Black Theology: An International Journal 13.3 (2015): 258–272.

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Quaker Women’s Group. Bringing the Invisible into the Light: Some Quaker Feminists Speak of Their Experience. Ashford: Headley, 1986. Reddie, Anthony. Theologising Brexit: A Liberationist and Postcolonial Critique. London: Routledge, 2019. Thistlethwaite, Susan B. Sex, Race and God. London: Chapman, 1990.

Chapter 9

With All Due Respect, He Ain’t My Husband Gender, Sexuality, and Theology in the Episcopal Church’s Rites of Marriage and Partnership Bryan Cones

WHAT’S IN A NAME? My partner, David, and I have been together now for nearly twenty years, and for most of that period, there were few if any official civil legal structures that accounted for our household. Nor were there officially sanctioned religious ones in our Roman Catholic Church or even in the US Episcopal Church, of which we are both now (also) members and in which I am now ordained as a presbyter. Until 2011, in our home state of Illinois, recognition of same-gender couples was restricted civilly to legal instruments such as wills and powers of attorney for health care and property. Religiously, recognition of same-gender couples was restricted, at least in our Roman Catholic context and in the Episcopal Church as well, to transgressive alterations to existing marriage liturgies often celebrated outside official “church spaces,” for example in my Roman Catholic community of Dignity/Chicago, which met in a United Methodist Church. At Dignity, over the course of our liturgical round, we celebrated annual “couples’ blessings,” baptized the children of couples, and from time to time celebrated “union ceremonies” for the same-gender couples who sought them, practices that had been going on for some years before I began to take part in the mid-1990s. These latter were more or less celebrations of the Roman Catholic Rite of Marriage1 with modifications to reflect the gender of the parties and exchanging the language of “marriage” for “holy union.” 99

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At the same time, while I was quite active both at the congregational level and as a part of Dignity in national efforts to expand marriage equality in both church and society, David and I never sought any institution’s recognition for our household. We both agreed that we have been up to something “different” in our relationship than what many couples (regardless of the gender of the partners) seem to mean by “marriage,” which for us has indicated a mutual “acquisition” between the parties that does not reflect our own understanding of what makes us “us,” with particular focus on a spouse as a “soul mate” and the emphasis on sexual exclusivity as the sine qua non of a committed relationship. While these dimensions are operative in our relationship, an undue focus on either strikes us as unhelpful in our own life together. Admittedly, not all couples would accept the language of “acquisition.” Still, the history of marriage and its related rituals suggested to us that such language captures at least a significant dimension of the institution. While some over the course of our relationship advocated and argued for “equal marriage” (in the 1990s and 2000s), others were suspicious of the “costs” of such recognition, especially to the extent that it has ritualized an “acquisition” or exchange of property or sexual access.2 David and I have long resonated more with Elizabeth Stuart’s own findings that “a great many lesbian and gay people understand their committed sexual relationships not in terms of marriage or of ‘living together’ like unmarried heterosexual couples, but in terms of friendship,”3 though we might further qualify Stuart’s emphasis on friendship. Time moves on, with both civil and religious “marriage equality” a fact in both our civil society and our current church. Our own state of Illinois first made available “civil unions” to partners of any gender in 2011,4 followed by marriage in 2014.5 The US Supreme Court ruling in 20156 extended our state protections nationally, and many same-gender couples have celebrated this victory with weddings both civil and religious. On the religious front, the Episcopal Church began a church-wide movement toward religious marriage equality with the provisional approval of “The Witnessing and Blessing of a Lifelong Covenant” [WBLC] in 2012 for same-gender couples only as part of its resource I Will Bless You, and You Will Be a Blessing.7 In 2015 the church’s General Convention extended the Book of Common Prayer’s (BCP’s) “Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage” to couples of any gender, also granting different-gendered couples permission to use the materials prepared for same-gender couples with the consent of the local bishop.8 These developments have made possible a flood of “church weddings” for same-gender couples, and many of my own friends and colleagues have celebrated them, with many others doing so civilly. In fact, the practice has become so quickly normative that I am routinely asked if David and I are married; further, I am sometimes asked, especially by my fellow queer Episcopalians and others involved in the religious struggles for marriage equality, why I do

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not refer to him as my “husband,” the use of which (along with “wife”) has for many same-gender partners been a title of personal, political, and, for many, religious importance. Episcopal priest and theologian Patrick Cheng, for example, has written that his wedding to “my husband, Michael,” was an experience of being “irrevocably changed—some might say ontologically changed.”9 I have, however, noticed in myself some discomfort with appropriating that title, much to the puzzlement of my peers. Since I am an Episcopal presbyter and liturgical theologian by vocation, the liturgical dimensions of the questions raised by same-gender marriage draw my attention—and sometimes suspicion, particularly in relation to the meanings of gendered titles such as “husband” and “wife” as “performed” in the liturgy through the use of particular rites themselves. For example, Mark Jordan notes in his application of gender theorist Judith Butler’s work to marriage liturgies, such rituals “perform certain identities after and outside any particular rites. . . . In a heterosexual church wedding, for example, the man and woman are invited into the elaborately defined (the overdetermined) roles of Christian Husband and Wife.”10 While both Episcopal liturgies of committed partnership are now by law available to partners regardless of gender (at least if one has a willing bishop), the pre-2015 rules highlighting the difference between the two rites and who can celebrate them—matrimony for one, covenant for the other—suggests that comparing these liturgies might provide clues to my own resistance to being called David’s “husband,” the use of which suggests to me an assent to the historic meanings borne by the term and enacted both through liturgy and in civil society, as noted earlier. The differences between them may also signal the trajectory of the lex orandi (as expressed in authorized liturgy) and lex credendi (doctrinal and theological explanation) of the Episcopal Church on marriage, which has been disrupted by the enacted liturgical theology, the theologia prima,11 of assemblies whose liturgies have been recognizing same-gender relationships for decades, indeed, as early as 1970 in New York City’s Church of the Holy Apostles.12 My own reflections suggest that, while the long-sought victory of “marriage equality” in the Episcopal Church is surely worth celebrating, our common discernment about liturgies of committed partnership however named, particularly the ways in which they inscribe gender, may not yet be over. Indeed, as the church continues discernment regarding the renewal of its liturgical resources, now may be a particularly acceptable time to press ahead with our reflection.13

WHO DO YOU SAY THAT I AM? Since its General Convention of 2015, the Episcopal Church has authorized two sets of resources for the liturgical celebration and recognition of marriage

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and/or holy union. The first set can be found in its 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which contains three outlines: “The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage”; “The Blessing of a Civil Marriage”; and “An Order for Marriage,” which differs from the other two by providing only an outline of required elements along with the text of vows.14 The second comes from I Will Bless You, and You Will Be a Blessing, which includes “The Witnessing and Blessing of a Lifelong Covenant,” adapted for use in a liturgical celebration of marriage as “The Witnessing and Blessing of a Marriage,” and “The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage (2),” which adapts marriage materials found in the BCP for use with a same-gender couple.15 Tracing the appearance of gender in each—specifically comparing the BCP’s “The Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage” (CBM) and “The Witnessing and Blessing of a Lifelong Covenant” (WBLC)—however, along with the theological language applied to or associated with gender, suggests a shift that might both trouble that presumed equivalence and goes some way toward unpacking the questions outlined earlier. Gender appears in the resources in several kinds of texts, including those directing the “performance” of those texts (rubrics), those intended to be spoken by the one presiding (instructions and prayers, for example) and the couple (especially the consents and vows), and in some of the scripture texts offered by the liturgy as appropriate to these celebrations. Of these, only the spoken texts are likely to be experienced directly by an assembly at a wedding, though the performance of the rubrics may be visible, and at times rubrics are even printed in worship aids. All of it, however, is accessible to those who prepare guidelines for their use, thus they all are worthy of attention. The rubrics, though brief, signal from the beginning differences between the resources and what they might mean when celebrated. In CBM, rubrics identify not only the opposite gender of the partners, “man” and “woman,” it even specifies where they are to stand in relation to the “celebrant,” for example, at the beginning of the liturgy: “The Celebrant, facing the people and the persons to be married, with the woman to the right and the man to the left.”16 It further directs the order in which the partners are addressed. For example, at “The Declaration of Consent,” the “celebrant” first addresses the woman, while for “The Marriage” (exchange of vows), the man is first to speak.17 Curiously, the use of capital letters varies, with “woman” and “man” capitalized in rubrics when that member of the couple is speaking. After the marriage, the rubrics continue to refer to the couple in gendered terms as “husband and wife,” always in that order, for example at “The Blessing of the Marriage” when the rubrics direct “The husband and wife kneel.” After the blessing, they are styled “the newly married couple.”18

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Not surprisingly, WBLC lacks any reference to the gender of the couple’s members. Throughout—both before the exchange of vows and after—they are routinely referred to as “the couple,” and individualized as a “member of the couple” only when necessary, for example at “The Witnessing of Vows and Blessing of the Covenant”: “The Presider addresses one member of the couple, saying .  .  .”19 While the elimination of gender in this instance also erases any hierarchies or “orders” embedded in the liturgy, it also proposes that “the couple” is already a pre-existing unit, rather than two individuals who are creating something new. Charles Hefling, in his own reflection on WBLC, specifically distinguishes the rite from “marriage,” noting that “liturgical blessing is not creation ex nihilo”: “It does make something new begin to happen, but does so on the basis of something that, by the grace of God, is already happening.”20 A close look at the rubrics makes this clear: The CBM refers to “the persons to be married,”21 while WBLC names them “the couple to be blessed.”22 In those places where CBM styles the couple “newly married,” WBLC continues to refer to them as “the couple”; this designation remains unchanged in the adaptation of WBLC as “The Witnessing and Blessing of a Marriage.” The spoken texts also reveal similar patterns of gender description in one resource with gender erasure in the other, though with different effects. References to the partners in CBM rely heavily on gendered address, typically “this man and this woman” and “husband and wife” (in those orders). These attributions appear at every critical moment in the liturgy, from the presentation of either the woman to the man or of the couple to each other, “The Declaration of Consent,” “The Marriage,” and the “Blessing of the Marriage.” Exceptions include a reference to “these two persons” in a question directed to witnesses in “The Declaration of Consent,”23 and to those times when the partners are referred to or addressed by name by the “celebrant”: once in the prefatory remarks at the beginning of the liturgy, in “The Declaration of Consent,” and in the pronouncement following the exchange of rings. The partners address each other by name in the vows and exchange of rings.24 WBLC, on the other hand, rather than merely erasing the gender of the parties, routinely refers to and addresses the partners by name. Indeed, almost everywhere gender appears in the CBM materials, WBLC has “N. and N.”— that is, a reference to the names of the partners. The only exception is in the question to the assembly, in which the CBM’s “these persons” is replaced by “this couple.”25 Of interest is a shift in the vows themselves as a gendered role (wife/husband) drops away. Rather than “I, N., take you, N., to be my wife/ husband,”26 WBLC’s vows read “I, N., give myself to you, N., and take you to myself.”27 The overall effect is to emphasize the individuality of the partners, thus perhaps diminishing any new “corporate” reality after the exchange

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of vows or, alternatively, emphasizing the unique identity of each partner in their commitment to one another. Gender appears finally, if more obliquely, in the suggested readings, though, as “suggested” indicates, they may or may not appear in any particular celebration of a marriage or union. Of the readings suggested in CBM, the following signal gender either by their content or by the short summary of each given in CBM and quoted here: Genesis 1:26–28 (Male and female he created them); Genesis 2:4–9, 15–24 (A man cleaves to his wife and they become one); Tobit 8:5b–8 (New English Bible) (That she and I may grow old together); and Mark 10:6–9, 13–16 (They are no longer two but one).28 Each of these arguably signals theological contentions connected to gender and its roots in the created order, which may or may not appear in a particular liturgy. All of them are absent from the suggested readings listed in WBLC, which provides only citations without summaries. WBLC additions include two that, contrary to the rest of the resource, reintroduce specific gender as a dimension of the liturgy: Ruth 1:16–17, in which Ruth commits herself to her mother-in-law Naomi; and 1 Samuel 18:1b, 3; 20:16–17; 42a, and 1 Samuel 18:1–4, both of which recount the covenant Jonathan makes with David. As both stories have long been invoked as biblical witnesses in favor of same-gender partnerships,29 in this context they function almost as warrants for the celebration itself. A further addition is a gospel text—John 17:1–2, 18–26—in which Jesus speaks of his oneness with his Father, and prays for such unity among his disciples, a trinitarian emphasis discussed later. The suggested scriptural texts point toward some theological connections the spoken texts of both resources make between the union being witnessed and celebrated, and various understandings of the divine and/ or creation as divinely instituted. CBM’s prefatory exhortation read by the “celebrant” makes these connections abundantly clear, and so is worth quoting in full: Dearly beloved: We have come together in the presence of God to witness and bless the joining together of this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony. The bond and covenant of marriage was established by God in creation, and our Lord Jesus Christ adorned this manner of life by his presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. It signifies to us the mystery of the union between Christ and his Church, and Holy Scripture commends it to be honored among all people. The union of husband and wife in heart, body, and mind is intended by God for their mutual joy; for the help and comfort given one another in prosperity and adversity; and, when it is God’s will, for the procreation of children and their nurture in the knowledge and love of the Lord. Therefore, marriage is not

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to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God.30

In no uncertain terms, CBM asserts that marriage is part of God’s intention for creation, indeed that it was “instituted” by God, and further that it signifies the relationship between Christ and the church, and so is grounded in both the first and second covenants, with particular attention to procreation as one of its purposes. These theological tropes are present throughout the prayer texts of the liturgy. The opening prayer evokes the creation narrative (“O gracious and everliving God, you have created us male and female in your image”31), a theme echoed in the prayers for the couple after the marriage (“Look with favor upon . . . this man and this woman whom you make one flesh in Holy Matrimony”32). Both options for “The Blessing of the Marriage” invoke the story of Jesus, the first noting that he was “born of a human mother,” and thanking God for “consecrating the union of man and woman in his Name.” The second notes that God has “consecrated the covenant of marriage that in it is represented the spiritual unity between Christ and his Church.”33 The claim is further emphasized in the eucharistic preface for marriage, which draws upon images from the Book of Revelation and makes ample use of gendered metaphor: “in the love of wife and husband, you have given us an image of the heavenly Jerusalem, adorned as a bride for her bridegroom, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord.”34 The theological themes found in WBLC are decidedly different, with the two versions of the optional exhortation opening the service largely explanatory rather than overtly theological.35 Gone is any reference to creation or the natural order, much less the relationship between Christ and “his” church—a signal, perhaps, of the reliance of such tropes on received gender roles to make any sense. In their places are more ample references to the biblically resonant word “covenant,” which replace references and inferences to marriage as such, for example, at the exchange of vows and rings.36 The couple’s theological-symbolic dimension, rather than referencing the relationship of Christ and the church, instead reflects the life of the Trinity and the triune God’s work in the world. One option for the opening prayer, for example, includes the petition that the couple “may be to one another and to the world a witness and a sign of your never-failing love and care”; another asks that “their joining together will be to us a reflection of that perfect communion which is your very essence and life, O Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”37 The vows also include invocations of the Trinity: “I will support and care for you by the grace of God . . . I will hold and cherish you in the love of Christ . . . I will honor and keep you with the Spirit’s help.”38 The trinitarian metaphor is most apparent in the eucharistic preface: “in the giving of two people to each other in faithful

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love you reveal the joy and abundant life you share with your Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.”39 EQUALITY OR EQUIVALENCY: WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES GENDER DIFFERENCE MAKE? Proponents of “marriage equality” rightly celebrate the civil legal protections that same-gender couples have gained in not only in the US but in many countries. More concentrated attention to the religious side of things, however, suggests a need for further reflection. While the two liturgies compared earlier are both authorized to enact a (civil) marriage in a US Episcopal religious context, it is difficult to argue that they are ritually performing the same theological reality based on their texts alone—to say nothing of how they are actually celebrated in an assembly. Regardless of the details of any particular wedding, however, one thing has changed for certain: the expectation of gender difference in the parties, such that their gender difference no longer matters at all. That change in the “ministers” of the liturgy—the couple40—and in the assembly that recognizes them has clearly wrought a change in the enacted liturgical theology, the theologia prima, of many assemblies. That change in the practice first of a few assemblies progressing to greater numbers has reached a point such that it is now provoking a change in the lex orandi—the authorized liturgy—of the Episcopal Church. The present participle in this case is necessary and important; it is arguable that at this point in its development, the lex orandi for recognizing committed relationships offers different (competing?) theological accounts of those relationships, hinging on whether the difference in the gender of the parties is both present and acknowledged. Given the rapid acceptance of same-gender marriage in the US context alone, we should not be surprised at the divergence between them. As David Greenberg notes, social change in relation to same-gender marriage “demands the capacity to act before a stage has been built, to be without any context, indeed to do in order to weave the very context that will make being possible.”41 The Episcopal Church in its assemblies and now in its lex orandi has been renovating and/or rebuilding its marital stage at high speed, and has now produced two different liturgies for marriage. Whether they are mutually exclusive remains to be seen. In the case of CBM, the difference in the gender of the parties is a foundational component of the relationship being celebrated, completely intertwined with creation and redemption. While not robustly patriarchal in itself, the appeal to creation as the foundation of the marital relationship is hard to disentangle from the story of the Fall that immediately follows the creation accounts—with Eve taking the blame. Indeed, some of the more

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robust defenses of the received practice of (opposite-gender) marriage have relied heavily on Genesis’ two creation accounts, with one concluding that the created structure of marriage includes the punishment that falls primarily on Eve found Genesis 3:16: “Through the pain of childbirth and the toil of childrearing, they give themselves away in a shared love that passes along God’s gift of life.”42 While the “toil of childrearing” may be shared equally in some marriages, the “pain of childbirth” is not, and, as Kathryn Tanner has pointed out, these burdens, by the logic of Genesis, are the consequence of sin, and so hardly can be relied upon as a foundation for a Christian theology of marriage.43 Given that many of the defenses of restricting “marriage” socalled to opposite-sex, even reproductively fertile, couples, inevitably return to Genesis’ inescapably patriarchal foundations, the continued use of these texts or their images in the liturgy is hard to justify. The Christ-bridegroom/church-bride analogy is arguably no less fraught, emerging as it does from the pastoral epistles and the Book of Revelation, the former of which continue to be used to justify biblically the “headship” of men over women and perpetuate the ancient and biblical understanding of women and children as property in a patriarchal household.44 Dale Martin argues that the household code in Ephesians “makes the male, patriarchal ideology even more insidious by conflating the superior male’s role with that of God and Christ in relation to the church. As Christ is head of the church, so the man is head of the woman; as the church is submitted to Christ, so wives must submit to husbands and women to men in everything (5:21–24).”45 Many commentators have attempted to overcome this difficulty, some by attempting to place Ephesians in historical and cultural context, and so suggest that its writer is trying to correct the marital patriarchy of its time, such that “the culturally accepted submission of wife to husband was qualified in revolutionary way. . . . [The text’s] exhortation to live married life in the spirit of Christ implies a radical equality between the two persons that is incompatible with patriarchal attitudes.”46 Others have argued that the analogy has been inappropriately reversed, as in the Task Force on Marriage’s assertion that “it is not that earthly marriages are mere symbols of the heavenly union, but that the heavenly union is the model which earthly marriages should emulate in order to be holy.”47 Others have been more creative still, in effect ignoring any gender hierarchy in the text and asserting that “Christ is the Bridegroom for women and for men; the church is Christ’s bride in its members, female and male. Gender does not hinder the Bridegroom or the bride.”48 Still, in the absence of fairly robust preaching on that text alone in any wedding liturgy, neither the couple nor the assembly is likely to have access to such critical reflection (or even much interest in it), leaving only the bare text of the liturgy, with its inescapably gendered male “Christ” and “his church.” Scholarly defenses of “traditional” marriage continue to rely on a

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fundamentally essentialist gendered theological interpretation, reinforced by Zachary Guiliano and colleagues, who insist, “we associate the male with Christ but the female and the offspring with the Church. The Church is one and many, both the Bride of Christ and, in her members, his children.”49 With Jennifer Philips, it is reasonable to conclude that the analogy, at best, “may indicate that husbands are to be benign rulers, even self-sacrificing ones, but does not alter the fundamental inequality of the spouses.”50 Even then, argues Philips, “the text connects the role of the husband with that of the Christ as consecrator and cleanser of that which formerly was stained, wrinkled and blemished.”51 The comparison of clean to soiled in the bride-church analogy extends also to images from Revelation, which are bound up with juxtapositions between eschatological bride and imperial whore. Even appeals to the language of covenant in the Hebrew scriptures, on which the WBLC relies, lead to troubling bride/whore comparisons, as Dora Rudo Mbuwayesango points out in her response to “Faith, Hope, and Love”: “Metaphorical depiction of the divine-human relationship in the biblical texts (particularly in the prophets Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel) is characterized by an association of divine love, compassion, commitment, and reconciliation with divine wrath and punishment in the form of the rape and mutilation of women.”52 As attractive as this metaphor may be on the surface, even a cursory exploration of its underpinnings reveals troubling dimensions for a contemporary theology of marriage or a committed relationship. Taken together, these images can hardly be the foundation of a “discipleship of equals” in any marital relationship, as feminist scholars and theologians have long pointed out.53

METAPHORICAL MOVES FORWARD? For these reasons, some might well argue that the divine-human marital metaphor applied to the liturgically inscribed roles of “husband and wife,” wherever or in whatever form it is found, is fatally irretrievable for any couple. This in itself is a difficult admission, given that allusions to both Genesis and Ephesians appear throughout the Western liturgical practice of marriage. At any rate, their reliance on gender difference—and subordination of one gender to another—suggest that they are unlikely to be helpful to same-gender couples, although one can understand the desire of couples to experience a kind of “equality” by using historic language that has long been denied them. Nor should we underestimate the ability of same-gender couples to creatively appropriate language once used to exclude them, as both Patrick Cheng’s and Deirdre Good’s reflections on their own weddings demonstrate.54 Still, I would argue that making cosmetic changes to the gendered language of CBM

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will do little to disrupt the embedded problematic theological motifs. Jennifer Phillips, in her now two-decade-old critique of the CBM, identified these same problematic metaphors, proposing alternatives in their place, including a focus on the couple as a new creation through baptism, the royal banquet and wedding feast as a model of marital hospitality, friendship with God as a basis for friendship among partners, the Trinity as a model for all community, the exodus as a sacred journey, and, apparent in WBLC, the covenant of God with God’s people.55 WBLC’s theological foundations take up some of Phillips’ proposals and suggest different, and perhaps more promising, pathways forward. The erasure of most references to gender leaves two persons identified by name rather than category, whose relationship is already presumed by the assembly that serves as a witness. Rather than creating something new through its celebration, WBLC suggests an acknowledgment of something already present and active—likely true of couples regardless of gender—the sacramental quality of which is made manifest by the assembly’s recognition through its theologia prima. Indeed, the liturgical recognition of such relationships long preceded any official church liturgy for it; it would be difficult to argue that their reality as committed relationships, much less the legitimacy of the families created in their lives together, were dependent upon the church’s lex orandi catching up. The sacramental reality the relationship signifies remains foundationally theological—the communion of the Trinity—yet one released from the constraints of gender roles. Though still at times named as a gendered Three (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), that Trinity is also named without reference to gender, as in one of the options for the opening prayer: “Holy Trinity, one God, three Persons perfect in unity and equal in majesty .  .  .” Such language suggests, one hopes, more promising and graced household and family relationships among the baptized than the Christ-church trope or any guidance drawn from those who wrote in Paul’s name in the pastoral epistles. The application of a trinitarian lens to a theology of marriage, in addition to disrupting a male-female hierarchy in the marriage liturgy (if not eliminating gender altogether), suggests a different sort of relationship, perhaps, than marriage as it has been received. That “traditional” practice might be summarized as a combination of Bernard Cooke’s historian’s understanding of marriage as the “general recognition that most people in any society live with some other person (or persons) in marriage”56 with the four-point distillation of “traditionalist” defenders of opposite-sex marriage, who list (as bullet points): “between male and female; connected to children and fruitfulness; passion and commitment (emotional and institutional weight); to be considered permanent.”57 Much of that account coheres comfortably with the received biblical metaphors; indeed, they are mutually reinforcing.

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A focus on the Trinity, on the other hand, proposes a relationship that is somewhat more open-ended, one that by its very nature must extend beyond the couple. As noted earlier, Jennifer Phillips suggests a marriage as relationship pointing to the trinitarian mystery: “At the very heart of God there is diversity in relationship, a dynamic movement of love and hospitality. Each person is distinct, yet all are one.”58 Australian Anglican Sarah Bachelard suggests the sacramental character and sanctifying potential of marriage might be found in “the love that is God’s own Trinitarian life . . . a communion of persons in relation, and each person of the Trinity is fully themselves and liberated to be so through the self-giving, non-possessive love of the other.”59 In the same collection in which Bachelard writes, Duncan Reid draws on the Orthodox theology of John Zizioulas to suggest that such a relationship reflects “communion that allows the other to remain itself, but within relationship.”60 Reid in particular connects the communion of “otherness” in the Trinity as described by Zizioulas to human friendship rooted in the body as “a vehicle both of otherness and communion. Body here means a particular body, so that the other presents her-/himself as a particular, human, personal other, not as a generalized abstraction.”61 For Reid, this suggests mature friendships that are truly public “open relationships” which “prepare the ground for a friendly world.”62 A group of self-styled “liberal” Episcopalians in support of samesex marriage also draw trinitarian connections from both CBM and WBLC, particularly in what Eugene Rogers calls “the third vow,” the promise by the assembly to love and support the couple, which the authors attribute to the action on the Holy Spirit: “The Spirit draws not the couple alone, but all who celebrate with them. . . . They do not promise by themselves. A congregation of witnesses promises also. In the third vow, not only the couple but also all the witnesses participate in a relationship of promises.”63 Though not always referencing the Trinity, other commentators take up friendship as a more fruitful metaphor for marriage regardless of gender, with feminist Roman Catholic Mary Hunt arguing, “Friendship, not coupled love, is the normative adult human relationship in my view,”64 and later, “‘Profound friendship’ is not antithetical to marriage but integral to it, or so I would recommend from a Christian perspective.”65 Mary Ann Tolbert suggests a more thorough reimagining of marriage, discarding marriage practices derived from various antiquities and replacing them with references to ancient practices of friendship, which she argues are more appropriate to contemporary understandings of marriage: Marriage partners share all things in common, as did ancient friends; marriage should be a relationship marked by mutuality and reciprocity, as was ancient friendship; marriage promotes honesty and intimacy, the faithful keeping of secrets and confidences, as did ancient friendship; marriage partners are each

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other’s soul mates, as were ancient friends; and marriage binds the two into one until death, as did ancient friendship.66

As Mark Jordan points out in his reflection on John Boswell’s and Alan Bray’s different exploration of rites of public friendship in Christian history, Tolbert’s proposal is hardly without warrant in Christian liturgical tradition, and in fact may be a recoverable “liturgical genealogy” for contemporary churches.67 Though it remains underexplored, the Trinity-friendship trope already inchoate in WBLC may provide a promising new focus to either replace the received Christ-church metaphor or accompany its renewal. A trinitarian metaphor, as both Reid and Hunt suggest, also offers promising connections between human relationships and the Christian mission, though this image also has limits.68

ONE LITURGY OR MANY? The change in the “ministers” of marriage, in which assemblies now gather around a sacramental couple no longer differentiated by gender has clearly wrought more in the theologia prima of the churches than can be captured by a few editorial changes in received liturgies—at least if the scholarly ink spilled in its regard is any indication. Something more is happening, and it will perhaps take some time for the church’s lex orandi to reflect the “adjustments” already at work in the theologia prima of liturgical assemblies—a fact now reflected in the Episcopal Church, which as of 2015 has two official liturgies by which to celebrate “marriage,” though it is far from obvious that they are enacting equivalent relationships. As Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski baldly states: “There is no doubt that the Episcopal Church is doing something new regarding marriage.”69 One thing these different liturgies do share, however, is the long-held conviction in Western theological reflection about marriage that it is the couple through their consent who are the “ministers” of the marriage, with the assembled church, through its designated presider, as their “official witness.” As the Task Force on Marriage puts it: “The principal end of marriage must be found in the couple themselves, and in their life together.”70 As Christian liturgical practice of recognizing vowed relationships continues to unfold, the persons themselves emerge as the primary interpreters of whatever “marriage” will be between them. Mark Jordan’s assertion that “shared ritual agency” is when many same-gender partners become “a couple” is particularly apropos in this regard: “They are not ‘being together,’ they are doing together.”71 Taking the persons themselves seriously beyond their gender as the primary symbol, along with their own interpretation of the symbol’s contours of

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commitment, will require a more open-ended approach to marriage than can be captured in any canonical form. It will also mean surrendering the claim that “marriage” has some fixed meaning written into creation and recorded in the book of Genesis and regulated in the pastoral epistles. More positively, it will mean a recovery of the insight expressed early in the Task Force on Marriage’s report: “Marriage is not a subject of dogmatic theology, but of moral or pastoral theology. This means that there is no core dogmatic doctrine concerning marriage, although there is a long history of regulation concerning who may (or can) marry whom, when and where, and under what circumstances; and considerable reflection on the morals and goods of marriage.”72 Marriage, like religious life and other forms of Christian commitment, and like the liturgies that mark them, is a matter of Christian practice and mission, and like liturgy (and doctrine for that matter), is subject to development over time and relationship to changes in culture. Attention to marriage as Christian practice—both in the assembly as a liturgy and in the life of its partners—frees it somewhat from the need for the kind of precision sometimes (unreasonably) expected of doctrine. Sarah Bachelard argues that more practical dimensions of life together might be a more fruitful course: “Increasingly . . . it is difficult to disregard the ordinary, incarnate criteria for discerning the human good (vitality, compassion for others, joyful participation in the common life of the community) in favor of arbitrary claims about what is allegedly ‘ordained by God.’”73 More promisingly, recognizing in the practice of assembly a more multivalent symbol in the “ministers” may allow a richer exploration of human relationship and its possibilities—opening new lenses on the meanings of Christian life “together” as yet unexplored, and allowing theological reflection on marriage to remain, as Mark Jordan argues, appropriately incomplete: “Marriage theology .  .  . usefully deploys a series of analogies between marriage and other points of doctrine, including spiritual discipline, apostolic community, or trinitarian relations. The point of the analogies is precisely to prevent marriage theology from ever being settled.”74 Siobhán Garrigan goes further, arguing that truly integrating queer relationships into the practice of assemblies will mean something more profound than changing the genders of pronouns and lightly editing the received script: Once worship is queered, God is too. God is thus restored to the Being that tradition has long worshipped: beyond gender, beyond binaries (Three in One), confounding of descriptive capabilities, but very much knowable—through acts of loving. Perhaps, even, through acts of queer sex.75

While some might find Garrigan’s contention confronting, the received liturgies of marriage arguably inscribe patriarchal “acts of sex” every bit as confronting as those Garrigan describes—a relational norm inscribed by

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centuries of repetition, liturgical and otherwise, with profoundly negative effects on women and gender and sexual minorities. Admittedly, none of this releases the Christian community from the need to continue to discern how it will recognize committed relationships in the practice of the assembly, and which ones, and what might be expected of those who seek public recognition of their life together. But it does suggest that “marriage,” both its liturgical celebration and theological reflection on it, will need to continue to unfold in plural ways. Some of that reflection will involve interrogating “marriage” as it has been received to unmask ways it has perpetuated the oppression of women and erased the presence of gender and sexual minorities. Such work is no less important for the heterosexual majority, and illustrates the ways in which the practice of what Lutheran Gordon Lathrop terms “catholic exceptions”—in this case, communities whose members primarily identify as gender or sexual minorities, such as Dignity/Chicago—might offer corrective “admonition” to the wider catholic “whole.”76 As Roman Catholic James Alison has argued on this matter in his context: “A mistake about being gay is also a mistake about being straight. For being normative and being a large majority are two very different things, and the shifts in self-understanding which will flow from this are only just starting.”77 Thus, although Charles Helfling has suggested that WBLC may no longer be necessary as more and more churches accept same-gender marriage, the opposite may be true. Indeed, the churches may need more options for acknowledging the sacramental reality of human relationship in its many vowed forms. Among these, Eugene Rogers’ attempts to draw analogies between monasticism and marriage as parallel forms of vowed religious life invite further reflection. Rogers’ focus on monastic “stability” gathers within it expectations of lifelong commitment and fidelity, though with a more open-ended cast. How any particular couple’s “stability” gets lived out—in common service, in the raising of children however conceived, in the mutual support as each pursues their baptismal vocations—the couple’s “joint discipleship” is the primary lens through which their common life is focused and the measure to which they are held. The practical, ethical living out of this stability—their use of money and other resources, the use of their time, their commitment to service, the sharing of household work and care of persons (such as children), and their expressions of sexuality—are all subject to their basic promise of stability, though the exact contours may well vary by couple. Discerning the contours of such options suggests further critical retrieval of the image of committed relationship present in both historic liturgies for marriage and in WBLC: “covenant.” Unlike the divine-human, Christchurch marital metaphors, covenant has other metaphorical analogs, and so it may be easier to disentangle from the vestiges of gendered power

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relationships, whether ancient or contemporary. Key to its usefulness, however, is that it is indeed covenant—a fundamentally open-ended relationship that continues to grow and develop—and not a contract, a more or less fixed exchange of rights and property. The former seems a far more appropriate metaphor for a sacrament in the assembly that echoes also the “baptismal covenant” of the Episcopal Church, which suggests through its questions patterns of life rather than fixed rules or behaviors. It is likely also more appropriate to the actual life of couples through their relationships, which are marked by different moments of discovery of the mystery of what makes us “us.” Both the promise of stability and the model of covenant are elements of the Western liturgical heritage broadly conceived, and so may provide lenses for the further development of liturgies of a committed relationship, however they are named. In the Episcopal Church, that development is already in process and continues forward, not least for the purposes of engaging the vestiges of patriarchal theology and gender relations still present in liturgical practice. Beyond these, further reflection might well be given to the missional dimensions of Christian relationship, what many commentators have called the “fruitfulness” of the relationship, once considered primarily in terms of offspring but now with a broader imagination. While WBLC takes some strides toward imagining new forms of relationships among the baptized beyond opposite-gender marriage, neither it nor CBM fully reflects the “baptismal ecclesiology” of the BCP, such that marriage or covenant between baptized persons might be seen as an expression of the ministry and mission to which they were ordered in baptism. Possibilities include, as Jennifer Philips suggests, explicit reflection on the promises of the Baptismal Covenant in relation to marriage, which can certainly appear in preaching.78 A reaffirmation of baptism with blessing and sprinkling of water would certainly not be out of place in such a liturgy, along with other expansions of the use of symbols suggested by Kenneth Stevenson, including adaptations from Eastern practice, such as crowning and anointing.79 Kathleen Fischer and Thomas Hart imagine such an “alternative future” for a marriage liturgy, including in their own proposals what they style a third “rite of passage” for the couple, “Sacrament to the World,” in which the couple make promises to fulfill their obligations to Christian mission in their “joint discipleship.”80 Such couplespecific promises might even be included in some way in the vows, perhaps as a prelude to the authorized vows provided in the liturgical resources. The hope here is to discover new ways to embody the kind of piety David Greenberg recommends from his Jewish tradition in which the couple “walk down the aisle toward the huppah reciting psalms and praying for the needs of others. The turning away from the self at this moment is deemed so powerful that heaven cannot help but answer these prayers.”81

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SO WHAT TO CALL HIM? In light of the reflections mentioned earlier, it is obvious to me why I can’t call David my “husband”: We have never celebrated a liturgy by which we would acquire that name—and I would not choose to do so. Celebrating a variation of CBM would not produce what Roman Catholic theologian Teresa Berger calls a “truthful anamnesis”82 of what the Holy One is doing and revealing in us in our lives together, and we could not serve as ministers to one another embodying such a relational symbol. While Eugene Rogers’ “moral companion” and Alan Bray’s “particular friend” (with a nod to Mary Hunt and Elizabeth Stuart) both capture something of relationship we have come to share, and provide fodder for theological reflection and spiritual practice, neither has a rhetorical ring to improve on the more everyday “partner.” The materials provided in WBLC might get a little closer than the CBM to what we have been up to, but those resources as yet have not been able to settle on a name other than “the couple” for the relationship that is recognized by the assembly in its liturgy. In fact, the best it could produce for us is our own version of “N. and N.”: “David-and-Bryan,” which is certainly more fitting than “husbands.” And that will have to do. NOTES 1. Rite Of Marriage: English Translation Approved by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and Confirmed by the Apostolic See (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1970). 2. While not all couples, regardless of the genders of the parties, would accept the language of “acquisition”—or may well be shocked by it—the history of marriage and its related rituals together suggest that such language captures at least a significant dimension of the institution (though not reducible to that dimension alone). Bernard Cooke states simply, “Christians became married according to the patterns of whatever culture they lived in,” especially among the upper classes, in which property exchange and family alliances were of high importance. See Cooke, “Historical Reflections on the Meaning of Marriage as Christian Sacrament,” in Alternative Futures for Worship, Vol. 5: Christian Marriage, ed. Bernard Cooke (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1987), 33–46, especially 34–38. L. William Countryman devotes a significant portion of his Dirt, Greed, and Sex to conceptions of “property,” including sexual property, in the contexts that shaped both the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament. See Countryman, Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, revised edition 2007), 144–214. Steven Greenberg notes that, in traditional Jewish marriage liturgies, a woman is “acquired” by a man, albeit with strict limits, a practice judged by Jewish feminists as irretrievable from its patriarchal foundations. Greenberg

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suggests same-sex couples might appropriate it as an expression of mutual exchange that signifies sexual exclusivity rather than an exchange of property. See his “Contemplating a Jewish Ritual of Same-Sex Union: An Inquiry into the Meanings of Marriage,” in Authorizing Marriage? Canon, Tradition, and Critique in the Blessing of Same-Sex, ed. Mark D. Jordan with Meghan T. Sweeney and David M. Mellot (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 88–89. John Witte has also traced the “contractual” dimensions of marriage beginning with biblical foundations through the Enlightenment. See his From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in Western Tradition (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, second edition 2012), especially 35–38, 46–52, 87–91. Witte (perhaps more than others) stresses the particular Christian interpretation and adjustment of the “natural” and legal institution of marriage in its various contexts, for example, in tracing Augustine of Hippo’s exposition of the goods of marriage (children, fidelity, sacrament). See From Sacrament to Contract, 65–75. 3. See Stuart’s Just Good Friends: Towards a Lesbian and Gay Theology of Relationships (London: Mowbray, 1995), 28. Stuart tracks the then-current (1995) debates about same-gender marriage, with particular concern that the struggle for same-gender marriage might “idolize the ideal”; Stuart’s research questions even the claim of an ideal regarding the received practice of heterosexual marriage. See Just Good Friends, 102–117. 4. Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act, http://www​ .ilga​.gov​/legislation​/ilcs​/ilcs3​.asp​?ActID​=3294​&ChapterID​=59 [accessed 2 August 2017] 5. Illinois Religious Freedom and Marriage Fairness Act, http://www​.ilga​.gov​/ legislation​/ilcs​/ilcs3​.asp​?ActID​=3525& [accessed 2 August 2017] 6. Obergefell v. Hodges, https://www​.supremecourt​.gov​/opinions​/14pdf​/14​-556​ _3204​.pdf [accessed 2 August 2017] 7. This edition of the resource, revised from a previous version authorized for provisional use in 2012, also includes an extensive theological rational for the liturgical blessing to same-gender couples, “Faith, Hope, and Love: Theological Resources for Blessing Same-Sex Relationships,” along with six responses from theologians associated with the Episcopal Church. This revised and expanded edition includes adaptations to WBLC for use in the celebration of a marriage, along with a genderneutral adaptation of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer’s “Celebration and Blessing of a Marriage” for use with same-gender couples. These resources are available online: https://extranet​.generalconvention​.org​/staff​/files​/download​/15668 [accessed 2 August 2017] 8. Resolution 2015-A054, https://www​.episcopalarchives​.org​/cgi​-bin​/acts​/acts​ _resolution​.pl​?resolution​=2015​-A054 [accessed 2 August 2017] 9. See Patrick Cheng, “The Amazing Grace of Same-Sex Blessings,” in Encouraging Conversations: Resources for Talking About Same-Sex Blessings, ed. Fredrica Harris Thompsett (New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2013), 66–67. 10. See Mark Jordan, “Arguing Liturgical Genealogies, or, the Ghosts of Weddings Past,” in Authorizing Marriage? Canon, Tradition, and Critique in the Blessing

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of Same-Sex, ed. Mark D. Jordan with Meghan T. Sweeney and David M. Mellot (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 116. 11. I rely here on Benedictine Aidan Kavanagh’s account of liturgical theology, which he locates in the celebration of liturgy and describes as “adjustments” that “will affect [an assembly’s] next liturgical act, however slightly.” While some commentators elide the theologial prima and the lex orandi, I prefer to distinguish them in the ways noted earlier. See Kavanagh’s On Liturgical Theology (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1984), 74. 12. See Heather White, “Gay Rites and Religious Rights: New York’s First SameSex Marriage Controversy,” in Queer Christianities: Lived Religion in Transgressive Forms, ed. Kathleen T. Talvacchia, Michael F. Pettinger, and Mark Larrimore (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 79–90. 13. The 2015 General Convention of the Episcopal Church, which authorized the use of the CBM for same-gender couples, also passed dozens of resolutions related to liturgy and renewal, including others related to gender and sexual minorities. See Bryan Cones, “The 78th General Convention of the Episcopal Church and the Liturgy: New Wine in Old Wineskins?”, Anglican Theological Review 98 (2016): 681–701. 14. Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing, 1979), 423–438. Public domain. 15. I Will Bless You, 78–107. 16. BCP, 423. The historic texts from which the BCP is constructed also indicate where the parties are to stand in relation to each other, “the man to the woman’s right, the woman to the man’s left” (Sarum Manual). See Mark Searle and Kenneth W. Stevenson, Documents of the Marriage Liturgy (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1992), 164. 17. BCP, 424, 427. 18. BCP, 430–431. 19. I Will Bless You, 83. 20. See Charles Hefling, “Variations on a Theological Theme: The Episcopal Church’s Rite for Blessing a (Same-Sex) Covenant,” in Resources for Talking About Same-Sex Blessings, ed. Fredrica Harris Thompsett (New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2013), 73. 21. BCP, 423. 22. I Will Bless You, 80. 23. I Will Bless You, 425. 24. I Will Bless You, 427–428. 25. I Will Bless You, 84. 26. BCP, 427. 27. I Will Bless You, 86, italics in the original. The phrase “and take you to myself” is an addition to the original 2012 version, a change directed by General Convention Resolution 2015-A054, though without explanation. Ruth Meyers of the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music reports the addition came through the legislative committee at the General Convention. Ruth Meyers, e-mail to author, March 1, 2018.

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28. BCP, 426. 29. Some examples include Saul M. Olyan, “‘Surpassing the Love of Women’: Another Look at 2 Samuel 1:26 and the Relationship of David and Jonathan,” in Authorizing Marriage? Canon, Tradition, and Critique in the Blessing of Same-Sex, ed. Mark D. Jordan with Meghan T. Sweeney and David M. Mellot (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 7–16, and Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg, “Modern Day Moabites: The Bible and the Debate about Same-Sex Marriage,” Biblical Interpretation 16.5 (2008): 442–475. 30. BCP, 423. 31. BCP, 425. 32. BCP, 429. 33. BCP, 430–431. 34. BCP, 381. 35. I Will Bless You, 80–81. 36. I Will Bless You, 86. 37. I Will Bless You, 82. 38. I Will Bless You, 86. 39. I Will Bless You, 88. 40. The theological traditions of the Western Christian churches assert that the couple are the ministers of marriage to each other through their consent, a contention repeated throughout the Episcopal theological reflection that has accompanied official resources for blessing same-gender couples. See the Task Force on Marriage’s “Report,” 24, as well as resources found in I Will Bless You. These include Deirdre Good’s response to “Faith, Hope, and Love” in which she describes the changes she and her spouse made to CBM in 2008 so that “two persons of the same sex could administer the sacrament to each other with integrity” (47), and “Handout F: Principles for Evaluating Liturgical Materials,” which insists that “Any rite of blessing a couple must hold up the two people making the covenant as the primary ministers within this action” (129). Anglican scholar Kenneth Stevenson has argued that the emphasis on the couple as the ministers of marriage was reinforced by Thomas Cranmer in his adaptations of the Sarum rite, and so is an important dimension of Anglican theological reflection on marriage. See Kenneth Stevenson, To Join Together: The Rite of Marriage (New York: Pueblo, 1987), 91–99. 41. Steven Greenberg, “Contemplating a Jewish Ritual of Same-Sex Union,” 90. 42. John Bauerschmidt, Zachary Guiliano, Wesley Hill, and Jordan Hylden, “Marriage in Creation and Covenant: A Response to the Task Force on the Study of Marriage,” 16. http://ang​lica​nthe​olog​ical​review​.org​/static​/pdf​/conversations​/Mar​riag​ eInC​reat​ionA​ndCo​venant​.pdf [accessed 14 August 2017] 43. Kathryn Tanner, “A Rejoinder to ‘Marriage in Creation and Covenant,’” 6. http://ang​lica​nthe​olog​ical​review​.org​/static​/pdf​/conversations​/Kat​hryn​Tann​erRe​ sponse​.pdf [accessed 14 August 2017] 44. L. William Countryman has provided in-depth exploration of marriage as a negotiation of “sexual property” as it appears in Pauline and deutero-Pauline literature. See his Dirt, Greed, and Sex, 185–214.

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45. Dale Martin, “Familiar Idolatry and the Christian Case Against Marriage,” in Authorizing Marriage? Canon, Tradition, and Critique in the Blessing of Same-Sex, ed. Mark D. Jordan with Meghan T. Sweeney and David M. Mellot (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 27. 46. William Roberts, “Theology of Christian Marriage,” Alternative Futures for Worship, vol. 5, ed. Bernard Cooke (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1987), 57. The Task Force on Marriage made a similar point in its “Biblical and Theological Framework for Thinking About Marriage,” while also admitting that the “unpalatable” language of male headship “cannot be denied.” See “Report,” 18. 47. Roberts “Theology of Christian Marriage,” 19. 48. Deirdre J. Good, Willis J. Jenkins, Cynthia B. Kittredge, and Eugene F. Rogers, Jr., “A Theology of Marriage Including Same-Sex Couples: A View from the Liberals,” Anglican Theological Review 93.1 (2011): 68. 49. Zachary Guiliano, “Augustine, Scripture, and Eschatology: A Reply to the ATR’s Respondents.” http://ang​lica​nthe​olog​ical​review​.org​/static​/pdf​/conversations​/ GuilianoResponse​-v3​.pdf [accessed 17 August 2017] 50. Jennifer Phillips, “A Critique of the Rite of The Celebration and Blessing of a Christian Marriage,” in A Prayer Book for the Twenty-first Century, ed. Ruth A. Meyers (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1996), 114. 51. Phillips, “A Critique of the Rite of The Celebration,” 115. 52. I Will Bless You, 49. The Task Force on Marriage also notes this “biblical analogy is used for faithful as well as unfaithful relationships,” and so cannot be relied upon alone as a source for Christian theologies of marriage. See “Report,” 16–18. 53. “Discipleship of equals” is an expression of Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and serves as the title of one of her books. Its use signals my own debt to feminist theological reflection in this matter and many others. See Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza Discipleship of Equals: A Critical Feminist Ekklesia-logy of Liberation (London: SCM Press, 1993). 54. Good notes the relative ease with which she and her wife, Julian Sheffield, adapted the CBM by altering gendered references for their 2008 wedding. See her response to “Faith, Hope, and Love,” I Will Bless You, 47–48. 55. See Phillips, “A Critique of the Rite of The Celebration,” 117–121. 56. Cooke, “Historical Reflections,” 34. 57. John E. Goldingay, Grant R. LeMarquand, George R. Sumner, and Daniel A. Westberg, “Same-Sex Marriage and Anglican Theology: A View from the Traditionalists,” Anglican Theological Review 93.1 (2011): 25. 58. Phillips, “A Critique of the Rite of The Celebration,” 120. 59. Sarah Bachelard, “Marriage and the Sacred: Fragments Straight and Gay,” in Kaleidoscope of Pieces: Anglican Studies on Sexuality, ed. Alan H. Cadwallader (Adelaide: ATF Theology, 2016), 54. 60. Duncan Reid, “Friends and Lovers, Friends and Others,” Kaleidoscope of Pieces, ed. Alan H. Cadwallader, 69. 61. Reid, “Friends and Lovers,” 71. 62. Reid, “Friends and Lovers,” 65; Reid quotes Jürgen Moltmann’s The Church in the Power of the Spirit.

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63. “A Theology of Marriage including Same-Sex Couples: A View from the Liberals,” 77. 64. Mary E. Hunt, “Love Your Friends: Learning from the Ethics of Relationships,” in Queer Christianities: Lived Religion in Transgressive Forms, ed. Kathleen T. Talvacchia, Michael F. Pettinger, and Mark Larrimore (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 137. Elizabeth Stuart’s Just Good Friends, noted above, builds upon Hunt’s work on friendship and extends it. 65. Hunt, “Love Your Friends,” 144. 66. Mary Ann Tolbert, “Marriage and Friendship in the Christian New Testament: Ancient Resources for Contemporary Same-Sex Unions,” in Authorizing Marriage? Canon, Tradition, and Critique in the Blessing of Same-Sex, ed. Mark D. Jordan with Meghan T. Sweeney and David M. Mellot (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 49–50. 67. Mark Jordan, “Arguing Liturgical Genealogies, or, the Ghosts of Weddings Past,” 104–112. 68. Robert Song, among other concerns, worries that the diminishment of the meaning of “friendship” (“friends on Facebook”) might render same-gender partnerships second-class. See Robert Song, Covenant and Calling: Towards a Theology of Same-sex Relationships (London: SCM Press, 2014), 53. Reliance on the Trinity as a model for committed relationship has also been criticized by writers such as Bernd Wannenwetsch, who suggests marriage is meant to mirror “the union of Christ and the church which is a ‘material,’ sensual, in fact a bodily relationship.” See his “Old Docetism—New Moralism? Questioning a New Direction in the Homosexuality Debate,” Modern Theology 16.3 (2000): 364. 69. “Another Look at Augustine on Marriage: An Historian’s Response to ‘Marriage in Creation and Covenant,’” 5. http://ang​lica​nthe​olog​ical​review​.org​/ static​/pdf​/conversations​/DanielJoslyn​-Sie​miat​kosk​iResponse​.pdf. [accessed 14 August 2017] 70. “Report,” 24. 71. Mark Jordan, Blessing Same-sex Unions: The Perils of Queer Romance and the Confusions of Christian Marriage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 74. 72. “Report,” 14. 73. Bachelard, “Marriage and the Sacred,” 57. 74. Blessing Same-sex Unions, 120. 75. Siobhán Garrigan, “Queer Worship,” Theology and Sexuality 15.2 (2009): 227. 76. See, for example, Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 157–158. 77. James Alison, Broken Hearts and New Creations: Intimations of a Great Reversal (London: DLT, 2010), 201. 78. “A Critique of the Rite of the Celebration,” 118. 79. Stevenson, To Join Together, 196–199. 80. See Kathleen Fischer and Thomas Hart, “Practical Liturgical Suggestions for a Wedding Celebration and for Family Liturgies,” in Alternative Futures for Worship, vol. 5, ed. Bernard Cooke (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1987), 69–86. 81. “Contemplating a Jewish Ritual of Same-Sex Union,” 96.

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82. See, for example, her Gender Differences in the Making of Liturgical History: Lifting The Veil on Liturgy’s Past (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 33.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alison, James. Broken Hearts and New Creations: Intimations of a Great Reversal. London: DLT, 2010. Bachelard, Sarah. “Marriage and the Sacred: Fragments Straight and Gay.” In Kaleidoscope of Pieces: Anglican Studies on Sexuality, edited by Alan H. Cadwallader, 43–58. Adelaide: ATF Theology, 2016. Berger, Teresa. Gender Differences in the Making of Liturgical History: Lifting The Veil on Liturgy’s Past. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Cheng, Patrick. “The Amazing Grace of Same-Sex Blessings.” In Encouraging Conversations: Resources for Talking About Same-Sex Blessings, edited by Fredrica Harris Thompsett, 66–70. New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2013. Cooke, Bernard. “Historical Reflections on the Meaning of Marriage as Christian Sacrament.” In Alternative Futures for Worship, vol. 5, edited by Bernard Cooke, 33–46. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1987. Fiorenza, Elizabeth Schüssler. Discipleship of Equals: A Critical Feminist Ekklesialogy of Liberation. London: SCM Press, 1993. Garrigan, Siobhán. “Queer Worship.” Theology and Sexuality 15.2 (2009): 211–230. General Convention of the Episcopal Church. “I Will Bless You, and You Will Be a Blessing.” Revised and Expanded edition (2015). https://extranet​.generalconvention​.org​/staff​/files​/download​/15668 Goldingay, John E., Grant R. LeMarquand, George R. Sumner, and Daniel A. Westberg. “Same-Sex Marriage and Anglican Theology: A View from the Traditionalists.” Anglican Theological Review 93.1 (2011): 1–50. Good, Deirdre J., Willis J. Jenkins, Cynthia B. Kittredge, and Eugene F. Rogers, Jr. “A Theology of Marriage Including Same-Sex Couples: A View from the Liberals.” Anglican Theological Review 93.1 (2011): 51–87. Hefling, Charles. “Variations on a Theological Theme: The Episcopal Church’s Rite for Blessing a (Same-Sex) Covenant.” In Encouraging Conversations: Resources for Talking About Same-Sex Blessings, edited by Fredrica Harris Thompsett, 71–78. New York: Morehouse Publishing, 2013. Hunt, Mary E. “Love Your Friends: Learning from the Ethics of Relationships.” In Queer Christianities: Lived Religion in Transgressive Forms, edited by Kathleen T. Talvacchia, Michael F. Pettinger, and Mark Larrimore, 137–147. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Jordan, Mark. “Arguing Liturgical Genealogies, or, the Ghosts of Weddings Past.” In Authorizing Marriage? Canon, Tradition, and Critique in the Blessing of SameSex, edited by Mark D. Jordan with Meghan T. Sweeney and David M. Mellot, 102–120. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. ———. Blessing Same-sex Unions: The Perils of Queer Romance and the Confusions of Christian Marriage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

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Kavanagh, Aidan. On Liturgical Theology. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1984. Martin, Dale. “Familiar Idolatry and the Christian Case Against Marriage.” In Authorizing Marriage? Canon, Tradition, and Critique in the Blessing of Same-Sex, edited by Mark D. Jordan with Meghan T. Sweeney and David M. Mellot, 17–40. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Phillips, Jennifer. “A Critique of the Rite of the Celebration and Blessing of a Christian Marriage.” In A Prayer Book for the Twenty-first Century, edited by Ruth A. Meyers, 110–129. New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1996. Reid, Duncan. “Friends and Lovers, Friends and Others.” In Kaleidoscope of Pieces: Anglican Studies on Sexuality, edited by Alan H. Cadwallader, 59–74. Adelaide: ATF Theology, 2016. Roberts, William. “Theology of Christian Marriage.” In Alternative Futures for Worship, vol. 5, edited by Bernard Cooke, 47–66. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1987. Song, Robert. Covenant and Calling: Towards a Theology of Same-sex Relationships. London: SCM Press, 2014. Stevenson, Kenneth. To Join Together: The Rite of Marriage. New York: Pueblo, 1987. Stuart, Elizabeth. Just Good Friends: Towards a Lesbian and Gay Theology of Relationships. London: Mowbray, 1995. Tolbert, Mary Ann. “Marriage and Friendship in the Christian New Testament: Ancient Resources for Contemporary Same-Sex Unions.” In Authorizing Marriage? Canon, Tradition, and Critique in the Blessing of Same-Sex, edited by Mark D. Jordan with Meghan T. Sweeney and David M. Mellot, 41–51. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Wannenwetsch, Bernd. “Old Docetism—New Moralism? Questioning a New Direction in the Homosexuality Debate.” Modern Theology 16.3 (2000): 353–364.

Chapter 10

Partner, Husband, Friend? The Sacramentality of a SameSex Relationship Joseph N. Goh

Many years back, in a moment of passionate romance, I gushed to the man with whom I was living in a committed relationship at that time, “You are mine.” I was slightly taken aback when he said, “No, I don’t belong to anyone. I belong to me and you belong to you.” It was not, as I learned later, a disavowal of the love that we had pledged to each other, but his refusal to succumb to an expectation of the total appropriation of an individual’s personhood that is presumably embedded in any form of a committed relationship—what Bryan Cones refers to as “a mutual ‘acquisition’ between the parties.” Cones’ notion of “a mutual ‘acquisition’”—one hallmark of heteropatriarchy—is not alien to citizens of multi-ethnic, multi-faith, and deeply conservative Malaysia. Myriad forms of heteropatriarchy are deeply entrenched in the various strata of political governance,1 nationalistic and economic imaginings,2 and sociocultural interactions and spiritual praxes3 in the country. Heteropatriarchy is arguably most evident in heteronormative married life. In many Malay-Muslim families, for instance, wives are expected to be subservient to, and dependent on their husbands in everyday dealings—an expectation reflected in Syariah (Islamic) family and matrimonial laws and cultural practices.4 The upshot is, I submit, a tacit sense of proprietorship in husbands over their wives. The committed relationship I shared with my beloved in Malaysia for five years, four months and eighteen days before he died of a terminal illness was lived out openly in some situations but remained clandestine in others. Heteronormativity and cisnormativity are also valorized in the country, and contra naturam laws are imposed on the private lives of its citizens. As same-sex 123

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activities are criminalized in civil and Islamic laws,5 and no legal protection exists for them,6 queer and trans Malaysians are unremittingly more concerned with issues of safety and protection than same-sex marriage rights. My relationship taught me that despite our mutually agreed dedication, the innumerable compromises that we happily made to maintain a healthy relationship, and the serendipitous inevitability of unexpectedly finishing each other’s sentences due to intimate familiarity, my beloved and I were two distinct individuals who did not transmogrify into clones of each other or live blissfully and unproblematically as “one.” Neither did we “own” each other. We voluntarily chose to continue gifting ourselves to each other, and traded both dependence and independence for interdependence. Evocative of the Trinitarian composition of plural unity (!), we were two but one, one but two. We addressed and referred to each other variably as “partner” and “husband”—sometimes even “friend” when revelation proved risky—even before the idea of an official marriage surfaced. Yet, it was “husband” that gripped me with delight to the core. (I still consider him as my late husband even though he passed away before we could officially tie the knot in his country of origin, a step we considered for logistical convenience rather than state validation.) I vividly remember the first time he referred to me in this way. I felt flattered, comforted, complete, and secure. As someone who was (voluntarily, then involuntarily) single for decades, I experienced a feeling of finality, of “belonging” to a man without actually “belonging” to him: the search was “over” as I had met someone who loved and supported me unconditionally. I was aware of the history of heteropatriarchal baggage that is embedded in marital nomenclatures and adopted through homonormative arrangements on some levels, but “husband” connoted feelings of familiarity, intimacy, and profundity for me that were absent in “partner” and “friend.” I wonder if such feelings parallel the trajectory that many men in the United States have taken in retaining “gay” despite the increasing anti-identitarian lure of “queer” due to the former’s continuing prowess “to signify more recent and more profound emotional connections with men as compared to women [and] experienced as more fundamental— more ‘essential.’”7 Truth be told, I was also eager to be accorded the same level of accomplishment I saw among my peers who had slipped into mainstream discourses of love through same-sex and opposite-sex relationships. To this day, widowhood has yet to strip me of such stirrings and inclinations. The furor surround Pope Francis’ statement on same-sex civil unions in 2020 had the unexpected effect of inciting fresh thoughts on my relationship and my reading of Cones’ work. Like many people, I followed the brewing controversy that ended abruptly via internet news portals. Apparently, in a scene from the Evgeny Afineevsky–directed film Francesco, the pontiff ostensibly expressed his support for same-sex civil unions when he said that

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“what we have to create is a civil union law. That way [same-sex couples] are legally covered.”8 The Vatican later explained that this decontextualized statement was spliced from a 2019 interview with the Pope by the Mexican broadcaster Televisa in which the pope “referred to a position he had taken when he had been archbishop of Buenos Aires.”9 Moreover, Pope Francis’ denouncement of same-sex marriages during the interview, in which he spoke of the “incongruity” of a “homosexual marriage,” was edited out in Francesco.10 Despite this fervent clarification/justification offered by the Vatican, which assuaged the chilling fear of scandalized conservatives that Rome was doing a complete turnabout on its rejection of homosexual activities, many of my friends around the globe continue to interpret this incident as a mitigation of the Vatican’s unrelenting stand against any semblance of same-sex partnership. I do not share the euphoria of what I perceive to be my friends’ mistranslation of the Vatican’s persistent homonegativity, and by extension, transnegativity. This segment of Francisco does not attenuate the Roman Catholic (henceforth “Catholic”) repudiation of same-sex unions—it unequivocally pronounces its ossification. By acquiescing to the possibilities of same-sex civil unions for practical purposes while pronouncing same-sex marriages as incongruous, Catholicism is in reality dismissing any possibility of acknowledging same-sex partnerships as constituting the sacrament of holy matrimony, which has remained safely ensconced within the parameters of doctrinal protectionism as generated by heteronormative systems. Marriage is somewhat of a Johnny-come-lately in the canonical enumeration of sacraments in the Catholic Church. In fact, it was only in the twelfth century that [marriage] came to be regarded as a sacrament in the same sense as baptism and the other official sacraments [and i] t was only after the Council of Trent, because of the need to eliminate abuses in the practice of secret marriages, that a standard Catholic wedding rite came into existence.11

For many contemporary Christians however, an ecclesiastically sanctioned sacramental marriage marks a pivotal, God-endorsed phase in their lives. My own experiences of active presbyteral ministry in the Catholic Church can perhaps further elucidate my thoughts. Between 2000 and 2007, I lived and worked in an urban mission on the outskirts of the city in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. My congregants comprised mainly the various indigenous Bidayûh communities who were originally practitioners of traditional faiths. Due to various socioeconomic (weddings are expensive!), cultural (the tua kampung or village headman is deputized to perform civil unions) and geographical reasons (the mission consisted of more than fifty villages, housing estates, and schools under the pastoral care of two or three ordained priests

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and several catechists),12 these congregants were more inclined to engage in kawen adat (traditional marriages) or kawen prentah (civil marriages) rather than step into the parish office to apply for kawen greja (church-sanctioned marriages).13 As the fundamental thrust throughout the archdiocese in relation to marriages was to ratify what were deemed as improper unions, an overwhelming majority of marriages was designated as necessary for ecclesiastical validation and validation ceremonies were held weekly at the mission base. What proved to be an undesirable outcome were the attitudes of those who had opted for kawen greja—sacramental marriages—from the outset or those whose “irregular” arrangements had been validated toward those whose marriages were not indexed by the legitimizing mechanisms of the church. The former spoke from what were obviously privileged spaces that offered comfortable, authoritative, and legitimate alliance with a theological colossus that is rarely, if ever, challenged on its teachings on morality and intimate lives. Bidayûhs and Ibans in committed relationships were often stratified according to their marital standing vis-à-vis the church. It was not uncommon for those who fell short to be derided by their more “respectable” peers, particularly as their children were not eligible for baptism until their marriages were validated. Marriages which were not endorsed by the church were deemed as enmity with the will of God and thus merited justifiable disdain. Regardless of the length of time a couple had lived as husband and wife through traditional or civil marriages (some were even grandparents), they still occupied a lesser position in relation to those who had embraced the sacrament of matrimony. What they had in terms of a committed relationship was merely a “second class option.” They could never be on par with those who were “validly” married. They were considered as living in sinful partnership as man and woman, rather than living in grace as husband and wife. To this day, I am saddened that this demeanor continues to be fomented by the church. This situation is certainly not unique to Sarawak, but it does reflect the hierarchy of committed relationships in the country. For me, Pope Francis’ position on same-sex marriage—then and now— aptly echoes the kawen adat/kawen prentah versus kawen greja stand in Sarawak. His support of same-sex civil unions, even if situated within a particular context, sits irrefutably at odds with same-sex marriages which he considers incongruous. No matter the joys, challenges, and depth of love a same-sex couple shares and the number of years they have spent in a relationship, their commitment can never elicit the recognition of a sacramental status for those who crave it. The pontiff’s ostensible support of civil unions is, as I interpret it, a condescending, charitable hand-out that is a “second class option” at best. It is an acquiescence to the pleas of those for whom the approval of Rome matters, a tentative endorsement of what the Vatican must

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perceive as a parodied ritual, an abominable arrangement that breeds “intrinsic evil” and “objective disorder.” While I no longer look to the approval of the Vatican or society for my life decisions, I am irritated by the hubris with which Rome obliquely desacramentalizes my committed relationship—effectively pronouncing the divine gift of love which I shared with my beloved as ungodly—but more so for reinvigorating this ideology in the minds and hearts of those who would otherwise be deliriously and openly happy that “the Mighty One has done great things for me” (Luke 1.49). I believe implicitly in democratized sacramentality in all aspects of my life. Sacramentality is fundamentally the beckoning of God that occurs through varied forms of materiality and subsequent human response, “an Ereignis, an event; that occurs whenever God is acting in a self-revelatory way and where there is a human response to this divine self-revelation.”14 I also believe that the personal sacramentality of a committed relationship is concomitantly a communal celebration. Whenever I addressed and referred to the man I loved as “husband,” it was an Ereignis of love which was simultaneously a personal and communal theopolitical sacramental statement. Against the Roman grain, I adhered to the understanding of my committed relationship as a divine invitation which we had both accepted by living with each other in love. It was our love that determined the sacramentality of our relationship, and if “love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God” (1 John 4.7), then what we had was godly. This is what “husband” meant and continues to mean for me. My affinity for “husband” over “partner” can be easily be misconstrued. It may appear as though “husband” must be irrevocably set against “partner” for its continual survival, a term of seemingly worthier connotations that sustains itself solely through its contrast with a lesser taxonomy. I do not hold such an attitude which promotes “the incessant insistence on alterity”15 that has long divided the straight and the queer, the cis and the trans, and the sacred and the profane. The pervasive coercion for human beings to choose either one or the Other—a ban on diversity in order to claim alleged purity in identitarian formations and thus naturalize normalcy—has had the effect of leaving many stranded at the periphery of recognizability and intelligibility. My own experiences have revealed to me the possibilities of living out a husband-andhusband relationship without the debilitations that are frequently associated with the term. The interchangeability in my usage of “husband,” “partner,” and “friend” is contingent on circumstance. I have witnessed flickering twitches of discomfort in social gatherings that relayed a clear message to me that “friend” was more acceptable than “partner,” or “partner” more palatable than “husband,” when I made reference to my beloved. I remember the confusion that registered on the face of a much older man when I explained to him that I

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was taking care of my “partner” in response to his question as to why I was spending so much time at the bedside of this particular man at the same ward where he was taking care of his wife. I immediately switched to “friend.” Judging from his subsequent facial expression, “friend” was grammatically more comprehensible whereas “partner” was meaningless and “husband” even less so. I was intrigued however, by how the sacramentality of my relationship remained intact through shifting terminology in this situation. Despite the fact that official same-sex marriages are still pipe dreams in Malaysia, I have seen varied configurations of same-sex relationships in the country. I am acquainted with friends in open and polyamorous relationships, and witnessed same-sex relationships that echo heteropatriarchal hallmarks of proprietorship. What has become evident to me is the versatility with which many queer and trans Malaysians experiment with their relationships without necessarily being encumbered by juridical, sociocultural, and religious expectations. While this situation is not peculiar to Malaysia, it turns the oppressively prohibitive ethos in the country on its head by affording queer and trans Malaysians some wiggle room to contextualize their relationships according to their actual realities without being dictated by popular expectations of intimate arrangements that are often bundled with more sanctioned relationships. We are free to explore and (re)invent the meanings of the terms we use for those to whom we have committed ourselves, and thus maintain definitional flexibility. I am able to discern, name, and live out a loving relationship in fluid ways—to call the man I love “partner,” “husband,” and “friend” privately and publicly as diverse circumstances dictate—without relinquishing the intense sacramentality of the experience. NOTES 1. Pey Jung Yeong, “How Women Matter: Gender Representation in Malaysia’s 14th General Election,” The Round Table 107 (2018): 771–786. 2. Shanthi Thambiah, “The Productive and Non-(Re) Productive Women: Sites of Economic Growth in Malaysia,” Asian Women 26 (2010): 49–76. 3. Sylva Frisk, Submitting to God: Women and Islam in Urban Malaysia (Copenhagen, Denmark: NIAS Press, 2009). 4. Maznah Mohamad, “Creating a Muslim Majority in Plural Malaysia: Undermining Minority and Women’s Rights,” Ishtiaq Ahmed, ed., The Politics of Religion in South and Southeast Asia, (New York: Routledge, 2011), 174–194; Maznah Mohamad, “Women’s Engagement with Political Islam in Malaysia,” Global Change, Peace & Security 16 (2004): 133–149. 5. The Commissioner of Law Revision, Malaysia, “Syariah Criminal Offences (Federal Territories) Act 1997” (2006), http://www​.agc​.gov​.my​/agcportal​/index​.php​ ?r​=portal2​/lom2​&id​=1431; The Commissioner of Law Revision, Malaysia, “Federal

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Constitution” (1957), http://www​.agc​.gov​.my​/agcportal​/uploads​/files​/Publications​/ FC​/FEDERAL​%20CONSTITUTION​%20ULANG​%20CETAK​%202016​.pdf. 6. Mazwin Nik Anis, “Dr Mashitah: No Constitutional Protection for LGBT,” The Star Online, June 19, 2012, https://www​.thestar​.com​.my​/news​/nation​/2012​/06​/19​ /dr​-mashitah​-no​-constitutional​-protection​-for​-lgbt/. 7. Barry D. Adam, “Love and Sex in Constructing Identity among Men Who Have Sex with Men,” International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 5 (2000): 331. 8. Quoted in Elisabetta Povoledo, “Vatican Clarifies Pope Francis’s Comments on Same-Sex Unions,” The New York Times, November 2, 2020, https://www​ .nytimes​.com​/2020​/11​/02​/world​/europe​/pope​-gay​-civil​-unions​.html. 9. Cited in Povoledo. 10. Cited in Associated Press, “Vatican Breaks Silence, Explains Pope’s Civil Union Comments,” NBC News, November 3, 2020, https://www​ .nbcnews​ .com​ / feature​/nbc​-out​/vatican​-breaks​-silence​-explains​-pope​-francis​-civil​-union​-comments​ -n1245803; see also Povoledo, “Vatican Clarifies Pope Francis’s Comments on Same-Sex Unions.” 11. Joseph Martos, Doors to the Sacred: A Historical Introduction to Sacraments in the Catholic Church (Liguori: Triumph Books, 1991), 343. 12. See Joseph N. Goh, “Sacred Sexual Touch: Illness, Sexual Bodies and Sacramental Anointing in Rural Bidayŭh Villages,” Rural Theology: International, Ecumenical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives 12 (2014): 42–52. 13. Priests also act officially as Assistant Registrars of Marriages. 14. Kenan B. Osborne, Christian Sacraments in a Postmodern World: A Theology for the Third Millennium (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1999), 140. 15. Joseph N. Goh, “Looking Queerly Through the Heart: Towards a Southeast Asian Praxis of Doing Church with LGBTIQ/PLHIV,” in Gender and Sexuality Justice in Asia: Finding Resolutions through Conflicts, ed. Joseph N. Goh, Sharon A. Bong, and Thaatchaayini Kananatu (Singapore: Springer, 2020), 186.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adam, Barry D. “Love and Sex in Constructing Identity among Men Who Have Sex with Men.” International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 5 (2000): 325–339. Frisk, Sylva. Submitting to God: Women and Islam in Urban Malaysia. Copenhagen, Denmark: NIAS Press, 2009. Goh, Joseph N. “Looking Queerly Through the Heart: Towards a Southeast Asian Praxis of Doing Church with LGBTIQ/PLHIV.” In Gender and Sexuality Justice in Asia: Finding Resolutions through Conflicts, edited by Joseph N. Goh, Sharon A. Bong, and Thaatchaayini Kananatu, 185–201. Singapore: Springer, 2020. ———. “Sacred Sexual Touch: Illness, Sexual Bodies and Sacra- mental Anointing in Rural Bidayŭh Villages,” Rural Theology: International, Ecumenical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives 12 (2014): 42–52.

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Martos, Joseph. Doors to the Sacred: A Historical Introduction to Sacraments in the Catholic Church. Liguori: Triumph Books, 1991. Mohamad, Maznah. “Creating a Muslim Majority in Plural Malaysia: Undermining Minority and Women’s Rights.” In The Politics of Religion in South and Southeast Asia, edited by Ishtiaq Ahmed, 174–194. New York: Routledge, 2011. ———. “Women’s Engagement with Political Islam in Malaysia.” Global Change, Peace & Security 16 (2004): 133–149. Osborne, Kenan B. Christian Sacraments in a Postmodern World: A Theology for the Third Millennium. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1999. Thambiah, Shanthi. “The Productive and Non-(Re) Productive Women: Sites of Economic Growth in Malaysia.” Asian Women 26 (2010): 49–76. Yeong, Pey Jung. “How Women Matter: Gender Representation in Malaysia’s 14th General Election.” The Round Table 107 (2018): 771–786.

Chapter 11

Common Ground The Gift of Womanist Theology in the Midst of the #MeToo Era Marguerite Kappelhoff

As early as 2006, African American activist Tarana Burke began using the phrase “Me Too” as a platform where survivors of sexual abuse could share their stories in an effort to reclaim their dignity and humanity.1 Going a step further, Burke set up the not-for-profit organization Just Be Inc. “focused on the health, wellbeing and wholeness of young women of color,” and the phrase “Me Too” became a movement.2 This movement gained significant visibility in late 2017 when actress Alyssa Milano posted on Twitter: “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted, write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.”3 While the initial intention was “simply” to raise awareness of the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault, the conversation quickly escalated to include all forms of oppression against women, highlighting the very nature of our societies, which support conditions that perpetuate misogyny, oppression, and abuse. Since 2017 the #MeToo hashtag has circumnavigated the globe in some eighty-five countries, crossing lines of stratification in terms of race, gender, and class and including voices from men, women, heterosexuals, queer, cis and transgendered people.4 The hashtag #MeToo has reshaped individual and public discourse on all forms of sexual harassment, assault, abuse, and violence that occur around the globe. It has created a watershed moment, raising the hopes of many that this movement’s momentum will continue to build human solidarity against all forms of sexual abuse and address issues of hegemony. Undoubtedly, this is an audacious goal. However, given the monumental upswell from its start along with the support and engagement across diverse lines, there is reason to be hopeful.

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The movement, however, is not without critics. General public backlash from establishment sources was not unexpected. Surprisingly, however, criticisms have been raised by some notable feminists and spokespersons, who find inadequacies within the movement, suggesting that it perpetuates a victim mentality, devalues all experiences of sexual assault by elevating them as equal, and sidelines women of color. As a result, they question the movement’s ability to affect “real” change.5 Part of the issue stems from the fact that feminist thought in and of itself is divided. This is evident even with the use of the word “feminist” being considered problematic as an overarching term because of its association “with the dominant perspectives of white, middle-class, Western women.”6 Author Sheila Greeve Davaney notes that once-assumed categories are proving problematic as many women are rejecting the term “feminist” in favor of other classifications that more correctly reflect their particular reality.7 That being said, feminists (understood in the broadest sense of the term) find commonality of agreement in matters relating to patriarchy and oppressive structures. However, the issue explodes open as soon as any attempt is made to discuss the #MeToo movement from a theological positioning. Once again, suspicion arises because of theology’s association with the “dominance of white, Western Christianity” and its “patriarchal images of God.”8 As such, any engagement in theological discourse results in attempts to “move beyond” the maleness of God or the institutionalized structures of religion by finding other terms and methodologies considered more palatable than the traditional offerings.9 Coakley suggests that the “problems of power, sex, and gender with which contemporary theory struggles so notably cannot be solved” in absence of “prior surrender to the divine.”10 As such she challenges feminist theology, suggesting it must be “more nuanced, less simplistic” and instead be continually open to the interruption of the Spirit.11 Despite her critics, the point Coakley makes is valid and would be characteristic of what binds together all feminist theologies—the fundamental desire for drawing forth, understanding, and discovering “the meaning of God’s self-revelation in our lives from the perspective of advocacy for the full humanity of women of all races, classes, sexual orientations, abilities and nationalities.”12 It is from this united position that the #MeToo conversation needs to find a way forward that can move past the normal pitfalls that truncate the discussion. This chapter seeks to explore a way forward by drawing on womanist theology, which I will argue is uniquely and appropriately placed not only to address these concerns but to accommodate them. Before I begin, it is important to state from the outset that I am not a womanist theologian, nor would I ever be considered to fall within the ranks of

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this distinguished category or to write as an authority in this space. I write as a privileged white woman, formed largely within mainstream theologies that are Western, white, and male, where the death of Jesus assumes central focus. Challenged by the lack of robustness in my own frameworks when it comes to addressing the complexities surrounding the responses to the #MeToo movement, I have been drawn to womanist theology, which is marginalized, female, communal, and concerned with how Jesus taught us how to live. I come as an outsider looking in, attempting to grasp the particular and profound wisdom of womanist theology. I write as one who seeks to learn from these astute black female voices, and in doing so I find myself inspired, challenged, and informed by their “God-talk,” which expands my thinking and feeds my soul. As I aim to demonstrate, womanist theology is holistic and robust, drawing insight from liberation, black, and feminist theologies. It calls to account all individual, social, and cultural injustices while urging us back to the message of the gospel with its themes of “liberation” that are Catholic by design and available to all who are “oppressed.” I argue that it is a theology of common ground that directly intersects with the concerns raised by the anti-#MeToo feminists. In what follows, I will first engage with some current tensions within feminism, as exposed in three main anti-#MeToo feminist critiques. I will then outline the general tenets of womanist theology in order to demonstrate its distinct value in approaching these tensions, then end by exploring a womanist theological response to the three concerns raised. My hope is that this chapter will highlight how womanist theology is both a gift and a challenge that reminds us to broaden the horizons of our thinking beyond where we currently stand.

FEMINIST DIVISION OVER THE #METOO MOVEMENT It is no surprise that, almost immediately, the #MeToo movement found critics. It is surprising, however, that the loudest voices appeared to come from within the feminist camp. Collectively identified as the anti-#MeToo feminists, these voices react to the movement by citing claims of moral agency: that with #MeToo, women were either further objectified as lacking the capacity to say “no,” or disempowered from being able to explore their sexuality, including the option to pursue sex as they wish on their own terms. Germaine Greer, identifying as an anti-#MeToo feminist, has questioned both the validity and efficacy of the movement. Her initial comment on the movement, from which she has not moved, was “Let’s see what happens,” thereby insinuating that she saw no immediate benefit from this movement or its efforts.13 Feminist author Carol Hanisch takes a similar stance, suggesting

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that what is required is a “feminist movement willing to go beyond hashtags and individual testimony.”14 Women of color from across the globe have raised their concerns about the movement’s ability to effectively represent the uniqueness of their situations, including issues of context, intersectionality, and the politics of race and gender. Within the Australian context, poet and author Eugenia Flynn reminds her readers that This Place is “forever shaped by the stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women,” including their “lives,” “losses,” “suffering,” “dignity,” and “resistance,” set against the backdrop of imperialistic colonialism and patriarchy.15 This Place is also the site where “stories of Black women” were “never taken seriously” and the site where the “#MeToo movement” did not hear “all the times that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women did not speak out, for fear of further stereotyping our men” in their attempt as women to “protect their community from being attacked by racists.”16 In broad terms, the arguments made by the anti-#MeToo feminists appear to fall into three main categories: Generational Some consider that these criticisms come from a generational divide in which the older generation of feminists suggest that the younger generation simply needs to “toughen up” and avoid being so naïve about the way in which the world works with its power imbalances and structural limitations.17 While writer Kate Davis would suggest that the intergenerational divide over #MeToo is both “painful and necessary,” she further argues that older feminists have severe concerns that young feminists will push the movement in directions that will destroy the progress that has already been made by the previous generations of feminists.18 Rebuttals from some of the younger feminists suggest that older feminists are “out of touch” with the reality of the current situation and reject their criticisms citing that they are very aware that “sexual harassment, assault and violence are very much part of everyday life of many different women and men.”19 However, their aim is that they want to address the “larger power structures that allow men—be they ‘powerful’ or not—to treat women as their sex objects.”20 Furthermore, they share the same concern for feminist agency, but understand that the issues go far beyond “individual capacity” and reflect the need for social change that can address the concerns about “who is able to speak out” given the number of women (and men) who have no avenue for communication given their constraints with either access to forms of social media or who cannot speak out because the consequences for doing so would be dangerous to them.21

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Individual versus Social Author Moira Donegan suggests that the rift within the #MeToo movement is not so much about a generational divide but rather is a “split between two competing visions of feminism—social and individualist.”22 As outlined by Donegan, an “individualist” model of feminism with its focus on “personal responsibility, individual freedoms and psychological adjustments” can offer women “meaningful routes out of the suffering imposed by patriarchy, and into equality with men.”23 On the other hand, “social feminism” is “less interested in ideas of empowerment and self-actualisation” but “proceeds from the assumption that misogyny is structural, and that women have a shared interest in fighting it.”24 Donegan suggests that “one approach is individualist, hard-headed, grounded in ideals of pragmatism, realism and self-sufficiency. The other is expansive, communal, idealistic and premised on the ideals of mutual interest and solidarity.”25 Anti-#MeToo feminists insist that the movement disempowers individual women and takes away their moral agency to make sexual decisions, including the ability to say no or, conversely, to determine to pursue sexual activities and express themselves sexually as individuals capable of choice. In response to this charge, proponents of the movement suggest that what the anti-#MeToo feminists fail to understand is the power of solidarity that can be gained when an individual woman begins to identify “their suffering as women’s suffering” and lend their voice as an instrument for bringing forth social change as they stand “together demanding that those forces be defeated.”26 Intersectional A major criticism of the #MeToo movement has been that race, gender, and context were neglected and sidelined and therefore diminished the unique value of particular contextual stories. It cannot be denied that the movement was marked by whiteness and privilege and consequently those with more privilege, power, and positioning were also more visible. This immediately exposes issues related to intersectionality.27 In addition, as Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad have pointed out, the intersection is not simply about including “color” but also about accommodating the expanse of the field when discussing “gender,” given that sexual assault and violence is not reserved solely as a one-way action of men against women, but is multi-directional and gendered across the board. Gill and Orgad write: The multiplication of terms for thinking about gender is having a major effect on the field moving scholars beyond a taken-for-granted cisgender binary, and

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in the process introducing radically new ways of thinking about both gendered and sexual experience.28

Along with race, privilege and gender, Zarko-Davis highlights the importance of context, stating that: One thing all this research has taught me is that the context matters; and within the context the question has to be asked about the social locations of the perpetrators and victims [sic survivors].29

This is particularly more pronounced when taking into consideration global, cultural and political structures that do not allow for the marginalized (predominantly women) to speak out without severe consequences to their livelihood and well-being. Womanism and Womanist Theology The term “womanist” was coined in 1979 by writer Alice Walker, who defines it to mean a young woman who is “sassy,” “confident,” and exhibits “outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior . . . Responsible. In charge. Serious” and thereby considered to be “womanish” as opposed to “girlish.”30 Walker comments further that a womanist is a “black feminist or feminist of color,” while adding the distinction that “womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender.”31 Walker goes on to define a “womanist” as a woman who “loves other women, sexually and/or non-sexually”; who “appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility . . . and women’s strength”; who “loves individual men, sexually and/or non-sexually”; who is “committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female”; who is “not a separatist, except periodically, for health”; who is “traditionally universalist”; and who “loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.”32 It is from these characterizations that womanist theology gains its impetus and forms its foundations as a distinct theology. Womanist theology found its voice in the early 1980s through the writings of Katie Cannon, Delores Williams, and Jacquelyn Grant, who are often considered to be the first-generation theologians and ethicists within the womanist tradition.33 Although related to both feminist and black liberation theologies, womanist theology considers itself to be decidedly distinct and unique, finding that neither of these groups adequately address womanists’ specific context and instead treat them as “marginal add-ons” rather than at the center of their theology.34

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While black liberation theology addresses issues related to race and class, and feminist theology addresses issues relating to gender, only womanists can adequately contextualize their theology and address the combination of “isms” (e.g., racism, sexism, classism35) experienced by African American women.36 Intersectionality thus becomes a starting point and catalyst for understanding womanist theology. It is important to note that when it comes to womanist theology the lines of agreement are not hard fixed but rather, being a lived theology, are everexpanding. Emilie Townes writes: There is no one voice in womanist religious thought, but a symphony that at times may move to a cacophony . . . [a] creative cacophony that refuses to settle for uneasy truces and obsequious compromises to appear united and of one mind in and to the theological academy or in the halls of the Black Church.37

Stephanie Mitchem adds that while certain topics are foundational to all theologies (salvation, Christology and so on), “the answers that womanists find are not always in accord with those of white, Western, or male theologies because black women’s lives have shaped other meanings.”38 Further to this, she notes, even in instances where there are “more established constructs of womanist theology . . . these are not closed, absolute, or hardened constructions”; rather, “womanists continue to explore each of the categories.”39 The breadth of womanist theology allows for the complex issues of intersectionality to be flexibly accommodated. Yet the approach of womanist theology is not so cacophonous as to be meaningless, and clear themes emerge in the key womanist writings that allow us the possibility of learning from their approach. For the purposes of this chapter, I present five generalized statements of commonalities found in womanist theological writings, and these will serve as the basis for deeper engagement with anti-#MeToo feminist concerns. 1. Womanists are at the same time both universalists40 and particularists.41 This is one of their most noted characteristics. They are universalist because they are concerned with and committed to the welfare, survival, and wholeness of all people regardless of gender, race, class, sexual orientation, or otherwise; yet particularist because they are concerned “first and foremost about Black women” and their particular contexts and circumstances.42 2. Womanists form their theology through the use of various cultural writings and biblical sources. A clear example is the choice of identification with the term “womanist,” a term that was coined in black literature

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rather than theological literature. Baker-Fletcher and others note that for womanist theologians and ethicists it is “black women’s culture” that becomes the “primary resource,” especially “narrative (written and oral, historical and contemporary),” from “all kinds of texts” including “scripture, intellectual essays, autobiography, fiction, poetry, and song” that are often combined with “Scripture,” “church doctrines,” “slave narratives,” or “liberation theologies.”43 This is because “womanists believe that God exists in places where the word of God is not necessarily mentioned.”44 Williams concludes that “each womanist theologian will add her own special accent to the understandings of God . . . so that womanist theology will one day reflect the divine spirit that connects us all.”45 3. Womanists give priority and preference to the ministry of Jesus as bearing more significance than his suffering on the cross.46 Womanists, like feminists, question the “viability of Christian atonement theories that stress the sacrifice of Jesus.”47 For womanists, two issues are present: suffering and surrogacy. Grant notes that for black women to identify with the “suffering servant” image of Christ only further adds to their already felt oppression by “glorifying servanthood” and “confirming” the “subservient status” of black women.48 Adding to this, “surrogacy” identifies the need for someone to “stand in the place assigned to someone else” in order to meet the needs and goals of others (something which black women identify with clearly).49 Jesus, rather than being assigned by God, voluntarily became this “surrogate” for humanity—a choice that black women never had.50 Williams, however, finds theological resolution by asserting that “Jesus did not come to die for humankind; Jesus came to live for humankind” and therefore it is “Jesus’ life and ministerial vision that redeem humans.”51 Grant further states that the significance of Christ is not his “maleness” but his “humanity.”52 4. Womanist theology is prophetic and pastoral, revealing its ability to operate in a creative and transformative way. Emilie Townes suggests that womanist ethics reveals two necessary voices: the pastoral and the prophetic.53 The pastoral voice provides the ability to be self-critical, to comfort and accept others, and encourages growth and change.54 Furthermore, it is this pastoral voice that provides for “leadership in the community” and “must always be prepared to consider all the information,” including the “varying social contexts that groups and individuals bring to bear.”55 This ensures that ongoing dialogues with other perspectives are foundational to womanist theology and its further constructions, even if particular focus is given to the experiences of black women and their communities.56 The prophetic voice relates to “being innovativecreative” (e.g., making a way out of no way57) and contains six key threads: (1) the desire and the ability to discern the will of God; (2) the

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exposure of the oppressive nature of society; (3) the necessity to be an agent of admonition; (4) the characteristic of unapologetic confrontation; (5) the search for the creation of a community of faith, partnership, justice, and unity; and (6) the determination that self-critical inclusivity is mandatory.58 5. Womanist theology and literature bears a recurrent, almost formulaic, theme of oppression59–suffering60–struggle61–survival62–liberation.63 Appearing frequently (individually or variously grouped), though defined with variation at times, these words are found throughout womanist theological writings. They come together to create a model of survival that demonstrates “a people that continue on, enduring pain and hardship, directed and accompanied by a God who does not necessarily set them free” but will help them “make a way out of what she thought was no way.”64 Collectively, womanist theology not only affirms the experiences of black women but also affirms the “deep wisdom formed in the struggle for survival under oppressive conditions.”65 Womanist Patricia Hill Collins prefers to call this a “culture of resistance” that fights the “matrix of domination” and “assists black women” throughout their personal, communal, and institutional dimensions in life in specific ways.66 Johnson writes: Throughout the history of African descendants in America, womanists—though only recently known as such—have lived as witnesses to the power of divine grace, enabling them to create triumph out of victimization. To overcome their anguish, Black women continue to draw strength from hearing and imitating the strategies adopted by their mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and great-great-grandmothers to handle their own suffering. These stories evoke growth and change, proper outrage and dissatisfaction, and enlarge Black women’s moral horizon and choices.67

It is important to highlight that the themes of “salvation” and “liberation” are closely tied, if not interchangeable, in womanist theology. In this view, salvation from “social sins” is the first priority, requiring that the saved participate to bring wholeness and shalom to the community through choosing to right wrongs and stand up for injustices. Even if that means placing themselves in a position where they may need to endure suffering, allowing themselves to experience God’s grace and mercy as God “makes a way out of no way,” either through immediate liberation or through the ability to struggle and survive until liberation comes.68 Taken together, these five tenets provide a seedbed for cultivating new responses to the challenges raised by the anti-#MeToo feminists.

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#METOO TENSIONS IN LIGHT OF WOMANIST THEOLOGY It is immediately evident that womanist theology naturally intersects with the #MeToo movement. Both womanist theology and the #MeToo movement carry the reoccurring theme of solidarity, in which women draw strength from the stories of others and share the cry for injustices perpetrated to be accounted for on the path to liberation. To be sure, womanist theology is first and foremost concerned with the experience of black women and then their immediate communities. However, the concern does not stop there, because womanist theology is also concerned with finding healing and wholeness for the entirety of society. As such, womanist theology is communal and holistic by nature, seeking to care for the needs of their immediate community before reaching further afield to consider the needs of others within their own story of struggle/suffering and search for liberation. Womanist theology engages through a lens of creative transformation in which God is understood to be actively involved with the human agent within their immediate context. It builds theology on a personal narrative that is contextually particular, in which God is present with each individual in the midst of their struggle, supporting them to “find a way out of no way.” Beyond the particular, however, this newly learned wisdom (of struggle, survival, liberation) is to be shared from the personal to the collective, tearing down power structures that seek to oppress in an effort to find liberation for all. At this point, it is wise to temper any claims to womanist theology as an exclusive voice by which to narrate the #MeToo movement. Of course it is not, especially given that the #MeToo movement has now spread across the globe. Offering a one-size-fits-all theology to the complexity of the issues would not only be a disservice to the movement, but would also lack an understanding of womanist theology and its main tenets (e.g., that it is concerned first and foremost with black women and therefore cannot speak into all contexts). Furthermore, African American womanist theology does not speak for every black woman the world over. For instance, in Africa, many in the “Circle for Concerned African Women Theologians” would describe themselves as “African feminists”—such as Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Musa Dube, Isabel Phiri, and Musimbi Kanyaro.69 That being said, other women in Africa would ascribe to womanism, especially as it is contextually understood within Africa.70 Furthermore, the term “womanism” and womanist theology is not simply ascribed to every black female; rather, this is a term that a black woman will choose for herself. Townes writes: “The confessional element of womanist means that it is a term that cannot be imposed, but must be claimed

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by the Black woman,” nor is the womanist “free to name others as womanist if this is not a term they claim for themselves.”71 Taking these concerns into account, womanist theology remains a robust and holistic perspective, able to integrate and accommodate disparate voices due to its concerns for intersectionality, contextuality, and concerns for liberation and salvation (personal, communal, institutional, and social). It presents an approach that transforms the individual, the immediate community, and society as a whole. It is therefore uniquely and appropriately placed to address the issues of division that have arisen within feminism around the #MeToo movement. Tending to Generational Concerns As outlined earlier, some tensions around the #MeToo movement have centered on whether it has validity and efficacy for achieving feminist agency or whether such “hashtag feminism” may undermine the decades of progress made by previous generations.72 These concerns have fallen somewhat along generational lines, with older and younger generations of feminists stereotyping each other in the popular media.73 The gift of womanist theology in the midst of the generational divide can be explored on many fronts.74 Firstly, womanist theology finds value in every shared story of suffering because every story is a reminder of how God comes to meet individuals within their point of oppression, seeking to find a way to help that woman find “liberation.” Even if that liberation is not immediate or in the manner that the woman would desire, it can still be a transformative moment on the way to salvation/liberation as God encourages them to continue struggling for healing and wholeness. Their story and the process of sharing this story with other women helps them in the midst of their own struggle, as a reminder of their own model of survival (oppression-suffering-struggle-survival-liberation), first for themselves and then for others. Furthermore, within womanist theology the focus on forming theology creatively and contextually in an effort to transform society results in drawing upon various cultural writings, be they current or historic, as primary resources. Thus, while concerns are raised by an older generation of feminists as to the ground that might be lost as younger feminists pursue the momentum of the #MeToo movement, a way forward is possible via womanist theology, which not only values narrative in the particular, but also draws upon all resources (whether literary or oral) that have gone before. Remembering that the “pastoral voice” in womanist theology is prepared to consider all of the information from varying contexts ensures ongoing dialogues rather than closed loops of communication.

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Additionally, womanist theology is continually and “prophetically” desiring, seeking, and discerning the will of God for this moment and this context, while looking further afield for liberation to be brought to other communities. Amanda Rossie Barroso highlights how the #MeToo movement has “brought survivors of all generations together, through their shared experiences of trauma and allyship, to tell stories about how sexual harassment not just impacts their mental health but also their economic security.”75 The prophetic voice seeks to be an agent of admonition who will unapologetically confront issues of injustice, including the exposure of the oppressive nature of society. Womanist theology therefore resources the body of Christ to pursue its mission in which collectively it calls to account all injustices. In this way it draws the community of faith back to the message of the Christian gospel, which is catholic by nature, ensuring inclusion for all. Unifying Individualist and Social Aims While earlier feminist groups focused their energies on establishing the existence of misogynistic behaviors and the power structures that allowed for sexual assault, the #MeToo movement has exposed the widespread prevalence of sexual harassment across the globe in all of its varying forms and the contextual ways in which it affects numerous women and men and the communities in which they exist.76 Given the global reach of the movement, men and women alike have shared stories which compare and contrast what is considered “normal” from culture to culture. This helps to identify inappropriate behavior that might otherwise be deemed culturally acceptable rather than acknowledged as sexual assault or violence. Rather than viewing these individual and social perspectives in competition, the #MeToo movement can actually be seen to hold both, resourcing and supporting solidarity between survivors of sexual assault. Here, womanist theology presents as a natural ally. Walker’s description of a womanist is one who is confident, sassy, and outspoken. A womanist is one who will use her voice in an effort to correct and call out inappropriate behaviors in any particular context. In her work on womanist thought, Kirk-Duggan brings in the concept of “sisterhood,” suggesting that it brings together women as collaborators and protectors around a common allegiance or purpose so that they might “foster empowerment and contribute to the well-being of others.”77 She adds that “true” sisterhood requires both “action and solidarity” in order to bring about change, and that this change can only take place as silence around suffering/oppression is broken and as persons are held to account for these injustices.78 In this way, a womanist finds that her place as a woman is anywhere that “God calls her to speak” as she “screams out” against institutional and systemic violence and abuse.79 Therefore, womanist

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theology with its particular concern for all women and with its commitment for the survival and wholeness of all people is uniquely placed to speak about these issues as it again calls back to account the survival and liberation of all people. A further gift of womanist theology is that it allows for an individual story of injustice and suffering to have validity and to be heard in the midst of a community that is concerned with and characterized by the radical acts of “truth-telling,” “reality testing,” and “reality challenging” in an effort to form an ethic of justice that “calls the community beyond itself into a wider and more inclusive circle” that “is neither tight nor fixed.”80 Townes suggests that this results in a “social liberation” taking place as individuals participate in the world with a “concern for others by bringing themselves together to act as witness to their own collective faith.”81 Expanding into Intersectionality The concern that the #MeToo movement is too narrowly focused and lacks the scope for the other intersections taking place provides an opportunity for the vast experience of womanist theology to rise up and accommodate this gap in three main ways. Firstly, and as already noted, womanist theology is not limited to addressing a single kind of suffering but is concerned with all oppression, including the structures and systems that have instigated and supported those forms of oppression. Secondly, womanist theology with its creative and transformative approach to theology, allows for this expanse in terminology and context to be accommodated because it finds validity in every contextual story as it draws insight and inclusion from the narratives presented seeking to find salvation for the entire community. Emilie Townes writes: Liberation [social and spiritual] is God’s work of salvation in Jesus. Because Jesus died for us and lives yet again in us, we have the promise of wholeness through our brokenness. Liberation is the process of struggle with ourselves and with each other that begets the transformation of all of us to our full humanity.82

These concepts (suffering, oppression, social salvation, dynamic theology) taken together as a model of survival create an expanse that does not limit the definition of what a “struggle” is, nor does it dictate or prescribe what form this liberation must take. Rather it allows for a theology that can accommodate diversity while celebrating the common gift of faith as it remains authentically contextual in practice. This is a truly catholic theology, revealing belief in a transcendent and immanent God. Kirk-Duggan reminds us that

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God is a personal, powerful, compassionate, liberating God who encompasses masculine and feminine qualities and cares about individuals and communities. This God of Black folk combines a “making a way out of no-way God” with a God who is “mother to the motherless and father to the fatherless.” Relationship with this God allows one to accept the gifts of creativity and substance to survive and transcend, and to celebrate the gifts grounded in that creation. The Womanist view of God celebrates a relationship with persons that produces intimacy, mercy, love, compassion and solidarity. This God is real and present.83

Finally, and perhaps most importantly as a response to this critique, it is necessary to highlight that womanist theology embraces diversity and understands issues of intersectionality as foundational.84 Mitchem suggests that rather than these categories of intersectionality being additive, they are “interlocking, interactive and above all relational,” becoming a “centrifuge that creates new meanings” and provides agency for all marginalized voices.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS The purpose of this chapter has been to appeal to the unrivaled value of womanist theology in the midst of a #MeToo era, learning at the feet of this theological tradition as a way to engage more robustly with anti-#MeToo critiques and the challenges of divisiveness within feminism. Womanist theology is inclusive by nature and draws from black, liberation, and feminist theologies in its own distinctive and holistic way, ensuring that it does not settle for an individual getting saved (liberated), nor for a certain type of individual getting saved (black women only), nor even for a single community getting saved. Rather, it reaches out beyond categories of age, gender, race, and class, demanding that social and cultural power structures must also be “saved,” lest no one is saved. Womanist theology is a gift to the #MeToo era because it values the narrative of the story (both written and oral). And through the story, the complexities of intersectionality can be revealed and expressed in a way that validates the unique and complex experiences of every survivor (male or female). Womanist theology helps to recapture and refocus the energy of the #MeToo movement, pressing toward solidarity as together groups find ways to speak out against injustices. A womanist is concerned about the transformation of individuals and society, noting that this liberation has spiritual as well as social dimensions. Social sin requires a community to respond—not just women (whether young or old, white or black) but men as well. When there is too much silence, a womanist is not afraid to raise her voice and act

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on behalf of herself, her “sisters,” her men, or her community as she seeks to find a liberation for all. In these ways, womanist theology can address the criticisms raised by some anti-#MeToo feminists and therefore bolster the efforts of the movement in a more holistic way. That is the gift of womanist theology, in that it pulls together every inch of humanity to bring it into a relationship with a just God who is immediately present to each individual in the midst of their oppression and suffering, reminding them to look toward Jesus, who modeled to humanity not how to die, but how to live. The way to live is in communities of hope and faith that are actively engaged with God, who helps them to “make a way out of no way” on their path to liberation and shalom.

NOTES 1. Tarana Burke, “Me Too is a Movement, Not a Moment,” Streamed live November 2018, TEDWomen, 16:07. https://www​.ted​.com​/talks​/tarana​_burke​_me​ _too​_is​_a​_movement​_not​_a​_moment​?language​=en​#t​-50490. 2. “Purpose,” Just Be Inc website, accessed January 18, 2019, https://justbeinc​ .wixsite​.com​/justbeinc​/purpose​-mission​-and​-vision. 3. Nadja Sayej, “Alyssa Milano on the #MeToo Movement: ‘We’re Not Going to Stand for it Anymore,’” The Guardian, December 1, 2017, https://www​.theguardian​ .com​/culture​/2017​/dec​/01​/alyssa​-milano​-mee​-too​-sexual​-harassment​-abuse. 4. See Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad, “The Shifting Terrain of Sex and Power: From the ‘Sexualization of Culture’ to #MeToo,” Sexualities 21.8 (2018). http:// eprints​.lse​.ac​.uk​/91503​/1​/Gill​_The​-shifting​-terrain​.pdf. 5. There are a number of anti #MeToo critics who band together under various categories. Some of the more notable ones: Germaine Greer, Gloria Steinbeck, Catherine Deneuve. See Valeriya Safronova, “Catherine Deneuve and Others Denounce the #MeToo Movement,” The New York Times, January 9, 2018, https://www​.nytimes​ .com​/2018​/01​/09​/movies​/catherine​-deneuve​-and​-others​-denounce​-the​-metoo​-movement​.html. See also: Katherine Kersten, “False Feminism: How We Got from Sexual Liberation to #MeToo,” Center of the American Experiment (blog), January 28, 2019, https://www​.americanexperiment​.org​/2019​/01​/false​-feminism​-got​-sexual​-liberation​ -metoo/. See also: anti-feminist figures like Christina Hoff Sommers, who has 237,000 followers on Twitter and who re-tweeted The Chronicle of Higher Education article about the case. Sommers added the following comment: “No jokes, please. We are fainting-couch feminists.” Christina Sommers, “No Jokes Please. We Are FaintingCouch Feminists,” Twitter, May 7, 2018, https://twitter​ .com​ /chsommers​ /status​ /993436175691108352​?lang​=en. 6. Letty M. Russell and J. Shannon Clarkson, “Introduction,” in Dictionary of Feminist Theologies, ed. Letty M. Russell and J. Shannon Clarkson (Louisville: WJKP, 1996), xiii.

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7. Sheila Greeve Davaney, “Introduction,” in Horizons in Feminist Theology: Identity, Tradition and Norms, ed. Rebecca Chopp and Sheila Greeve Davaney (Minneapolis: Ausburg Fortress, 1997), 4. While not wanting to dismiss these preferred distinctions, for the purposes of this chapter, the term “feminist” will be employed as a single overarching term to refer to any group other than “womanist.” 8. Russell and Clarkson, “Introduction,” xiii. 9. Russell and Clarkson, “Introduction,” xiii. 10. Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay “on the Trinity” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 59. 11. Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self, 296. 12. Russell and Clarkson, “Introduction,” xiii. 13. Mehdi Hasan, moderator, “Transcript: Germaine Greer on the #MeToo Movement,” January 8, 2019, Head to Head (blog), Al Jazeera website, https://www​ .aljazeera​.com​/programmes​/headtohead​/2019​/01​/transcript​-germaine​-greer​-metoo​ -movement​-190107074617210​.html. 14. Carol Hanisch, “Reflections on #MeToo, From a Founder of the Women’s Liberation Movement,” Medium (blog), October 13, 2018, https://medium​.com​/s​/ powertrip​/reflections​-on​-metoo​-from​-a​-founder​-of​-the​-womens​-liberation​-movement​ -119742f1bc4e. 15. Eugenia Flynn, “This Place,” in #MeToo: Stories from the Australian Movement, ed. Miriam Sved, Christie Nieman, Maggie Scott, and Natalie Kon-yu (Sydney: Picador Pan Macmillan, 2019), 17. 16. Flynn, “This Place,” 22. 17. Anisa Subedar, “Has a Feminist Movement Divided Women?” BBC News, August 17, 2018, https://www​.bbc​.com​/news​/blogs​-trending​-44958160. 18. Kate Harding, “The Feminist Divide Over #Metoo Is Both Painful and Necessary,” Think (blog), Nbcnews website, January 20, 2018, https://www​.nbcnews​.com​ /think​/opinion​/intergenerational​-feminist​-divide​-over​-metoo​-both​-painful​-necessary​ -ncna838936. 19. Dubravka Zarkov and Kathy Davis, “Ambiguities and Dilemmas around #MeToo: #ForHowLong and #WhereTo?”,  European Journal Of Women’s Studies 25.1 (2018): 4. doi: 10.1177/1350506817749436. 20. Zarkov and Davis, “Ambiguities and Dilemmas around #MeToo,” 6. 21. Zarkov and Davis, “Ambiguities and Dilemmas around #MeToo,” 5. 22. Moira Donegan, “How #MeToo Revealed the Central Rift within Feminism Today,” The Guardian, May 11, 2018. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/news​/2018​/may​ /11​/how​-metoo​-revealed​-the​-central​-rift​-within​-feminism​-social​-individualist. 23. Donegan, “How #MeToo Revealed the Central Rift within Feminism Today.” 24. Donegan, “How #MeToo Revealed the Central Rift within Feminism Today.” 25. Donegan, “How #MeToo Revealed the Central Rift within Feminism Today.” 26. Donegan, “How #MeToo Revealed the Central Rift within Feminism Today.” Emphasis added. 27. Kimberle Crenshaw first coined the term “intersectionality” in an effort to express the varying forms of oppression and marginalization experienced by Black women due to the intersections of race, gender, and class. See: Kimberle Crenshaw,

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“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” (University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989), 139–67. 28. Gill and Orgad, “The Shifting Terrain,” n.p. 29. Zarkov and Davis, “Ambiguities and Dilemmas around #MeToo,” 4. 30. Alice Walker, In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens (San Diego: Harvest, 1983). See also: Linda Hogan, From Women’s Experience to Feminist Theology (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997), 122. See also: Delores S. Williams, “Womanist Theology: Black Women’s Voices,” Christianity and Crisis 47.3 (1987): 66–67. 31. Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, xi–xiii. 32. Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, xi–xiii. Emphasis retained. 33. Patricia-Anne Johnson, “Womanist Theology as Counter-Narrative,” in Gender, Ethnicity and Religion: Views from the Other Side, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), 198. See also: Yolanda Y. Smith, “Womanist Theology: Empowering Black Women through Christian Education,” Black Theology: An International Journal 6.2 (2008): 201. 34. Stephanie Y. Mitchem, “Finding Questions and Answers in Womanist Theology and Ethics,” in Feminist Theologies: Legacy and Prospect, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 69. 35. Womanists differ in their terminology for the growing list of “isms.” Jacquelyn Grant initially referred to class/race/sex as a “tri-dimensional reality”; see Jacquelyn Grant, White Women’s Christ, Black Women’s Jesus (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 217. Delores Williams coined the term “demonarchy,” which she would see as a more relevant term than patriarchy to describe the “demonic governance of black women’s lives” by both white males and females. See Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993), 185. 36. Mitchem, “Finding Questions and Answers,” 68. 37. Emilie M. Townes, “Ethics as an Art of Doing the Work Our Souls Must Have,” in Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader, ed. Katie Cannon, Emilie Townes, and Angela Sims, (Louisville: WJKP, 2011), 36. 38. Stephanie Y. Mitchem, Introducing Womanist Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002), 105. 39. Mitchem, Introducing Womanist Theology, 105. See also: Elaine A. Crawford, “Womanist Christology and the Wesleyan Tradition,” Black Theology: An International Journal 2.2 (2004): 213. 40. Rufus Burrow, “Womanist Theology and Ethics,” Encounter 59 (1998): 166; Williams, “Womanist Theology: Black Women’s Voices,” 60. 41. It is not just African American womanists who are identifying themselves as “womanists.” Other examples are emerging, such as (1) Debra Mubashshir Majeed, a Muslim and African American religious scholar who has begun to state womanist thought from an Islamic perspective; and (2) Lee Miena Skye, an Australian aboriginal woman who writes and publishes as an Australian Indigenous Christian womanist. Her PhD (2005) was entitled “Documentation of Australian Christian Womanist Theology.”

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42. Townes notes that womanist ethics must begin with particularity, given that “claims about universalities often evolve out of particular communities and ideologies that have been dominant, yet unacknowledged for doing so” (Townes, “Ethics as an Art,” 36–37). 43. Karen Baker-Fletcher, “Passing on the Spark: A Womanist Perspective on Theology and Culture,” in Changing Conversations: Religious Reflection and Cultural Analysis, ed. Dwight N. Hopkins and Sheila Greeve Davaney (New York: Routledge, 1996), 145; Johnson, “Womanist Theology as Counter-Narrative,” 201. 44. Linda Moody, Women Encounter God: Theology across the Boundaries of Difference (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1996), 86. 45. Williams, “Womanist Theology: Black Women’s Voices,” 70. 46. Unlike some feminist thought, womanists do not feel the need to “abandon” Jesus because of his maleness. See Anne M. Clifford, Introducing Feminist Theology, (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2001), 119. Rather through challenging and replacing “traditional oppressive Christology” with an “egalitarian Christology,” womanist theologians see that the “crucifixion was for universal salvation, not just for male salvation or, as we may extend the argument to include, not just for White salvation.” See Grant, White Women’s Christ, Black Women’s Jesus, 219. 47. Delores S. Williams, “Atonement,” in Dictionary of Feminist Theologies, ed. Letty M. Russell and J. Shannon Clarkson (Louisville: WJKP, 1996), 18. 48. Jacquelyn Grant, “The Sin of Servanthood and the Deliverance of Discipleship,” in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie Townes (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993), 199–201. 49. Williams, “Atonement,” 18. 50. Grant, “The Sin of Servanthood,” 199–201. Williams, “Atonement,” 18. Emphasis added. 51. Williams, “Atonement,” 18. Emphasis retained. 52. Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus, 220. 53. Townes, “Ethics as an Art,” 42. 54. Townes, “Ethics as an Art,” 42. 55. Townes, “Ethics as an Art,” 42. 56. Mitchem, Introducing Womanist Theology, 105–6. 57. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 108. Williams uses this phrase in relation to womanist theology to specifically depict the black women’s struggle to survive in the midst of their suffering and surrogacy and in finding that it is God who helps them to “make a way out of no way.” 58. Townes, “Ethics as an Art,” 43–47. 59. Black women have sometimes been referred to as the “oppressed of the oppressed” since they have been “doubly despised and have suffered the consequences of being black and female in a racist, sexist society.” See Hogan, From Women’s Experience to Feminist Theology, 139. 60. Keshgegian notes that womanist views on suffering differ from that of traditional Christianity which often views that suffering is a result of sin or evil that is related to human disobedience. The “remedy for suffering” is “found in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ,” allowing for the concept of “redemptive suffering,”

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which is seen as a “good or necessary condition for salvation” and “imitative of Jesus Christ’s saving act.” See Flora A. Keshgegian, “Suffering,” in Dictionary of Feminist Theologies, ed. Letty M. Russell and J. Shannon Clarkson (Louisville: WJKP, 1996), 279. In distinction, Williams rejects that suffering can be good in and of itself, unless one chooses to suffer for “the sake of justice and compassion, healing and liberation.” See Delores S. Williams, “Survival,” in Dictionary of Feminist Theologies, ed. Letty M. Russell and J. Shannon Clarkson (Louisville: WJKP, 1996), 280. 61. Struggle is closely linked to survival and at times liberation. Karen BakerFletcher puts it this way: “Even when God does not liberate us in the time or the way that we want, God encourages us to continue struggling for healing and wholeness.” See Karen Baker-Fletcher, Dancing with God: The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective (St. Louis: Chalice, 2006) preface, x. 62. Womanist theologians (such as Williams and Townes) place “survival” at the primary feature noted in the experiences of African American women and draw from biblical references such as Hagar, the wilderness traditions and the Babylonian captivity as validation of God’s activity in the midst of the “African-American community’s survival and quality-of-life struggle” (Williams, “Survival,” 280). 63. Baker-Fletcher points out that not all womanists are liberation theologians; however, they all do ascribe to liberation themes. She suggests that both she and Williams would view that while God does liberate, God does not always liberate but does provide for “quality of life” by “providing vision for survival resources and concrete survival resources in the midst of our existential, concrete, physical, and spiritual lives” (Baker-Fletcher, Dancing with God, x, emphasis added). Moody adds: “The views of God implicit in womanist theology maintain a delicate balance between traditional understandings of God’s transcendence and God’s immanence” (Moody, Women Encounter God, 108). 64. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 108. 65. Daniel L. Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, second edition 2004), 428. 66. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 57, 26, 112, 192. Though she is not a theologian, Patricia Hill Collins’ writings have been widely drawn on by womanist theologians, including Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Stephanie Y. Mitchen, Teresa L. Fry Brown, and Kelly Brown Douglas. 67. Johnson, “Womanist Theology as Counter-Narrative,” 209. 68. Williams emphasizes this clearly in the use of the Hagar passage where God “provides Hagar with new vision to see survival resources where she saw none before.” See Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 198. 69. Teresia M. Hinga, “African Feminist Theologies, the Global Village, and the Imperative of Solidarity across Borders: The Case of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 18.1 (2002): 79–86. 70. For instance, Chikwenye Ogunyemi is a Nigerian womanist literary critic who identifies as a womanist in this 1997 interview: Susan Arndt, “African Gender Trouble and African Womanism: An Interview with Chikwenye Ogunyemi and Wanjira Muthoni,” Signs 25.3 (2000): 711. Ogunyemi lays claim to her own understanding of

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“womanism” that is distinguishable from the African American understanding, given her concern for African “peculiarities” that the African American understating would neglect. She states that “only African women may be African womanists,” which is due in part to context, but also because of the different African approaches to such things as childbearing, lesbianism, interethnic skirmishes, and religious fundamentalism (712). 71. Townes, “Ethics as an Art,” 36. 72. Harding, “The Feminist Divide.” 73. Stassa Edwards, “The Backlash to #MeToo is Second-Wave Feminism,” Jezebel​.com​, January 11, 2018. https://jezebel​.com​/the​-backlash​-to​-metoo​-is​-second​ -wave​-feminism​-1821946939. 74. Womanism and womanist theology are not without their own generational differences. Yet my reading and experience of womanist theology is that even thirdwave authors look up to and respect the womanist lineage that has gone before them. This is quite possibly due to the value womanists place in shared stories—particularly from the older generation. 75. Amanda Rossie Barroso, “The Myth of a #MeToo Generational Divide,” National Women’s Law Center (blog), November 13, 2018, https://dev​.devurl​.info​/ nwlc2​.org​/blog​/the​-myth​-of​-a​-metoo​-generational​-divide/. 76. Zarkov and Davis, “Ambiguities and Dilemmas around #MeToo,” 8. 77. Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Exorcizing Evil: A Womanist Perspective on the Spirituals (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997), 156. 78. Kirk-Duggan, Exorcizing Evil, 156. 79. Kirk-Duggan, Exorcizing Evil, 156. 80. Townes, “Ethics as an Art,” 38. 81. Townes, “Ethics as an Art,” 39–40. 82. Townes, “Ethics as an Art,” 41. 83. Kirk-Duggan, Exorcizing Evil, 140. 84. Identifying this diversity, Kirk-Duggan would add: “Persons created by this God are created imago Dei, created in a life experience of diversity, mutuality, and wholeness. A Womanist theology calls for an inclusiveness which invites us to be concerned about the ‘least of these,’ according identity and respect for all life.” See Kirk-Duggan, Exorcizing Evil, 140.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arndt, Susan. “African Gender Trouble and African Womanism: An Interview with Chikwenye Ogunyemi and Wanjira Muthoni.” Signs 25.3 (2000): 709–726. Baker-Fletcher, Karen. Dancing with God: The Trinity from a Womanist Perspective. St. Louis: Chalice, 2006. ———. “Passing on the Spark: A Womanist Perspective on Theology and Culture.” In Changing Conversations: Religious Reflection and Cultural Analysis, edited by Dwight N. Hopkins and Sheila Greeve Davaney, 145–162. New York: Routledge, 1996.

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Burrow, Rufus. “Womanist Theology and Ethics.” Encounter 59 (1998): 157–175. Coakley, Sarah. God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay “on the Trinity.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2000. Davaney, Sheila Greeve. “Introduction.” In Horizons in Feminist Theology: Identity, Tradition and Norms, edited by Rebecca Chopp and Sheila Greeve Davaney, 1–16. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997. Flynn, Eugenia. “This Place.” In #MeToo: Stories from the Australian Movement, edited by Miriam Sved, Christie Nieman, Maggie Scott, and Natalie Kon-yu, 17–28. Sydney: Picador Pan Macmillan, 2019. Grant, Jacquelyn. “The Sin of Servanthood and the Deliverance of Discipleship.” In A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, edited by Emilie Townes, 199–218. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993. ———. White Women’s Christ, Black Women’s Jesus. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989. Hinga, Teresia M. “African Feminist Theologies, the Global Village, and the Imperative of Solidarity across Borders: The Case of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 18.1 (2002): 79–86. Hogan, Linda. From Women’s Experience to Feminist Theology. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997. Johnson, Patricia-Anne. “Womanist Theology as Counter-Narrative.” In Gender, Ethnicity and Religion: Views from the Other Side, edited by Rosemary Radford Ruether, 197–214. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002. Keshgegian, Flora A. “Suffering.” In Dictionary of Feminist Theologies, edited by Letty M. Russell and J. Shannon Clarkson, 279. Louisville: WJKP, 1996. Kirk-Duggan, Cheryl A. Exorcizing Evil: A Womanist Perspective on the Spirituals. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997. Migliore, Daniel L. Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004. Mitchem, Stephanie Y. “Finding Questions and Answers in Womanist Theology and Ethics.” In Feminist Theologies: Legacy and Prospect, edited by Rosemary Radford Ruether, 66–78. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. ———. Introducing Womanist Theology. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2002. Moody, Linda. Women Encounter God: Theology across the Boundaries of Difference. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1996. Russell, Letty M., and J. Shannon Clarkson. “Introduction.” In Dictionary of Feminist Theologies, edited by Letty M. Russell and J. Shannon Clarkson, xiii–xvii. Louisville: WJKP, 1996. Townes, Emilie M. “Ethics as an Art of Doing the Work Our Souls Must Have.” In Womanist Theological Ethics: A Reader, edited by Katie Cannon, Emilie Townes, and Angela Sims, 35–50. Louisville: WJKP, 2011. Walker, Alice. In Search of our Mothers’ Gardens. San Diego: Harvest, 1983. Williams, Delores S. “Atonement.” In Dictionary of Feminist Theologies, edited by Letty M. Russell and J. Shannon Clarkson, 18. Louisville: WJKP, 1996.

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———. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1993. ———. “Survival.” In Dictionary of Feminist Theologies, edited by Letty M. Russell and J. Shannon Clarkson, 280. Louisville: WJKP, 1996. Zarkov, Dubravka, and Kathy Davis. “Ambiguities and Dilemmas around #MeToo: #ForHowLong and #WhereTo?”  European Journal Of Women’s Studies 25.1 (2018): 3–9.

Chapter 12

This Is My Body Re-Making the Maternal Image in Terms of Divine Relation and Difference1 Rebekah Pryor

Triptych (2014; figure 12.1) feels familiar. Beyond the resonances of personal experience—of folding like that to see a child (absent here, but nevertheless implied by the posture), of being met by such a maternal body—the work’s 24-carat gilded edge locates it in a long lineage of sacred art. Even with its pared-back aesthetic that reduces the image to the barest of essential details (a single body is all that is given), it references a heritage of iconography

Figure 12.1  Triptych. Source: Rebekah Pryor, 2014, acrylic and gold leaf, 25 × 20 × 5 cm.

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in which, as philosopher Marie-José Mondzain describes, “each material element .  .  . is invested with a double spiritual and temporal meaning.”2 Image-makers throughout art history have used gold not only for its physical, light-reflecting properties and its metallic nobility, but for its semiotic value too.3 In this tradition, Triptych is an object whose repetitious, gilded form signals a space, state and context in which the maternal body is prescribed. It is like an icon, written over and over again, of Mary holding her Christ-child; like the Eleousa, the Virgin of Tenderness. Positioned as a contemporary art object however, and rejecting the formulaic composition of the Marian icon, according to which both mother and child are figured, Triptych constitutes a reworking of physical and semiotic conventions. Symbolically, while its transparency and glowing, gilded edge indicate a kind of boundless overflow of divine power that pushes the work into the category of a devotional artifact, from another perspective it signifies a steadfast “occupation of space,” a reclamation of territory that is just as personal and political as it is spiritual.4 My making of Triptych was, after all, not a maneuver to “guarantee God’s iconic privileges.”5 It was a way to think and speak for myself. This discussion takes my own creative practice as the starting point for examining the artistic and theological implications of the body as a moving, thinking subject, and the possibilities for love and human becoming—beyond the singular subject—that the maternal body in particular opens up. Specific works of ancient iconographic and contemporary art guide the thinking and, with reference to these, I consider the implications of Marie-José Mondzain’s theory of the image economy and Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of sexuate difference for my task of re-imagining the body of the mother in relation to the God of my tradition. I come, in the end, to the potential for prolific and generative images of both to aid us in the immediate (and precursory) work of (re)visioning theology and its strongly gendered semiotic and ontological histories, and the ongoing spiritual and the entirely incarnational task of human becoming.

THE FUNCTION OF THE ICON IN A HISTORY OF THE IMAGE In the studio, my work has long been preoccupied with contemporary depictions of the mother and their potential as icon-like images useful to religious and everyday spiritual practice. This exploration emerged from my growing ambivalence toward the material culture of the contemporary Christian church that made me ask: Where was I in this? My female-identified body is inseparable from my experience of spiritual revelation and any thinking about Christ and divinity, and yet my own religion—a religion centered on the

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Incarnation—appeared incapable of representing it in ways that were intelligible and true to me, as a whole person. My own subjecthood was rendered invisible by a symbology (inscribed in images, words, and theologies) that bore little trace of my real female body and the thought and speech I proffer because of it. I had come to find that my participation in the Christian tradition was being mediated by a language not my own, and a culture predicated on the singular, unified, and ocular imaginary of the male body. The work of Marie-José Mondzain describes the political development of the church’s singularity of vision and recognizes it as an era that continues to have an influence on contemporary Western culture. Mondzain identifies the “image economy” that enabled the church to exercise and sustain temporal and spiritual authority and, in turn, imperial power. In the Byzantine era, the currency of the icon allowed the church to designate its own territory of rule over what was visible (the institution and its orthodox imagery of “eikôn tou theou, the Son who is an image of God”) and what was invisible (God “Himself”).6 The church fathers understood the power of the image and its duality: that it constitutes “the best and worst of things,” both the inescapable “freedom of the gaze” and the risk of idolatry.7 And so the icon was used to align vision with image—visible with invisible—under the ecclesiastical rule, symbolically and economically enabling the church to occupy space within the ambit of its spiritual charter, and beyond it into political territory. This double conflation became the primary task of the icon, Mondzain argues: “The icon is a symbol: which is to say that in the economy of its map of the occupation of space, it is also aimed at being a map for the occupation of the spirit.”8 The orthodox icons of the Virgin Mary demonstrate this. The Eleousa (or Virgin of Tenderness) is one type, and the Theotokos of Vladimir, a prime example.9 In this portrayal, the infant nestles into the body of his mother, their cheeks touching, his right arm stretched out across her chest and his left arm curving around the back of her neck. Mary holds her child with both arms. The eyes of the child look to his mother while hers are directed outward, toward the viewer. The Eleousa, often cross-referenced with the biblical narrative of the holy family’s escape to Egypt,10 is a picture of relational intimacy and reciprocal love and care that symbolizes, beyond this historical mother-child relation, the closeness between God and humanity that the Incarnation enables.11 In tracing its lineage in relation to the Hodegetria type in which the Virgin, forward-facing and seated, holds the Child, also forward-facing, on her lap, art historian Robert P. Bergman proposes that the shift to a closer, more expressive figural arrangement signals “an essential theological decision rather than an artistic metamorphosis.”12 In the Christian Egyptian context from which the earliest Eleousa likely emerged, the intimacy and mutual adoration of the Virgin and Child reflected an

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understanding of Mary as intercessor, advocating “on behalf of mankind” to Christ the judge.13 It indicates a hopeful theology, charged with affection and, nevertheless, dependent on a very particular formulation of divine order and power. For the church keen to establish doctrinal consensus and assert its rule, Marian icons were presented as authoritative visions that addressed a specific conundrum presented by the Incarnation: the inextricable link between the Son and the space (khôra) and subjectivity of Mary’s maternal body. Mondzain articulates the church’s problem (and flags its implications for women) most concisely: Thought about the Son is thought about the image, thought about the image is thought about place and space (the icon), thought about space is thought about the bodies of women under the double sign, already broached, of virginity and maternity. How will the iconic matrix become swollen with space over which to rule, and give expression to the full power of an institution in which real women would have hardly any place, because their strength manifests itself as the pure, empty substrate of a power they do not share?14

The body of the woman at the center of the Incarnation represented a major challenge to the church and its ordering of doctrine and, in this, Mary’s virginity—rendered in word and image as blank, empty, uninscribed—became paramount. The borders of her womb circumscribed (at least imaginably) her limits at the same time as they indicated the circumscription of Christ’s body in Incarnation. The Marian icon—virginal and maternal—announces that the body of the woman is “the dwelling place of the infinite”; the visible, imaginable space in which the invisible, unimaginable God can be seen.15 In this way, it maps her body as a wide-open space, ready to be traversed and occupied. The further identification of the church as “Mother” itself extends the power of this assertion, marking out the territory of the institution and positioning its related political claims (in personal and civic spaces) as holy, pure, and uncontestable. In eighth-century Byzantium, when iconoclasts raged against the power of venerated saints, the associated threats to local government authority and “the locus of the holy,” holiness was, as Giakalis Ambrosios writes, “not just a matter of personal piety; it was closely connected with the exercise of power in society.”16 Thus, in a further attempt to consolidate their teaching and shore up institutional authority, the leaders of the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches gathered at the seventh ecumenical council in 787 CE, endorsing the Theotokos and sanctioning iconography as “a concept, a lawful institution and a tradition” concerned with spiritual transcendence rather than aesthetic enjoyment.17

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While Mary was thus iconographically bestowed with the power to “bring the favour of God, who is [her] son, upon us,”18 in the present discussion and milieu this power dynamic constitutes a complex semiotic, philosophical and, arguably, theological problem. Given its devotional and ecclesial imperatives and its reach and material proliferation from monastic to domestic spaces, the Eleousa propelled and reified particular orthodox ideas about what “woman” and “mother” mean and, indeed, how women’s bodies appear in relation to other (particularly men’s and children’s) bodies. As Mondzain has already emphasized, for the devout faithful the effect of the icon was at once personal and political. For women, it was also universalizing. Philosopher Julia Kristeva describes it as “the threefold metamorphosis of a woman in the tightest parenthood structure”: Mary (and all women after her, for she is positioned as the ideal) is daughter, wife, and mother—nothing more or less—to God who is variously and simultaneously identified as her Father, Bridegroom, and Son.19 This feminist critique finds that the ecclesiastical tactic by which Mary’s status as God-bearer was affirmed (first in 431 CE and again in 787 CE), at once designates Christ as human by virtue only of his mother and all but negates Mary’s own humanity by making her an empty vessel: pure, virginal, and forever defined according to a masculine God who appropriates her body for his salvific purpose. In this way, as Kristeva points out, Mary’s humanity is prescribed according to the three feminine functions (daughter-wife-mother) within a totality where they vanish as specific corporealities while retaining their psychological functions. Their bond makes up the basis of unchanging and timeless spirituality.20

Returning to the studio, I re-establish the value of my Triptych by the small and simple fact that I made it, and that it also constitutes a reclamation of sorts, positioned as a vision of the invisible and occupying space at the margins of an iconographic tradition of image operations that forgot about me: my corporeality and my subjectivity. In the process of locating it there, I assume my own authority as a thinking, speaking subject with a capacity greater than that of the church fathers to compose a theological and artistic response to Mary and what it means to be a woman and a mother in relation to the divine. RE-IMAGINING THE BODY OF THE MOTHER AND THE DIVINE Luce Irigaray writes: “Whether we really are at the dawn of a new culture, or rather in an important cultural transition, art has a role to play in seeing us through this time.”21 She suggests that art, practiced and engaged, can positively constitute a stage of expansion, opening new historical and personal

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horizons on our way to human becoming. Indeed, a flow of images—coming and going, whether in art, language, or spiritual construct, neither suffering iconoclastic destruction nor iconophilic fixation—helps materialize new visions and possibilities for realizing what it means “to become incarnate.”22 In terms of this chapter’s focus on iterations and political formations of the Marian icon, the third-century image of the Virgin and Child in the Catacombs of Priscilla in Rome is understood to be the earliest. This rendering depicts the biblical Visitation of the Magi scene: Mary seated with Jesus on her lap, Magi in attendance.23 It was, for the Christians of that time, at the beginning of thinking about what it meant that Jesus—divine enough to draw the attention of wise men—was born in the usual way (of a female body) and into the relational life and death of humankind. In its reflection of common, familial relations and ordinary, domestic contexts, this and similar images preceded and overflowed the bounds of early church doctrine, locating the divine in the everyday and originating action of the maternal. Such aesthetic overflow was not uncommon in early expressions of Christian theology. Representations of the Trinity, for example, were multiple and sometimes incongruous with the doctrine of the day, but as such indicate a “symbolic excess” in the way that the Trinity was being imagined by early believers.24 The Christian art of the classical era reflected the diverse cultural inheritance of the time: for example, prototypes that figured the shepherd, the philosopher, and the orant were borrowed from existing Greco-Roman imagery and infused with new meaning; “neutral” motifs like birds and plants were also appropriated from existing naturalist traditions; and early narrative scenes, such as those in the Catacombs of Priscilla, followed existing figurative tropes common to ancient Egyptian art (for example, the goddess Isis breastfeeding Horus).25 While this proliferation of divine representation may demonstrate theologically the excess of the divine and a necessary turn to the imagination in order to describe the indescribable,26 as has already been discussed, it quickly became problematic for the church, leading to the maneuver that saw the institution develop as an “empire of the gaze, and of vision”—an “iconocracy,” according to Mondzain—sanctioning some images over others in order to prevent heretical doctrine.27 One of the earliest known examples of image-making of any kind is in the Chauvet cave in France which dates back to 32,000 BCE. With reference to the cave’s ancient hand stencil paintings, Mondzain imagines the gesture of art-making as an “image-producing operation” that enables “the man in the Chauvet cave” to gaze upon his own image via a process of gesture (that puts distance between the man and the wall), breath (that inscribes the image in pigment) and revelation (that comes when the man removes his hand and sees his image).28 It is a movement of thinking, according to Irigaray’s logic. Human hands make the image in this era, sharply contrasting the epoch of

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the church where images were “unmade by human hands to guarantee God’s iconic privileges.”29 The return to one’s own hand, own body, is a necessary return in redressing a symbolic order that appears lacking in Christianity and Western culture generally. Such a return is not straightforward in a culture shaped by patriarchy, the legacy of which includes not only a separation of body and soul and their relegation to woman and man respectively, but a forgetting of the “maternal mystery of the sharing of life and of breathing.”30 We know historically and in our own time that this has been characterized by behaviors of dominance but also, as Irigaray identifies, by a taboo on spirituality. Tina Beattie concurs: The Reformation and its aftermath saw a widespread transformation in attitudes towards the maternal body and the material world, which has significance not only for the role and representation of women, but for the Christian understanding of the relationship between nature, humanity and God.31

For Irigaray, this constitutes a failure to fully comprehend our humanity. What is needed, she argues, is recognition of sexuate difference: recognition of each person as a real human subject, different and differently capable of embodying diverse spiritual qualities.32 The cultivation of sexuate energy (that is, the energy that emerges from sexuate difference rather than simply the act of sex itself) needs to be a primary task in our journey of spiritual becoming. Just as God is imagined as being vertically transcendent to us, so the human other must be understood to be horizontally transcendent and, as such irreducible, because of their difference. Without an understanding of this, we risk making idols of each other, cast as sacred and superior (thus demanding some kind of worship response) or entirely imperfect and forbidden (thus requiring utter denial and rejection). The problem Irigaray identifies for a contemporary audience—a problem not new in the age-old contestations of religious art—occurs when such representations become totems or idols, effectively locking up the divinity they mean to represent. In totemic cultures, the strength or fragility of a living being depends on the totem or, perhaps more specifically, is contained by it. While the individual cannot contain the self or his or her own (sexuate) energy, individuality is safeguarded and the difference is continuously valued by rules requiring sexual relation beyond the ties of blood and clan. Only the individual’s totem (observed, revered, and allowed to remain intact) can preserve and protect the uniqueness of each one, and each one’s belonging to their respective clan. Patriarchal cultures, on the other hand, have “cancelled the preservation of difference ensured in totemic cultures.”33 The difference is identified only in terms of physiology, rather than also in terms of uniqueness. Sex and marriage have often, historically, been exclusively between men and women of

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the same culture and the same religion. In order to assuage his ambition of divine illumination, man has sustained the right and strength of mind and spirit, while separating himself and relegating the weakness and impulsivity of the body to woman. The value of the feminine other and the integrity of belonging together even in difference is lost and, perhaps worse, ignored in favor of a culture in which the other is counted as an idol of desire to be resisted and dismantled or forever cast as an icon, pure and emptied of herself. In “Beyond Totem and Idol, the Sexuate Other,” Irigaray turns to look again at Jesus Christ, describing him as “a bridge between totemic cultures and patriarchal cultures, the cultures of life and the cultures of the mind, confused by the patriarchy with the Word.”34 Exceeding the reach of the early church’s imaginal and dogmatic prescriptions of God Incarnate (and all bodies thereafter), Christ persists as a challenge to patriarchal assumptions about the body. And, as the one who undoes death with resurrection, Christ can be seen to go beyond totemic expectations of the spirit, in the process opening up the possibility for each person to realize their life more fully and in terms of love.35 Irigaray recognizes that “what Jesus presents to us as the mirror of God is the absolute necessity of love in a human becoming, in a divine becoming.”36 In keeping with her philosophical schema by which recognition of our sexuate difference, one from every other, is critical to both our capacity for love and becoming, Irigaray identifies the implications of Christ in this way: This revelation of a Jesus whose incarnation is the path for a more fulfilled human becoming speaks to me, invites me to progress towards a more accomplished feminine identity. First of all, this means not considering myself as purely body, with only a natural capacity for engendering children, more or less spiritual, depending on whether the seed of the father is this or that. Putting myself in search of my word, my words, seems to be the first fidelity to a theology of incarnation.37

In this statement, Irigaray interprets the Incarnation as an invitation to take up her own humanness, her own personhood and subjectivity, her own “word . . . words.” In so doing, she resists and subverts the prescriptions of a patriarchal church imaginary that would otherwise qualify her and her “feminine identity” only in virginal and maternal terms, always and only ever in relation to the Father and the Son. In looking beyond this iconographic tradition of the body—a tradition that, as Mondzain, Kristeva and others have already helped suggest, has long limited our imagining of both the woman and the divine—Irigaray effectively draws our attention back to the matter, capacities and relations of our own bodies, and urges us to be faithful to them.

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In a study of images of the body of the mother, Mary is one such subject who, like Christ, demonstrates faithfulness to her own flesh and also to her own word. Her virginity implies not only the intactness of her hymen but also her spiritual interiority. She is more than just “mother,” however that role is rendered in iconographic terms. As an autonomous and relational subject, she is “a woman who stays faithful to herself in love, in generation.”38 The catacomb icon conveys the common bond Mary and Jesus shared, but also when “read” in the context of the story, something of the difference that each embodied and the distinct ways they remained faithful—“virginal”— to the self.39 Other later renderings of the same subject (the Eleousa, for example) similarly depict Mary holding her Christ Child, the boundary of her body marking the beginning of what may be identified in Irigarayan terms as “the interval,” a space made for and with that which is other, and as such, irreducible.40 In terms of my practice, an artwork can represent such an interval. It can transport us into new places and new ways of seeing, into imaginative patterns of seeing that illuminate the different and common conditions, desires and ambitions of our life together.41 Always rooted in the “depth of flesh” that comes from our shared and interactive human experience, a work of art can function, not as a complete or exhaustive representation, but as a provisional “signpost along the way.”42 PERFORMING THE ICON AND OTHER WORKS OF ART In the studio, it seemed to me, therefore, that a single artwork of a single posture was inadequate. A new proliferation of pictures of the mother’s body in action was needed to uncover and express something true, according to me, about the breadth of divine love and our embodied potential for human becoming. Performing the Icon (Choreographic Notes 1–12) (2015; figure 12.2) was inspired by the multiple quality of Trisha Brown’s Roof Piece (1971 and recreated in 2011).43 In Brown’s work, dancers performed a series of movements while positioned on various rooftops within a ten-block area of New York City. Dressed in red, each dancer mimicked the movement of another until the choreography encircled the area. Roof Piece calls to mind the themes of my own project, particularly the moving, multiple nature of the body and the dramatic, enveloping potential of gesture. Like Roof Piece, which was made to be performed in a range of non-traditional settings, Performing the Icon sought to investigate the versatility of contemporary images that represent the various movements of the maternal body. This series of twelve collages, each depicting a single, gesturing figure on a blank white background, resembles

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Figure 12.2  Performing the Icon (choreographic notes 1–12). Source: Rebekah Pryor (installation view), 2015.

a kind of choreographic notation: a sequence of imaged gestures that can be mimicked, repeated, and reordered to create endless iterations of the subject. As such, they move beyond their domestic origins, adapting in ways that make them performatively and symbolically useful in different contexts—the liturgical space of the cathedral, for example, or the cultural institution of the gallery—where they might reveal, interrupt, and expand conceptions of the body, the woman, the mother, and the divine.​​​ In her reading of Emmanuel Levinas’ Totality and Infinity, Irigaray extends the notion of the face as the site of revelation of the other’s “living presence.” Where Levinas identifies the face whose revelation in speech transcends contemplation and practice, Irigaray proposes that it is instead the whole (sexuate) body, given by “the touch of the caress,” that not only recognizes the other as other (and therefore transcendent) but also returns the body of the self “back to itself in the gesture of love.”44 The gesture both precedes and exceeds speech. In Performing the Icon, even in the absence of the other’s body, the gesture of the woman signals the relation—“the touch”—between the two. In contrast to the Eleousa icon, this image of relation succeeds not only without the other’s body but also without the clear expression of the face. The moving body is a face: an irreducible expression of living presence that resists the fixative effect of any iconographic form. The whole body of the woman as mother constitutes an epiphany, a revelation of love.

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Figure 12.3  Performing the Icon (detail 1). Source: Rebekah Pryor, paper collage, 29.7 x 42 cm.

Figure 12.4  Performing the Icon (detail 2). Source: Rebekah Pryor, paper collage, 29.7 x 42 cm.

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Figure 12.5  Performing the Icon (detail 3). Source: Rebekah Pryor, paper collage, 29.7 x 42 cm.

In its expression, or face, according to Levinas, the other cannot be summarized or contained by an image.45 Indeed, as he articulates, “transcendence precisely refuses totality,” making every picture of it exhausted and inadequate.46 Irigaray agrees when she perceives the loss of mobility and “perpetual unfolding and becoming of the living being” when the “face” is fixed in an image.47 She urges a return to the first sense of touch: The face, or at least a certain conception, idea, or representation of it, can be swallowed up in the act of love. A new birth, which undoes and remakes contemplation by returning to the source of all the senses—the sense of touch. There is no longer any image there, except for that of letting go and giving of self.48

In its allusion to dance, Performing the Icon may accordingly be framed as an image of the maternal body that makes and unmakes itself (along with the theological ideas it represents) in the moment of seeing by giving way to sensations of movement and touch. More than a sensation felt externally, at the surface of skin, the touch described here urges a return to one’s perhaps long-forgotten incarnational origins in the body of the mother. By depicting only her body—the woman as a single subject—the work re-imagines a relation beyond mere duality: a lovers’ love that is not solitary but permeates boundaries and membranes to constitute a communion (cultivated by space

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and breath) between two. The image, which by now exceeds the originary mother-child dyad, suggests multiple relations: two are “at least three, each of which is irreducible to any of the others: you, me and our creation, that ecstasy of ourself in us . . . prior to any ‘child.’”49 LIGHT, SILENCE, AND THE SOUNDING OF BREATH If light is the work in Triptych (2014), then the body, my physical being with which I love and think, is the work in Performing the Icon (Choreographic Notes 1–12) (2015). In any case, whether by light or movement, the effect of the artwork is to draw the energy of the artist and viewer (or viewer and viewer) together into an act of collaboration of meaning, understanding, and love. What follows this complex interaction is a prolific re-visioning of the divine image as it springs out from the generative nature of the body in relation with another. Importantly, in these works, language is rendered dumb; it cannot yet speak or be spoken. The cut, clear acrylic material of Triptych quietly awaits the activation of light. And in its evocation to dance, where words are impoverished and find no place, where all that can be read or sounded is deep breath and body, Performing the Icon inspires a meditative silence in which the other—however different, present or absent—“remains palpable.”50 NOTES 1. This chapter is drawn from my doctoral work, developed and now published as Motherly: Reimagining the Maternal Body in Feminist Theology and Contemporary Art (London: SCM Press, 2022). 2. Marie-José Mondzain, “Iconic Space and the Rule of Lands,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 15.4 (2000): 65. 3. Thomas Zaunschirm, “The Invention of the Gold Ground,” in Gold, ed. Agnes Husslein Arco and Thomas Zaunschirm (Vienna: Hirmer, 2012). 4. Mondzain, “Iconic Space and the Rule of Lands,” 65. 5. Marie-José Mondzain, “What Does Seeing an Image Mean?”, Journal of Visual Culture 9.3 (2010): 314. 6. Mondzain, “Iconic Space and the Rule of Lands,” 58. 7. Mondzain, “Iconic Space and the Rule of Lands,” 74–75. 8. Mondzain, “Iconic Space and the Rule of Lands,” 65. 9. Theotokos of Vladimir, c. 1130 CE, unknown icon painter (Constantinople School), tempera on panel, 104 × 69 cm, The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia. http://www​.tretyakovgallery​.ru​/en​/collection/​_show​/image/​_id​/2216. 10. See Matthew 2.13-15. Robert P. Bergman also cites other homiletic sources that connect this icon type to the family’s journey in Egypt. Robert P. Bergman, “The

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Earliest Eleousa: A Coptic Ivory in the Walters Art Gallery,” The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 48 (1990): 50. 11. International Marian Research Institute, “All About Mary: Eleousa: Origin and Meaning,” University of Daytona, https://udayton​.edu​/imri​/mary​/e​/eleousa​-origin​ -and​-meaning​.php. This type differs from the earlier Hodegetria type from which the Eleousa is derived. In the earlier image, Mary holds Jesus with her left arm while gesturing to him with her right, directing the attention of the viewer to his status as the Christ. Refer also to Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, “The Cult of the Virgin Mary in the Middle Ages,” Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History October (2001), https://www​.metmuseum​.org​/toah​/hd​/virg​/hd​_virg​.htm. 12. Bergman, “The Earliest Eleousa: A Coptic Ivory in the Walters Art Gallery,” 51. 13. Bergman, “The Earliest Eleousa: A Coptic Ivory in the Walters Art Gallery,” 52. 14. Mondzain, “Iconic Space and the Rule of Lands,” 66. 15. Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 101. 16. Giakalis Ambrosios, Images of the Divine: The Theology of Icons at the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 4. 17. Ambrosios, Images of the Divine, 30. 18. Bergman quotes from an early Coptic homily (wrongly ascribed to Cyril of Alexandria) here. Bergman, “The Earliest Eleousa: A Coptic Ivory in the Walters Art Gallery,” 52. 19. See Kristeva’s essay “Stabat Mater” in Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia Universtiy Press, 1986), 169. 20. Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, 169. 21. Luce Irigaray, Prières Quotidiennes: Everyday Prayers (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2004), 29. 22. Catherine Keller, Intercarnations: Exercises in Theological Possibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 58. 23. Sandro Carletti, Guide to the Catacombs of Priscilla (Vatican City: Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, 2007). Notably, recent archaeological evidence identifies the Visitation of the Magi (Matthew 2:1–12) rendering in the Catacombs of Priscilla as the earliest image depicting the Virgin and Child, rather than the Virgin and Child (with Balaam and star) scene, found in the same catacombs but now understood to be a scene modeled on the life and relations of the deceased rather than Mary and Jesus. See Mary Joan Winn Leith, “Earliest Depictions of the Virgin Mary,” Biblical Archaeology Review 43.2 (2017): https://www​.baslibrary​.org​/biblical​ -archaeology​-review​/43​/2​/3. 24. Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 196. 25. See Felicity Harley, “Christianity and the Transformation of Classical Art,” in A Companion to Late Antiquity, ed. Philip Rousseau (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 306–326. 26. Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self, 196.

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27. Mondzain, “Iconic Space and the Rule of Lands,” 59. 28. Mondzain, “What Does Seeing an Image Mean?”, 313–314. 29. Mondzain, “What Does Seeing an Image Mean?”, 314. 30. Luce Irigaray, “Beyond Totem and Idol, the Sexuate Other,” Continental Philosophy Review 40.4 (2007): 357. 31. Tina Beattie, “Redeeming Mary: The Potential of Marian Symbolism for Feminist Philosophy of Religion,” in Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings, ed. Pamela Sue Anderson and Beverly Clack (London: Routledge, 2004), 111. 32. It is important to note here that while Irigaray’s project concerns the relation between “woman” and “man” because of the historical nature of these constructs, their relations and effects in/on culture, this does not exclude those who identify as neither “woman” nor “man.” Irigaray in fact contends that the individuation of every human being is sexuate; however they identify themselves on the spectrum of gender, and that gender itself need not be prescribed by the female-male binary. In the prologue of Vegetal Being, Irigaray insists that sexuate difference exceeds the physicality of bodies and presupposes a transcendental reality “through the respect for the irreducible difference between two subjects who do not partake in the same sexuate identity.” That every human being is sexuate and, therefore, that everyone is different, is the key argument in Irigaray’s ethical project. See Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 5. 33. Irigaray, “Beyond Totem and Idol, the Sexuate Other,” 361. 34. Irigaray, “Beyond Totem and Idol, the Sexuate Other,” 362. 35. This is a consistent theme in the teachings of Jesus, and one central in the Johannine account: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10.10). 36. Luce Irigaray, Luce Irigaray: Key Writings (London: Continuum, 2004), 150. 37. Irigaray, Luce Irigaray: Key Writings, 151. 38. Irigaray, Luce Irigaray: Key Writings, 152. 39. The nature of Mary’s response to the angel Gabriel who announces God’s favor and plan for her, indicates her consent and preparedness to participate according to her own desire and will. After gaining further details regarding her involvement, she responds, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1.38). Later in the same gospel, the account of Jesus praying on the Mount of Olives the night before his death indicates Jesus’ faithfulness to his own desire and will (which is, ontologically, human and divine). He prays: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.” (Luke 22:42) In each case, the spiritual response to God and the other/s involved in God’s plan, implies agency rather than passivity and as such, a faithfulness to the self. 40. See Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), 48. 41. For more on the significance of iconic patterns in culture and common life, see Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000).

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42. Luce Irigaray, “To Paint the Invisible,” Continental Philosophy Review 37.4 (2004): 394; “Beyond Totem and Idol, the Sexuate Other,” 354. 43. For more on this work and Trisha Brown’s dance practice generally, refer to http://www​.trishabrowncompany​.org. 44. See Irigaray, “The Fecundity of the Caress,” Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), 185–217 and Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979), 185–219, 256–266. 45. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 297. 46. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 293. 47. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 192. 48. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 192. 49. Luce Irigaray, Re-Reading Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (London: Athlone Press, 1991), 88. 50. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 192.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ambrosios, Giakalis. Images of the Divine: The Theology of Icons at the Seventh Ecumenical Council. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Beattie, Tina. “Redeeming Mary: The Potential of Marian Symbolism for Feminist Philosophy of Religion.” In Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings, edited by Pamela Sue Anderson and Beverly Clack, 107–122. London: Routledge, 2004. Bergman, Robert P. “The Earliest Eleousa: A Coptic Ivory in the Walters Art Gallery.” The Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 48 (1990): 37–56. Carletti, Sandro. Guide to the Catacombs of Priscilla. Vatican City: Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, 2007. Coakley, Sarah. God, Sexuality and the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Irigaray, Luce. “Beyond Totem and Idol, the Sexuate Other.” Continental Philosophy Review 40.4 (2007): 353–364. ———. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. New York: Cornell University Press, 1993. ———. Luce Irigaray: Key Writings. London: Continuum, 2004. ———. Prières Quotidiennes: Everyday Prayers. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2004. ———. Re-Reading Levinas, ed. by Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley. London: Athlone Press, 1991. ———. “To Paint the Invisible.” Continental Philosophy Review 37.4 (2004): 389–405. Irigaray Luce, and Michael Marder. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Keller, Catherine. Intercarnations: Exercises in Theological Possibility. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.

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Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi. New York: Columbia Universtiy Press, 1986. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1979. Mondzain, Marie-José. “Iconic Space and the Rule of Lands.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 15.4 (2000): 58–76. ———. Image, Icon, Economy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. ———. “What Does Seeing an Image Mean?” Journal of Visual Culture 9.3 (2010): 307–315. Zaunschirm, Thomas. “The Invention of the Gold Ground.” In Gold, edited by Agnes Husslein Arco and Thomas Zaunschirm, 10–27. Vienna: Hirmer, 2012.

Chapter 13

Encounters Among Strangers Bodies, Marys, Arts Stefanie Knauss

The invitation to respond to Rebekah Pryor’s evocative art and thoughtful essay comes with some apprehension and questions: I write from a quite different place—geographically, personally—as a woman who is not a mother and never even wanted to be one, as somebody who deeply appreciates art in its many forms but has no artistic bone in her body, as a German Catholic working in the United States, as a feminist theologian whose research engages with phenomenology and cultural studies rather than psychoanalytical theories. Am I the right person to respond to this essay? What might this encounter between strangers contribute? And yet, the notion of an encounter between strangers is in itself something that is not quite foreign to Pryor’s writing. In discussing Irigaray’s argument for the importance of recognizing the sexuate difference between all individuals, Pryor notes: “Just as God is imagined as being vertically transcendent to us, so the human other must be understood to be horizontally transcendent and, as such irreducible, because of their difference.” Perhaps this encounter with Pryor’s art and writing can be one in which our differences do not have to be glossed over or leveled but may remain in place and, as such, become a source of something new. Pryor’s essay touches (!) on a number of issues worth thinking about both individually and in their interrelationship. I will focus here on just three topic areas that particularly speak to me, both in their familiarity (in regards to my experience and own research) and strangeness: body, Mary, and art. I put these in the somewhat awkward plural in the title of this essay because there are many bodies, Marys, and arts or aspects of the aesthetic in Pryor’s essay, and they are multiplied again as I read and think about them from my perspective. 171

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BODIES AND SENSE-ATIONS As Pryor shows, drawing on both her own embodied experiences and the representations and theories of bodies in Christian art and theology, body and embodiment are ambivalent issues: bodies, and especially women’s bodies, have been sites of regulation and power, marked as different and hierarchically ordered, the individual or collective body’s boundary the line between belonging and not-belonging.1 But bodies are also, in their materiality, concreteness, and there-ness, sites of resistance—conscious or not. Jutta Reuter underlines that through bodily practices, norms are ever reproduced somewhat differently and thus challenged so that bodies are producers of meaning “with a mind of their own” (eigensinnig), an embodied meaning that breaks through the crevices of ideologies written into bodies.2 In the Christian traditions, the ambivalence of bodies is particularly apparent as they are at the same time taken to be a source of sinfulness (especially in sexual terms) and yet also the privileged space of the encounter between immanence and transcendence: God’s creation from the beginning of all time, the stuff of God’s “dwelling among us” in the materiality of human life, as the space of continued relationship with the divine in the sacraments through the taste of water, bread and wine, the scent and feel of ointment, the touch of laying on of hands, and at the end of days, in the bodily resurrection that exceeds all understanding of embodiment and yet affirms it unequivocally. What Caroline Walker Bynum writes of the resurrection can also be said of these other theological affirmations of embodiment: “For however absurd it [the concept of bodily resurrection] seems [. . .] it is a concept of sublime courage and optimism.”3 Sanctified and demonized, rendered invisible and yet hyper-present, bodies, and again women’s bodies in particular, in the Western tradition are like Pryor’s Triptych: visible and yet transparent, a space onto which idea(l)s of bodies and selfhood can be projected, or where I can discover myself beyond such norms imposed onto my body, delineated by a boundary which can be precious or excluding, a site of separation or encounter. The continued struggles with the paradoxical relationship between immanence and transcendence in the Christian imaginary reflect the unease of Western culture with the connection between body and mind, being and knowing, feelings and arguments. The encounter with art is one of the important spaces where we experience this connection and become aware of our embodied ways of thinking and knowing. Vivan Sobchack’s phenomenological film theory4 offers a framework to reflect on how one’s body knows (in the encounter with film, visual arts, dance, etc.) in a pre-discursive way that emerges from one’s sensory, embodied experiences but is not limited to it, in a strange paradox of being deeply anchored in one’s body, yet also being ecstatically taken outside of it.

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Looking at Pryor’s Triptych, I make a similar experience: I don’t “know” motherhood and I’m skeptical of some of the ways in which it has been upheld as the ultimate fulfillment of a woman’s life and being, even (perhaps unwittingly) by feminist theories which aim at validating women’s experiences of motherhood.5 I don’t have the bodily experiences of holding a child, bending down to them, curving around them to a degree that these gestures and their meaning would be inscribed into my body. And yet in Triptych, my body feels the postures and what they might mean (protection, care, tenderness, warmth, exhaustion, backaches . . . ) and knows although I can’t know: sensations become sense. Even though I see Pryor’s art only on my screen, in photographs, and not “in the flesh,” the artist’s body, the artwork’s body and my (the viewer’s) body meet in the spatiotemporal encounter with the artwork (here and now) and immediately touch each other in an exchange (I touch and am touched at the same time) of experience, being, meaning. What might be an intimate encounter between bodies, however, is not totally withdrawn from social regulations and happens in a context. Just as my body is porous and open toward the influence of my environment and others, my bodily sensations and imaginings are shaped by cultural habits, representations, and values. This is particularly noticeable with regard to gender norms, one of the primary factors that impact and shape my body and my embodied being in this world, both in how I fit and diverge from these norms. Whereas this gender order is often experienced as restrictive and used to create hierarchies of power (who rules over whom, who is allowed to love whom, which forms of self-expression are appropriate, normal, healthy, good, etc.), Pryor affirms with Irigaray the positive value of “sexuate difference” (as a range of identities not limited to the binary of masculinity and femininity and physiological differences between them) and recognizes the energy that emerges from it. As Irigaray underlines, our embodied encounters teach us that difference is not the exception but the norm. The uniqueness of each body with its whole changing range of capabilities, shapes, scars, and pleasures lived within and shaped by its environment and encounters with all other unique bodies—human, animal, plant—is a gift and resource, not a problem to be overcome by neatly putting this beautiful multiplicity into distinct categories. MARYS AND WOMEN In the Christian tradition, Mary’s body has certainly been the most visible female body, and yet, as Pryor notes, it has been presented as “an empty vessel” to be appropriated by masculine discourses of a masculine God and

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“filled” with notions of femininity and motherhood that uphold patriarchy. Mary’s hypervisible body has rendered other women’s bodies invisible, the veneration of the one exceptional woman has justified the sociocultural devaluation of all others. Feminist theologians have consequently been suspicious of Mary and her theological and artistic representations in the service of patriarchy. And yet like for Pryor in Triptych and Performing the Icon, Mary’s body and story have also provided women with a possibility to find strength, a validation of their own being, and thus they have challenged, reconsidered, and recreated the tradition. The arts have provided a particularly creative space for the deconstruction of Marian theology to explore new visions in an interaction with the rich iconographic tradition of representations of Mary, as Pryor’s art and reflections affirm. Among the many re-imaginations of Mary, I have recently become particularly fascinated by the tradition of the Virgin of Guadalupe, although I am not Latina and do not share the cultural-embodied experience of all the complexities of this Marian imaginary.6 The Guadalupe is a significant presence in Latin culture in the Americas, and embodies the ambivalent role of Mary in the Catholic tradition as both legitimating oppression (both individual, social and political) and encouraging resistance. Traditionally represented as an individual without her child, with darker skin, and with connections to Indigenous traditions, she offers herself an artistic reflection on the personhood and dignity of women, Indigenous and other marginalized populations, on their bodies and sexualities. Latina artists have explored the complex and often contradictory meaning of Guadalupe’s virginal and maternal body, her relation to other women and all human beings, and her relationship with the divine. Some of my favorite images are of Guadalupe running toward the viewer with her skirts flying up, with a wide smile on her face, grabbing a snake by the neck (Yolanda López, Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe, 1978), of Guadalupe posing in a bikini made of roses, in a confident stance with her hands on hips, proud of her body and her sexuality (Alma López, Our Lady, 1999), or of the Lupe sitting at her desk reading, with a fuming cup of coffee while her companion angel offers her croissants (unknown artist).7 These images of Mary discover sides of her that the theological tradition’s focus on Mary’s virginal motherhood as an unachievable model for other women have sidelined over centuries. Mary is not just a maternal body in service of another (giving birth, feeding, protecting, holding, mourning) but an embodied being who enjoys her body, the strength of her muscles, movement, her desires and pleasures, a body of wisdom (but who also needs the jolt of caffeine to do all that thinking and savors the buttery flakiness of a croissant), a body that expresses her being in all its aspects. These images open up new possibilities of relating to Mary—as a friend, perhaps even a lover, a scholar, a person not defined

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through her relationship to a man—and thus new ways of thinking of myself as a woman, and what that means for my relationships with other beings and God. Thinking of Mary as a friend, a lover leads me back to scripture and Mary’s extended visit with her relative Elisabeth when they are both pregnant (Luke 1:39–56). Unsurprisingly, the passage doesn’t dwell on the feelings between the two women, but the text provides an opening to reflect on Mary as a complex and multifaceted person who makes her own decisions, thinks critically and speaks prophetically, freely moves in space, seeks out a range of relationships, and whose embodied being is not reduced to a very narrow range of functions but is expansive and expressive. In the dynamic movement between ancient texts and contemporary images, between collective traditions and subjective experiences, something new emerges that has perhaps always been there, and that allows me—and perhaps other women—to encounter Mary in new ways.

ART AS A SPACE OF ENCOUNTER In her essay, Pryor references the “symbolic excess” of art that is able to exceed the words of doctrine or theology. Her artistic re-imagining of Marian iconography in her own body—and of her body in Marian art—is an example of such “symbolic excess,” as are the images of the Guadalupe I have mentioned (and many others beyond that). Art is a space of doing theology in an imaginative, embodied, sense-ational way which is not in competition with discursive theology, but in a mutually challenging, enriching, and deepening relationship. Like bodies, and Mary’s body in particular, art is not an uncontested space. As part of specific visual cultures or regimes, it can contribute to enforcing particular ways of seeing oneself or others, but it is also a space of excess where these limitations can be disrupted in different representations, or in different, resistant ways of seeing. It is also a space where as a viewer, I am able to exceed my own limitations and gain access to other experiences. Looking at Pryor’s art and that of others’, I realize that this happens not so much by how I think about the artworks— although learning more about iconographic traditions, contexts of production, the specific materiality and symbolism of an artwork and so on enriches my experience—but in how I feel the work. As I said before, I haven’t experienced care for a child, and encountering Pryor’s artworks thus is, in a way, an encounter with a stranger. And yet my body feels the figures in Pryor’s works in a meaningful way. The encounter draws on what my body knows—not the care for children, but for animals and plants—and incorporates something unknown to expand both my body’s and the artwork’s experiential sphere. As viewing the artwork extends my embodied experience, the absence of the

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figure of the child makes it possible that I can also contribute something new to the body of the artwork: the expansion of the significance of gestures of care or protection beyond their limited (and limiting) association with motherhood to include the caring attitude toward all of creation that all beings may practice. The woman in the artwork, the artist, and I, remain strangers with our unique bodies and sets of experiences, but we also have this moment of encounter that has brought forth something new. As Pryor writes: “An artwork can represent such an interval [where space is made for the other]. It can transport us into new places and new ways of seeing [and I would add: touching, tasting, smelling, hearing], into imaginative patterns of seeing that illuminate the different and common conditions, desires and ambitions of our life together.” This is one of the pleasures of art: pleasure not in terms of a repetitive appreciation of conventional beauty but as the joy in the expansion of my experience, the jolt of the new, the feeling of color, the touch of form, the coming together of recognition and strangeness. A pleasure that is embodied, hard to express and yet meaningful, that might lead to deeper understanding but that has, first of all, value in itself: as a moment of becoming fully human as an embodied being within creation.

NOTES 1. Mary Douglas’s work remains foundational for my understanding of the symbolic use of body as boundary marker; as does the work of Michel Foucault for the analysis of the often very subtle forms of regulation through which bodies are made docile and disciplined. 2. See Jutta Reuter, Geschlecht und Körper: Studien zur Materialität und Inszenierung gesellschaftlicher Wirklichkeit (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2011). 3. Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 343. 4. See for example Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thought: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). With a focus on touch, see Laura Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). 5. See for example for a critique of Julia Kristeva’s feminist theory of motherhood Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1999), ch. 3.1. 6. For an exploration of Mary’s contradictory role in theology and the arts, see Stefanie Knauss, “Imagining Mary in Theology and Visual Culture: Between Constraint and Resistance,” Women: A Cultural Review 30.2 (2019): 123–140. I draw here on some ideas from that essay. See also María del Carmen Servitje Montull, “Mary of

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Guadalupe: Icon of Liberation or Image of Oppression?,” in Feminist Intercultural Theology: Latina Explorations for a Just World, ed. María Pilar Aquino and Maria José Rosado-Nunes (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2007), 231–247, for a consideration of the Guadalupe (incindentally with reference to the same image by Yolanda Lopez) from a Mexican perspective. 7. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Neomi de Anda who has shared this last image with me.

Chapter 14

Deterrence Crucified People Stephen Burns

Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured. (Hebrews 13:3, NRSV)

Deterrence (figures 14.1 and 14.2) is a powerful artwork by Uniting Church in Australia deacon John Tansey.1 I first encountered it in the days just before Holy Week, 2017, when it was installed outside the main doors of St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral in Bendigo, rural Victoria.2 At a distance at least, the artwork might well seem to depict a familiar Passiontide scene: three crosses, each holding the body of a crucified person. In this it is not unusual as a temporary, seasonal addition to (or permanent feature of) a churchyard and its witness on the street: to biblically literate viewers, it could evoke Matthew 27:38 and gospel parallels (Mark 15:27; Luke 23:33; John 19:18); and to art enthusiasts, it might resonate with any number of crucifixion scenes, from Andrea Mantegna’s gruesome Crucifixion (1455–60) to George Rouault’s softer Les Trois Croix (1938), to name but two well-known examples.3 On closer inspection, though, Deterrence reveals some quite contemporary and contextual dimensions: the corpuses are twined from barbed wire; each cross bears a sign, though none sport the biblical “INRI” (John 19:19) but rather the names of off-shore Australian detention centers—Christmas Island, Manus, Nauru; and while one of the bodies is clearly that of a man,4 of the figures in Deterrence, one figure is a woman, and another a child. Trusting that Tansey’s art “offers viewers shocking and poignant windows into the experience of those who have sought to migrate,”5 in what follows I explore aspects of Tansey’s sculpture as it intertwines feminist and liberationist concerns.6 I correlate aspects of Tansey’s (and other) art and its powerful 179

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Figure 14.1  Deterrence. Source: John Tansey (installation view; 2014). Used by kind permission of the artist.

depiction of the intersection of gendered and colonial oppression to some Christian doctrine, recent and still neglected themes in theology, and current issues—albeit in impressionistic and fragmentary ways.

DETERRENCE IN THE NEWS In the week in which I saw the artwork, it had already attracted some local press attention, with the Bendigo Advertiser of April 11 running a story headlined “St Paul’s Anglican Cathedral Erects Statues of Crucified Refugees Outside Church.”7 The web article featured eleven slides of the installation, beginning with that of its pregnant woman on a cross. The article described the cathedral as “renowned for its political activism,” noting that not only has a statue of James Cook within the cathedral grounds previously been dressed in “rainbow attire” to coincide with Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and on another occasion donned in “raincoat and flippers” to “lament global warming,” but also that a cathedral banner welcoming refugees had twice been stolen. Notably, the cathedral has been active in interfaith collaboration and support for the building of a local mosque, resistance to which garnered national press attention. An interview with the then cathedral dean, John Roundhill, suggested that he “expected the artwork to shock Bendigonians

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Figure 14.2  Deterrence. Source: John Tansey (female figure; 2014). Used by kind permission of the artist.

but believed it was his cathedral’s duty to advocate on behalf of those less fortunate, including refugees,” and he was quoted saying that he hopes the art “raises awareness and people understand there is a deep, deep connection between issues currently besetting our world and the Christian story.” This was not the first time that Deterrence had been in the press. John Tansey, the artist, made the work in 2014 while stationed at St Kilda Mission, Melbourne, where Deterrence was first installed on April 10 at an intersection in the busy suburb in which the mission is set. At the time, Tansey wrote an artist’s statement that was reprinted on Bendigo Cathedral’s Facebook page three years later, and which had also made its way into print—local,8 ecclesial,9 and national10—when the work was first erected: Deterrence, Tansey

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said, is intended “to explore the questions and links between the crucifixion, the way the Romans used crucifixion as a deterrent and how the Australian Government has become obsessed with the harsh treatment of asylum seekers.” He elaborates, The cross in the Christian tradition was used by the Roman imperial power as a tool of deterrence, and as a political weapon to reinforce their power over an occupied state. Jesus was crucified due to his persistence in acting and speaking against the oppressive system and the status quo.

Notable in Tansey’s artist statement is his deliberate repeated reference to crucifixion as practiced by Roman rulers—a point of particular importance given St Kilda’s significant Jewish population: Tansey was sensitive not to confer onto his art oppressive tropes within Christian tradition which place culpability for Jesus’ cross with the forebears of Tansey’s neighbors.11 None of the press pieces to emerge at the time of Tansey’s initial installation of Deterrence make this connection to its initial setting amid a contemporary Jewish population, but a number did refer to the work as “confronting,” and while Tansey reported “a lot of really good feedback” when his work was first placed in public, including people placing flowers under the crosses during Holy Week—and indeed among local Jewish people—he also related witnessing a person “try to pull the synopsis out of the ground. Failing that he walked away and then returned and spat at each cross. The vitriol was intense.” In 2017, some initial good feedback was reported in Bendigo, with the local news relating young advocates of refugees welcoming the work. While Deterrence stood outside Bendigo Cathedral in late Lent, 2017, the detention centers named in the work—Christmas Island, Manus, Nauru— were also very much in the news, just as they have a longer, controversial history in policy for dealing with what Australian government calls “illegal maritime arrivals” (IMAs).12 On Good Friday, reports emerged of a shooting by Papuan soldiers into the detention center on Manus Island.13 Nine persons—five center staff, two detainees, and two Papuan officials—were injured by shots from more than one weapon. Initial reports from the Australian government suggested that the soldiers were somehow attempting to protect a young boy from detainees, but this version of events was contradicted head-on by Amnesty International, whose briefing “In the Firing Line” cited digital and cinematic evidence to the contrary. Then in early Eastertide, a tweet by Muslim scholar Yasmin Abdul-Magied caused controversy for relating Australian detention centers, with Syria and Palestine, to ANZAC Day commemorations: LEST. WE. FORGET. (Manus, Nauru, Syria, Palestine . . . )14

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Amid “outrage,” the tweet was deleted, and the tweeter apologized, while others called for her “sacking” from work with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Toward the end of the Easter season, it was Amnesty International who put Manus in the news again, this time in collaboration with a Roman Catholic nun, Jane Keogh, who witnessed fear among detainees as well as a crisis among the administration at the detention center on the island.15 This is characteristic of continued pressure the human rights organization has held toward the Australian government since publishing its 2013 document, “This is Breaking People,”16 in which it cataloged experiences—including “a host of human rights violations”—at the center, with expressed concern for children (as well as LGBTIQA and disabled persons); charted and critiqued policies on Australian offshore detention through various prime-ministerships; and insisted that detainees in the PNG center should be transferred to Australia and given full access to asylum procedures denied them while on Manus. It was in part as a response to findings such as these that Tansey produced Deterrence. It is a confronting, evidently polarizing artwork, and deserving of further theological reflection, which I pursue in what follows, focusing in turn on various aspects of the artwork and three main foci: colonization, gender, and abuse.

CRUCIFIED PEOPLE In my subsequent interview with John Tansey, he spoke of his theological outlook being influenced by liberation theology; he did not, however, specifically relate Deterrence as perhaps he might to a strand within liberation theology that speaks directly of “crucified people.” Insofar as this is wellknown, it is associated with the work of the Spanish Jesuit who settled in and worked from El Salvador, Jon Sobrino.17 Sobrino’s own work on this theme consciously echoes and amplifies the brief writing on it by his colleague Ignacio Ellacuría.18 Sobrino and Ellacuría had shared a priests’ house together, and it was only because he was out of town at the time that Sobrino was not himself murdered alongside Ellacuría and five other Jesuit brothers and two—tellingly, often unnamed women: their housekeeper and her daughter, on November 16, 1989, when their home was raided by Salvadoran armed forces.19 Sobrino recounts Ellacuría’s dissatisfaction with Jurgen Moltmann’s better-known image of “the crucified God,” and Ellacuría’s own insistence on “stressing another much more urgent theological idea,” that is “the crucified people,” in order that such talk could be directed to “bring[ing] them

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down from the cross.”20 Ellacuría identifies crucified people in the history of his own Latin America, citing for example, what he calls the “colossal disaster” of European invasion: “Some seventy years after 1492, the indigenous population had been reduced to 15 percent; many of their cultures had been destroyed and subjected to anthropological death.” But he also locates crucified people in what contemporary Western thought categorizes variously as “the third world,” “the South,” and “developing countries.” As Ellacuría continues, while these designations “are attempting to say that something is wrong,” such language “does not communicate how wrong.”21 The metaphorical language of crucified peoples might, he suggests, resist the “cover up” inherent in other languages and convey something of both the “historical enormity of disaster” and its “meaning for faith.” And while he regards the analysis of the situation of persons in the so-called third world as an exercise in “coproanalysis”—that is, looking at the feces of the first world, which produces the third world22—this, he asserts, is essential in order to reveal, not least to the first world, not only “gospel values of solidarity, service, and readiness to receive God’s gift,” but also the “humanizing potential” and “openness to transcendence” which may be found among the poor who practice a “relevant holiness . . . that gives more of Jesus,”23 so desperately needed across the world, in Ellacuría’s view. The liberation theology with which Ellacuría and Sobrino are associated has produced or appropriated various contextual crucifixion images, most notably with respect to “crucified people” Guido Rocha’s Tortured Christ (1975),24 a grisly depiction of the cross informed by Rocha’s personal endurance of torture. Turning to Deterrence, it is clear that the work intends to reference other contemporary “crucified people”: persons in Christmas Island, Manus, and Nauru detention centers, environments in which human rights organizations have cataloged serious human rights violations.25 In seeking passage to Australia, many if not all of the detainees in the centers are themselves attempting to transit from third- to first-world circumstances. My interview with John Tansey also revealed another referent, in that the artist’s use of barbed wire was suggested to him by seeing an artistic representation of Aboriginal people chained together. Tansey saw Richard Savage’s sculpture Terror Australis (2014),26 in which chains not only lock Aboriginal bodies together, but the chain is used to shape their bodies. It was this artwork that suggested Tansey’s use of barbed wire to depict the figures imprisoned in detention referred to in Deterrence. Tansey’s artwork, emerging from this consciousness of people of the land, might be praised for confronting its viewers with contemporary realities of migrants on the seas, proposing in its own way that these have, in Ellacuría’s phrase, meaning for faith.​

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CHRISTA CRUCIFIED My interview with John Tansey also revealed that in shaping from barbed wire a figure of a pregnant woman he was not conscious of contemporary theologies of Christa, that is, feminist turnings—“refiguring, resassembling”27— of the doctrine of Christ. Associated with the writings of Rita Nakashima Brock and Carter Heyward from the 1980s,28 Christa has more recently been the subject of a full-length book treatment in Nicola Slee’s Seeking the Risen Christa, as well as having some of her recent feminist history recollected in Elizabeth Johnson’s The Strength of Her Witness, in which a variety of references to her may be found.29 Modern theological consideration of Christa was initially provoked by two pieces of art appearing coterminously in 1974, themselves sculptures. One, Almuth Lutkenhause-Lackey’s Crucified Women,30 was exhibited in a liturgical setting for Lent and Easter, 1979, at the United Church of Canada’s church premises on Bloor Street in downtown Toronto, and later, in 1986, was permanently installed on the grounds of Emmanuel College in the University of Toronto. The other, Edwina Sandy’s Christa,31 was initially produced for the United Nations Decade for Women, and later, in 1984, displayed during Holy Week in New York’s Episcopal (Anglican) Cathedral of St. John the Divine—where it has recently been returned.32 Both sculptures depict a bare-breasted, round-hipped, crucified female figure, an image that has itself provoked polarizing responses among feminists, apart from others. Some have seen it as a “visual sermon, and strangely, a sermon of hope,”33 as representing “the creative, liberating Spirit of God/ess,”34 while others have criticized it as glorifying women’s suffering.35 Others again have pressed its ambiguities to ask questions both of their own Christian tradition and contemporary cultural mores, such as Ivone Gebara’s enquiry, “Why should the naked body of a crucified man be an object of veneration while that of a woman be judged pornographic?”36 Nicola Slee’s treatments of Christa explore both poles and the space between them in not only refusing to shirk from the violence of the cross and relating this to contemporary gender-based violence and oppression. So in response to the question “Who is the Christa?” she suggests that Christa is women “forced to have sex who didn’t want it,” youngsters “trafficked out of [their] own home countr[ies],” orphans left to care “for three siblings under five in a shanty town,” women walking “a thousand miles through a war zone.”37 But she also seeks a risen Christa, as she says “in search of symbols of the feminine divine which can speak to and of women’s risenness, strength, power, vitality and liveliness, our quest for life in all its fullness,”38 and so she imagines Christa “feasting at the tables of the poor”39 as she is depicted in Emmanuel Garibay’s series of images of Emmaus:40 a woman with stigmata, “laughing eyes,” and low cut

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red dress, drinking beer in a tavern with her friends,41 or Christa bathing in a river, “swish[ing] her hands slowly through the warm waters / sending little ripples down the stream,” “in no hurry to move, naked[,] clothed in glory[,] singing.”42 In her emphasis on a risen Christa, Slee’s poetic depictions significantly shift the focus of earlier representation of a woman-Christ crucified, asking not only “Why is the Christa always suffering, broken, dying?” and “Where is the risen Christa?” but “Why have we not realized her?” “Is she still on her way to us?” and “How can we help her arrive?”43 and then seeking to give contour to a feminist quest that privileges “natality” over “necrophilia,” “flourishing” over decay, “birthing” over dying, “redemption through peaceful protest rather than violence.”44 Notably, Slee invokes Ivone Gebara’s notion of “everyday resurrections” to seek a risen Christa in everyday, even “mundane,” experience as this may be the setting for “a process of resurrection, of recovering life and hope and justice along life’s path even when these experiences are frail and fleeting.”45 The process, according to Gebara, invites attention to the like of “beautiful music that calms our spirit, a novel that keeps us company, a glass of beer or a cup of coffee shared with another,” “a sentiment, a kiss, a piece of bread, a happy old woman.”46 So these are some of the aspects of the “mundane” on which Slee focuses. In doing so, while contributing to a refocusing of the imagery (accenting, even introducing, risenness) around Christa, Slee also uncovers a genealogy, as it were, for her going backward well beyond Sandys and Lackey, Heyward and Brock in the 1970s and 80s, to show how “the idea of a female Christ is nothing new, but a very ancient idea rooted in Scripture, tradition and Christian practice down the centuries.”47 So she cites, for example, the anti-slave campaigner Sojourner Truth in the nineteenth-century United States, the fourteenth-century cult of female crucified martyr St Wilgefortis, who (according to legend) sprouted a beard,48 and the biblical figure of Wisdom-Sophia among Christa’s antecedents. And she sets Heyward and Brock in a much wider company of contemporary advocacy theologians including Marcella Althaus-Reid, Kelly Brown Douglas, Chung Hyun Kyung,49 Lisa Isherwood and Israel Selvanayagam, as well as artwork from all around the world, including Australia—Arthur Boyd’s Crucifixion, Shoalhaven (1979–1980), an image elsewhere deemed by Kim Power to be “replete with sacramentality,”50 and perhaps therefore able to be appropriated as indicating a context of grace in which refugees might seek sanctuary. Among other voices from Asia to add to those noted by Slee might be Choan-Seng Song, whose Jesus, the Crucified People considers Christa in work on “crucified people” near-contemporaneously with Sobrino in the mid1990s. Song’s work does not cite either Sobrino or Ellacuría, but concentrates

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on Sandy’s sculpture, for which he has unequivocal affirmation, questioning those (including a New York bishop) who reacted to the sculpture with what Song deems a “skin-deep theology” overly focused on Christa’s naked body, but not appreciating her “haggard face trying to contain the extreme sorrow and pain seething in Christa’s heart, not the emaciated body on which centuries of injustice has been done.”51 Song asserts that by no means did Sandy’s Christa “desecrate” Christian symbolism, as some (such as the bishop) charged. “Rather,” Song asserts, “it forced open the ‘Christian’ symbol of maleness and exposed it to the history of God with women as well as men, and not just with men,”52 revealing “a fundamental weakness and deficiency in traditional androcentric Christian theology,” and promising to “revolutionize our human psyche conditioned by centuries of male domination.”53 Song’s affirmations are ones with which Slee would later concur: “Christa is every woman disfigured, raped, battered, discarded . . . every girl murdered in order for her family to have a son . . . every female fetus aborted to make room for a male.”54 For Song’s part, he certainly sees Christa as a healing figure, if not articulating, as Slee would come to, her “risen forms.” Turning back to Deterrence, it is important to remember that John Tansey does not explicitly identify the crucified female refugee in his artwork as Christa. Indeed, the Christ figure in his tableaux is evidently the one on the central cross, who wears a crown of thorns. Interestingly, though, in my interview, Tansey identified the crown of thorns on the head of the central figure as the only feature of his work that, three years after making it, he wished to rethink. He suggested that the impaled head of the central corpus might overly identify this one with Christ, when, rather, each figure might evoke Christ. Other questions follow from this discussion: Does Tansey’s figure glorify women’s suffering, or appropriately (if disturbingly) locate at least one significant instance of it? If Boyd’s Shoalhaven Christa is notable for being “replete with sacramentality,” might the same somehow be said of Tansey’s rather different Christa? Moreover, what “everyday resurrections” may be experienced in Australian detention centers—or if Gebara’s take on that central Christian doctrine is deemed insufficient, what difference can or does the doctrine make for detainees on these islands? We might hope that those who either embrace or castigate the idea of Christa confront the latter question. CRUCIFIED CHILDREN Since John Tansey’s art installation started making some news, a distressing feature in international media has been the coverage of terror campaigns conducted by ISIS/Islamic State/Daesh that have included the crucifixion—as

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well as beheading and burning alive—of children. Sometimes the horror of crucifixion has been deliberately inflicted on Christian children. John Tansey could not have been aware of this when making Deterrence,55 but these reports, emerging from Syria and other countries from which millions have been displaced and sought refuge, add poignancy to Tansey’s decision to depict a child on the cross. In the quest to flee peril in their homelands, many other children have died at sea, including Aylan Kurdi, whose limp body washed up on a beach near Bodrum, Turkey, on September 2, 2015, stirring up international attention. Aylan’s fate has been depicted in controversial art by Ai Weiwei,56 as one way of reminding that Aylan’s death was, tragically, not isolated: in the months following, the United Nations Refugee Agency reckoned, conservatively, that two children died at sea every day while trying to cross the Mediterranean.57 At the same time, a series of Royal Commissions into institutionalized sexual abuse of children has discredited not only the Roman Catholic Church, but the Anglican and (to as yet lesser extent) Uniting churches in Australia, with crucifixes publicly identified among victims as a “trigger” for painful memory of abuse inflicted at the hands of clerics and others working for the churches.58 Tansey’s sculpture may have taken on resonances which could not have been imagined at the time of its making, such as have been taken up equally, if not more, forcefully in Erik Ravelo’s difficult images, Untouchables (2013),59 which “simulate a crucifixion with an adolescent slung against the back of a cleric, symbolising the church’s abandonment of children to predatory clergy.”60 If this seems to be in bad taste, consider this, from a victim of abuse by Anglican clergy in Newcastle, NSW, Australia: “Gray told the commission Rushton abused him regularly between the ages of 10 and 14, and would sometimes ‘cut my back with a small knife and smear my blood on my back. . . . That was symbolic of the blood of Christ.’”61 The neglect of children as a focus for reflection in Christian theology is slowly being countered in (mainly feminist) work that contests a perhaps more common interest in prenatal life and then adolescent sexuality, for the most part ignoring young lives in the leap between the two62—a neglect that may be compounded (or “inspired”) by the Bible’s own relative lack of interest in Jesus as a child, with “hidden years” prior to his “public ministry.”63 As a part of this rectification, it is child abuse which has emerged as a (necessary) major focus of concern, and which has, in some feminist thought, been linked to what is deemed “divine child abuse” focused on the cross of Jesus. Against this background, some viewers may see in Tansey’s sculpture scrutiny of “christological doctrines [that] reflect views of divine power that sanction child abuse on a cosmic scale and sustain benign paternalism,”64 as well perhaps as provoking imagination about “God the child” which some other feminist theologies have foregrounded in their attempts to grapple with and

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challenge child abuse.65 It might be that, as Rita Nakashima Brock suggests, “imagining deity as Child locates divine power not in control and authority but in vulnerability, joy, openness, and interdependence,”66 and this might possibly play a part in exposing corrupt power over others and Christian doctrine co-opted to harm. But that Brock herself admits that the dying Jesus is “the image of the destroyed child”67 also points to the scale of the challenge, as it will be difficult for some to accept that any image of crucifixion can convey joy,68 some Johannine maternal imagery beloved of some feminist exegetes, among other things, notwithstanding.69 We might hope at least that those, motivated by doctrinal concern, who worry about Christa, a crucified women, in Tansey’s and other like-kind art, would also be concerned about the portrayal of children upon a cross—just as at the same time recognition of the hideous actions of ISIS might compel realization that “crucified people” are real,70 as much as they are a metaphor. VISUAL THEOLOGY Images of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph as the “Holy Family,” themselves “refugees” on their “flight into Egypt” (Matthew 2:13–23), have a venerable history in art—from Michaelangelo’s Tondo Doni (1506–1508) to Janet McKenzie’s The Holy Family (2007).71 These images are another provenance within which Deterrence might be identified,72 even as Tansey’s art recasts traditional imagery of Jesus’ crucifixion. Whether focusing on the nativity, the passion, or elsewhere, artists have, as Aaron Rosen points out, often “brought Jesus uncomfortably close to contemporary reality,”73 for example, Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece (c.1515) with its Jesus covered in boils and oozing sores to mirror the symptoms of those who looked at it, or Michelangelo Mirisi de Caravaggio’s (1571–1610) use of models for gospel scenes brought “straight from the streets—and brothels—of Rome.”74 Rosen also cites various contemporary examples, including Zhang Huan’s Ash Jesus (2011)—in which the Christian savior is composed of ash from Buddhist temples, Cosmo Cavallo’s Sweet Jesus (2005)—a nude made from chocolate, and Vanessa Beecroft’s Black Christ (2006)—a young Sudanese man in his underpants shaping his body as a crucifix, which is one of Beecroft’s works (along with others depicting a white madonna breastfeeding black baby Jesuses) intended to expose what she, while living in Sudan, came to think of as the “double face of the humanitarian effort,” “the price for the ones that are helped.”75 Australian Ron Mueck’s Youth (2009) is on the cover of Rosen’s book—another young black man, lifting his shirt above sagging trousers to reveal a pierced side, “perhaps in the wake of a knife attack.”76 It pre-dates the Black Lives Matter movement with which it is so resonant, but by no means

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violence against black youth.77 Rosen’s discussion also encompasses other controversial images, such as Gilbert and George’s Jesus Says Forgive Yourself: God Loves Fucking . . . (2005)—their statement on “what they perceive as Christianity’s harmful teaching on sex, particularly the condemnation of homosexuality”78—composed not only of blood, but of “piss,” from which they shape crucifixes, and “spunk,” which “look[s] like a crown of thorns.”79 Gilbert and George’s crucifixion from bodily fluids itself relates most closely of these examples to Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987), deemed to be one of “the most influential images of all time”80—of a crucifix dropped into a vat of human blood and urine. While this was presumed to be sacrilegious by the person who defaced it when exhibited in Melbourne, this charge was adamantly denied by the artist.81 As Rosen notes, “Ironically, what many religious viewers find upsetting about these works—their insistent, palpable, corporeality—lies at the heart of Christian theology: the incarnation of God in human flesh.”82 While the destruction of the image is one pole of possible response (seen also in the “vitriol” directed at Deterrence), at another is reception of such works in doctrinal affirmation and devotion. Andrew Hudgin’s poem, Piss Christ, on Serrano’s artwork, suggests that “If we did not know” it was human bodily fluids in the plastic vat, “we would assume it was the resurrection / glory,” the urine a halo of light making the Christ so beautiful. Moreover, “what we see here, the Piss Christ in glowing blood” is “the whole irreducible point of the faith”: that is—in his striking wording—“God thrown in human waste, submerged and shining.”83 Among some of these examples, perhaps, Tansey’s Deterrence may seem somewhat conventional. It is surely, for some at least, a portal to doctrine and devotion, and not least the kind of uncomfortable encounter with injustice84 that might unsettle persons toward practices of advocacy, protest, resistance, and care for crucified people.

NOTES 1. I am most grateful to John Tansey for meeting me for an interview about Deterrence on April 21, 2017, as well as kind permission for use of his photography. 2. I thank Andrew Curnow, the then bishop of Bendigo, for introducing me to the sculpture, and John Roundhill, then the cathedral’s dean, for displaying the work. 3. See also Richard Harris, The Passion in Art (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 4. As one might presume the gender and age of those crucified alongside Jesus, according to gospel memory: the fourth century Gospel of Nicodemus calls them Dismas and Gestus, though canonical scripture is silent with regard to their names. 5. Susanna Snyder, “Moving Body,” in Church in an Age of Global Migration: A Moving Body, ed. Susanna Snyder, Joshua Ralston and Agnes M. Brazal (New

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York: Palgrave, 2015), 1–19. Snyder discusses art on the Mexico/US border, and she employs Duncan Forrester’s image of theology in fragments—see his Theological Fragments: Essays in Unsystematic Theology (London: T & T Clark, 2005). On experience of, and theological reflection on, migration, see also Susanna Snyder, AsylumSeeking, Migration and Church (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012). I am much indebted to my first student, then colleague, Susanna Snyder’s work about welcoming asylum seekers, both her writing and practice. 6. I take it that “feminism minimally defined is a movement which seeks change for the better in terms of justice for women,” and that “a feminist theologian need not be female by sex.” Ann Loades, “Feminist Theology,” in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century—Volume 2, ed. David F. Ford (Oxford; Blackwell, 1989), 235. 7. http://www​.bendigoadvertiser​.com​.au​/story​/4592392​/church​-erects​-crucified​ -refugee​-statues/​#slide=1 All websites cited were correct at June 2, 2017. 8. http://stkildanews​.com​/what​-would​-jesus​-say​-about​-boat​-people/ 9. http://crosslight​.org​.au​/2014​/05​/04​/17525/ 10. http://www​.heraldsun​.com​.au​/leader​/inner​-east​/st​-kilda​-church​-leader​-protests​ -asylum​-seeker​-policy​-with​-easter​-crucifix​-installation​/news​-story​/dee​2465​395a​beef​ 4045​dd8a​73da0268c 11. Although Tansey didn’t mention these examples, one might think of Donald Mackinnon’s work on tragedy and atonement, or liturgical revision which takes care within the Palm Sunday passion reading and Good Friday solemn intercessions to locate responsibility for the death of Jesus. 12. http://www​.ima​.border​.gov​.au 13. http://www​.smh​.com​.au​/federal​-politics​/political​-news​/evidence​-contradicts​ -government​-stance​-on​-manus​-good​-friday​-shooting​-amnesty​-20170514​-gw4q5j​.html 14. http://www​.smh​.com​.au/​/lifestyle​/news​-and​-views​/opinions​/hysteria​-over​ -yasmin​-abdelmagieds​-anzac​-day​-post​-cannot​-be​-separated​-from​-racism​-20170427​ -gvtjdj​.html 15. www​.amnesty​.org​.au​/sister​-jane​-keogh​-manus​-refugees 16. See stati​​c​.amn​​esty.​​org​.a​​u​/wp-​​conte​​nt​/up​​loads​​/2016​​/09​/A​​nmest​​y​_Int​​ernat​​ ional​​_Manu​​s​_​Isl​​and​_R​​eport​​-1​.pd​f See also https://static​.amnesty​.org​.au​/wp​-content​ /uploads​/2016​/10​/ISLAND​-OF​-DESPAIR​-FINAL​.pdf​?x85233 17. See Jon Sobrino, The Principle of Mercy: Taking the Crucified People Down from the Cross (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994). 18. See Ignacio Ellacuría, “The Crucified People,” in Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology, ed. Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuría (London: SCM Press, 1996), 257–278. 19. John Neafsey, Crucified People: The Suffering of the Tortured in Today’s World (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2014), 42. The two women were Elba Ramos and Celia Manuela Ramos: see www​.catholic​-chaplaincy​.org​.uk​/20th​-anniversary​-of​ -the​-murders​-of​-6​-jesuits​-their​-houskeeper​-and​-her​-daughter​-november​-16th​-1989/ Thanks to Bryan Cones for locating the information which enables them to be identified. 20. Sobrino, Mercy, 49.

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21. Sobrino, Mercy, 50. 22. Sobrino, Mercy, 54. 23. Sobrino, Mercy, 55–56. 24. See Hans-Ruedi Weber, On a Friday Noon: Meditations Under the Cross (London: SPCK, 1979), 41, 78–79, and Anton Wessels, Images of Jesus: How Jesus is Perceived and Portrayed in Non-European Cultures (London: SCM Press, 1986), 8. 25. See stati​​c​.amn​​esty.​​org​.a​​u​/wp-​​conte​​nt​/up​​loads​​/2016​​/09​/A​​nmest​​y​_Int​​ernat​​ ional​​_Manu​​s​_​Isl​​and​_R​​eport​​-1​.pd​f See also https://static​.amnesty​.org​.au​/wp​-content​ /uploads​/2016​/10​/ISLAND​-OF​-DESPAIR​-FINAL​.pdf​?x85233 26. https://www​.facebook​.com​/Ind​igen​ousA​rchi​tecture​/posts​/659314474203919 27. Nicola Slee, Seeking the Risen Christa (London: SPCK, 2011), 5. I owe Nicola many thanks for enabling me not only to see Deterrence as I have done in these reflections, but for so much of my own theological education and Christian formation. 28. Rita Nakashima Brock, Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power (New York: Crossroad, 1988); Carter Heyward, The Redemption of God: Toward a Theology of Mutual Relation (Scranton: University of America Press, 1982), Carter Heyward, “Christa,” in Dictionary of Feminist Theologies, ed. Letty Russell and Shannon Clarkson (Louisville: WJKP, 1996); Carter Heyward, “Christ,” in Handbook of U.S. Liberation Theologies, ed. Miguel de la Torre (St. Louis: Chalice, 2004), 16–30. See also Stephen Burns and Bryan Cones, “Carter Heyward,” in Twentiethcentury Anglican Theologians, ed. Stephen Burns, Bryan Cones and James Tengatenga (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 175–184. 29. Elizabeth Johnson, ed., The Strength of Her Witness: Jesus Christ in the Global Voices of Women (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2016). An important omission, aside from those discussed below, is Julie Clague, “The Christa: Symbolizing My Humanity and My Pain,” Feminist Theology 14 (2005): 83–108. And while Johnson herself has not written about “Christa,” she has spoken about, for example, “pain and violence experienced by women on the cross, of whatever sort.” See She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Perspective (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 264. 30. Find images at https://photosbykenn​.wordpress​.com​/2009​/03​/15​/the​-crucified​ -woman​-emmanuel​-college​-toronto/ 31. Find images and author interview at https://feminismandreligion​.com​/2015​/10​ /06​/christa​-interview​-with​-edwina​-sandys​-by​-nettie​-reynolds/ 32. The Christa Project: Manifesting Divine Bodies (catalog) (New York: Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 2016), including a central essay by Nicola Slee. 33. Slee, Risen Christa, 16. Note that Slee’s book, mainly comprised of poetry, includes an extensive theological essay at the beginning. See also Nicola Slee, “Visualizing, Conceptualizing, Imagining and Praying the Christa: In Search of Her Risen Forms,” Feminist Theology 21 (2012): 71–90. 34. Carter Heyward, “Christa,” in The Strength of Her Witness: Jesus Christ in the Global Voices of Women, ed. Elizabeth A. Johnson (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2016), 80. 35. Heyward, “Christa,” in The Strength of Her Witness, ed., by Elizabeth A. Johnson, 80; Slee, Risen Christa, 16.

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36. Slee, Risen Christa, 16. 37. Slee, Risen Christa, 76. 38. Slee, Risen Christa, 24. 39. Slee, Risen Christa, 149. 40. The image on the cover of Slee, Risen Christa, can be found at https://imagejournal​.org​/article​/recognizing​-the​-stranger/ Note that Garibay has a number of variants on this image, all entitled “Emmaus.” 41. Slee, Risen Christa, 121. 42. Slee, Risen Christa, 124–125. 43. Slee, Risen Christa, 1. 44. Nicola Slee, “At the Table of Christa,” in Presiding Like a Woman, ed. Nicola Slee and Stephen Burns (London: SPCK, 2010), 178; also Slee, Risen Christa, 114. 45. Ivone Gebara, Out of The Depths: Women’s Experience of Evil and Salvation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 122, quoted by Slee, Risen Christa, 25. 46. Gebara, Depths, 124–125, quoted by Slee, Risen Christa, 25. 47. Slee, Risen Christa, 4. 48. For an image of this saint in the diocesan center for the Diocese of Graz, Austria, see https://en​.m​.wikipedia​.org​/wiki​/Wilgefortis#​/media​/File​%3ASaint​_Wilgefortis​_Graz​_20121006​.jpg 49. Chung Hyun Kyung, Struggle to be the Sun Again: Introducing Asian Women’s Theology (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1990), 64–71 discusses “Jesus as mother, woman, and shaman.” 50. Kim Power, “Embodying the Eucharist,” in Reinterpreting the Eucharist: Explorations in Feminist Theology and Ethics, ed. Anne Elvey, Carol Hogan, Kim Power, and Claire Rankin, (Sheffield: Equinox, 2012), 172. 51. Choan-Seng Song, Jesus, the Crucified People (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006), 226. 52. Song Jesus, 226. 53. Song, Jesus, 227. 54. Song, Jesus, 228. 55. The earliest reports I can track are from 2015, postdating Tansey’s work: http://www​.independent​.co​.uk​/news​/world​/middle​-east​/isis​-crucifies​-children​-for​-not​ -fasting​-during​-ramadan​-in​-syria​-10338215​.html 56. https://www​.theguardian​.com​/artanddesign​/2016​/feb​/01​/ai​-weiwei​-poses​-as​ -drowned​-syrian​-infant​-refugee​-in​-haunting​-photo. Other art by Ai has also focused directly on the plight of refugees: see https://news​.artnet​.com​/exhibitions​/ai​-weiwei​ -investigates​-migration​-at​-czech​-museum​-amid​-refugee​-related​-eu​-funding​-dispute​ -889628. Further, see http://time​.com​/4022765​/aylan​-kurdi​-photo/ 57. http://www​.unhcr​.org​/en​-au​/news​/press​/2016​/2​/56c6e7676​/growing​-numbers​ -child​-deaths​-sea​-un​-agencies​-call​-enhancing​-safety​-refugees​.html 58. http://www​.abc​.net​.au​/news​/2016​-02​-28​/child​-abuse​-survivors​-arrive​-in​-rome​ -ahead​-of​-pell​-testimony​/7205696​?pfmredir​=sm 59. https://www​ . facebook​ . com​ / ErikRavelo​ / photos​ / a​ . 476684219088077​ .1073741825​.476683165754849​/569115693178262/​?type​=1​&theater

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60. Aaron Rosen, Art and Religion in the Twenty-first Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 2016), 50. 61. See http://www​.theaustralian​.com​.au​/news​/inquirer​/newcastles​-ring​-of​ -evil​-abuse​-in​-catholic​-anglican​-churches​/news​-story​/ce3​c902​837f​e6f4​7754​54b1​ 6ea144c39 62. For more on this point, see Ann Loades, Feminist Theology: Voices from the Past (Oxford: Polity Press, 2001). Marcia Bunge, The Child in Christian Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000) is a pioneering and instructive corrective to the problem, important for making clear how little “mainstream” theological attention has been given to reflection on children’s lives, not least in “theological anthropology.” See also Janet Martin Soskice, “Love and Attention,” collected into her The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender and Religious Language (Oxford: OUP, 2007). 63. “Hidden years” and “public ministry”—each commonplace terms—are both constructs, the latter oftentimes redacted into headings in the gospels. Donald Capps, The Child’s Song: The Religious Abuse of Children (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995) includes interesting speculation about Jesus’ vulnerable childhood. 64. Rita Nakashima Brock, “And a Little Child Will Lead Us: Christology and Child Abuse,” in Christianity, Patriarchy and Abuse: A Feminist Critique, ed. Joanne Carlson Brown and Carole R. Bohn (Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 1989), 43. 65. See Janet Pais, Suffer the Children: A Theology of Liberation by a Victim of Child Abuse (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1991), which makes God the Child its central motif. 66. Brock, “Little Child,” 55. 67. Brock, “Little Child,” 57. 68. Monica Furlong, “Trying to Get Well: Trusting the God who Breaks in from the Future,” in 20/20 Visions: The Futures of Christianity in Britain, ed. Haddon Willmer (London: SPCK, 1992) includes a moving reflection about the cross, from feminist perspective. The grisly details of crucifixion recounted in Martin Hengel, The Cross of the Son of God (London: SCM Press, 1986) should give pause to any oversimplified “devotional” focus on the cross. 69. Nicola Slee’s work on Christa draws particularly on exegesis by Dorothy Lee and Barbara Reid. 70. See Neafsey’s disturbing Crucified People for more examples. 71. An ABC news report on Deterrence describes the figures on the crosses as “a pregnant woman, a father, and their child.” https://m​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​ =qfVBwQo0Z_I 72. Recent compositions of the holy family have contributed to the confronting of the tradition: Olivero Toscani’s 1992 advertising campaign for Benetton featured a “holy family”—an Asian child and two women, one black, one white—in a “globalised, sexually ambiguous” representation of the image, as part of a wider initiative that also included contemporary pieta-scenes, notably of patients with AIDS just before their deaths: see Joseph Bristol, “Unsafe Sex? Eliding the Violence of Sexual Representation,” in Political Gender: Texts and Contexts, ed. Sally Ledger, Josephine Mcdonagh, and Jane Spencer (Routledge, 2014), 214. These images intended,

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according to Toscani, to move “from promotion of products to promotion of social awareness” (The Guardian, February 20, 1992, p. 22). 73. Rosen, Art and Religion, 47. 74. Rosen, Art and Religion, 47. 75. http://www​.flashartonline​.com​/article​/vanessa​-beecroft​-2/ 76. Rosen, Art and Religion, 212. 77. See Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2015), especially “Jesus and Trayvon,” 171–203. 78. Rosen, Art and Religion, 52. 79. Rosen, Art and Religion, 52. 80. http://100photos​.time​.com​/photos​/andres​-serrano​-piss​-christ 81. Serrano says for himself, “I’m a Christian artist making a religious work of art based on my relationship with Christ”: http://www​.huffingtonpost​.com​/udoka​-okafor​ /exclusive​-interview​-with-​_18​_b​_5442141​.html 82. Rosen, Art and Religion, 49. 83. Luke Hankins, ed., Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2012), 79. 84. For the theme of unsettling in encounter with injustice, see Neafsey, Crucified People, 122–123; and on justice and devotion, Elizabeth Johnson, “Torture,” in her Abounding in Kindness: Writings for the People of God (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2015), 211–214.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brock, Rita Nakashima. “And a Little Child Will Lead Us: Christology and Child Abuse.” In Christianity, Patriarchy and Abuse: A Feminist Critique, edited by Joanne Carlson Brown and Carole R. Bohn, 42–61. Cleveland, Ohio: Pilgrim Press, 1989. Gebara, Ivone. Out of The Depths: Women’s Experience of Evil and Salvation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002. Hankins, Luke, ed. Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2012. Heyward, Carter. “Christa.” In The Strength of Her Witness: Jesus Christ in the Global Voices of Women, edited by Elizabeth A. Johnson, 80. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2016. Johnson, Elizabeth. She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Perspective. New York: Crossroad, 1992. Kyung, Chung Hyun. Struggle to be the Sun Again: Introducing Asian Women’s Theology. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1990. Loades, Ann. “Feminist Theology.” In The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century—Volume 2, edited by David F. Ford, 235–253. Oxford; Blackwell, 1989. Neafsey, John. Crucified People: The Suffering of the Tortured in Today’s World. Maryknoll: Orbis, 2014.

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Power, Kim. “Embodying the Eucharist.” In Reinterpreting the Eucharist: Explorations in Feminist Theology and Ethics, edited by Anne Elvey, Carol Hogan, Kim Power, and Claire Rankin, 152–185. Sheffield: Equinox, 2012. Rosen, Aaron. Art and Religion in the Twenty-first Century. London: Thames and Hudson, 2016. Slee, Nicola. “At the Table of Christa.” In Presiding Like a Woman, edited by Nicola Slee and Stephen Burns, 7–8. London: SPCK, 2010. Slee, Nicola. Seeking the Risen Christa. London: SPCK, 2011. Snyder, Susanna. “Moving Body.” In Church in an Age of Global Migration: A Moving Body, edited by Susanna Snyder, Joshua Ralston, and Agnes M. Brazal, 1–19. New York: Palgrave, 2015. Sobrino, Jon. The Principle of Mercy: Taking the Crucified People Down from the Cross. Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994. Song, Choan-Seng. Jesus, the Crucified People. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006.

Chapter 15

Pink Crosses in Ciudad Juárez David Tombs

THE VISIT OF POPE FRANCIS TO CIUDAD JUÁREZ On February 17, 2016, Pope Francis celebrated a Mass attended by 250,000 people at the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez.1 The city, which is often referred to simply as Juárez, is located on the south and west side of a bend in the Rio Grande (Rio Bravo del Norte), just across the river from El Paso, Texas. Juárez and El Paso are one of the world’s largest border-crossing conurbations and are linked by three heavily used international bridges. The combined population is over 2 million people, with about two-thirds living in Juárez. During the Mass, the Pope had a clear view across the water to El Paso, and he blessed the crowds gathered on both the United States and Mexican sides. To underline the cross-border significance of the celebration, prior to the Mass, the Pope visited the memorial to those who died while crossing the border, and he took a moment under its towering Pilgrim’s Cross to pray specifically for migrants.2 The inclusion of Juárez in the Pope’s five-day itinerary had symbolic significance. The city had grown significantly since 1970 and then expanded dramatically in the 1990s. Mexico’s entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in January 1994, bolstered the growth of assembly factories, or maquilas, in Juárez and elsewhere along the border.3 Employment opportunities created rapid population growth and attracted workers from other parts of Mexico. However, the more open border for goods also drew organized drug-trafficking cartels into the city. Fighting between drug gangs, and other organized crime, had escalated rapidly, with murders, kidnapping, extortion, and widespread corruption. The years 2007–2010 had been particularly bad. In the words of historian Oscar Martinez: “Other than urban centers around the world caught up in warfare, few communities have ever 197

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been subjected to the level of torment experienced by juarenses during the 2000s.”4 The situation finally started to improve in 2011. By the time of the Pope’s visit in 2016, the murder statistics were more in line with other cities in the United States and Mexico.5 Nonetheless, the city remained associated with a reputation for lawlessness and drug-related violence, as portrayed in the sensationalist movie Sicario (2015). The Pope’s decision to visit was therefore an important message of support and solidarity for both the city and the people. To prepare for the visit the authorities organized a publicity campaign with the slogans “Love Juárez” and “Pride in Juárez.” These messages sought to counter the bad press that Juárez had received in global media in previous decades. Alongside the drug violence, the city had also become internationally known for stories of disappearances and deaths of young women, which were often enacted with extreme brutality. In this chapter, I explore how this violence against women in Juárez became a specific focus for activism and protest in the wider context of violence in the city. The chapter by Stephen Burns in this collection raises profound questions about the place and the meaning of the cross in the world we live in. Considering these questions further in relation to Juárez invites attention to the distinctive pink crosses which local activists used in creative ways to protest this violence. The traditional cross—or more usually the crucifix—is a central image in Mexican Catholic culture, and is omnipresent in churches, in people’s homes, and sites like the Pilgrim’s Cross. Juárez activists intentionally drew upon this strong cultural significance to highlight the suffering and death of the women in a very public way. In the process, they asked the public to view the deaths of women alongside—and perhaps also through—the suffering and death of Jesus. They brought the suffering of women into the public forum in a way that demanded attention, and which invited questions about the place of the cross in a world of injustice and suffering. It is less clear whether the activists wished to go even further than this, and whether they might also have wanted the public to reconsider the suffering and death of Jesus through the suffering and death of the women. This would have been a bold theological move in a conservative culture, but it could claim support from feminist and liberation theologies, which recognize theological reflection as a second step that follows on from lived experience. For example, the Latina theologian Nancy Pineda-Madrid, who grew up in El Paso, uses the lived experience of suffering in Juárez as a profound opportunity to rethink a Christian understanding of atonement and salvation in her book Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Juárez.6 A similar second-step approach might be used to think christologically as well as in response to violence against women in Juárez.

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Even if this christological re-visioning was not intended or addressed by the activists themselves, their use of pink crosses provides a good opportunity for theologians to consider this possibility as part of their reflections on the violence. In what follows, I discuss the violence against women in Juárez and the failure of the police and authorities to respond. This prompted local activists to engage in new forms of protest. Their use of pink crosses was a creative expression of political activism. This offers an important opportunity for theological reflection on how the cross might be understood in new ways in light of women’s experiences.

VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN JUÁREZ Juárez gained global notoriety for the extreme form of violence against women and girls that has been termed “feminicide.” The victims were often not just brutally killed, but also raped, and sometimes tortured or mutilated.7 In the majority of these cases, the victims were typically working class and aged between ten and thirty. The horrifying impact of the murders was heightened by public displays of some of the bodies. Mutilated bodies were left in prominent places within the city. In some cases, the bodies showed injuries to the breasts or bite marks to the left nipple. These public displays conveyed an aggressive message of power and threat. They were a brutal warning of the harsh consequences facing anyone who might demand justice might face. In other cases, the women’s bodies were taken out into the desert around Juárez and either dumped or buried. The women’s fate and location remained uncertain until they were discovered later. Some of these women worked in the maquilas, which typically favored female employees.8 Cases involving maquila workers attracted considerable media attention in the 1990s. The discovery of eight women’s bodies in November 2001 on a busy street near the maquila association office strengthened the impression that there was a close connection to the maquilas. However, the statistics indicate that the problem was much more wide-ranging than just maquila workers and reflected a deeper systemic problem faced by women in the city. The anthropologist and activist Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos argues strongly for the use of the term “feminicide” (in Spanish feminicidio) to describe many of the murders in Juárez. The term “femicide” to refer to the killing of women because they are women was introduced by the feminist scholar Diana Russell, at the first International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in Brussels in 1976. Femicide means more than deaths involving victims who are female. It makes clear that they were killed because they are female.9 Furthermore, the term “femicide” is often used to highlight a

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pattern of misogynistic brutality and terror, and to highlight this brutality as intentional and not just incidental. The term “femicide,” or in a Spanish-speaking context “feminicide,” therefore makes visible important systemic elements in the violence, which might otherwise be insufficiently recognized.10 Without this proper naming, these systemic elements do not receive the attention that is required to understand and address the destructive social dynamics at work. The term “feminicide” is also often used to highlight the level of immunity that frequently accompanies violence against women. In Juárez, the widespread failure to hold perpetrators to account, and the sense of impunity this created, added to the sense of fear and threat.11 Despite extensive media coverage, it is hard to establish a precise figure for this pattern of deaths and disappearances.12 The journalist and activist Esther Chavez Cano who collated information on 400 cases of murdered women between 1993 and 2010 is often cited.13 In April 2009, the El Paso Times reported that since 1993 more than 600 had been murdered and many more were missing.14 Other sources put the figures even higher, but it is often hard to disaggregate the number of women killed through feminicide from statistics which include overall numbers for women killed by gender-based violence. There are high levels of family violence in Mexico, and many of the murders of women in Juárez involved husbands or family members inside their homes. These cases are usually excluded from the figures discussed under the heading “feminicide,” but they provide an important factor for understanding the wider context. Despite a growing outcry over the deaths and disappearances, holding perpetrators accountable was a low priority for police and authorities in the 1990s. When relatives reported disappearances, they typically received little help. Instead of making violence against women a priority concern, the police often added to the pain of loved ones by dismissing the problem or blaming the victims. They sometimes suggested that victims of sex attacks were most likely involved in prostitution or drugs or other criminal activity. In other cases, disappearances were explained as the woman crossing the border to be with a boyfriend or seeking work. It was much easier to say that the missing woman had simply crossed the border into the United States than to launch a proper investigation in Juárez. As with other cities, most of the murders in Juárez in the 1990s and 2000s involved male victims, and this was especially true during the peak of the drug war. The feminicide must therefore also be contextualized in a wider picture of exploitation and other violence taking place in Juárez, including widespread drug and criminal violence involving male victims, as well as the many other forms of gender-based violence experienced by women in their homes.15 Without adequate attention to this wider context of violence, there

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is a risk of sensationalizing the macabre details of the unexplained deaths and disappearances of young women. Local feminist activists have been at the forefront of developing a deeper understanding of the feminicide and have sought to both publicize the violence and examine its wider social context and causes. For the most part, both the civil authorities and the church also failed to help and proved to be more part of the problem than the solution. Local authorities did not do enough to oversee a proper investigation or to keep the family informed.16 Despite an attempted purge of corrupt police violence against women remained a low priority to other crimes. Likewise, the church, other than a few outspoken individuals, failed to provide effective leadership. Church leaders largely ignored the killing of women. On the rare occasions that church leaders addressed the subject, they sometimes implicitly blamed the women, by suggesting that either what they were wearing or how they were behaving contributed to the problem.17 The church’s failure to address these issues is even more notable when viewed alongside the important work done by liberation theologians in relation to the suffering of “the crucified people” in Central America. Oscar Romero, Ignacio Ellacuria, and Jon Sobrino were at the forefront of this reflection in El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s.18 Yet church authorities in Mexico failed to take up and apply this insight in relation to the deaths in Juárez. In marked contrast to the inability or unwillingness of the police, the local authorities, and the church to respond effectively, local women’s groups and feminist activists took remarkably bold steps to publicize the killings and demand justice. Their use of pink crosses was an important part of this work.

PINK CROSSES AS PROTEST AND MOURNING As Stephen Burns shows in his discussion of Tansey’s artwork “Deterrence” in this volume, the religious iconography of crucifixion can be a powerful way to address a contemporary issue, especially when viewed alongside writings on “crucified people” in liberation theology. Tansey’s depiction of the three crucified figures can be an invitation to view the situation of refugees in light of the cross, and also to see the cross in light of the experience of refugees. This bidirectional dialogue—from lived experience to theological insight, and from theological insight back to lived experience—is an important element in a liberationist methodology. As Burns points out, while Tansey may not have been familiar with this liberationist literature, his representation of crucified figures provides an excellent opportunity for this type of dialogical theological reflection.

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Burns also discusses how Tansey’s crucified woman can be viewed alongside a variety of Christa figures (depictions of women on a cross) in Western art. This would also be interesting to consider in Juárez. At least one artist has offered a powerful Christa image in response to the violence at Juárez.19 A naked woman is chained to a wooden cross in a desolate area outside the city. She appears to be suspended over a pit which will serve as a shallow desert grave. Her left breast is bleeding suggesting her nipple has been cut off or stabbed. The Juárez Christa image suggests a strong connection between women and the cross, and shows both the extremity of the violence and the sense of spectacle associated with women’s suffering. However, Nicola Slee’s work on Christa images highlights the potential ambivalence and complex reception of Christa images.20 On one hand, many women report seeing a close connection in the Christa between the suffering of Christ and their own experiences as women. This perspective offers a significant affirmation to their work in resisting oppression. On the other hand, there is an understandable fear that the connections made in the Christa between women and suffering will be insufficiently critical of the patriarchal social dynamics at play. This uncritical perspective can reinforce the harmful connection between women and victimhood. In light of Slee’s discussion on the complexity of Christa images, it is noteworthy that women’s groups in Juárez used a much plainer and more straightforward feminist representation of the cross to highlight the connection between the suffering of Jesus and violence against women. In the early 1990s, the Ocho de Marzo (March 8th) group started to document the abductions and deaths and began to identify the initial patterns that were emerging. In 1995, the group made a public statement by painting telegraph poles in Juárez pink and wrapping black ribbons around them. In the years that followed, pink wooden crosses were used to mark where a woman was found dead, or to mark the place where she disappeared.21 Often the names of women were written across or tied to the cross-beam. If the victim had not been identified, the word “unknown” might be written instead. In a similar way, in March 1999, another group known as Voces sin Eco (Voices without Echo), used cross symbolism in a similar way by painting black crosses against pink backgrounds on telegraph poles or murals. Washington Valdez, a reporter for the El Paso Times, describes the Cross of Nails that was part of the Exodus for Life march in March 2002.22 Starting in Chihuahua City, the state capital, on International Women’s Day, the march organized by a range of women’s groups ended at the Paso del Norte Bridge in Juárez. To mark the completion of Exodus for Life, the protestors installed a large wooden cross made of railway sleepers, which they had brought from Chihuahua City in a truck. This was fixed to a pink metal panel about 4 meters high. Large black spikes in the shape of nails on the metal

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panel provided a dramatic frame for the cross and gave rise to the name of “Cross of Nails.” The demonstrators added the names of women to the nails and the cross became a well-known and highly visible memorial site.23 The use of crosses by activists draws upon a dense symbolism of Christian suffering while at the same time inviting the viewer to see the suffering of women in terms of Christ’s own suffering. The bright pink color makes the crosses visually arresting in public places. At the same time, the color conveys a widely understood association with women and women’s experiences. The viewer is encouraged to move from the suffering of Christ to the suffering of women in Juárez, guided by the bright pink color of the cross. The use of cross imagery in Juárez is effective on a number of levels. On one level, it underlines the sense of cruelty and injustice in the deaths of innocent women. Roman crucifixion was a summum supplicium a “highest punishment” which took physical pain and public humiliation to an extreme level. The wooden crosses witness the pain and suffering of the victims and not just their deaths. On another level, the crosses also affirm the honor and dignity of violated and murdered women. This affirmative message rests on the deep cultural significance that Christ on the cross has in Mexican society.24 It is not just an image of suffering but also conveys deep respect and reverence. The crosses therefore serve as a culturally effective way to both denounce the violence and to affirm the women’s innocence, dignity, and human worth. The crosses serve as a creative illustration of what the Irish scholar Nuala Finnegan describes as “mourning, re-humanization, and commemoration” in various cultural responses to feminicide in Juárez.25 In a conservative Catholic culture, the widespread use of a Christa image would most likely be seen by many as indecent and maybe even offensive. The pink crosses make a strong connection between the cross and women without prompting anything like the same level of potential outcry and opposition that is often unfairly raised against Christa figures. While the pink crosses have been criticized by some conservatives, it is hard for critics to denounce the crosses as disrespectful. The simplicity of the crosses also means that they are much easier image for activists to create than a traditional crucifix or a contemporary Christa. The crosses also avoid some of the difficult issues discussed by Slee on how some Christa images might invite the male gaze onto the violated female body. There is no female figure to attract the male gaze. Instead, there is an empty absence, and perhaps a name that serves as a reminder. By drawing on powerful religious imagery, the pink crosses of Juárez serve as a highly effective image of protest, but they also convey more than just protest, they prompt the viewer to see the women in light of Christ’s suffering and death. To what extent the activists also wish to invite the viewer to reflect anew on the suffering and death of Jesus in light of the suffering and

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death of the women is unclear, but it is a further step that some viewers might make and that theologians might explore. Such re-readings of crucifixion in light of sexual violence against women are encouraged by feminist and liberation theologies, even though these readings have not been pursued very frequently. It is still unusual for the sexual violence which is attested in the crucifixion narratives to be acknowledged or discussed as part of the Easter story.26 Re-reading the crucifixion of Jesus from perspectives informed by sexual violence and execution has only recently come to the fore. The feminicide in Juárez offers a challenging context to take such readings further but this task lies beyond the scope of this short chapter. In conclusion, the pink crosses are much more than just a political protest to denounce the violence of the perpetrators and attest to the suffering of the women. They also creatively affirm the dignity of those crucified. This affirmation of dignity carries a sense of hope and resistance alongside a sense of grief and lament.

NOTES 1. Oscar J. Martínez, Ciudad Juárez: Saga of a Legendary Border City (Phoenix: University of Arizona Press, 2018), 205–206. 2. J. Weston Phippen, “The Pope of the Poor in Ciudad Juárez,” The Atlantic (February 17, 2016); https://www​.theatlantic​.com​/national​/archive​/2016​/02​/pope​ -mexico​/463134/ accessed January 20, 2021. 3. Maquilas (an abbreviation for maquiladoras) are manufacturing factories on the Mexican side of the border. Most are internationally owned (usually by US companies) and operate as assembly plants for export goods destined for the United States with minimal (or no) duties or tariffs. Many of the employees in the maquilas are women who have migrated from other parts of the state of Chihuahua or elsewhere in Mexico. On July 1, 2020 the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) replaced NAFTA. 4. Martínez, Ciudad Juárez, 184. 5. The reasons for this shift in fortune are debated. Felipe Calderon, who was president from 2006 to 2012, claimed credit for his hard-line on drugs. In March 2009, Calderon dispatched the military to assist police in law enforcement. However, other commentators suggest the decline in violence had other causes. For example, by 2011, the Sinaloa drug cartel (a regional cartel that was also known as the Pacific cartel) had overcome their local rivals, the Juárez cartel. The reduced homicides in Juárez may have reflected Sinaloa’s success and uncontested ascendancy rather than the government’s achievement in reducing the overall level of drug smuggling. 6. Nancy Pineda-Madrid, Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Juárez (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), see especially 9–38, 97–121. In this short piece, I cannot do more justice to other material in Pineda-Madrid’s important book, especially her

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insights on Mexican female cultural symbols, including Guadalupe, La Malinche, La Llorona, and Coyolxauhqui (47–58). See also Nancy Pineda- Madrid, “Feminicide and the Reinvention of Religious Practices,” in Women, Wisdom, and Witness: Engaging Contexts in Conversation, ed. Rosemary P. Carbine and Kathleen J. Dolphin (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2012), 61–74. 7. Pineda-Madrid suggests that most journalists date this back to 1993, with one of the first victims being identified as Alma Chavarría Fávila; see Pineda-Madrid, Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Juárez, 12. 8. The shift system in the maquilas could make night-shift workers especially vulnerable. Traveling to or from work late at night, or early in morning, was hazardous. A sudden time change for a work-shift could leave a woman more isolated during travel, especially if she had to wait to change buses. Some feminist analysts suggest that the highly regulated oversight and control of women in the maquilas may also be connected to the feminicide. This analysis identifies the feminicide as an extreme form of the wider regulation of women. However, the statistics show that only a minority of the overall victims work at maquilas. Although working in a maquila might add to the vulnerability of women, it was only one part of a much wider problem. In the 1990s links between the maquilas and the feminicide received particular attention from journalists, but over time more attention has been given to wider patterns of violence in the city. 9. See Diana Russell and Jill Radford, Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing (New York: Twayne, 1992); Diana Russell, “Defining Femicide and Related Concepts” in Femicide in Global Perspective, ed. Diana E. H. Russell and Roberta A. Harmes (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001), 12–28. 10. Russell’s term “femicide” was used in English language discussions of the phenomenon. However, in Spanish, the equivalent term, feminicidio, did not always convey the gendered significance so clearly, and could be mistaken for female homicide. In a Latin American context, the term feminicidio in Spanish (or feminicide in English) conveys this fuller meaning more clearly; see Fregoso and Bejarono, eds. Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 4. 11. Impunity is often identified as a further criterion for speaking of femicide or feminicide, rather than just the murder of women. See Católicas por el Derecho a Decidir (CDD) and Comisión Mexicana de Defensa y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos (CMDPDH), Femicide and Impunity in Mexico: A context of structural and genearlized violence: Report presented before the Committee on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, CEDAW (July 17, 2012). 12. See Amnesty International, Mexico Intolerable Killings: Ten Years of Abductions and Murders in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua (AMR 41/027/2003; London: Amnesty International, 2003); Rosa Linda Fregoso, meXicana Encounters (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 1–29; Diana Washington Valdez, The Killing Fields: Harvest of Women—The Truth about Mexico’s Bloody Border Legacy (Los Angeles: Peace at the Border, 2006); Melissa Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2006); Kathleen A. Staudt, Violence and Activism on the Border: Gender, Fear, and Everyday Life in Ciudad Juárez

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(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008); Alice Driver, More or Less Dead: Feminicide, Haunting, and the Ethics of Representation in Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015). 13. On Chavez Cano’s life, and her journey from accountancy to journalism and advocacy, see María Socorro Tabuenca, “From Accounting to Recounting: Esther Chávez Cano and the Articulation of Advocacy, Agency, and Justice on the USMexico Border,” in Mexican Public Intellectuals, ed. Debra A. Castillo and Stuart A. Day (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 139–161. 14. Pineda-Madrid, Suffering and Salvation, 13. 15. See Steven Dudley, “Covering Violence Against Women: How We Miss the Bigger Story.” Insight Crime (March 10, 2017). 16. See Amnesty International, Mexico Intolerable Killings, 4–6. In 2002, a group of non-government organisations (NGOs) took a case against the Mexican government to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in relation to the forced disappearance, torture, and murder of three young women whose bodies were discovered with others at Campo Algodonero. The Commission reviewed and referred the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2007. In 2009, the Court ruled against the Mexican government in a judgment that criticized official negligence over deaths and disappearances. 17. See Pineda-Madrid, Suffering and Salvation, 34–36. 18. David Tombs, Latin American Liberation Theology (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 212–213. 19. See Jenny Manrique’s photo of a painting featuring a naked woman chained to a wooden cross; Jenny Manrique, “Ciudad Juarez at war,” in Latinamerica Press (April 23, 2009). Available at http://www​.lapress​.org​/articles​.asp​?item​=1​&art​=5842 accessed January 21, 2021. 20. Nicola Slee, Seeking the Risen Christa (London: SPCK, 2011); see also Nicola Slee, “The Crucified Christa: A Re-evaluation,” in When Did We See You Naked?: Jesus as a Victim of Sexual Abuse, ed. Jayme R. Reaves, David Tombs and Rocio Figueroa (London: SCM Press, 2021), 210–229. 21. A photograph by Iose depicts eight pink crosses at Lomas del Poleo Planta Alta, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, which commemorate eight victims of feminicide in 1996 found at this spot. The image is viewable at: https://commons​.wikimedia​.org​/ wiki​/File​:Cruces​_Lomas​_del​_Poleo​.jpg 22. Washington Valdez, The Killing Fields, 68–69; cited Pineda-Madrid, Suffering and Salvation, 102–103. 23. See Martínez, Ciudad Juárez, 230, Figure 29. 24. See Jennifer Scheper-Hughes, Biography of a Mexican Crucifix: Lived Religion and Local Faith from the Conquest to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 25. Nuala Finnegan, Cultural Representations of Feminicido at the US Mexico Border (London: Routledge, 2019), 8. 26. Jayme R. Reaves, David Tombs and Rocio Figueroa, eds. When Did We See You Naked?: Jesus as a Victim of Sexual Abuse (London: SCM Press, 2021).

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Finnegan, Nuala. Cultural Representations of Feminicido at the US Mexico Border. London: Routledge, 2019. Martínez, Oscar J. Ciudad Juárez: Saga of a Legendary Border City. Phoenix: University of Arizona Press, 2018. Pineda-Madrid, Nancy. Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Juárez. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011. Tombs, David. Latin American Liberation Theology. Leiden: Brill, 2002.

Chapter 16

Hinterland is Intersection Talking Back to the Exodus Blockade Jione Havea

Robert Warrior set a platform for talking back to the exodus blockade1— which here refers to the use of the liberation zeal to block any interrogation of the exodus narrative and traditions. Other readers talk back to the exodus blockade but i launch this reflection from Warrior’s shadow because he too has commitments to native peoples, which is my way of saying that he gives me an excuse to join the intersectional drive of this collection of essays. My other excuse is the invitation by Gale A. Yee, at her address as the 2019 president of the Society of Biblical Literature, for biblical scholars to join her at the platform of intersectionality.2 I jump on the platform of intersectionality not because i am another etcetera (as Yee puts it), but because i walk the paths of intertextuality (thanks to Danna N. Fewell, David M. Gunn, David Jobling and co.) with my talanoa cap looking backward.3 From intertextuality to intersectionality, the hop is not too much of a stretch for my native mind. Expecting that the editors and some of the other contributors have given their understandings of what intersectionality involves, i simply jump on to the platform of intersectionality with no further qualifications. TORAH TROUBLES The waves of liberation criticism,4 with crest along race, class, gender, and contextual lines, have irritated, enriched, and reshaped biblical criticism for several years now.5 The ripples of these waves have reached, in one form or another, the shores of all books of the Bible, with some biblical books receiving more attention than others, and with particular characters and passages 209

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within those books being favored over the rest. (Yes, liberation critics have etceteras too but this chapter is not the platform for that talanoa.) In the case of the Torah (Pentateuch), turning here to focus on feminist criticism, many feminists find this collection significant as well as troublesome. Two testimonies suffice to make my point: He who teaches his daughter the Torah, teaches her impurity.6 I am a rabbi. I am a woman. I am a feminist. To be perfectly honest, sometimes reading the Torah terrifies me. How can one book speak so powerfully to my Jewish soul while at the same time disturbing so painfully my female soul?7

Regarding the texts that fund the exodus blockade, the books of Exodus and Numbers draw more attention than Leviticus and Deuteronomy, with Miriam as the favored character for feminist critics. This is evident in the two volumes of Feminist Companion to Exodus to Deuteronomy.8 Twelve of the seventeen chapters of the first volume, and all eleven chapters of the second volume, deal with texts from or issues relating to Exodus and Numbers. Moreover, Part III (six chapters) of the first volume and Part II (four chapters) of the second volume are dedicated to Miriam. While Miriam plays a significant role in bringing the book of Numbers (especially Num. 11) into the sight of feminist critics, there are other interesting texts in Numbers, such as the Sotah (Num. 5) and the two-part story of the daughters of Zelophehad (Num. 27 and 36),9 that have also caught feminist eyes. The dry (in the sense that they lack a storyline) and legalistic books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, on the other hand, do not catch much interest from feminist critics. The surges of feminist waves also irrupt in works that are not intentionally feminist. Of particular interest to me are the sections on Exodus in the first two editions of Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World.10 The first edition contains “An Asian Feminist Perspective: The Exodus Story (Exodus 1:8–22, 2:1–10),” which is a skit written by a group of Asian women in which they give special attention to, at that time, the lesser-known women characters in the exodus story.11 In the skit, the midwives, Puah and Shiprah, together with Jochebed, mother of Moses and Miriam, and other women friends, schemed and activated a plan to save baby Moses,12 then a character named Leah influenced the Egyptian princess to take him under her care. The skit ends with the princess convincing Pharaoh to allow her to keep the baby. This skit pushes the boundaries of biblical criticism in both form and content, especially the stress it gives to the agency of women characters and to the messy and bloody background behind the exodus blockade.13

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One of the two chapters added to the revised and expanded volume of Voices from the Margin is by Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan (of USA), “Let My People Go! Threads of Exodus in African American Narratives.”14 KirkDuggan also deals with the liberating and violent sides of the exodus blockade, as those manifest in A Raisin in the Sun, by the black woman playwright Lorraine Hansberry, in the lyrics of Sweet Honey in the Rock, a 1970s a cappella all-women’s group, and in the sermons of five black male preachers. Kirk-Duggan too affirms the exodus story as a complex and powerful story of enslavement, deliverance and genocide, with powerful women assisting in the survival of the protagonist, Moses.15 These feminist voices from the margin, drawing upon the experiences and insights of Asians and African Americans, invite critical engagement with the complexity of the exodus story if we are to materialize the hopes of the marginalized.16 Even though there are other feminist voices in the two volumes of Voices from the Margin, Leviticus-Deuteronomy remain (apart from one chapter on Miriam’s snowy skin), as it were, on the margins. This chapter attends to this lack by privileging issues and concerns that one finds in Leviticus-Deuteronomy. HINTERLAND The geographical and ideological settings for Leviticus-Deuteronomy is traditionally identified as “the wilderness”—the place where the descendants of Jacob wandered for forty years after crossing the Sea of Reeds (Exod. 15), inbetween the house of refuge that became a house of bondage (Egypt) and the fertile land that belonged to the Canaanites.17 I use “hinterland” in this reflection to refer to the same settings, in part because this reflection “talks back” to traditional views and seeks to alter both the rhetoric and the perspectives. This shift to “hinterland” is situated in native Pasifika (for Pacific Islands, Oceania) where (is)land extends into the sea, and so moana (the deep ocean) is our “hinterland.”18 As moana is very much present in the daily living of native islanders, so are the energies of moana (fluidity, confluency, waviness, playfulness, etcetera) very much present in my conceiving of (and musings around) the hinterland in this reflection. A Gathering Place The character of Moses binds the book of Exodus to Deuteronomy,19 for Exodus opens with his birth and Deuteronomy closes with his death and replacement, and the hinterland is the setting where the exodus drama unfolded or, it might be more appropriate to say, the context that unfolded the exodus

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drama. The descendants of Jacob were oppressed at the opening of Exodus and when Deuteronomy closes, they mourned the death of their leader and then left his remains in the hinterland as if that was his ancestral home. The hinterland is not just a wasteland (according to the traditional understanding of the wilderness) through which people journeyed, but also burial grounds, ceremonial sites and homes, for the trespassing Israelites and for the inhabitants of the hinterland. The hinterland is where old generations of Hebrews were replaced with new ones,20 where regulating words were given then revised,21 remembered in a rather complex story where “God has the ability to inflict plagues as well as to heal.”22 The hinterland is also a gathering place, (1) like a meeting ground, similar to what Maoris call marae, the place where they commune, celebrate, learn and mourn, and (2) like a field where gleaners gather sustenance, and in this case, they also gather offspring, teachings, tribes, memories and more. As gathering place, the hinterland is a sacred place that flows with life. I stress this view not because other places are not sacred, but because the hinterland is not often seen as sacred. In drawing attention to the hinterland, i am unapologetic about being attentive to context. This reflection comes against the many who only see this context as barren, and they avoid it because it is not a land of promise. I invite readers to not see the hinterland only as a hostile context. The hinterland throbs with life, being a context for gathering and recollecting. As Indigenous Australian mentors continue to teach me, and this is evident in artworks relating to ceremonial sites, the hinterland might be dry and rugged on the surface but water and life (usually painted with shades of blue in Aboriginal art) flow beneath the surface. What is needed then are lenses that will allow one to appreciate the hinterland differently. Despite its prominent place in the Pentateuch, the “wilderness tradition” has, in general, received a bad rap from biblical scholars primarily because of the aridity and desolateness of the context, and the murmuring (Heb rib, which in a legal context refers to seeking legal rights) and rebellious tendencies of what is portrayed as an ungrateful and stiff-neck people against their covenanting G*d and chosen leader, Moses.23 What dominant critics perceive as rebellion can also function as an inspiration for other critics who welcome opportunities to talk back and to read against the grain. Since i am not looking for a “promised land” nor would i shy away from acts of rebellion and resistance, and in the spirit of the feminist hermeneutics of suspicion, i want to metaphorically sink my feet into the sand of the hinterland. To my island mind, sand is both a mat at the beach (the Tongan word fala refers to both mat and sand)—at once bordering and connecting land with the ocean—and the covering of the desert floor. At beaches, the sand marks the shifting points of arrival and departure. I suspect that if there was a desert

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in Tonga, our ancestors would have referred to its sand as fala (mat) also. This allusion is significant because, in Tongan circles, rolling out a mat for visitors is a sign of welcome and hospitality. This is the connotation of the Tongan proverb fofola e falá kae tālanga e kāinga (roll out the mat so that kinfolks may converse).24 If a mat is not rolled out, the welcome is hurried and faked. To look with native Tongan lenses at the desert and its mat of sand invites seeing the hinterland also as a place of welcome and hospitality, which one offers when one is at home. In this regard, there is more to the sand of the hinterland than its aridity and heat. Sand is also a sign of welcome and hospitality. To read the hinterland narrative in the interests of Moses and the descendants of Jacob, as the biblical narrator prefers, one sees hostility in the context and its inhabitants, especially the Moabites, Edomites, and Ammonites. Attention has been raised on behalf of the Canaanites, Palestinians, and Indigenous people of the promised land,25 but lacking are sincere solidarities with the locals of the hinterland. Who reads with sincerity on behalf of, for instance, the Moabite women in Numbers 25?26 How do readers, to borrow a common island feel, cross the hinterland without getting sand in their toes?27 Sand is also used in the Pentateuch as a metaphor for the large number of descendants that G*d promised Abraham (cf. Gen 22:17). Abraham was promised to have so many descendants—as many as sand, and as many as stars. This links sand with seeds in the Torah’s system of signification. As a sandy place, the hinterland is a place of grains, pointing toward seeds, food and descendants, hence people. In this link, the hinterland is a talanoa context for seeding and for planting. This native way of seeing the sand in the hinterland invites altering rhetoric and language so that one may perceive the hinterland as a place of life and newness. This is not a completely new reading, for the hinterland is where the new generation was conceived and birthed.28 It is a place of beginning, a view that is possible because the hinterland is also a place of ending. The resulting challenge is for readers to hold these alternative views together: new and old, ending and beginning, death and life, aridity and hospitality, and so forth. In other words, to read against the “wilderness narrative.” What gives this reflection an intersectional feel? It challenges the traditional view of the hinterland which advances and at once draws upon patriarchal values. In the first place, this reading problematizes the popular association of seed with men and land with women. As far as the hinterland is concerned, seed/sand/grains are components of land. This is the upshot of a context-friendly reading for which welcome is the starting point. Second, this reading dismantles the divide between fertile and barren land. What has traditionally been seen as barren is also fertile, and vice versa, with both qualities usually ascribed to womenfolk. In this reading, the barren hinterland

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is also a fertile gathering place. On both fronts, it makes no sense to uphold the underlying patriarchal assumptions. The hinterland experience presents a curious dilemma for feminist critics because it was there that the foundations for Israel’s patriarchal system (e.g., Decalogue, Priestly and Holiness Codes) were laid, supplemented and revised, as well as where the elders who were bearers of patriarchy’s guiding light were rejected (e.g., Korah) and replaced (e.g., Moses), several times. The hinterland is the place where the lines of Patriarchy were drawn, in the sand. Water and Food Water and food were rare and precious in the hinterland, and references to those are narrated as having to do with, on the one hand, the murmurs on the part of the people or, on the other hand, provisions graciously given by YHWH to sustain the chosen people.29 Scarcity and divine providence combine to raise the value of water and food in the hinterland. Shortly after the people crossed the Sea of Reeds, they arrived at Marah where the water was bitter (Exod. 15:22–27). YHWH and Moses had unwisely led thirsty people to bitter water! The people grumbled against Moses, as expected, and YHWH showed him a piece of wood which he threw into the water and the water became sweet. From Marah the people moved to Elim, where water was plenty, then to the Wilderness of Sin, where the people grumbled against Moses and Aaron with the memorable words: “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots, when we ate our fill of bread! For you have brought us out into this wilderness to starve this whole congregation to death” (Exod. 16:3). YHWH responded by raining manna and quail for the people to eat. Miracles happened. And the people survived on the provisions of YHWH. Food was significant in the wilderness literature for two other reasons: first, food became a marker to distinguish purity from profane, cleanness from defilement.30 Certain animals are clean and those may be eaten (e.g., animals that have divided hoofs, cleft-footed and chew the cud; fish with fins and scales), but some are unclean and people who eat those are defiled as a consequence (see Lev. 11). In association with holiness, purity and cleanness became normative, driven by the mantra that calls upon the people to be holy for YHWH their G*d is holy (Lev. 11:44–45). My foregoing musing leads to the second aspect in which food was significant in the wilderness literature. Eating the wrong food defiled the people, but through sacrifices and rituals, the right kind of food can restore the defiled. Food and libation are the key ingredients offered up in sacrifices. Leviticus is framed with instructions on the different kinds of sacrifices that might be

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offered, and the rituals involved, for well-being, peace, and redemption (Lev. 1–5 and 24–27). Without food, sacrifices could not be offered, and relationships cannot be mended.31 Food, a means for sustaining relationships and for expressing hospitality in many cultures, also takes communal and religious significance. Patriarchy placed food in the domestic realm, which also traps women. But this reflection highlights how, also at the direction of patriarchy, food is crucial in the worship and public life of Israel. In this regard, patriarchy trips over the limits that it set. Children and Nationalism Along with the attention to Israel’s “new generation” in the hinterland is anxiety about identity and nationhood. The rounds of censuses (Num. 1–2, 3–4, and 26) and long lists of regulations in Exodus-Deuteronomy, especially those that anticipate entry into the land of the Canaanites (e.g., Num. 15, 27, and 33), set limits on the identity of G*d’s people: who is in, and who counts? S/he who is different, who is not in, does not count.32 In the background of this is a jealous G*d/husband/father who demands loyal and exclusive commitment from, by seeking to control the body, sexuality, and words of (see Num. 30 and Deut. 22), his people/children/wife.33 The hinterland narrative fudges between presenting G*d’s hinterland people as “a people” and as “a nation,” between peoplehood and nationhood. Without land or national boundaries, G*d’s hinterland people operated as if they too believed that nationalism is possible before a nation is formed. One might even argue that nationalism is necessary in order for a nation to be formed if, as Gayatri Spivak puts it, “there is no nation before nationalism.”34 The hinterland was where the teeth of the new generation were cut on nationalism and edged with discrimination against the goyim (non-Hebrew nations or gentiles, including the native people of the hinterland). Nationalism, itself a deceptive category that exists in the imagination,35 forged the image of G*d’s covenanted partner as “a people” (‘am). But these people were not of the same mind from the beginning, and all the way to the end of their hinterland time. Numbers 32 is an example of the division between them as their journey drew closer to the end. As they prepare to cross into Canaan, the Gadites and Reubenites approached Moses to ask that they stay behind on the east side of the Jordan, for that land was just right for their great number of cattle (Num. 32:1–5). They did not want to cross over together with the other tribes, as first planned. Did they think the land of the Canaanites was not good enough for them? Were they scared that the cattle might drown if they cross the Jordan? Did they want to keep their cattle to themselves, rather than share with the other tribes? Were they

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scared and stingy? Their request gave the impression that they were not in solidarity with the rest of Israel, so Moses associated them with the spies who in Numbers 13 spoke against entering Canaan (Num. 32:6–15). The Gadites and Reubenites then came back with a compromise. They agreed to cross over and fight alongside the other tribes until they possess the land (Num. 32:16–24), but they still want to dispossess Gilead. Then Moses, Joshua, and the heads of the Israelite tribes, agreed to assign Gilead to the Reubenites and Gadites (Num. 32:25–32). Gilead too is marked to be grabbed by G*d’s people, who will now be divided across the Jordan. The nation that is being formed fragments and divides, as it expands, even before it arrived. Insofar as nationalism is founded on the consciousness of the elite and protected by the gatekeepers of patriarchy, the fragmenting tribes suggest that the nation that is being formed is unsteady and fragmented, and at odds with itself. It thus makes sense that a lot of hooplas are made to install fear in the hearts of surrounding nations, but the noise has more to do with the fever of nationalism rather than the stomping of new people. The powerful nation that Israel’s patriarchy would like readers to find and celebrate at the end of the hinterland journey is not as collected or as strong. But then, no nation is ever as united or as powerful as its nationalists imagine it to be. The monotheistic nation that was birthed from G*d’s hinterland people is not exempt from division and dwindling. It appears that a fundamental flaw in the exodus plan was expecting a “tomorrow people” (name used in reggae circles for future generations) to arrive and build a nation based on the imaginations (read: nationalism, patriarchy) of a “yesterday people.” Those imaginations are not free of flaws, and the “tomorrow people” would have probably been more effective if they were permitted and enabled to dream up alternative imaginations. The division between the tribes in Numbers 32 could be read as the permission to think differently, and to transgress the old imagination.

INDIGENOUS UPON ARRIVAL There is a popular assumption that the hinterland belongs to no one, reflecting the principle of terra nullius (no man’s land) according to which Europeans settled the cluster of (is)lands now known as Australia, and other (is)lands, so there is no sustained attempt to wrestle with accounts of the Hebrews trespassing over sovereign nations in the hinterland. Even studies that favor Indigenous peoples and cultures tend to pass over the wilderness literature. Resisting the Hebrews is actually what the kings and leaders of people indigenous to the hinterland did, with the story of Balak (Num. 22–24) as one of the better-known ones. Balak’s voice of resistance however loses out to the

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fascination with Balaam’s talking ass, both in the biblical account and in its interpretations by preachers, artists, teachers and scholars, male and female, feminist or otherwise. At one level, there is a need to read the hinterland story with eyes that privilege the interests and cultures that are indigenous to the hinterland. At another level, is a need to also read the hinterland account, especially the legal texts, with attentiveness to how those texts attempt to indigenize the Israelites. This second suggestion is based on the assumption that legal regulations set limits that define, establish and maintain order in a society, by distinguishing normalcy from foreignness, those who belong and are normal from those who do not belong and thus need to be excluded. Situated in the context of the hinterland (cf. Deut. 1:1), the legal texts are presented as aiming to define normalcy for when the people arrive in the land of the Canaanites. But the definition of normalcy comes from, and therefore privileges, the values of the people who are coming into the land, the foreigners. Put simply, the legal texts intend to make the Hebrews become indigenous upon their arrival. In the process, paradoxically, the legal process exposes the foreignness of Israel to the land of Canaan. Why else would they need to regulate their presence, possession, organization, and administration in the land of the Canaanites? A bird’s view, with the sensitivities of indigenous eyes, over the legal texts reveals four main components: (1) call to remember the place from where they have come, (2) revelation of the divine will with instructions about what and how to operate, (3) which are conditions for their possession of or expulsion from the land that they are going toward, (4) and the people are required to teach all of those to the tomorrow people. The legal texts look backward and forward, in terms of time, space, and people. Juxtaposing the Decalogue (Deut. 5:6–21) with the preamble and text of the Shema (Deut. 6:1–9) manifests the four components noted above. Call to Remember Twice, in the first and fourth commandments, the Decalogue reminds Israel that they were brought out of Egypt, qua “house of slavery.” In the first commandment, the deliverance from Egypt is the justification for YHWH’s claim to be Israel’s only G*d (Deut. 5:6–7). The existence of other G*ds is not denied, nor is the sovereignty of YHWH over other G*ds claimed. All that the first commandment does is claim a place for YHWH as the only G*d for Israel (see “Law as Divine Revelation”). Then in the fourth commandment (albeit different from the Exodus 20:8–11 version), the remembrance of Egypt is the impetus and enticement for keeping the Sabbath regulation (Deut. 5:12–15). Both commandments make the people feel grateful that they are no longer in Egypt, from where YHWH delivered them. On the other

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hand, both commandments serve as constant reminders to the people that they are sons and daughters of slaves, which are damaging stigmas. The combination of gratefulness for being delivered in the past together with the charge to remember that they were sons and daughters of slaves can create dependency, which can extend toward future generations of “tomorrow people” (see “Instruct Future Generations”). Remembrance is a tricky responsibility that can both liberate (from the past) and enslave (the present to the past, and to the deliverer). The chorus in Emma Donovan’s song Ngarranga (remember), echoing the cries of the Stolen Generation, highlights the stresses of remembering: “Will there ever be a place where my mind is free?” She asks in the song, has she really survived the loss of identity, the breaking of families, of which she is constantly reminded.36 In the spirit of this Indigenous Australian artist, remembrance is a selective process that often forgets the faces, presence, and contributions of women, foreigners, poor, and minoritized. Remembrance is not free of memory loss. Law as Divine Revelation All ten of the commandments of the Decalogue, and most of the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, are worded as revelations of YHWH’s will regarding how the people should live. The Decalogue is constructed with men in mind, with women as objects for adulterous (Deut. 5:18) and covetous (Deut. 5:21) men. The Decalogue does not recognize women as sharing the same privileges and agencies as “subjects of the law” as men do,37 and this is the case also in other law codes. In Leviticus, the bodies of women are regulated to the extent that it feels as if no part of their bodies is private (Lev. 12:1–8; 15:19–30). Women’s menstrual cycle too is made public, seen as contaminated and contaminating, hence the flow that signifies life is stigmatized. Furthermore, in Numbers, women’s desire (Num 5:11–31), rather than men’s jealousy, as well as women’s words and vows (Num 30:1–16),38 are regulated. These constraints are stipulated as the will of YHWH, as if to shut down the will to resist. When G*d is the basis that authorizes laws and regulations, and men are the bearers and minders of those, women are disadvantaged. Such is the workings of patriarchy, which fruitions when religious and cultural traditions uphold those and in the process silence and blindfold the tomorrow people (see “Instruct Future Generations”). If asked, Hebrew Bible laws and regulations would give a loud “No” to the question that Australian singers Mandawuy Yunupingu and Garrumul Yunupingu ask through the lyrics of Good Medicine: “Can you dig it in a woman’s world?” A Yothu Yindi (in Yolngu, the name of the group means

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“child and mother”) song is proud of womanhood: when told she is “a lucky child,” she replies “confidentially”: “it’s cause I’m a woman.”39 Conditions for Remaining in the Land The Deuteronomistic theory of history is complex,40 but one of its key drives is to represent the land of the Canaanites as G*d’s gift promised to Abram (cf. Gen. 12:1–4a). For Abram’s descendants to inherit and maintain this gift, they are required to observe and uphold the laws of G*d and accept the leaders assigned to them (especially the Levites and the Davidic monarchy). If the people do not uphold the laws and teachings of G*d, they will be spit out of the land. Alas, the principles of retribution are necessitated. In this case also, resistance from the peoples of the land is not seen for what they are but as evidence that the people of G*d failed to observe the laws of G*d. The many law codes in Exodus to Deuteronomy, critically located in the hinterland in anticipation of the people grabbing G*d’s gift, are presented as if they are the right dosage for Israel if they wish to live long and prosper in the promised land. This is the context for the Shema also: “Obey, O Israel, willingly and faithfully, that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly [in] a land flowing with milk and honey, as the Lord, the G*d of your fathers, spoke to you” (Deut. 5.3, emphasis added). Who dares rebel against an impatient G*d who visits the guilt of the parents on their children, to the third and fourth generations, but shows kindness to the thousandth generation of “those who love me and keep my commandments” (Deut. 5:9–10)?41 Who would dare such a G*d? In other words, in the ears of Israel, to observe the law is both, to use Australian expressions, “good on you” (for being obedient to G*d) and “good for you” (according to the teachings of retributions). The religious sphere overlaps with, runs into, the personal sphere, making the observance of the law necessary. Instruct Future Generations G*d’s laws are supposed to be “good for your children,” thus assuring its endurance. It is the responsibility of parents to teach their children (compare Deut. 5:16). This sounds almost like a parent feeding bitter medicine to a child, or a celebrant at the communion table saying “take, eat, this is the body of Christ.” The child and the worshipper are expected to say, at least in their hearts, “Amen. Amen” (cf. Num. 5:20–22). The difference between these subjects is that the child often cries in resistance and in disgust. Context and conditions, which differ from time to time, have made it necessary to revise and adapt old teachings in new situations. Teaching children is an event in legal revision, and of innovation,42 for the needs and lives of

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“tomorrow people” differ from those of their parents and ancestors. This is one of the marks of what is nowadays known as contextual interpretation, but it is not foreign to biblical texts. This is most evident in the hinterland story, where the old and the new generations are starkly distinguished, and the whole of Deuteronomy is presented as teachings for the new generation “on the other side of the Jordan” (Deut. 1:1, 6) as they prepare to “take possession” of their new home. As the hinterland story imagines arrival,43 the old teachings need to be revised because the people have on several occasions refused to follow YHWH’s directions (cf. Deut. 1:26). Readers in the “Yahweh Alone Party” would disapprove of the people’s refusals as disrespect and disobedience. But resisting G*d is not a strange phenomenon in biblical memory. As early as the creation and the garden stories, G*d does not have complete control over the creation and over humanity. G*d’s will is not always honored, and according to the biblical account, resistance has been a key aspect of human life. The stronger the emphasis on instructing future generations is, the stronger my suspicion that control is lacking. The underlying assumption here is that the lacks and fractures in the relationship between parents and their children reflect what occurs in the relationship between YHWH and the people of Israel. The foregoing musings both present and problematize how legal texts seek to normalize or indigenize the people of Israel upon their entry to the land of the Canaanites. When Israel settles and convinces its people, even to the third and fourth generations, that they have rights to the land of the Canaanites, an injustice has been committed. The control of such indigenizing legal texts over the minds and values of “tomorrow people” should not go unchallenged. To not interrogate those is to bow out to the Exodus blockade, and to blow off any flickers of the hermeneutics of suspicion.

EXODUS FROM THE BLOCKADE I encourage seeing the hinterland as gathering place and as home, but one should not thereby romanticize it. The hinterland is still a harsh and wild place, evoking the kind of images that many associate with the hinterland as the back-land behind the border, like Australia’s Outback, which “exists only insofar as it is deigned [by the colonial power that claims sovereignty over the land] to exist. Its very existence depends on the [colonial] Project.”44 Any engagement with the “wilderness narrative” cannot avoid facing up to the complexity of the hinterland. Only someone from outside, donning colonial blindness and pronouncing imperial arrogance, would describe the hinterland as out of the way—for

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G*d could have taken the people on the shorter route by the sea (Exod. 13:17–18)—or out of place because it is backward and behind time and currency. People who endure the hinterland and gulp its sparkles, on the other hand, would disagree with such perceptions. The land and people of the hinterland have sophisticated cultures (read: civilizations) with poly-lingual ways of knowing, woven and inscribed into wood and rocks, remixed and edged upon their bodies and recollections, and so they are not backward at all. The exodus narrators and legislators appear too worried about G*d’s people sleeping with the people of the hinterland (see e.g., Num. 25), whom they see as, like the people of the new world in the colonial gaze, savages. In the end, G*d’s traveling party failed to appropriately name and appreciate the wisdom of the hinterland. But there are moments when the guards are let down, and the hinterland redeemed G*d’s people. The contribution by Moses’ father-in-law, Jethro of Midian, toward maintaining order and justice in the community is evidence of hinterland wisdom (see Exod. 18). Moreover, some insights bear the traces of indigenous women’s wisdom. From whom did YHWH learn that a certain kind of wood can sweeten bitter water (see Exod. 15:25)? that women have the right to inherit (see Num. 27)? that a day of rest was necessary (see Deut. 5:12–15)? or that cities of refuge would be caring (see Num. 35, Deut. 19)? How could G*d’s people have survived forty years without tapping into hinterland wisdom? These questions suggest, to my native mind, that G*d and Israel received hinterland help. The chronicles of colonial exploration and expansion are impressive, with tales of victories and conversions, but often lacking are credits given to the natives of whom explorers, missionaries, and colonizers took advantage. Of relevance for me here are the explorations in Oceania by the British Captain James Cook, who “was uniquely fortunate in encountering Tupaia, a dispossessed high chief and navigator-priest of Raiatea [Society Islands].”45 Tupaia was familiar with the seascape for thousands of miles away from his home and he drew a map for Cook.46 Cook picked up on his second voyage to Oceania another native of Rai’atea, named Mai (mispronounced as Omai), who became his translator in the second and third voyages. Would Cook have succeeded without Tupaia and Mai, in other words, without native/indigenous guidance?47 Similarly, would Israel have survived the wilderness without hinterland guidance? G*d and Moses get all the credits, as Cook did, but it is difficult to imagine how they succeeded without having access to hinterland help. The biblical account does not entertain my query, and that is understandable because the bible is lined with the fervors of Israel’s nationalism—which culminate in what i call the exodus blockade. This essay, to the contrary, in the shadows of Robert Warrior, adds another attempt to lift the exodus blockade.

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Ignoring the hinterland is as problematic as trying to colonize it. Colonial powers misunderstand and misrepresent the hinterland, and they have no control over its perception or over its borders. Colonial powers fail when it comes to the hinterland. In bringing this chapter to close, i invite r-e-s-p-e-c-t for the hinterland, and for its peoples and talanoa. This invitation comes alongside the urge for protest and resistance, which is ongoing, as Musa Dube concludes: Colonizing and imperializing powers, as we now know, have a chameleonlike capacity for persistence. Decolonization and liberation are, therefore, not a given, nor a finished business. Similarly, many feminist victories have been won, but patriarchy and its institutions have not fully yielded to women’s demands. To be in the struggle for justice and liberation is, therefore, to be in a luta continua, the struggle that always continues.48

NOTES 1. Cf. Robert Warrior, “Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians.” Christianity and Crisis 49.12 (September 11, 1989): 261–264. 2. Gale A. Yee, “Thinking Intersectionally: Gender, Race, Class, and the Etceteras of Our Discipline.” Journal of Biblical Literature 139.1 (2020): 7–26. 3. In Pasifika the word “talanoa” (both singular and plural) refers to three overlapping events: story, telling (of story), conversation around story and telling (or storyweaving). 4. See Els Maeckelberghe, “Across the Generations in Feminist Theology: From Second to Third Wave Feminisms,” Feminist Theology 23 (2000): 63–69. 5. Cf. Elisabeth Shüssler Fiorenza, Searching the Scriptures. Volume 1: A Feminist Introduction (New York: Crossroad, 1993); Athalya Brenner and Carole Fontaine, eds. A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible: Approaches, Methods and Strategies (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); Susanne Scholz, Introducing the Women’s Hebrew Bible (London: T & T Clark, 2007). 6. Naomi Ragen, The Sacrifice of Tamar (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010), 43. 7. Elyse Goldstein, ReVisions: Seeing Torah Through a Feminist Lens (Woodstock: Jewish Lights, 2001), 19. 8. Athalya Brenner, ed. A Feminist Companion to Exodus to Deuteronomy (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1994); Athalya Brenner, ed. Exodus to Deuteronomy: A Feminist Companion to the Bible (Second Series) (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). 9. See also Yael Shemesh, “A Gender Perspective on the Daughters of Zelophehad: Bible, Talmudic Midrash and Modern Feminist Midrash,” Biblical Interpretation 15 (2007): 80–109. 10. R. S. Sugirtharajah, ed. Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World (London: SPCK, 1991); R.S. Sugirtharajah, ed. Voices from the Margin:

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Interpreting the Bible in the Third World. Revised and Expanded Third Edition. (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2006). 11. R. S. Sugirtharajah, ed. Voices from the Margin (1991), 267–279. 12. See also Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Reading the Women of the Bible (New York: Schocken, 2002), 24–33. 13. This chapter was included in the 2006 expanded volume whereas Cyris H. S. Moon (of South Korea), “A Korean Minjung Perspective: The Hebrews and the Exodus” and Jean-Marc Ela (of Cameroun), “A Black African Perspective: An African Reading of Exodus” were not included. 14. In Sugirtharajah, Voices from the Margin (2006), 258–278. The other chapter added to the expanded volume was by Eleazar S. Fernandez (of Philippines & USA), “Exodus-toward-Egypt: Filipino-Americans’ Struggle to Realize the Promised Land in America.” 15. So Judy Fentress-Williams, “Exodus” in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora, ed. Hugh R. Page Jr. et al (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010), 83. 16. Note in this connection that the chapters on Exodus-Numbers in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and The African Diaspora (edited by Hughes et al, 2010) are by women: Judy Fentress-Williams (Exodus), Madeline McClenney-Sadler (Leviticus) and Michelle Ellis Taylor (Numbers). 17. This essay follows upon my reflection in “Remixing Egypt,” forthcoming in Bible Blindspots: Dispersion and Othering, ed. Jione Havea and Monica Melanchthon (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2021). 18. So Pio Manoa, “Redeeming Hinterland,” The Pacific Journal of Theology Series II 43 (2010): 68. 19. Carol Meyers, Exodus (Cambridge: CUP, 2005), 12–16. 20. See Dennis T. Olson, The Death of the Old and the Birth of the New: The Framework of the Book of Numbers and the Pentateuch, (Chico: Scholars Press, 1985). 21. See Bernard M. Levinson, Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel (Cambridge: CUP, 2008). 22. Judy Fentress-Williams, “Exodus,” 85. 23. Cf. George W. Coats, Rebellion in the Wilderness: The Murmuring Motif in the Wilderness Traditions of the Old Testament (Nashville: Abingdon, 1968). 24. On the connection between mats, conversation and hospitality, see also Sisilia Tupou-Thomas, “Telling Tales” in Faith in a Hyphen: Crosscultural Theologies Down Under, ed. Clive Pearson (Adelaide: OpenBooks, 2004), 1–4. Further, Seforosa Carroll addresses her concept of “hospitaleity” with the “stranded” qualities of mats in her article “Stranded,” The Pacific Journal of Theology Series II, 43 (2010): 28–34. 25. By Naim Stifan Ateek and Robert Allen Warrior in Sugirtharajah, ed. Voices from the Margin (1991), 280–295 and Sugirtharajahm, ed. Voices from the Margin (2006), 227–241. 26. I make a similar move in Jione Havea, “Releasing the story of Esau from the Words of Obadiah” in The Bible and the Hermeneutics of Liberation, ed. Alejandro F. Botta and Pablo R. Andiňach (Atlanta: SBL, 2009), 87–104.

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27. Steed Davidson, “Building on Sand: Mapping biblical hermeneutics for Island Communities.” Paper presented at “Islands under the Bible” section of the Society of Biblical Literature, New Orleans (Nov 21, 2009). 28. See Olson, The Death of the Old and the Birth of the New. 29. The latter is highlighted in Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, Journeying with God: A Commentary on the Book of Numbers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995). 30. See Judith Romney Wegner, “Leviticus” in Women’s Bible Commentary, ed. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville: WJKP, 1998), 42–47, and Mary Douglas, “The forbidden animals in Leviticus.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 59 (1993): 3–23. 31. Even though sacrifices are not offered as prescribed in modern times, the language and values of sacrifice rituals continue to be used. See Wesley J. Bergen, Reading Ritual: Leviticus in Postmodern Culture (London: T & T Clark International, 2005). 32. See Sue Levi Elwell, “Numbers,” in The Queer Bible Commentary, ed. Deryn Guest, Robert E. Goss, Mona West and Thomas Bohache (London: SCM Press, 2006), 105–109. 33. Cf. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Deuteronomy,” in Women’s Bible Commentary edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville: WJKP, 1998), 58, 61–64, and Deryn Guest, “Deuteronomy” in The Queer Bible Commentary, ed. Deryn Guest et al (London: SCM Press, 2006), 124–127. 34. Gayatri C. Spivak, Nationalism and the Imagination (Calcutta: Seagull, 2010), 13. 35. Spivak, Nationalism and the Imagination, 44–58. 36. Emma Donovan, “Ngarranga.” On Ngarranga. VGM 12009, compact disc, 2009. 37. See also Katherine Doob Sakenfeld, “Numbers,” in Women’s Bible Commentary, ed. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe (Louisville: WJKP, 1998), 55 and Frymer-Kensky, “Deuteronomy,” 58–59. 38. See Jione Havea, Elusions of control: Biblical law on the Words of Women (Leiden: Brill/Atlanta: SBL, 2003). 39. Mandawuy Yunupingu and Garrumul Yunupingu, “Good Medicine.” On Garma, by Yothu Yindi. Phantom 1091333, compact disc (2007). 40. Cf. Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1972), 307. 41. See also Bernard M. Levinson, Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel (Cambridge: CIP, 2008), 57–88. 42. Levinson, Legal Revision, 22–56, 89–94. 43. Susan Slater, “Imagining Arrival: Rhetoric, Reader, and Word of God in Deuteronomy 1–3” in The Labour of Reading: Desire, Alienation, and Biblical Interpretation, ed. Fiona C. Black, Roland Boer and Erin Runions (Atlanta: SBL, 1999), 107–122. 44. Manoa, “Redeeming Hinterland,” 67. 45. David Lewis, We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), 8.

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46. Lewis, We, the Navigators, 9–10, 343–348. 47. At the risk of adopting what i oppose, i clarify: i do not celebrate the contributions that natives made to the colonization of their lands, peoples and worldviews, but i honor native people and hinterland wisdom. 48. Musa W. Dube, Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (St. Louis: Chalice, 2000), 197.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Carroll, Seforosa. “Stranded.” The Pacific Journal of Theology Series II, 43 (2010): 28–34. Dube, Musa W. Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. St. Louis: Chalice, 2000. Fentress-Williams, Judy. “Exodus.” In The Africana Bible: Reading Israel’s Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora, edited by Hugh R. Page Jr. et al, 80–88. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2010. Goldstein, Elyse. ReVisions: Seeing Torah Through a Feminist Lens. Woodstock: Jewish Lights, 2001. Levinson, Bernard M. Legal Revision and Religious Renewal in Ancient Israel. Cambridge: CIP, 2008. Lewis, David. We, the Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. Manoa, Pio. “Redeeming Hinterland.” The Pacific Journal of Theology Series II 43 (2010): 65–86. Ragen, Naomi. The Sacrifice of Tamar. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010. Slater, Susan. “Imagining Arrival: Rhetoric, Reader, and Word of God in Deuteronomy 1–3.” In The Labour of Reading: Desire, Alienation, and Biblical Interpretation, edited by Fiona C. Black, Roland Boer ,and Erin Runions, 107–122. Atlanta: SBL, 1999. Spivak, Gayatri C. Nationalism and the Imagination. Calcutta: Seagull, 2010. Sugirtharajah, R. S., ed. Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World. London: SPCK, 1991.

Chapter 17

Asian Immigrants’ Hinterland Choi Hee An

As Jione Havea challenges and defines the meaning of the hinterland, the hinterland is a space of complexity and intersectionality.1 It is a space of fluidity and unknown. It is definitely the wilderness that people are buried and born, trespass and stay, celebrate and mourn, and remember and re-member. The concept of hinterland exists in the space of in-betweenness and bothness. Each person in different race, gender/sex, class, nationality, ethnicity, and others experiences the hinterland distinctively and inter-relatively based on one’s own spiritual psychological physical conditions. I as a Korean immigrant first-generation female Christian scholar in the United States have survived and lived in this space with double or triple consciousness and unconsciousness. As I bring and develop the sense of multiple hybrid identities, I discover the hinterland that Asian Korean immigrants face and challenge. What is the hinterland that Asian immigrants in the United States are given and create? What is the hinterland that the Asian immigrant church in the United States creates and transforms? Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, how do Asian immigrants understand hinterland? HINTERLAND FOR ASIAN IMMIGRANTS IN THE UNITED STATES Not only Asian immigrants but also other immigrants entered the United States with a belief in the land of opportunity, the promise land. All immigrants make their journey to a new land hoping for a better future. They picture the better qualities of living and pursuing their dreams. They expect more opportunities and better treatment in their jobs. They seek better safety and security than the current conditions of living in their own countries. 227

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However, when they arrive at the new land, they realize that it is not the land that they dream of. They immediately face the hardship of political and economic injustice. They realize that even though they work harder than others, they often get less pay and experience hidden and unhidden discrimination and violence. They are used as cheaper labors and the target of abuse.2 Still, they hold to have hope for a better future and better life by struggling and fighting for equal opportunities and harmony. This new land becomes their hinterland. Their hope and despair are overlapped and coexisted. Their hardship is demanded by the immigrant society and pursued by individual immigrants themselves. For Asian immigrants in the United States, the concepts of hinterland can be understood in various distinctive points. Among these points, two points are addressed in this essay. First, staying in the crash between Eastern and Western cultures and identities. Second, staying in the polarization between white and black paradigms of the racial discourse. “Staying” in these points means surviving in constant forms of existence. It is not a fixed condition of not-moving. Rather, it is a flowing in balance to exist and live. It is a consistent movement to survive and thrive. At the same time, staying also means accepting the current conditions as is. It recognizes, bears, and deals with complexities and conflicts as is. First, staying in the crash between Eastern and Western cultures and identities. Not only first-generation immigrants but also second/third-generation immigrants live in the overlapping coexistence of Eastern and Western cultures and identities. For the first-generation immigrants, Eastern cultures and identities are the main part of their psychological, spiritual, and even physical conditions in a way that they think and behave. However, as they enter the United States, they reconsider their Asian cultures and try to adjust their identities.3 Even though they still value the Eastern cultures and practice the Eastern ways of living such as religious rituals, ethics, worldviews, clothes, ethnic food, and others, they learn to adopt and assimilate into the ways of living in the United States. Their norms, values, and ethics are seriously questioned. Their communal identities are challenged. Their relationships are dis-communicated. Their family relations are miscommunicated. Their whole beings experience intense paradigm shifts. Whether they hold or denounce their ways of Eastern cultures and identities, they accept and adopt the Western cultures and values. Even if they denounce and disdain the Eastern ways of living as they assimilate, their memory makes them stay in between the Eastern and Western cultures and identities. The second/third-generation immigrants are raised in both Eastern and Western cultures from the early stages of their lives. However, unlike the first-generation immigrant parents, they are not exposed to direct contacts of

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the Eastern cultures as they grow up. Even though they appreciate their parents and respect the Eastern culture, the main part of their identities is formed under the great influences of the Western culture. Some of them are taught by the mega-narrative to disdain the non-Western culture as barbaric savage culture.4 The second/third-generation immigrants often find a discrepancy between their parents’ ways of living and their own. For example, as they give great value for independence and individual freedom, they recognize conflicts from the Eastern values of communality and harmony. However, even if they disagree with their parents’ ways of living, their direct or indirect exposure to Eastern cultures and/or physical genetic connections to Asianness make them stay in between Eastern and Western cultures and identities. In this sense, both the first and second/third-generation immigrants stay in the crash between both cultures and identities whether they choose to connect with their Asian roots or not.5 Second, staying in the polarization between white and black paradigms of the racial discourse. When racial issues are raised in public, there is no presence of Asian immigrants in the picture. The framework of white and black binary dominates the whole picture. Many Asian immigrants often find themselves in the middle of white and black relations as they are treated as bystanders of racism. In the eyes of white, Asian immigrants are definitely not white. White society shows two conflictive social attitudes toward Asian immigrants in the US context. On the one hand, it tries to make sure that Asian immigrants stay outside of their white boundaries and privileges. They are never accepted as allies of white. On the other hand, white society positions Asian immigrants as the model minority. It demonstrates the case of elite Asian immigrants as the proof of successful assimilation. By using Asian immigrants as the token, white society puts Asian immigrants in the position of defending white privileges and condemning other ethnic people as failures. At the same time, in the eyes of non-white immigrants, Asian immigrants are seen as honorary white or white allies.6 Non-white immigrants often neglect or ignore Asian immigrants in their social justice collaborative work.7 Asian immigrants are not seen as allies of ethnic minority groups. Even if they want to get involved in solidarity, they recognize that their presence is welcome but their leadership is not.8 They find themselves either in silence or in a bystander’s position. They discover themselves as the other from both white and other ethnic people. At the same time, even though it is true that Asian immigrants are treated as the other from both groups, it does not mean that they are perfectly innocent in this racial relationship. Asian immigrants learn and internalize racial prejudice and discrimination against black and Latinx people. Under a powerful mega narrative of white and black paradigms in the racial discourse, they often

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deceive themselves in the position of white rather than black. As white/black narrative locates Asian immigrants in a non-black position, they also locate themselves in the position of white.9 When this deception is occurred not only in white/black narrative but also in their own consciousness and unconsciousness, it hypnotizes them to act out as silent racists. From the US history, they often exhibit complex relationships with black and Latinx people not in the position of solidarity, but in the position of conflicts and disputes. Even though they themselves are victims of anti-Asian violence, they often reveal their own internalized racial prejudices and collude with white construction. These external and internal complications are from the combinations of the products of white and black binary racial discourse and Asian immigrant’s immanent contexts. When white and black binary racial discourse is more polarized in public, these external and internal complications dismiss antiAsian discrimination. The existence of racism against Asian immigrants is minimized and even denied. Lifting up the suffering of only black, this binary racial discourse successfully defends white construction and its system. The existence of racism against Asian immigrants is discrete.

COVID-19 PANDEMIC AS HINTERLAND FOR ASIAN IMMIGRANTS IN THE UNITED STATES When COVID-19 pandemic occurs, COVID-19 itself becomes a space of wilderness. It dries out food and water. During the pandemic, food, water, paper, and essential daily products are scarce. In order to get into essential stores or hospital services, people line up outside of stores and hospitals for numerous hours. COVID-19 disperses people to not only their own homes but also nations. Exodus happens everywhere and nowhere. People who are from other countries are not allowed to enter but go back to their own countries even at the entrance of airports. No foreigners and strangers are welcomed in any spaces. Divided lines from the sky to land and water are ever more visible and conflictive than before. Nationalism and patriotism are dangerously displayed in political and economic competitions to obtain resources. US government in particular demonstrates its patriotism and nationalism to control all dimensions of resources including products of medical supplies exclusively for US people. At the same time, racism against black groups arises as COVID-19 hits and kills them. Nationalism and immigrant policy against Latinx groups are shamelessly exercised as COVID-19 hits them hard without any medical and economic supports. For Asian immigrants, COVID-19 situation gets more complicated than ever. Anti-Asian discrimination is ever more visible than before. Starting

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from when US white political leaders called COVID-19 the Chinese virus, one-third of US Americans see Asian immigrants as the cause of blame.10 From verbal harassment to physical harassment, countless hate crimes against Asian immigrants are filed and reported. Their daily life spaces such as the streets that they live in, grocery stores that they visit, and any public spaces that they are entitled to enter are invaded and threatened. Spit on, Yelled at, Attacked: Chinese Americans Fear for their Safety “I feel like I’m being invaded by this hatred. . . . It’s everywhere. It’s silent. It’s as deadly as this disease.” Woman in Face Mask Assaulted by Man who calls her a Diseased Bitch— Feb 5 Suspect admits he tried to kill [Asian] family at Midland Sam’s Club—March 1 “I don’t know how to shake my increasing trepidation of other people.”11 As Asian immigrants experience anti-Asian violence, they exhibit fear, anxiety, isolation, powerlessness, loss of belongingness, and other psychological and physical symptoms. Many of them express their increasing trepidation of other people. However, their fear of avoiding other people is seen as isolated individual psychological problem and personal weakness. As cases of hate crimes illustrate, attackers are not only white people but also black and Latinx people. Asian immigrants are treated as the common enemy and disease to get rid of. However, their experience of anti-Asian violence hardly gets attention in major media. In fact, media and political white leaders either ignore or promote this violence. Their public blame creates more blatant violence but is accepted as a silent agreement for them to be punished. On top of COVID19, Asian immigrants endure anti-Asian violence rather in silence. On the one hand, the public induces anti-Asian violence and allows it as punishment in silent agreement. On the other hand, Asian immigrants themselves tend to hide or avoid any engagements in public from the traumatic anti-Asian violence experiences. These internal and external circumstances make them more isolated and marginalized. WITH MY PERSONAL REFLECTION ON ANTIASIAN VIOLENCE IN COVID-19 AS HINTERLAND I myself also had “spit on” and “yelled at” experience by other ethnic groups during the COVID-19 pandemic. The violence that I watched on TV becomes my own experience. Understanding hinterland as wilderness in Exodus is real in every sense. As I meditate on the meaning of wilderness for Asian

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immigrants in the middle of COVID-19, I find hinterland not only in Exodus but also in 2 Corinthians 4:8–10: We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. (2 Corinthians 4:8–10, NRSV)

Even though Asian immigrants find themselves being afflicted in every way between white and black, between white and non-white, between black and Latinx, and between their own Asian ethnic group and other Asian groups, they are not crushed. They are perplexed in between these groups and in between public and private forces to feel shame, but not driven to despair. They are persecuted by the public and/or individuals as the cause of blame, but not forsaken and still go on. They are struck down by verbal and physical abuse literally, but not destroyed. During the pandemic, I see and observe that they seek for hope through their faith and church community. “I donate the money that I receive for stimulus checks.” “I deliver some masks to my Latinx neighbor.” “I often made food for the communities that serve for COVID-19 patients.” “I was in black lives matter demonstration today.” “I sent some masks to the homeless shelters.” Bringing the masks and delivering food to their neighbors beyond their ethnic communities and participating in black lives matter in solidarity, they try to learn from COVID-19 and exercise “love their neighbors.” They demonstrate how not to be crushed, not driven to despair, not forsaken, and not destroyed by practicing faith and love in action. COVID-19 provides a space of anti-Asian violence, affliction, perplexing, persecution, and being struck down by others as well as a space of hospitality, love, and hope with and in others. Even though many of them have lost their jobs and cannot have even stimulus checks because of their documentation status, they share what they have and offer their services to care for others. They learn how to creatively and patiently love through their church communities. After all, Asian immigrants make COVID-19 a hinterland that we cannot escape but must live in.

NOTES 1. Jione Havea, “Hinterland is intersection: Talking back to the exodus blockade,” in this volume. 2. Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik eds., Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 3. Refer to Harry H. L. Kitano and Roger Daniels, Asian Americans: Emerging Minorities (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, third edition 2001).

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4. Refer to Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). 5. Pyong Gap Min, ed. Asian Americans: Contemporary Trends and Issues (London: Pine Forge Press, second edition 2006). 6. Kim D. Chanbonpin, Between Black and White: The Coloring of Asian Americans, 14 WASH. U. GLOBALSTUD. L. REV. 637 (2015), 647–652. https:// openscholarship​.wustl​.edu​/law​_globalstudies​/vol14​/iss4​/10 7. Choi Hee An, Unpublished manuscript. 8. Choi Hee An, A Postcolonial Leadership: Asian Immigrant Christian Leadership and Its Challenges (New York: State University of New York Press, 2020), 107–179. 9. George Yancey, Who is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003), 1–50; Kim D. Chanbonpin, Between Black and White: The Coloring of Asian Americans, 14 WASH. U. GLOBALSTUD. L. REV. 637 (2015). https://openscholarship​.wustl​.edu​/law​_globalstudies​/vol14​/iss4​/10 10. Joshua Rhett Miller, 32 percent of Americans have seen coronavirus bias against Asians: poll. New York Post, April 28, 2020. Available at: https://nypost​.com​ /2020​/04​/28​/32​-percent​-of​-americans​-have​-seen​-coronavirus​-bias​-against​-asians/; Ipsos, New Center for Public Integrity/Ipsos poll finds most Americans say the coronavirus pandemic is a natural disaster: three in ten Americans blame China or Chinese people for the pandemic. News, April 28, 2020. Available at: https://www​.ipsos​.com​ /en​-us​/news​-polls​/center​-for​-public​-integrity​-poll​-2020 11. Lauren Marks, “Racial Dimension of Social Distancing,” Emotional Geographies Lab, Coronotes, March 23, 2020. https://carleton​.ca​/emogeolab​/2020​/racial​ -dimensions​-of​-social​-distancing/

Index

Aboriginal, 134, 184, 214. See also First Peoples abuse, xi, 29, 55, 131, 142, 183, 188, 228 agency, x, 75, 78–79, 92–93, 111, 134– 35, 141, 144, 210 angels, 23–47 Anglican, 179, 185, 188 art, 153–65, 171–76, 179, 181, 185, 187, 189–90, 202 Asia, 39, 44, 186, 227–32 authority, 24–25, 40–41, 91, 133, 155– 57, 189 autonomy, 29, 32, 41, 61 becoming, 154, 158, 160, 161, 164 birthing, 47, 49, 53–54, 186 Black Lives Matter, 89, 94, 189, 232 blackness, 93 blood, 66, 159, 188, 190 breastfeeding, 49, 158 catacombs, 158 celibacy, 49 child/ren, 47, 49–50, 53, 54, 70, 104, 107–8, 126, 153–55, 158–61, 165, 173–76, 179, 187–89, 215–16, 219– 20. See also girls Christa, 81, 185–87, 189, 202–3

confession, 7, 9, 11–12, 19 cosmology, 23, 25, 27, 29, 31–32, 40 covenant, 55, 100, 109, 113–14 covid/COVID-19, 2, 39, 89, 227, 230–32 crucifixion, 40, 179–90, 197–204 deconstruction, 5, 9, 174 detention, 1, 179, 182–84, 187 diaspora, 93 disability, 3, 5, 16 discrimination, 1, 215, 229–30 doctrine, 6–9, 11, 15–20, 76–77, 89, 112, 156, 158, 175, 180, 185, 187, 188, 190 economy, 41, 79, 82 enlarged feminism, 2 Episcopal Church, 99–115, 185 eschatology, 76 failure, 79, 80, 84, 89, 95, 159, 199–201 feminicide, 199–201, 203 First Peoples, 1. See also Aboriginal flourishing, x, xii, 23, 27, 29, 39, 41, 186 Francis, Pope, 48–51, 58, 124–26, 197 freedom, 31–32, 39–44, 155, 229 friendship, 100, 109–11

235

236

Index

genealogy, 9, 111, 186 generational divide, 134, 141 girls, 28, 57. See also child/ren goddess, 54, 158 grace, 6, 12, 15, 19–20, 68, 103, 105, 126, 139, 186 Grand Narratives, xi hierarchy, 16, 41, 107, 109, 126 iconography, 153, 155, 175, 201 image economy, 153–55 Imago Dei, 95 immanence, 172 imperial, 30, 41–42, 44, 93, 95, 108, 155, 182, 220, 222 in-betweenness, 227 indigenous, 58–59. See also First Peoples infancy, 53, 57. See also child/ren intersectionality, 5–7, 11, 15, 17, 134, 137, 141, 143–44, 209 interval, 161, 176 invasion, 183 Jesus/Christ, 12, 23, 24, 29–32, 39, 40, 42, 44, 47, 66, 72, 75–84, 89, 104, 105, 133, 138, 142, 145, 154, 156– 58, 160, 161, 181, 183, 186, 189–90, 198, 202–4, 219, 231; bridegroom, 107; gaze of Christ, 29–32, 42–44. See also Christa; Sophia; Woman Wisdom khôra, 156 lex orandi, 101, 106, 109, 111 liberation criticism, 209, 210 liberation theology, 133, 136, 137, 144, 179, 182, 183, 198, 201, 204 liturgy, 99–115 male gaze, 23, 27–32, 41–43, 203 marriage, 99–115, 123–28 martyrdom, 186

Mary/mariology, 1, 47, 54, 55, 60, 66, 68–70, 72, 154–58, 161, 171, 173–75 maternal body, 153–54, 156, 159, 161, 164, 174 metaphysics, 82 moana, 211 modesty clothing, 28 Mother Earth, 47–61 mother/-hood/-ing, 47–61, 173–74 multiplicity, 7, 9, 19, 25, 27, 79, 83, 173 neoliberal/ism, 41, 82 normative categories/normativity, 5–8, 15, 75, 77, 81, 83–84, 89, 100, 108, 113, 123, 214 original sin, 5–9, 11, 15–16, 19–20 Pacific Islands, 44, 211 pantheism, 48 personhood, 16, 23, 28, 32, 43, 75, 79–84, 123, 160, 174 postcolonial, xi, 44, 54–58, 90, 93–95 power, 5, 7, 9–10, 23, 26–29, 31–32, 41–43, 50, 56–60, 81, 89, 92, 113, 132, 134–35, 139–40, 142, 144, 154–57, 172–73, 181, 185, 188, 189, 199, 220 psychoanalysis, 82–83 queer, 9, 82–84, 100, 112, 124, 127–28, 131 racism, 9, 18–20, 78, 90–91, 93–94, 137, 229–30 redemption, 60, 81, 95, 106, 186, 215 resurrection, 12, 71, 160, 172, 186, 190 ritual, 57, 59, 76, 111, 115, 127 Roman Catholic Church, 47, 99, 110, 113, 115, 125, 156, 182, 188 sacrament/ality, 113–15, 123–28, 186, 187 selfhood, 53, 172 sexism, 7, 9, 16, 90, 137

Index

sexuality, 5, 7, 42, 99–115, 123–28, 133, 174, 188, 215 sisterhood, 142 slavery, 44, 91–94, 217 Sophia, 30, 43, 44, 186 space, 154, 156, 164; space-making, 78, 94; space of encounter, 175–76; space to grow, 12 spit, 182, 231 sport, 1, 76–78. See also tennis sprouting, xii talanoa, 209, 210, 213, 222 tennis, 77–80 terra nullius, 216 theologia prima, 106 thing-ness, x, xi torture, 183 trans person, 124, 127, 128 transcendence, 156, 164, 172, 183 trauma, 44, 142, 231 Trinity/trinitarian, 104–12, 124, 158

237

Tupaia, 221 Uniting Church in Australia, 179, 188 veil, 24, 29, 43–44, 66, 68, 72 violence, xii, 6, 7, 9–11, 30, 43, 44, 55, 57, 77, 131, 134, 135, 142, 185, 186, 190, 198–204, 228, 230–32 virginity, 51, 55, 156, 161 visual theology, 187–88 white supremacy, 20, 29, 39, 42, 78–79, 82, 89, 92–94 whiteness, 5, 89–95, 135 wilderness, 211, 213, 214, 216, 220–21, 227, 230 wisdom, 2, 23, 27, 53, 57–60, 133, 139–40, 174, 221 Woman Wisdom, 30–32, 43, 186 womanist theology, 2, 42, 90–92, 131–45

About the Contributors

Marie-Elsa Roche Bragg is a duty Chaplain to Westminster Abbey and assistant Chaplain to the British Houses of Parliament, London, as well as Ignatian spiritual director and psychotherapist. Her publications include Towards Melbreak (2017) and Sleeping Letters (2019). Stephen Burns is a professor of liturgical and practical theology at Pilgrim Theological College, Melbourne, University of Divinity, Australia. His publications include Postcolonial Practice of Ministry (coed. with Kwok Pui Lan, 2016), Liturgy (2018), Twentieth Century Anglican Theologians (coed. with Bryan Cones and James Tengatenga, 2021), From the Shores of Silence: Conversations in Feminist Practical Theology (coed. with Ashley Cocksworth and Rachel Starr, 2023) and, as editor, Ann Loades’ Explorations in Twentieth Century Theology and Philosophy: People Preoccupied with God (2023). Choi Hee An is a clinical associate professor of practical theology and director of the Anna Howard Shaw Research Center at the School of Theology, Boston University, USA. Her publications include A Postcolonial Self (2015), A Postcolonial Leadership (2020), and A Postcolonial Relationship (2022). Jin Young Choi is a professor of New Testament and Christian origins at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, USA. She is the author of Postcolonial Discipleship of Embodiment (2015) and co-editor of Minoritized Women Reading Race and Ethnicity (with Mitzi Smith, 2020), Faith, Class, and Labor (with Jeorg Rieger, 2021), and Activist Hermeneutics of Liberation and the Bible (with Gregory Cuéllar, 2023).

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Bryan Cones is a presbyter in the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago, USA. His publications include Liturgy with a Difference (coed. with Stephen Burns, 2019), Fully Conscious, Fully Active (coed. with Stephen Burns, 2019), and This Assembly of Believers (2020). Shannon Craigo-Snell is a professor of theology at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, USA. Her publications include The Empty Church (2014), No Innocent Bystanders (with Christopher Doucot, 2017), and Disciplined Hope (2019). Jenny Daggers is honorary fellow in theology at Liverpool Hope University, UK. Her publications include Postcolonial Theology of Religions (2013), Christian Doctrines for Global Gender Justice (coed. with Grace Ji-Sun Kim, 2015), and Routledge Revivals: The British Christian Women’s Movement (2017). Sally Douglas is a minister of the Word in the Victoria-Tasmania Synod of the Uniting Church in Australia and a lecturer in New Testament Studies and Theology at Pilgrim Theological College, Melbourne. Her publications include Early Church Understandings of Jesus as the Female Divine (2016) and The Church Triumphant as Salt: Becoming the Community Jesus Speaks About (2021). Joseph Goh is a senior lecturer in gender studies at Monash University Malaysia. His publications include Living Out Sexuality and Faith (2018), Unlocking Orthodoxies for Inclusive Theologies (coed. with Robert ShoreGoss, 2019), Becoming a Malaysian Trans Man (2020), and Doing Church at the Amplify Open and Affirming Conferences (2021). Jione Havea is a native pastor (Methodist, Tonga) and research fellow with Trinity Theological College, Aotearoa New Zealand. His publications include Losing Ground: Reading Ruth in the Pacific (2021) and, as editor, Theologies from the Pacific (2021). Marguerite Kappelhoff is the executive dean at the Sydney College of Divinity, Australia. Her publications include “The Marks of the Church: A Paradigm for the Twenty-First-Century Church” in Hope in the Ecumenical Future (Pathways for Ecumenical and Interreligious Dialogue, ed. by Mark Chapman, 2017). Peter Kline is the academic dean and lecturer in systematic theology at St Francis College, Brisbane, University of Divinity. His publications include Passion for Nothing (2017).

About the Contributors

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Stefanie Knauss is a professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, USA. Her publications include More than a Provocation (2014) and Religion and Film (2020). Cristina Lledo Gomez is the Presentation Sisters Theology Lecturer at BBIThe Australian Institute of Theological Education. She is also Research Fellow for Charles Sturt University’s Public and Contextual Theology Research Centre. She is the author of The Church as Woman and Mother: Historical and Theological Foundations (2018) and co-editor of God of Interruption: Mothering and Theology (with Julia Brumbaugh, forthcoming in 2023) and 500 years of Christianity and the Global Filipino/a: Postcolonial Perspectives (with Agnes Brazal and Ma. Marilou Ibita, forthcoming in 2023). Janice McRandal is Director of the cooperative, a centre for public theology in Brisbane, Australia. Her publications include Christian Doctrine and the Grammar of Difference (2015) and, as editor, Sarah Coakley and the Future of Systematic Theology (2016). Rebekah Pryor is an artist and curator, and a researcher at the University of Divinity, Australia. Her publications include Contemporary Feminist Theologies: Power, Authority, Love (ed. with Kerrie Handasyde and Cathryn McKinney, 2021) and Motherly: Reimagining the Maternal Body in Feminist Theology and Contemporary Art (2022). David Tombs is a professor of theology and public issues at Otago University, Aotearoa New Zealand. His publications include When Did You See Me Naked? Jesus as a Victim of Sexual Abuse (with Jayme Reaves and Rocio Figueroa, 2021) and The Crucifixion of Jesus: Torture, Sexual Abuse, and the Scandal of the Cross (2023).