Religion, Feminism, and Idoloclasm: Being and Becoming in the Women’s Liberation Movement 9781138710078, 9781315200774

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Religion, Feminism, and Idoloclasm

Religion, Feminism, and Idoloclasm identifies religious and secular feminism’s common critical moment as that of idol-breaking. It reads the women’s liberation movement as founded upon a philosophically and emotionally risky attempt to liberate women’s consciousness from a three-fold cognitive captivity to the self-idolizing god called ‘Man’; the ‘God’ who is a projection of his power, and the idol of the feminine called ‘Woman’ that the god-called-God created for ‘Man’. Examining a period of feminist theory, theology, and culture from about 1965 to 2010, this book shows that secular, as well as Christian, Jewish, and post-Christian feminists drew on ancient and modern tropes of redemption from slavery to idols or false ideas as a means of overcoming the alienation of women’s being from their own becoming. With an understanding of feminist theology as a pivotal contribution to the feminist criticism of culture, this original book also examines idoloclasm in feminist visual art, literature, direct action, and theory, not least that of the sexual politics of romantic love, the diet and beauty industry, sex robots, and other phenomena whose idolization of women reduces them to figures of the feminine same, experienced as a de-realization or death of the self. This book demonstrates that secular and religious feminist critical engagements with the modern trauma of dehumanization were far more closely related than is often supposed. As such, it will be vital reading for scholars in theology, religious studies, gender studies, visual studies, and philosophy. Melissa Raphael is Professor of Jewish Theology at the University of Gloucestershire, UK, and teaches modern Jewish thought at Leo Baeck College, London. Her previous books include Rudolf Otto and the Idea of the Holy (1997), The Female Face of God in Auschwitz (2003), and Judaism and the Visual Image (2009).

Gender, Theology and Spirituality Edited by Lisa Isherwood University of Winchester, UK

Searching for the Holy Spirit Feminist Theology and Traditional Doctrine Anne Claar Thomasson-Rosingh God and Difference The Trinity, Sexuality, and the Transformation of Finitude Linn Marie Tonstad Christian Goddess Spirituality Enchanting Christianity Mary Ann Beavis Schooling Indifference Reimagining RE in Multi-cultural and Gendered Spaces John I’Anson and Alison Jasper Shame, the Church and the Regulation of Female Sexuality Miryam Clough Living Out Sexuality and Faith Body Admissions of Malaysian Gay and Bisexual Men Joseph N. Goh The Spirituality of Anorexia A Goddess Feminist Thealogy Emma White Religion, Feminism, and Idoloclasm Being and Becoming in the Women’s Liberation Movement Melissa Raphael For more information and a full list of titles in the series, please visit: www. routledge.com/religion/series/GTS

Religion, Feminism, and Idoloclasm Being and Becoming in the Women’s Liberation Movement Melissa Raphael

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Melissa Raphael The right of Melissa Raphael to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-71007-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-20077-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Verity

Contents

Acknowledgements

x

Prologue: Woman: the world’s first idol

1

Introduction

8

Iconoclasm and violence 11 Idoloclasm and the de-colonization of consciousness 15 Women as captive and slave to their idea 17 Women’s liberation and the liberation of God 24 Smashing mirrors and other anarchies in the realm of the eternal feminine 29 Is feminist idoloclasm just a second wave period piece? 33 The intrication of four waves of religious and secular feminist idoloclasm 38 1

The appearance of the feminine

48

The aestheticization of the feminine (or oppression by ‘the figures of beauty’) 49 The sexual politics of female beauty 54 Later feminist theorizations of female appearance 60 2

Idolized women

69

Idolization and female celebrity 71 Gynolatry and the sexual politics of romantic love 75 Sex robots as new idols of the feminine 78 Idolization and the face of death 83 3

Impossible women The non-existent woman 92 Dangerous work: idoloclasm and the (de)realization of the female self 95

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Contents Third wave idoloclasm and the re-evacuation of the female self 105

4

Idoloclasm in Christian feminist theology

114

The dismantling of idols begins 115 The early charges of idolatry 120 Counter-idolatrous apophaticism in Christian feminist theology 125 Marcella Althaus-Reid and the queering of idols 130 5

Second wave feminist Christology and Mariology in a counter-idolatrous mode

137

Christolatry from a post-Christian perspective 137 Idoloclastic feminist Christologies 140 Second wave criticism of Mary as an idol of the feminine 145 The Christian feminist defence of Mary as an icon of the feminine 149 6

Jewish feminist idol-breakers

156

Jewish feminists and feminist Jews 157 The alienation of mid-twentieth century Jewish women 160 Women in search of a usable Jewish self 165 Idoloclasm and Jewish cultural criticism 168 Four Jewish feminist artists who broke images of women by making them 170 Idoloclasm and the queerness of the Jewish self 175 7

Jewish feminist theology out of the idoloclastic sources of Judaism

184

‘Whatever is contained must be released’ 184 Women’s creation in God’s image, not ‘man’s’ 185 Making an exodus from idolatry 188 The ideology of femininity in modern Jewish thought 191 Procedural idoloclasm in Jewish feminist theology 197 8

From broken idols, a Goddess feminist self The reinstatement of female ‘idols’ 207 Excavations of the feminine 210 Thealogical non-realism and the realization of a female self 215

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The Goddess as a counter-essentialist image of the feminine 217 Thealogical Iconophilia 223 Postscript: a parting of the religious feminist ways 230 9

After idoloclasm

241

What next? 241 After captivity, the open air 242 ‘Only (re)connect’ 245 New directions for new selves 249 Becoming (divine) 253 Bibliography Index

262 288

Acknowledgements

I owe much to Ursula King, Ruth Mantin, Carol Christ, Sue Morgan, and Lisa Isherwood who were there at the beginning of my feminist studies in religion and theology. Without their friendship and their spiritual politics this book would not have been written. The legacy left by the late Pamela Sue Anderson, Grace Jantzen, and Asphodel Long to my own, and to so many others’, feminist studies of religion and philosophy will also be evident to many who read this book. I have written it in long and grateful conversation with them and with Peter Segal, Ian Wisniewski, Stephen Grover, Dee Carter, Jacob Gross, and Nicholas Harris. Many colleagues, including George Pattison, Aaron Rosen, Claudia Welz, Paul Fiddes, Daniel Langton, Elisheva Baumgarten, Ruth Illman, Agata Bielik-Robson, Miri Freud-Kandel, and Kavita Maya have invited me to speak on aspects of the modern criticism of idolatry at seminars and conferences that have stimulated and refined my thinking. Classes and tutorials with far more of my past and present undergraduate and postgraduate students than I can name here have also had a formative influence on this book. Dana Densmore, Paul-Reid-Bowen, Carole Taylor, Kay Butler, Katie Waller, Ally Kerks, Corrie Donaldson (formerly Agnolutto), Daniel Lichman, and Robyn Ashworth-Steen are among those I would like to acknowledge. Warm thanks are also due to Josh Wells and Jack Boothroyd at Routledge and to Lisa Isherwood, the editor of the Gender, Theology and Spirituality series. All have been generous in their enthusiasm and expertise in bringing this project to completion. Finally, and of course firstly, heartfelt thanks are due to Edwin who dedicated considerable time and energy to reading and discussing some of the draft chapters with me, and to my daughter Verity who also read parts of this book while I was writing it. The comments, stars, and double exclamation marks she left on the manuscript sometimes made me laugh and always made me think. That writing this book was a more companionable process than it might have been also owes much to my father, now in his nineties and still a daily source of talk and support.

Prologue Woman: the world’s first idol

It begins well. In the first chapter of Genesis, the image of a God for whom no image or likeness can be manufactured, is conferred on all human beings, male and female, and irrespective of caste.1 The man and the woman are of the same genus and moment. They come into being face to face; beating heart to beating heart. But Genesis narrates the creation of humanity twice over. On its second iteration, as it has been most often culturally received, a part of Adam is taken from him – his rib – and presented back to him as his helper or opposite number. Adam calls this part of himself ’ishshah, woman, as she was taken from the man, ’ish. The animals who have been created before her are ‘living creatures’. Woman is a prototype. More a construction than a creation, she is reproducible. She is the first domestic appliance insofar as she is manufactured to the specification of the masculine project. Because this second, probably earlier, version of humanity’s existential origins has underpinned theologies of companionate marriage, Martin Buber famously drew Genesis 1 and 2 together with the phrase ‘In the beginning is the relation’.2 But in this instance, the text surely narrates the opposite: the beginning of the instrumental I/It binary, where a male ‘I’ is given a female ‘It’ or thing among things, crafted and animated in the image of his requirement. Only in Genesis 1 is there the condition of women’s primary existential possibility as a person, not an idea. But it is the various scholarly and popular interpretations of the second story of the creation of the man, and later the appearance of the woman, in Genesis 2, that have shaped the experience of every Jew, Christian, and Muslim on earth. And it is here, in Genesis 2, which I read as a Jewish feminist whose theological interpretation is not limited to Jewish sources alone, that woman is not merely the inferior of the man who will be her husband, she is not of the same category or genus. Her humanity is reduced to an a priori idea. She is a type, an entity derived from a man to lighten his mood and load. Her creation is the occasion of his promotion to a new rank. Through her he attains the standing of ’ish – the man. Before that he is merely undifferentiated matter, ’adam.3 Her secondary, derivative, being renders his being primary, and thereby, in a patriarchal culture, dominant.4

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Genesis 1 promises iconicity to every human being who will ever live, but Genesis 2 does not. In this story, woman never does quite come to life as a woman, the full speaking subject of her own experience. Without a man,5 a woman is existentially redundant; a conceptual vacuity. It is difficult to see how the construction of woman in this canonical text can be anything other than the first crime (of many) against the humanity of women. It is a crime against her image/ination by God. And more than that, it defames God by attributing the creation of the world’s first idol, in the form of a woman, to God. God sculpts a piece of bone into the shape of a woman and brings it to the man after having performed a kind of keyhole surgery or caesarian on his anaesthetized body. This woman is an insensible, faceless subtraction, drawn from him while he was unconscious. She is given to him before she exists as a subject of consciousness. She has not made a free gift of herself to him, nor he to her, because he has not suffered for the sake of her becoming. Her extraction was painless; he slept right through the operation. His acquisition comes at the modest price of an inessential piece of bone. Such sacrifice as it might be, the loss will leave no scar. There is no sign of any violation of his integrity: no mark or wound. God has carefully resealed the small hole he made in Adam’s flesh.6 The man has lost something negligible of himself – a spare rib – to gain himself. The rib is not a gift, surrendered in love. On the contrary, the woman is forever indebted to the man for the piece of himself that was used to create her. She must return that part of his being that he has forfeited for her being with the gift of her becoming. For to be a woman ‘marks the completion of his creation, it is not problematic but self-evident for her to be ordained for man to be for man in her whole existence’.7 After Genesis 2, a woman’s marriage to a man will be a re-assimilation of her being to his. And so it was. Woman’s derivation places the possibility of her becoming beyond the reach of three-dimensional incarnation. She lacks historicity. She has come into being as the solution to a problem: a helper whose attributes are tailored to the requirements of the man’s situation. Even the most generous translation of the Hebrew (ezer k’negdo) not as a ‘fitting helper’ but as a ‘pillar of strength in times of trouble’ or ‘foil’ would not, I think, refute my suggestion that in Genesis 2 – unlike Genesis 1 – patriarchy guarantees its social order by attributing its own fabrication of the world’s first idol to God. For in Genesis 2, woman is not made in the image of God. In fact, the woman could hardly be more ontologically unlike God or the man, who, from the outset, enjoys the form of a ‘living being/soul’.8 While Genesis 2 may say nothing about Adam having been made in the image of God, he comes into existence as no less than an incarnation of the very spirit of God blowing through the earth. He, not she, makes visible the unconditioned, invisible God as one whose materiality is breathed into the four directions of unbounded, undetermined possibility, as dust drifting through warm air and golden light. By contrast, the woman is a walled thing. After Adam’s procedure, woman is fashioned (va’yiven),9 a term interpreted by some of the passage’s

Prologue

3

rabbinical commentators as a building or construction into a pyramid-like form that narrows towards a point at the top but which stands four-square on the ground.10 And God must work quickly. Under this reading, she must be finished (in more ways than one) before Adam wakes up. The paint, as it were, barely has time to dry. There can be no risk of his being repulsed by her still formless bloodied appearance.11 By implication, if he does not find her pleasing he will not want to marry her, which entirely defeats her object. But this prototypical woman’s body is thereby not so much a body, as the likeness or appearance of a body, fashioned from a piece of cracking, rattling bone; the litter of an open grave. As such, woman is an anticipation and reminder of the man’s mortality. She is a fixed, opaque likeness, not an open, incomplete image that inhabits its own futurity. She is blocked: in short, an idol unlike the translucent man, who is thereby an icon. Nothing is revealed or hidden in her: she is bounded and exhausted by her figuration, which not only occludes, but precludes, her possibility. In her form, Genesis 1’s creation of the female in the image of God is forgotten. The female person created in Genesis 1 had the infinitely recursive capacity of a human face to reveal God’s face in the face-to-face relation – a relation whose processes include ‘the specifically human ability to listen and respond’.12 By Genesis 2, ‘as man’s self-reflecting Other’, women’s reproductive power to give birth to life has been usurped: ‘God (and through Him man) becomes the creator or mother of the mother’. This woman born of man, reversing the natural order of man born of woman, is a primary ‘disavowal of the maternal debt’.13 Yet the problem is also more basic than that: this is the first ideological reversal of human truth into a false image. Now woman is made in the image of man. She is a paradigmatic instantiation of false consciousness. Thenceforth, a woman cannot be the truthful subject of her own experience. As a work of art that resembles a woman, she cannot ‘step forth’ (existere) from herself. Blind and silent, she cannot self-interpret; she cannot communicate herself. The dialogical ‘I’ is impossible without a ‘Thou’, and she is neither an I nor a Thou because she is him: bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh (v. 23). If the female ‘I’ is none other than the masculine ‘me’, hers is a condition from which there can be no self-becoming. If self-becoming occurs in the reciprocalities and mutualities of relation, a woman cannot become, for she is not herself to give. She cannot properly love or be loved because she exists to serve a generic function, and her service to the other is economic rather than responsible. It must be said that the ezer is not intended by God to be the man’s slave. Although a number of the medieval rabbis, including Gersonides, interpret Genesis 2 as a warrant for female subordination, the fabrication of woman in Genesis 2 is not usually understood as licensing a husband (in Hebrew, ba’al, literally, master) to enslave his ezer. Abravanel (who has read Aquinas) denies in his commentary on Genesis that man has the right to use woman as a slave. Even though only the man is made in the intellectual and

4

Prologue

spiritual image of God, and the woman is made only for procreative purposes, that she is of his flesh entitles her at least to the respect that is due to him. That she is of neither his head nor his foot, but of his middle, signals that she is neither his ruler nor his slave.14 And it must be conceded that ancillary relationships can be companionable ones (so long as the servant does not overstep the hierarchical mark). The primary service Adam’s woman is created to perform is that of a companion: an antidote to loneliness after the conversation of the cattle, wild beasts and birds had been found wanting.15 Leaving aside God’s apparent violation of his own later proscription of the sculpting of three-dimensional full-body images of human beings, in this second version of the creation of humanity, the woman is in the world only because she is a base solution to the existential situation of the man: he is alone and he will remain alone if he does not propagate.16 And man in his solitude is not just miserable. He has no kavod (dignity/ glory/gravitas) for such can only be reflected back to him by the society of those around him.17 Woman’s existence is therefore a historical contingency. She would never have existed, or would have been surplus to requirement, if the dog, as it were, had in fact proved to be ‘man’s best friend’.18 And, really, while a woman is a more taxonomically suitable partner for marriage and reproduction than a dog, a dog would have sufficed. For the man’s tragedy is that even after God has made him a woman to keep him company, the man will remain forever in a state of existential loneliness: because, flesh of his flesh, she is him. She cannot but live for him. In her, he has lost the opportunity to step outside his interiority into the exteriority of relationship. Woman, however, has nothing but exteriority. As Mary Wollstonecraft pointed out in 1792, in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (in many respects a work of modern feminist ethical theology), woman ‘was created to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused’.19 Like any other doll fashioned from an objet trouvé – perhaps a peg or a stick – whose face may have been painted on as a nod to realism and a finishing touch, she is a stand-in for a living body. She is a make-believe generic woman for the man to hold at night to keep the dark at bay. Fashioned in the likeness of a woman who does not yet exist, from whence will come her heart of flesh? Over the Jewish and Christian centuries, there have been numerous uneasy attempts to resuscitate the woman of Genesis 2. Jewish interpretations of Genesis 2 are diverse and most commentators, ancient and modern, are not insensible to the predicament of its woman.20 It has not escaped apologetic notice that the biblical account of the creation of woman lacks any reference to the infusion of a soul. (A bone-woman may seem a little too much of a prototype for the twenty-first century artificially intelligent gynoid sex robots made in the likeness of a pornographic fantasy woman for the sexual satisfaction of men as shy and lonely as Adam.) Some commentators have therefore preferred to translate ‘rib’ as ‘side’. Were Eve to have been taken from Adam’s side then she might have accrued sufficient

Prologue

5

ontological affinity with him to qualify as one half of the one-flesh union that is a marriage. As her husband’s ‘other half’, her interests would be protected; he would care for her as he would for himself.21 She would reflect better on him, too, if she had been extracted as a ready-made person from his whole person, rather than from his bone; to dishonour a wife is to dishonour the man who has acquired her.22 For other rabbinical commentators, she was never a separate creation but the result of a separation or peeling apart of the two faces from the front and the back of the one body of the primal androgyne created in Genesis 1. Others again, including Christian feminists, have claimed that the woman is not the after-thought of creation, as Wollstonecraft considered her to be,23 but its culmination;24 that she is the one who will induct men into the shift from self-preoccupation into a caring relationship with another. It is not the task of this prologue to weigh the merits of these and other readings, which are complex and deserve a great deal more space than is available here. My point is at once more general and particular: namely, that none of these readings amount to much if the woman’s humanity is cancelled before she is created, that is, if her being constitutes an a priori idea of what will facilitate his humanity. In other words, Genesis 2 presents an ontogenetic narrative that grants powers to Jewish and Christian ideologies of femininity that extend beyond those that institute sexual complementarity. For it is a fundamental principle of western ontology that when one thing exists for the sake of another, then it is inferior or subordinate to it.25 The Adam of Genesis 2 is not a god because a god requires nothing extrinsic to his existence in order to be a god. The man needs the woman. What is at stake here is rather the foundation of a philosophical anthropology that will henceforth reproduce the grounds of gender-alienation and injustice. The woman’s appearance marks the appearance of sexual differentiation into primary and secondary orders of being, the secondary being a custommade, mechanically reproducible appearance. She is an idol not because she is an object of (erroneous) worship but because, as a fashioned likeness of a person, she is a silent, unhearing, unseeing caricature or false image of a living agent. The serene inexpression of her carved face yields no glancing refraction of the divine image. Whereas a man’s creation from dust and ashes signals both the freedom of his becoming and the pathos of his finitude, the woman sculpted from bone is already dead and if she cannot die, she also cannot live. She is non-existent. She is a figment and habitation of the patriarchal imagination. This book is about her, the bone-woman, and about the women’s liberationists who stepped forth, in hope, courage and joy, from the four walls of her construction and greeted one another at its gate.

Notes 1 The translation of Genesis 1 and 2 used here is Tanakh: A New Translation of the Holy Scriptures According to the Traditional Hebrew Text, Philadelphia and Jerusalem, The Jewish Publication Society, 1985, unless otherwise indicated.

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2 I and Thou, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958, p. 18. See further Andrew Metcalfe and Ann Game, ‘“In the Beginning Is Relation”: Martin Buber’s Alternative to Binary Oppositions’, Sophia, 51 (2012), 351–363. 3 Gen. 2: 7. 4 An earlier version of this reading of Genesis 2 was first given as ‘Idoloclastic Love: Modern Jewish Theology, Genesis 2, and the One Heart of Flesh’, at the International Colloquium: Love in the World Religions, University of Oxford, November 8–11, 2016. 5 In ‘Body Politics: A Theological Issue?’, Feminist Theology, 15 (1997), 74, Lisa Isherwood points out that one of the consequences of Eve being part of Adam’s body is that single men and women cannot be complete human persons in their own right and nor can they find fulfilment in same-sex relationships. Instead, marriage is required to slip the rib ‘neatly back into place under the control of its original owner’. 6 Gen. 2: 18–24. 7 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 3/1, ‘The Doctrine of Creation’, Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1958, pp. 302–303. 8 Gen. 2: 7. 9 Gen. 2: 22. 10 BT Berakhot 61a; BT Eruvin 18a. 11 BT Sanhedrin 39a. 12 See further Claudia Welz, Humanity in God’s Image: An Interdisciplinary Exploration, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 108–112, 195, 255, 264 and passim; Stephen Pattison, Saving Face: Enfacement, Shame, Theology, Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, Ashgate, 2013, p. 156 and passim; Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust, London and New York, Routledge, 2003, passim. 13 Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1989, p. 120. 14 On Abravanel, see Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe, trans. Jonathan Chipman, Waltham, Brandeis University Press, 2004, pp. 11–12. In Grossman’s view, not one of the medieval rabbinic commentators on this biblical text regards woman as equal to men, who are directly and fully created in the image of God. 15 Gen. 2: 18–20. 16 As noted in Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, ch. 12. 17 Joseph B. Soloveitchik, ‘The Lonely Man of Faith’, Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought, 7 (1965), 22 ff. 18 My thanks to Naomi Goldman for pointing this out in different words. Discussing this text with her and Daniel Lichman when they were in training for rabbinical ordination at Leo Baeck College was extremely helpful. 19 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with Strictures on Moral and Political Subjects, London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1891 [1792], p. 68. 20 Deborah Achtenberg’s ‘Bearing the Other and Bearing Sexuality: Women and Gender in Levinas’s “And God Created Woman”’, Levinas Studies, 10 (2015), 137–154, reads Levinas’ 1972 essay ‘And God Created Woman’, in Nine Talmudic Essays, trans. Annette Aronowicz, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 1990, pp. 161–177, as a legitimate attempt to use BT Berakhot 61a’s reading of the creation of woman from a double-faced dyad as an acknowledgement of women’s full humanity. In the midrashic conception of the first human as an androgyne, woman is thereby derived from the human, rather than the specifically male. However, Achtenberg notes that while the Talmudic material on Genesis 1 and 2 does not necessarily regard women as inferior to

Prologue

21 22 23 24

25

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men, the context of Berakhot 61a is one in which women are routinely treated as inferior, undermining alternative readings. It is also worth noting that the word ish is usually read as connoting a biologically particular male rather than a generic (hu)man being. Levinas also presents his reading of the creation of Eve in ‘Judaism and the Feminine Element’, in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Seán Hand, London, Athlone Press, 1990 [1965], pp. 34–35. BT Yevamot 62b. The preeminent medieval Jewish commentators Rashi and Maimonides’ theology of marriage compelled them to translate tzela not as rib but ‘side’ (see Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed 2: 30). A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 133. Phyllis Trible, ‘Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 41 (1973), 30–48, and God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1978, p. 102. For early modern Christian proto-feminist readings, see also Sheila Rowbotham, ‘Adam’s Knobby Rib’, Spare Rib, Issue 1, July 1972, reprinted in Marsha Rowe, ed., Spare Rib Reader, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin, 1982, pp. 543–544. Compare Paul in Corinthians, 11: 7–10: ‘For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. (For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man) (RSV). Although Paul recognizes that ‘in the Lord’ there is some eschatological reversal of this order (vv. 11–12), the text is generally interpreted as recommending the social and cultic status quo as that of a divinely created order.

Introduction

The world, it must be said, has always been populated by well-loved women of nondescript or unstudied appearance, exuberant spirits, intrepid imaginations, and decided opinions. That much is evident. Why, then, did twentieth-century women’s liberationists argue, as many still do, that all women labour under the tyranny of idols or spectres of the feminine that haunt their imagination and alienate them from their own becoming? Why did they try to destroy those images with words and counter-images, and occasionally, almost always symbolically, with weapons? This book reads the women’s liberation movement, in its secular as well as religious moments, as another, though not just another, modern response to the alienation of the human from its own humanity. This book proposes that breaking the divine-human idols that contain female being and estrange it from its becoming was not an episodic or optional element of women’s liberation but was the religious and post-religious gesture and moment of women’s liberation itself. That is not to say that all feminists are the same or that they are all (crypto) theists. Some, perhaps the majority, of feminists are self-identified atheists, agnostics, or secular humanists. Modern criticism of religion has already convinced them that God does not exist in surplus of ‘his’ idol. Other feminists are religious or spiritual in orientation. I number myself among those feminist theists for whom the liberation of God from the god called God is the precondition and consequence of the liberation of all difference from patriarchal totality. This book reads second wave theory and praxis as an attempt to realize or recreate women by necessarily radical criticism of the extant ideas of the human and divine that had defined them. * On International Women’s Day in 1986 an unknown person (presumably a woman) went into the Tate and poured paint stripper over the British pop artist Allen Jones’s sculpture Chair (1969). Chair is a seat made from the body of a be-wigged female mannequin dressed only in black leather kneehigh boots, gloves, and hot pants, lying on her back with her knees closely pressed against her breasts, a matching leather seat cushion bound onto

Introduction

9

her body with straps. As a surface on which anyone might take their erotic repose, the figure is literally ‘part of the furniture’, much like the female hat-stand and table Jones made at the same time. The acid damaged the figure’s plastic ‘skin’ so badly that the work took several years to restore. This was not the first protest to be staged against his work: in 1978, feminist protesters let off stink bombs at one of his exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Undaunted, Jones, a Senior Academician at the Royal Academy of Arts, has continued to provoke his audience in much the same (lucrative) vein for half a century: the rubber breasts of Curious Woman (1965) were procured from a joke shop; more recently, he cast the model Kate Moss in a life-size plastic cast (A Model Model, 2014–2015). There has also been a steel Kate, a wooden Kate, a photograph of Kate in glittering bronze cast . . . and so on (and on). Contemporary feminists are more inclined to appreciate his style than were their mothers and grandmothers. The fashion commentator Grace Woodward is one of those who does: ‘As a feminist, you might think I’d hate Allen Jones’s work. Today’s women are bombarded with insipid, obvious images of what they should look and act like (usually thin, white, tall). And yet in Jones’s women I see complexity, power-play and consumption mixed with desire – for me, somewhat how it feels to be a modern woman. I look at Desire Me [a 1969 watercolour of a half-naked woman in stiletto heels] and I think “yeah, that could be me”, and that’s rare’. Ambiguously, Woodward concludes her piece with the aside that women may be slaves to such images, but that is because, like captives who develop Stockholm Syndrome, they have fallen in love with them.1 Jones himself leaves it to the viewer to decide whether his images are adulatory or contemptuous (or both). He claims to be sympathetic to feminism and is fascinated by the ‘amount of fakery and construction that goes into making something [usually a woman] that looks normal’.2 (This book shares his interest in the female uncanny, but not his adulation of its forms and indifference to its affective consequences.) It is actually very rare for feminists to vandalize paintings and sculptures of women as Chair’s assailant did, or the suffragette Mary Richardson did on 10 March 1914 when she slashed Velásquez’s celebrated painting of a sensually recumbent, almost faceless, nude, popularly known as the Rokeby Venus. Richardson’s attack, in retaliatory protest at the violent arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst the day before, was one of a whole spate of first wave suffragette attacks on the nation’s most prized portraits of female beauties and men in positions of ownership and authority over the course of that year.3 But a more representative example of feminist idoloclasm would be Susan Griffin’s 1998 text, ‘The Anatomy Lesson (Her Skin)’: From the body of the old woman we can tell you something of the life she lived. We know that she spent much of her life on her knees. (Fluid in the bursa in front of her kneecap.) We say that she must often have been fatigued, that her hands were often in water. (Traces of calcium, traces

10

Introduction of unspoken anger, swelling in the middle joints of her fingers.) . . . We can tell you she bore several children. We see the white marks on her belly, the looseness of the skin, the wideness of her hips, that her womb has dropped. (Stretching of the tissue behind the womb.) We can see that she fed her children, that her breasts are long and flat, that there are white marks at the edges, a darker color of the nipple. We know that she carried weights too heavy for her back. (Curvature of the spine. Aching.) We can guess that she rarely sat through a meal. (Tissue of the colon inflamed.) We can catalogue her being: tissue, fiber, bloodstream, cell. . . . By the body of this old woman we are hushed. . . . We know that it was in her body that we began. And now we say that it is from her body that we learn. That we see our past. We say from the body of the old woman, we can tell you something of the lives we lived.4

Griffin’s piece is counter-idolatrous in its insistence on the pathos and historicity of women of flesh, not plastic. It is an invitation to the reader to use her compassionate imagination to see a woman’s truth, not to obliterate her untruth. All idoloclasts know that bodies are controlled through their minds, so leverage or force of a sort must be used to cancel a false image’s hold on consciousness. But Griffin’s ‘knife’ is made only of words, used to open the readers’ consciousness, not to dissect an old woman’s body as if it were (still) a thing. Her anatomy of the feminine is not a scientific cutting but an insistence on the culturally unremarked truth of female bodies as those that live and die, that are not and never were the ‘dead’ object of their image. False images of the feminine have been broken by feminists in numerous ways,5 but in all cases the intention has been to destroy in order to recreate. To break an alienating, objectifying image of the feminine is to redeem the integrity of female subjectivity from its representation in forms constructed in the interests of a religio-political ideology. Some feminists have used classically theatrical idoloclastic methods to stage their resistance to selfestrangement. When, for example, they disrupted beauty contests to protest women’s subjection to arbitrary and impossible standards of female beauty,6 they problematized the idea of women as a decorative object whose finalists were incapable of doing other than rehearsing, in a swimming costume, a few clichés about pets and world peace with a winsome smile. The first feminist idoloclasm I can remember took place in 1970, when I was a child of 10 years old. I had been allowed to stay up late and was settling down to watch the Miss World beauty contest with my mother when women in the auditorium raised placards and started shouting and throwing flour and smoke bombs at the host, Bob Hope. I resented this interruption of the glittering proceedings. But I was also thrilled by its rage and disobedience. I would remember its sheer pandemonium long before and after I understood it. I could read, literally, the signs: women were not to be appraised like cattle in the pens of a meat market.

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Counter-idolatrous feminist art and other types of direct action have been key to the performative, demonstrative liberation of the feminine from its false idea and they will play a central role in my discussion. (Groups of women sweeping into shops that in a pre-digital age stocked ‘soft’ pornographic magazines on open shelves and throwing them all over the floor before walking out again might be another example.) But it is what women wrote to break the ideological hold of patriarchy on consciousness that this book is mostly about. Five of its chapters will present Christian, Jewish, and Goddess feminist resistance to the cognitive tyranny of false ideas of the human and the divine operative in their traditions. These chapters are placed between four chapters in which the discussion has little or no explicitly religious content. These opening and closing chapters offer a free-standing account of second wave feminist idoloclasm. But they also serve a larger purpose, which is to show that feminism, as a modern ethical criticism of culture, has a prophetic religious and post-religious element. Religious and secular feminisms have different perspectives and motives, and their integrity must be respected. But they are also, I think, mutually informing and should not be set apart. The radicalism of religious feminism is often underestimated. When, in 1979, Naomi Goldenberg proclaimed that ‘feminists are cooking up a Götterdämerung’ she was referring to religious as well as secular feminists: ‘The feminist movement in Western culture is engaged in the slow execution of Christ and Yahweh. Yet very few of the women and men now working for sexual equality within Christianity and Judaism realize the [systemic] extent of their heresy’.7 Goldenberg might have added that what she called, after Nietzsche, ‘the slow execution’ of the gods, was intended to liberate a global polity, not just two of its religions.

Iconoclasm and violence For the sake of precision, I refer to images of the human and divine that activate false ideas in their cultural representation as ‘idols’, and their breaking as ‘idoloclasm’. This unfamiliar word has been used occasionally by others as a rare synonym for ‘iconoclasm’. Unless you are religiously committed to aniconism (and, as it turns out, neither Islam nor Judaism are invariably so) an icon and an idol are two different things. An idol is, by definition, a false and harmful image. An icon is not. An icon is an image that is translucent to some truth or good and wields no power in and of itself.8 I use the word ‘idoloclasm’ to refer to feminist criticism’s liberative ‘breaking’ of toxic imaginary figurations of the feminine. There are also important distinctions to be drawn between idoloclasts and iconoclasts. Very broadly speaking, and if only for the purposes of this study, iconoclasts tend to use violence to break other people’s icons. They use iconoclasm as a form of displaced violence to establish religio-political ascendancy over people whose difference or different beliefs they fear, despise,

12

Introduction

and exploit. It is one thing to break cognitive idols through criticism, and quite another to smash material idols with a hammer. It is the breaking of cognitive idols that is the subject of this book: the images of women (and thereby of men) that are set up to occupy consciousness, alienating and vacating the human of its humanity by those who adulate inhuman powers. Nonetheless, it must be acknowledged that both idoloclasm and iconoclasm are words of whose association with puritanical fanaticism many would be justifiably wary. Even when it is a critical moment, not an actual vandalization, idol-breaking is illiberal. No one calls their own images idols. To deface, whitewash, or smash someone’s else’s gods is to cut off that person’s power at source. Whether those gods are benevolent or otherwise, breaking them is an attempt to void the lives that give them habitation of the meaning and identity they offer. The history of idoloclasm is therefore a long and traumatic one. At its worst, it can be an act of extreme intolerance to the point of terrorization. Following a month of interrogation, on 18 August 2015, Islamist militants beheaded the 82-year-old Syrian archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad and hung his mutilated body on a column in one of Palmyra’s main squares. He was a renowned scholar who dedicated his life (and his death) to the study and preservation of the antiquities that once graced that ancient city. Here, as elsewhere, museums had been looted of their pagan ‘idols’ (many of which were too valuable on the international market in antiquities to actually destroy) and their sites demolished. Asaad’s ‘crime’ was refusing to tell his tormentors where the city’s pagan images had been hidden for safe-keeping. Histories of western iconoclasm usually begin with the ancient Israelite bid to establish its identity through attempts to eradicate assimilation into the local cult.9 The methods and motivations of Israelite iconoclasm cannot be equated with those that have occurred in contemporary Syria and Afghanistan. Even so, in the biblical dispensation, idolatry, betting on the power of other foreign gods over the God to whom fealty had been sworn, was also a punishable offence. The God of the Hebrew Bible is a complex figure whose sublimity encompasses the will to liberation from slavery, social justice, and love of the resident stranger as well as neighbour. Against his caricature, he is not without the pathos of regret and a titanic, betrayed love. As a Jew, I feel claimed by this God and as a Jew, I am also traditionally licenced by God to argue with him. But the God of the Hebrew Bible is also an iconoclast. His prophets not only give good philosophical, political, and ethical reasons for breaking idols, but also show him to be prey to petty jealousy of any other local gods who are loved or feared instead of, or in addition to, him. He will not allow gifts to be made to any other gods. Their ‘murder’ can be ordered, along with the defectors or rebels who have betrayed their allegiance to him. The Hebrew Bible discredits other people’s gods as idols in terms that connote their likeness to all sorts of detestable, vain, empty, insubstantial and worthless things. And even by the early medieval period, when Jews in exile had no need, power or appetite

Introduction

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for idoloclasm, and Jewish philosophy knew that a false idea presented far greater dangers to spiritual health than its material image, other people’s sacra were still ‘othered’ as culturally foreign or strange (zarah). Not only has iconoclasm been a cause and manifestation of inter-religious hatred and intra-religious violence (punishing people for worshipping the right God in the wrong manner), its role in colonial conquest dates back at least to the Iron Age and runs right through to modernity, where the otherness of colonized ‘animists’ has been derogated as that of fetishists or idolators. To summarize and dismiss an indigenous religion and the people who practise it as belonging to a ‘primitive’, unevolved irrational natural order is to justify their subjugation, containment, and exploitation under the category of servants or animals. Iconoclasm can also erase an entire aesthetic heritage. Between Edward VI, Elizabeth I, and Oliver Cromwell, England was stripped of its Catholic images. It is more than arguable that apart from depriving women and men of the providence and consolation of Mary and other female saints, the process erased memory and beauty and impoverished a whole set of organic, festive relationships with the seasons and the land over which the images presided. At the juncture between iconoclasm and ecocide, modernity has killed off the pagan energies, domestic and foreign, of the land, skies, and waters. A terrible disenchantment of materiality – a comprehensive disengagement from the animate numinous, ideological and practical – has cleared the way for ecological devastation on an unprecedented scale and whose consequences are only now becoming fully apparent.10 There is also a certain epistemological over-confidence and moral highhandedness in even the best-intentioned idoloclast. In 1996, around the time when the second wave feminist project of female self-realization came under such intense feminist theoretical criticism that it all but collapsed, Moira Gatens was of the view that a woman’s body is a necessarily socially imagined phenomenon; a cultural product that cannot and should not be purified of its ambiguities and its fantasies. Those, she wrote, who attempt to posit an autonomous, binary ‘full female morphology as working towards an autonomous feminine sexuality or feminine subjectivity are clearly mistaken’.11 To have a body image is to have, perhaps, ‘a double of sorts’ but such is not an idol, it is one that ‘allows us to imagine and reflect upon ourselves’. It is what allows us to project ourselves into future situations and back to past situations’.12 The point of feminism, Gatens thought, is to be attentive to how our ideas about male and female embodiment affect our ethical treatment of one another, not to dismantle or ‘smash’ them in order to isolate some truth about the body.13 Although the word ‘idol’ was rarely used by feminists other than in relatively early second wave Christian and Jewish feminist writings, its modern synonyms appear widely in discourse on the objectification of women. Yet it may be that even feminist idoloclasm is an act of domination. Not all women would agree that their consciousness needs to be liberated from

14

Introduction

falsehood and error. A feminist idoloclast might want to purge women’s consciousness of images of women that she regards as holding them captive to an illusion; others might regard those images as lending some harmlessly escapist glamour to their daily round. And other feminists again might see women imitating or making those images as the creative prerogative of liberation itself. It may be that the only idolatrous one here is the feminist idoloclast herself, for only she has claimed the political and epistemological wherewithal to discern true images from false ones. In the wrong hands, the idoloclast’s hammer is a dangerous thing. Yet a humane culture also needs idoloclasm as a tool of resistance to the more acute dangers of moral relativism and deliberate dehumanization. Both secular and religious feminist criticism of the ideology of femininity is a charge against a tradition that manufactures false images of the human and the divine in order to control them. Just as theistic religion regards idolatry as a sin against God analogous to a sin committed with respect to other people,14 women’s liberationists understood women’s self-alienation as a primary moral wrong or sin committed against their humanity. Their idoloclasm was a bid for human integrity; it stabilized or curtailed the exercise of relative and finite powers with aspirations to the status of absolute and eternal ones. Without the courage and defiance of the idoloclast, the religio-political history of the criticism of culture in which independent, progressive, humanistic thought makes itself seen and heard is hard to imagine. Idol-breaking is a preventative against modern ideological group-think to the point where it begins to impose a single coercive totalitarian idea of the human and the divine that violently suppresses any other idea. Nazi Germany’s ideological manipulation of a whole nation’s consciousness exemplifies modern idolatry at its most lethal. Spell-bound by its death-dealing idol, Hitler, Nazism’s racist ideology elevated Aryans into the pure type of the human-god and abjected everyone else into their sub-human slaves. Jews were eventually reduced to no more than viruses and shapes (Figuren), some of them having been enslaved on their way to the killing fields and the gas chambers. But more routine idolatries are chronically damaging to ordinary lives everywhere. As argued by Abraham Joshua Heschel, a rabbi and peace and civil rights activist whose daughter went on to play a pivotal role in the development of Jewish feminism, civilization needs prophets. The prophet is ‘an iconoclast, challenging the apparently holy, revered, and awesome. Beliefs cherished as certainties, institutions endowed with supreme sanctity, he exposes as scandalous pretensions’.15 The second chapter of this book observes how women’s destruction of idols of the feminine has sometimes all but destroyed themselves.16 But for better or worse (usually better), feminism has been an act of cognitive tyrannicide – women’s liberation from captivity to an ideology – before it has been a bid for women’s educational and reproductive rights and equality of pay and opportunity. Women’s liberation is a de-colonization of

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15

consciousness, and only after, or with, that, the liberation of their embodiment and existential choices.

Idoloclasm and the de-colonization of consciousness ‘Post-colonial feminism’ is a term normally used to refer to a later critique of second wave feminism’s ‘white solipsism’, that is, its re-colonization of women of different classes, races, and ethnicities by universalizing its own white western middle-class experience as, simply, women’s. But it is also possible to construe second wave feminist idoloclasm as itself a type of postcolonial thinking insofar as it offered a radical interpretation of patriarchy as a primary colonization of the entire human and natural world. The women’s liberation movement’s ‘radical’ wing defined the patriarchal order as one that takes everything, including consciousness itself, as its territory. It is by what Audre Lorde called the ‘psychic milking’ of women’s energies;17 through the acquisition and subjugation of consciousness, of spirit as well as matter, that a patriarchal order extends the reach of its power. Even – especially – its philosophy is political. If all women’s and all non-white men’s reason is as substandard as western philosophy from Aristotle to Sartre has pronounced it to be, then so is their humanity.18 People who do not meet certain rational, moral, and thereby physical, standards can or should be colonized. And by way of a vicious circle, that they are colonized at all is evidence of their lesser humanity. A male elite occupies the world as if it were its own by warrant of its own god. At once cringing before, and glorified by, a projection of its own pretensions to majesty, patriarchal expansionism is commissioned by its god called God to save history from a chaotic reversion to nature. Territory is held and extended not only by episodic bloodshed, but by a patrilineal bloodline’s ownership of the reproductive and manual labour of the sexual and racial other, using its ‘animal’ production to consolidate and enrich its own lordship from here to eternity. Women’s liberationists were not, then, protesting the colonization of women’s wombs alone. (Modern patriarchy did not, after all, represent white women as breeding animals, but as companionate objects of love and desire, who would be at least moderately decorative and exercise a good influence on children.) Women’s liberationists were rather protesting the preoccupation of a woman’s mind in ways that forced her to adapt herself to a ‘reality’ shaped by the interests of patriarchy.19 Without literally comparing themselves to people who suffered under any historically specific colonial rule, the women’s liberation movement theorized the occupation of female consciousness as another, or primary, colonization of the human other. In doing so, they identified the lock on women’s freedom, but also, with idoloclasm, the key. The immediate historical context of the early second wave undoubtedly reinforced its view of patriarchy as the colonial power of all colonial powers. Early second wave views of women’s cognitive and domestic enslavement

16

Introduction

developed during the very period in which the (feminizing) subjugation of lands and bodies as empire was being challenged by revolutionary liberation movements the world over, and with some success.20 American women became feminists at a time when American colonial warfare’s particular operational principle in Vietnam – ‘kill everything that moves’ – would have epitomized patriarchy itself. Second wave feminism’s criticism of the feminine as a product of ideology rather than a natural property of a woman’s person was similarly characteristic of its time. In this period, liberationists understood that ideology, as Slavoj Žižek put it, does not just produce false consciousness as ‘an illusory representation of reality’ but as a total ‘social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence’.21 Modern ideology is a way of circumscribing ‘alternative modes of conceptualization of all the major practical issues’ through the inculcation of a ‘specific form of materially anchored and sustained social consciousness’. Modern ideology cultivates not just illusion but the selective reinforcement of traditional attitudes.22 This book interprets the women’s liberation movement as one of women who were engaged, and are still engaged, in a non-violent modern struggle against the reinforcement of a traditional, normative ideology of femininity, differently inflected the world over, but intending to produce local versions of the feminine same. An ideology of femininity is a political device by which to naturalize, socialize, and maintain power and control over women. It moulds women into conformity with its standard ideal type whose psychosocial compliance allows a gender-governance to maintain power without overt violence. A narrow range of ideas about what is and is not desirable in a woman’s appearance as the hypostasis of her character socializes her into ‘basic patriarchal polities with regard to temperament, role and status’. A gendered human personality is formed along socially and politically stereotypical lines, whether ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’, in accordance with the needs and values that the dominant group find convenient in the subordinated one.23 ‘Unfortunately’, wrote Naomi Goldenberg in her early idoloclastic manifesto, ‘any social group or gender that is being stereotyped, or rather archetyped’, regards her archetype as inescapable and ‘is effectively discouraged from attempting to deviate from [its] preordained categories’.24 Whatever its specific prescriptions, an ideology of femininity is a means to control a woman’s body through control of her mind. Under patriarchy, women are mentally and visibly pictured by themselves and others in ways that are produced, or at least conditioned, by ideology. So, of course, are the images of men. Patriarchal images of women are not produced in isolation from images of men (which are the subject of another book) but in contradistinction to the ontologically and historically pivotal character of masculinity. But the political imagination of women produces bodies that are no more mute than images of men. All images are ekphratic or ‘talkative’. Images of whatever kind are always in intermedial

Introduction

17

conversation with texts.25 Visual images are, indeed, not just things but are ideologically ‘operational’.26 All images are texts of a kind, representing patriarchal ideas in ways no less intelligible and communicable than words. Second wave feminists understood the female body as the site on which oppressive ideals were posted and thereby enforced. ‘Woman’ is a template from whose putatively perennial qualities women copy femininity and thence from one another. Patriarchy colonizes women’s consciousness with the endlessly replicated figure of woman. From her mould, a whole regiment of the feminine same can be turned out. She is a manual of the feminine, from which all women are expected to learn how to look, act, think, want, and feel. After Marx, and able to claim women trade-unionists, anarchists, communists, anti-fascists, and health pioneers as their early-twentieth-century urban foremothers, second wave feminists offered a material account of the production of what Sheila Rowbotham’s book on the subject called ‘woman’s consciousness [of a] man’s world’. Ahistorical and disembodied notions of human consciousness – male or female – were now disputed. Consciousness is, it was argued, a political, ‘historical artefact rather than an absent cause’.27 Under patriarchy, female embodiment is constructed in ways that cannot be abstracted from unequal relations of power. Behind the thing and the relationships between things are social relations that reify them into phenomenal abstractions of particular values.28 Putatively timeless ideas about men and women are not disinterested and nor are they invisible. Enforced by a combination of inducement and threat, the ideological construction of gender roles instantiates a sexual division of labour to the advantage of male interests. Traditionally, women’s roles have been indispensably ancillary ones. These have, necessarily, confined women to the sphere of the natural whose products are conformed to culture by women’s maternal and domestic labour. A woman must therefore be taught to desire her biological and domestic servitude and taught to be anxious lest she not be sufficiently attractive to warrant or attain it. If she comports herself correctly – if she gets herself right – she will be cherished by her husband and family. If she does not, she risks unwantedness as if this is what it means to be alone. The desire to be desired is not one to which every woman is susceptible, but few women (among whom I do not number) are entirely immune to its force.

Women as captive and slave to their idea This book began with Genesis 2 as narrating the creation of woman as the world’s first idol. A feminist account of the enslavement of women to their patriarchal idea might have opened with Plato’s allegory of the prisoners in the cave, a foundational metaphor of western politics and epistemology.29 In Plato’s allegory, narrated here to draw out its relevance to the traditional condition of women, prisoners have been chained by their necks and legs to the wall of an echoing cave from birth. All this situation allows them to see

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Introduction

are the flickering forms made by puppeteers, walking high up on a parapet between the fire and the prisoners. The forms are not substances, but shadows cast by the light of the fire against the blank wall of their cave. Unable to turn their heads and blinded by the glare of the fire, they mistake these shadows for themselves. As slaves, they labour unceasingly but without any vision or hope of the open road, the sea, the moon, and the stars, for they have never seen them or developed the concept of freedom of which they are such lovely symbols. When one of Plato’s slaves finally escapes from the cave his eyes take time to adjust to the light of the real world. Gradually, a world comes into focus. Real, wondrous, natural objects are all around him. He returns to the cave with stories to tell. Until that moment, the slaves are unaware that theirs is only a spectral reality, an order in which ideologues pull the strings. It is only when all the slaves have escaped from the confines of a darkened consciousness peopled by fabricated two-dimensional appearances, shadows, and illusions that they will know themselves to have been captive threedimensional persons and, in that knowledge, become free. Some feminist commentators have interpreted the platonic cave as a gynophobic symbol of the womb: a prison of flesh that must be escaped before men can know the good, the true, and the beautiful. Yet, just as Mary Wollstonecraft urged that women cease to be the idol or ‘puppet’ of men and be permitted to ‘walk without leading strings’,30 the allegory can also be read as a very apt metaphor for the patriarchal factory of idols and the epistemological condition of the women who labour within it. If the enslaved prisoners are women, then not until they break their cognitive chains and self-liberate from the cave of patriarchy will they know who and what they might be. Until then, all women know are the dancing shadows of idols or false images. The word ‘woman’ does not refer to anything that any of them has yet seen. Mary Wollstonecraft regarded the ideology of femininity of her age as painting ‘the portrait of a house slave’.31 About half a century later, first wave feminism derived much of its immediate momentum from women’s involvement with anti-slavery societies whose own constraints on women’s activism reflected those they suffered in the wider social order. Women were increasingly struck by the irony of agitating for civil rights for men that were not enjoyed by themselves. The Declaration of Sentiments of the First Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, held on the 19th to the 20th of July 1848, described ‘the history of mankind’ as ‘a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her’. At this and subsequent conventions, the conviction arose that the legal condition of women was at least analogous to that of slaves. That a woman’s body is ‘given away’ by one man to another man in a traditional marriage ceremony, acquired as a something akin to a purchase through a dowry, indicated that she was an object bought at market as slaves are bought, not an agent in her

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own right. A woman’s promise of obedience to her husband rendered him, to all intents and purposes, her master, the law giving him the right to play God on God’s behalf – to reward, punish, and confine her at will. At best subject to the providential care of a husband or father, a woman was effectively, in the eyes of the law, civilly dead. Women were the property of their husbands and, without the franchise, subject to laws over whose formulation they had no say. Rights were withheld from the best of women that had been ‘given to the most ignorant and degraded men’. Denied an education, women were excluded from the professions and from public leadership roles in the Church. They were ineligible to make their own legal representation. If married, they were (until a series of married women’s property laws had been passed) without rights to their own property or wages.32 Of course, even at the time, white women could see that any literal correlation between their own experience of oppression and that of black slaves was horribly wrong. White women were notable among those who had abused male and female slaves, or who had been grossly complicit in their abuse. White women benefited directly from slavery. For them, and for any who were affluent enough to delegate some or all of their domestic labour to black female servants, to refer to themselves as ‘slaves’ ignored appalling asymmetries of power. In mitigation, it should be emphasized that some first wave feminists such as Angelina and Sarah Grimké, the daughters of a South Carolina slave owner, refrained from making literal comparisons between the condition of white women and black slaves. They protested the legal denial of women’s rights and liberties, while still laying the ground for second wave feminism’s account of female enslavement as first and foremost a state of consciousness. By the middle of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir had interpreted Hegel’s account of the first moment of self-consciousness as naming an existential possibility denied to women. It was not that Hegel was a proto-feminist. His conservative, oppositional, ontology of gender and his view of the development of subjectivity and individuation confirmed the sexual divisions of labour of Greek philosophy and of own his time. In comments made in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel, like other luminaries of Western philosophy, regards women as natural and physiological entities, belonging to the familial realm of the immediate and the particular, and therefore lacking in the dimensionality of the historical and universal. It was rather Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, which Marx understood as a paradigm of class struggle, that Beauvoir understood as a paradigm of women’s struggle against the enslavement of their own consciousness. In Beauvoir’s reading, the master knows himself to be master only in the deference of the slave [woman] to his will. The [male] self knows himself through the [female] Other, whose inessential being he must sublate – both cancel and preserve – in order to realize his essential self.33 In a relation that will play out across modern continental philosophical psychology, she is

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Introduction

the necessary object to his subject. Human consciousness is split into that of the master who exists for himself, and the slave whose subjection confirms his sense of self. Woman is, again, a slave or puppet insofar as she is constructed and controlled by men who have moulded her to their idea of what she should be in a world not of her making, narration or legislation. Although Beauvoir’s summation of Hegelian epistemology is not uncontroversial, loosely applied, his master-slave dialectic posited an asymmetrical relationship between two classes of people: one, as many have put it, has power without accountability, while the other has accountability without power. The slave must continually acknowledge the legitimacy of the master’s authority over him. But both he and his master know that any such acknowledgement is worthless because it has been coerced. Yet to grant the slave the freedom to assent freely and rationally to the master’s power is impossible as such would emancipate the slave and end the rule of the master. It fell to Jewish and Christian women’s liberationists to make the connection between the biblical narration of the Israelite slaves’ exodus from Egypt and the emancipation of women’s consciousness from mental slavery to all Pharaonic masters. Marcus Garvey’s words, used in the Pan-African cause: ‘Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our mind’, set to music in Bob Marley’s more integrationist ‘Redemption Song’ in 1980, was, filtered through Marx, the prophetic theme song of all twentieth-century liberationists, women’s liberationists included. Although Marx found Ludwig Feuerbach’s thinking too individualistic and theological for the purposes of a proletarian revolution, Feuerbach’s criticism of religion and philosophy as having alienated humanity from the affective, concrete historical possibility of freedom was formative for Marx in the early 1840s. Feuerbach opened the way to a ‘real humanism’ that, in Marx, would shift the focus of political philosophy from the elite to ordinary people, oppressed, but, if only their consciousness were liberated, no less the carriers of the historical process. Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Capital characterized capitalism as a system in which thinking and behaviour was dominated by invented, divisive values and figures of exchange. The working class would come to life by unifying into a revolutionary movement of agents educated into a Marxist consciousness that capitalism is not the fact of an eternal order but a history of reification. The alienation and exploitation of labour depends not only on the enslavement of workers’ productive labour, but of their consciousness. Unequal, instrumental class relations depend on the cultivation of illusion: power empowers itself by force, but also by buying off labourers with so low a sense of their worth that a nugatory wage would seem (like the heavenly reward promised for obedience to God) a fair exchange for a life of toil, making things that they, their makers, cannot afford. It is only by the cultivation of illusory power and its lack that workers think they have no choice but to passively accept their lot. Under this regime, they cannot

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imagine rejecting their alienated identity and becoming part of a class that is human because it is a class for itself. Marx urged that it is the immediate task of philosophy, which is properly in the service of history’s ordinary people, not metaphysical truths, to unmask alienating semblances claimed by their oppressors to have heavenly ordination but which are fantasies in service to their own project. What poses as an embodiment of the absolute and infinite, whether it be the state or, for feminists, the institutions and offices of gender, is actually a hypostasis of the finite power of the ruling class. Being illusory in character if not in effect, the rule of the masters can be deposed by ordinary people organized for revolution in this world. Justice and reward need not be deferred to the next. Once social criticism has theoretically exposed and clarified the workings of an oppressive society, political action is already underway. That the criticism of religion is the prerequisite of social criticism was also a lesson learned from Marx. In the introductory notes for his unfinished Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx presented liberation as a restoration of truth to the subject from tyranny by men in the name of a God who is himself a tissue of illusion and self-deception. If one were to paraphrase Marx’s argument here in the terms of women’s liberation, women’s liberationists’ demand for the abolition of patriarchy and its illusions is the demand for women’s real happiness. The moment had come for women to throw off what Marx had called the ‘imaginary flowers’ that decked their chains and pluck the ‘living flower’ of their own personalities, their own lives. Once a woman had begun to think, act, and fashion her reality like a woman who has discarded her illusions and regained her senses, she would begin to move around herself as her own true sun.34 The communist rallying cry, ‘Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!’, which improves on the last three sentences of Marx’s 1848 The Communist Manifesto, could as much have been, ‘Women of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!’ That Marxist philosophy informed feminist theorizations of how the lives of ordinary women might be practically liberated from their idea is not to say that all feminist idoloclasts were Marxist feminists (there were never all that many of those). Nor was it a priority of Marx’s to examine the impact of capitalism on women or to explain the origins of the sexual division of labour other than incidentally as a function of the mode of production. Rather, second wave idoloclasts read Marx, as others have done, as a secular prophet and exponent of the messianic dream of the end of estrangement.35 Marxist interpretation of the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie was taken over by feminism, notably through Beauvoir and Firestone, as a paradigm of the sexual-political struggle between the male and the female. Feminist political philosophers from the 1960s through to the 1980s commonly characterized women’s oppression in terms of a revised version of the Marxist theory of the alienation or estrangement of labour, infused by Hegelian notions of alienation as an objective stage in human development

22

Introduction

that can be historically superseded: women’s time for self-ownership, not least ownership of the means of her own (re)production, had come.36 Marx’s dialectical–materialist account of class struggle could be read through the lens of women’s experience of oppression as interpreted by feminist criticism of sexual inequality and injustice. Marxist philosophy suggested that the will of patriarchy is concentrated in a woman’s embodiment as another piece of a man’s private property. A woman cannot mature into a social actor because she is a ready-made standard receptacle who fulfils her destiny once she has become the required incarnation, the life-moment and value-form, of her patriarchal idea. Just as communism’s abolition of fetishized private property would rehumanize and re-socialize the working man as no longer a means to the end of capitalist production, so too, when a woman was no longer the private property of a man she would fulfil the dream of a complete return of herself from her tradition as a fully social human being.37 In Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels had claimed that the family does not belong to any natural order but to the historical rise of class society, private property, and the modern state. Woman, for Engels, was the family and the state’s ‘first slave of the slave’. Offering a diluted version of Johann Bachofen’s matriarchal historiography (one that would be adapted into a matrifocal historiography in the late 1970s by spiritual feminists), Engels argued that an overthrow of matriarchy during the Iron Age had been the first world-historical defeat of the female sex: ‘The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of his children’.38 Engels understood women’s oppression as a political consequence of the privatization of biological and social labour. Women’s emancipation would therefore follow from the abolition of women’s domestic labour and their entry into the public industries of a collectivized society. Both Eleanor Marx and Alexandra Kollontai, a leader of the international Socialist Women’s movement, an elected member of the revolutionary Central Committee in 1917, and Commissar for Social Welfare in the Soviet government,39 further criticized capitalism as producing families in which women are defined as reproductive property with no time, will, or money of their own. In a capitalist system, the family places a crushing burden on working class women by forcing them to work for wages without relieving them of any of the duties of housekeeper and mother. With Edward Aveling, Eleanor Marx’s partner (whose faithlessness was probably a significant contributory cause of her suicide in 1898), Eleanor Marx argued that women are triply exploited as mothers, unpaid domestic servants, and workers. Marx and Aveling’s 1896 essay the ‘The Woman Question’ described women as ‘the creatures of an organized tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organized tyranny of idlers’. For women, as for the labouring classes, ‘no solution of the difficulties and problems that present themselves is really possible in the present condition of society’. Bearing the ‘stamp of

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lost instincts, stifled affections’, is not women’s nature, the essay asked, ‘a nature in part murdered?’ Without jettisoning the institution of marriage, the essay argued that with socialism would come not only the end of women’s economic dependence on men, but also their existential integrity: ‘For ourselves, we believe that the cleaving of one man to one woman will be best for all, and that these will find each in the heart of the other, that which is in their eyes, their own image’.40 Decades before the advent of gynoid domestic and sex robots that now threaten the caste labour of women with redundancy, Germaine Greer popularized a feminism that was revolutionary and liberationist rather than reformist or merely egalitarian. Greer described women under patriarchy as little more than robots programmed ‘to provide cheap labour, and even more, free labour, exacted of right by an employer possessed of a contract for life, made out in his favour’.41 Over the course of her entire feminist career, Greer has insisted that mere equality with men – to be raised to a sameness with men – is a conservative idea, and has argued instead for women’s liberation into full human beings. Women, she wrote in 1970, are ‘the most oppressed class of life-contracted unpaid workers for whom slaves is not too melodramatic a description’.42 Before women were granted access to higher education and the professions, few women, other than, perhaps, unmarried women in aristocratic or royal families with no male heir, were able to alter their lot other than through the deployment of cunning, gossip, and their sexual allure. It is, noted Greer, a mark of slavery to resort to manipulation rather than direct action to achieve one’s ends.43 But more than that, a woman is ‘represented with reference to what a man is – which is what it is to be a slave’.44 Again, although one winces to hear white middle-class women describe their state as one of ‘slavery’, this referred to a state of mind. Even the expectation that most women would pass their lives in unpaid domestic service could hardly be equated with the bonded labour of a slave.45 Wealthy women could, and still do, pay poor women and men small sums to do all their domestic labour for them. And domestic labour in modern Europe or North America was and is not comparable to domestic labour in parts of the world where families live in far smaller living spaces, with poor access to electricity and clean water. What was being protested was women’s cognitive enslavement to an idea of woman that, especially outside the cosseted lives of the female elite, amounted to little more than a menu of services. Their imaginations fed on a junk of luxurious romance, most women’s material actuality was, it was argued, far less glamorous than its dreams. Disappointingly, it usually amounted to an industrious adult life spent cleaning, laundering, cooking, and caring for children, the sick, and the elderly. This work was undertaken for low pay outside the home or no pay within it – all the while trying to look at least presentable. Female industry, aesthetic and productive, would, it was claimed, always fall categorically beneath the interest or recognition, let alone the reward, of history and culture.

24

Introduction

Of course, no one, including any woman reading this book, wants to be told their standing, and their voluntary service to others they love, is even analogous to that of a slave; that they are no more than an ideological concoction with a forename. But feminist idoloclasm and its discourses do not claim that patriarchal colonization of women’s consciousness has made all women servile. Women’s agency may be hampered and distorted by false consciousness, but no feminist would claim that idols of the feminine have, in fact, comprehensively evacuated women of their will, personality, and intelligence. Simone de Beauvoir’s (and Wollstonecraft’s) references to the tawdriness or ‘silliness’ of ‘woman’s character’ and the ‘prudence’ and ‘shabbiness’ of her values are unpalatable. Yet neither were describing inherent qualities of the feminine, only those that are the result of an ideology that must reduce real women, especially, but not exclusively, middle-class women, to smaller, more manageable, imaginary ones, namely, dolls of a sort.46 To criticize the idolization of the feminine is not to claim that a woman is nothing but her idea, quite the opposite. A material person will, in any case, always surpass or lag behind their idea. Any modern revolution must assume that. The point, then, of feminist idolclasm has neither been for ‘strong’ women to insult or rescue ‘weaker’ women as the dupes of patriarchy, nor has it been to defame men or sum up every man’s love for a woman as gynolatry. It has not been the intention of feminism to claim that mothers’ joy in motherhood is misplaced because having children is ‘really’ just how patriarchy appropriates the fruits of her reproductivity. It would have grossly demeaned and insulted decent people everywhere to have claimed that, or that every man’s intimate relationship with a woman is actually a relationship with a slave, puppet, or doll, or that every child’s love for his or her mother is actually love for a breeding animal. Feminism’s critique of idols was rather an attempt to understand the relationship between class and gender ideology and the psycho-political malaise that distorted relationships between men and women, between women and between a woman and her own image. A woman is not just the appearance of herself (to borrow another phrase from Marx). Feminist theory’s diverse but principal idoloclasts – Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Mary Daly, Germaine Greer, and Judith Butler among them – were not claiming that women were devoid of reflexivity, will, and joy, or that, idolized by fear or desire, they had never loved or been loved. What feminists did want to suggest was that if women flourish, it is in spite of a fundamental and persistent injury to her humanity.

Women’s liberation and the liberation of God It is crucial to the argument of this book that, because the modern criticism of culture is so intricated with that of the cosmic governance against which modernity is in only selective revolt, the liberation of women from their

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false idea was not and is not divisible from the liberation of God from ‘his’ ideational captivity to patriarchy’s false gods, not least the god who can be called ‘he’, but on no account ‘she’. Feuerbach’s theory of projection had opened the door to feminist theorizations of women’s alienation. ‘By his God thou knowest the man’, wrote Feuerbach, ‘and by the man his God; the two are identical’. The divine being is ‘nothing else than the human being, or rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective’. That is, God is ‘contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being’, but is, in truth, the projection of power onto an imaginary being. The human has thereby forfeited status, is diminished: ‘the poor man has a rich God’.47 Far from straightforwardly atheistic, Feuerbach’s criticism of religion did not want to destroy it but to make it more philosophically coherent and better equipped for love and self-understanding. Nonetheless, Feuerbachian insights into the abstraction of the human ideal and its agency in God would be borrowed by feminists (Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Elisabeth Lenk, Luce Irigaray, and Mary Daly to name but a few) to explain modern femininity as the projection of male subjectivity onto a useful object, created in accordance with a list of specifications it claimed to have been ordained by God. Even under patriarchies that publicly disown God, the fate of women is bound up with God’s and secular feminist criticism is bound up with religious feminist criticism. The idols of God, ‘man’ and ‘woman’, are a cocreative function of one another, and cannot be understood in isolation from the other. Religious women’s liberationists understood this most clearly, but were not alone in thinking that, one way or another, patriarchy was buttressed by its own theology. As Irigaray wrote: ‘Man is able to exist because God helps him to define his gender (genre), helps him to orient his finiteness by reference to infinity. The revival of religious feeling can be interpreted as the rampart man raises in defence of his very maleness’.48 Religious feminists, even more than secular feminists, knew from first-hand experience of their traditions that these were structured around an exclusively masculine conception of a masculine divine subject and female natural object in ways that made women less than fully and normatively human.49 In the event, secularism did not bring about its predicted demise of the world religions, and it was, and remains, the case that not one of these fully affirms women’s personhood.50 Second wave feminist studies in religion set about demonstrating this in various ways. Mary Daly, more than any other feminist theorist, argued that whether women are religious or not, their freedom to be and to become who they will be is dependent on the liberation of women’s consciousness from a three-fold captivity to the self-idolizing god called ‘Man’, the projection of his power called ‘God’ – both creations of patriarchy after its own image – and to the idol of the feminine called ‘Woman’. In this, the religious criticism of religion, which begins and ends in the ultimacy of its cosmic dimension, is perhaps the most radical of all modern criticisms for it is a critique that is circular and without finition.

26

Introduction

The second wave idoloclastic critique, secular and religious, was as follows. ‘Man’ has the self-awarded power and authority from God to construct ‘woman’ as the biddable complement of men. As an idol, woman improves upon women, turning them into object-ideas or ‘value-forms’ whose purpose is to supplant, and thereby control, female subjectivity itself. In her idol, the biological, and therefore moral and rational, imperfections of actual women are overcome, her beauty the crowning symbol of her biddability. In short, these three idols produce a three-fold alienation of women as other to their own subjectivity; other to the normative humanity of men, and other to the god who, as cosmic autocrat, is a projection of the elite masculine will. It would be a mistake to think that patriarchal models of God leave only women in religious communities as other to men and to the ultimate reality men have created. After three thousand years of Abrahamic culture, where revelation has been authorized and mediated by exclusively male prophets, redeemers, law-givers, priests, teachers, and theologians, the very fabric of reality is masculine. Women cannot but be ontologically derivative of the masculine and existentially estranged from masculine ideas of the feminine. The extent to which modernity has overcome this alienation is a matter of opinion. One thing, though, is certain. Modernity is a dialectical process and its struggle against religious authority is not globally achieved. To this day, it is both the case that religion itself has modernized, and that modernity, globally, has provoked reactionary religion and politics. During the second wave, the sexual-political reasons for abolishing the Father-god were no less relevant for religious feminists than for secular feminists. Even in a post-theistic dispensation, God’s will and authority were still being exercised by the men who had once recreated God in their own image and claimed to be his appointees, but who had long deposed him. Secularization had in many ways made matters worse. It could not and did not undo a culture ineradicably shaped by the theistic narratives, hierarchies, and categories that produced it. To the contrary, the ‘death’ of God in modernity provoked a fearsomely reactionary global (local and post-colonial) religiopolitical fundamentalism in which the re-subjugation of women symbolized the reinstatement of a neo-traditional governance. At the same time, secularization granted a modern masculine elite the economic, technocratic, and military power to play God in his stead. Modern patriarchy’s capacity for exploitation and destruction could, and does, operate unchecked, its overweening hubris rendering the idea of a God more powerful than themselves either laughable or intolerable. All previous male idoloclasm, however radical its criticism of religion and culture, had left the projection of masculinity onto God intact. Even as a projective, fictive idea, the God of modern critics of religion was still He. The central importance of religious feminism to the women’s liberation movement was that its idoloclasm released women from all of patriarchy’s idols, including its presiding divine one, not just some of them. Just as Feuerbach’s demystification of theology as anthropology would restore ‘man’

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to himself,51 so too would feminism’s demystification of ‘woman’ restore women to themselves by refusing their ordination as the projective creature of projective gods, whether those few in ‘heaven’ or the many on earth. By acts of idoloclasm, all women would be radically free: self-creative, selflegislating and, in that sense, divine. The women’s revolution is historically and theoretically over-determined. The role of Marxism has been touched upon, but women’s liberation has far too many sources and intersections to enumerate here or in any single book. Brevity runs the risk of over-simplification, but it would be difficult to understand feminist idoloclasm’s prophetic dimension without at least passing attention to its immediate situation in other types of modern emancipatory thought. Feminist idoloclasm is an outworking of the Enlightenment’s demystification and democratization of ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and monarchical authority. Grounded in prophetic theology, the Enlightenment was a recognition of the intrinsic God-given rights and values of the individual, if, at the time, only those of white property-owning men. After Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘liberal’ feminists would claim the same liberties and equalities that the Enlightenment had awarded to middle-class men. And more than that, the Enlightenment had a revolutionary potential that suggested to women that they too had the right to pursue their ‘life, liberty and happiness’ as the full subjects and agents of their own experience. Thus Luce Irigaray: ‘To remain faithful to herself, to turn back to herself, within herself, to be born again free, animated by her own breath, her own words, her own gestures, this corresponds to the most decisive conquest for women. And to speak of women’s liberation, women’s liberation, without such a course, such autonomy, is not possible’.52 In modernity, which produced feminism, autonomy is the condition of dignity. The state of self-creative being and becoming undefined by any exterior or heteronomous agency, not least God’s, was not possible until women had overcome the alienation of their will and deportment by religio-cultural legislation, which until the end of the twentieth century was still almost exclusively mediated by men. As a modern criticism of false consciousness, all feminists, if from diverse contexts and with different perspectives, sought to break the ‘mind-forged manacles’ of the patriarchal ideology of femininity as it operated through the social and religious offices of tradition. In 1856, the art critic Louis Edmund Duranty stated that if he were to set fire to the Louvre, he would do so with the conviction that he was serving the future of art.53 Duranty was proclaiming what was to be the revolutionary principle of modernism, which is that a new future depends on an act of liberation from the dead hand of tradition. The positive, visionary, dimension of modern revolutionary ideas has a necessarily negative aesthetic dimension whose origins lie in pre-modern theology. Before modernity, unauthorized images must be destroyed. After modernity, it is authorized images that must be ritually defaced or broken in order to relieve culture of an oppressive hegemonic tradition and restore life, agency, and possibility

28

Introduction

to their object. As a piece of religio-political performance art,54 idoloclasm is an act of insurrection towards resurrection. To take a hammer to the god called God was to take the same hammer to the idol of the feminine and the masculine, for ‘man’ has substituted himself for God, and then made woman from one of this god’s ribs. (As Nietzsche put it, ‘Man created woman – and with what? With a rib of his god – of his ideal’.)55 Neither God nor ‘woman’ exist apart from ‘man’. Both are his fictions, a product of his will to power. As soon as the divine ordination of these conventions is dismissed as mere ideology, then humanity is not merely at liberty, but obligated, to prise open these hollow figures to new existential horizons of truth and possibility. Like other ideals over-valued into idols, the false note or hollow ring of ‘woman’ could be sounded out by a tap of an idoloclast’s hammer, one that is, at the same time, a tuning fork. Nietzsche, like Marx, was a secular prophet of redemption from slavery. Although his master–slave dialectic is the reverse of Marx’s and his advocacy for virility is difficult to regard as other than inimical to the spirit of feminism, he too sought to remake the image of the human through liberation from the vitiation of tradition. Although some have seen Nietzsche’s remarks on the feminine as mere asides, irrelevant to his philosophy, some (notably Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, and Francis Oppel) have been slower to dismiss them. Nietzsche knew the eternal feminine to be something of a ruse; a construct and product of male desire that could sometimes be deployed in women’s favour, but a nonetheless defunct ideal; a sanctification of lies that merely bred desire for revenge.56 Provocatively, flamboyantly, or as he might prefer it ‘prankishly’ misogynistic, Nietzsche referred to late nineteenth-century emancipated women as ‘abortive women’ and, more promisingly, as ‘anarchists in the realm of the “eternal feminine”, the ones who turned out badly’.57 Nietzsche dismissed vapid stereotypes of the feminine as much as he did those of the masculine, regarding the former as the replacement of women by actresses or hypocritical imposters.58 Critical of all traditional gender constructions of his period, especially those smacking of Christian hypocrisy, he expressed, through an art of the self, uncompromising opposition to the life-stultifying norms, institutions, and myths that underpinned them. What feminist idoloclasts took from modern criticism of religion, principally that of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, was its attempt to overcome existential estrangement by reclaiming the human freedom and power that had been relinquished to a projective God. Although both secular and religious feminism presented a late modern criticism-of-the-criticism of religion as having liberated men from God without, or only incidentally, liberating women, it could still be deployed in the analysis of women’s alienation. Beauvoir’s 1949 account of ‘woman’ as a myth, a fantasy or idol, urged women’s resistance to their ontological relegation to a false idea, to the state of dolls they were given in early childhood for mimetic induction into patriarchy. Beauvoir used modern techniques of demythologization on

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femininity. She regarded the female idol ‘woman’ as a projection so necessary to the flourishing of patriarchal institutions that if ‘woman’ did not exist ‘man’ would have had to invent her, as indeed he had. Her argument paralleled the modern criticism of religion, which had also noted, with some justification, that if God did not exist he would have to have been invented, and that the only justification for his shortcomings was that he did not exist. Husbands and fathers had arrogated their power over women from God whose fatherhood was an inflated version of their own. Women could read the modern liberative turn through Beauvoir as an incitement to reclaim the freedom and power they had relinquished to a male projection that would grind out their individuality into more and more of the same. This was the feminist response to a nightmare that haunted the modern imagination, namely that the world is becoming a factory of replicants, a population of forms that look uncannily like one another; who are just too perfect a copy to be a naturally imperfect original.

Smashing mirrors and other anarchies in the realm of the eternal feminine Even before Feuerbach, the feminist notion of woman as a mirror onto the face of patriarchy – as a reflection and a projection rather than a self-subsistent reality – could be found in Mary Wollstonecraft’s notably theological criticism of Christianity as failing to live up to its own belief in the creation of all human beings in God’s image. On grounds that put reason and theology to one another’s service, women and men had protested the theological and philosophical defamation, and the legal and cultural circumscription, of the feminine since at least the seventeenth century.59 But even before Feuerbach had pointed out that the idea of God is to be a magnifying mirror to man, Wollstonecraft understood that feminine artifice and weakness is the result of being trapped in a claustrophobic world of the reverse mirror image. In her, a man visualizes his desire and expands into the god-for-woman that his world order requires him to be. Similarly, in 1929, Virginia Woolf observed that, over the centuries, the role of women has been to serve as a flattering mirror whose magical power is that of reflecting a man back to himself with an image twice his natural size.60 Mary Daly and others took the metaphor further, conceiving of women under patriarchy as Magnifying Mirrors, reflecting all the cultural and spiritual distortions of their masters.61 Sheila Rowbotham’s 1973 recollection of her childhood preoccupation with mirrors is something of a preface to this book: When I was a little girl I was fascinated by the kind of dressing-table mirror which was in three parts. You could move the outer folding mirrors inwards and if you pressed your nose to the glass you saw reflections of yourself with a squashed nose repeated over and over again. I used to

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Introduction wonder which bit was really me. Where was I in all these broken bits of reflection? The more I tried to grasp the totality, the more I concentrated on capturing myself in my own image, the less I felt I knew who I was. The mirror held a certain magic. The picture started to assume its own reality.62

Rowbotham observed that the women’s liberation movement had been a long time coming because ‘to start with we had consciously to recognize our femaleness and see through the existing versions of femininity which surrounded us. This was very difficult. There were distorting mirrors everywhere’. Women’s subjection to the unrelenting propaganda of what Friedan, some ten years earlier, had called the ‘feminine mystique’, had set Rowbotham the task of dissuading women from ideologically induced contentment with their lot, which was not merely unsatisfactory, but illusory.63 Whereas modern philosophy understood the dignity of the self as its consciousness of being an autonomous ‘I’ recognized by other autonomous subjects as a ‘you’, feminists argued that a woman is not an ‘I’ – is not free – while she still bears the image of the man who gazes at her and sees only an image of himself, at home in his world, organized for the satisfaction of his need, vanity, and desire. As pure exteriority or surface, she is nothing without his gaze. As we shall see in the second chapter of this book, Firestone especially denied that a man’s love for a woman can be other than aesthetic if she is reduced to an appearance. A man’s love for an image can only be a compliment paid, narcissistically, to himself. Firestone therefore urged women to smash their own image not only because it occluded their becoming, but also because it occluded love. When women are constantly glancing into the mirror of patriarchy, anxiously checking to see if they look ‘right’, namely, a sufficiently pleasing approximation of a feminine aesthetic norm, they are seeing not themselves but a stranger to themselves. They are looking for an image of a woman’s face superimposable on their own. When that mirror had been smashed, they would be able to look, instead, directly, without patriarchal mediation, at one another and see an image of themselves. It was thus that Mary Wollstonecraft concluded a work of 1787, paraphrasing Paul: ‘our faculties will expand, and not mistake their objects, and we shall no longer “see as through a glass darkly, but know, even as we are known”’.64 Smashing the mirror of patriarchy was, if it could be done at all, nothing short of a world-historical moment. Women might, it was thought, see who they were, and who they might be, for the first time since their creation. In a western culture, the first chapter of Genesis stabilizes the human image. It does so by the creation of original, non-replicable, and absolutely egalitarian images of the male and the female. In Genesis 1, God, who cannot be imagined, let alone imaged, creates all human beings, male and female, not just the monarch (as was customary in the ancient Near East), in his own image. The possibility of idols is primordially obviated. After

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Genesis 1, truthful images of the human as finite and equal – as not manmade – presented all idoloclasts, including Christian and Jewish feminist idoloclasts, with a natural critique of their distortion. Yet, as outlined in the prologue to this book, the second chapter of Genesis is the more culturally prevalent account of the genesis of woman, and it is here that woman is created as an image of woman, not in the image of God. She is created for the sake of man, that is, created in the image of his requirement, and it is this that primordially estranges women from their full humanity. Second wave feminist thinkers’ engagement with objectifying images of women therefore needed to do something more radical than make honorary men of women within institutions unruffled by feminism. The women’s liberation movement was not just a bid for equality of opportunity or even for autonomy. Its radical politics were necessarily a religious politics. Liberal feminism’s struggle to end sexual discrimination was part of a more radical revolution against a cosmically grounded polity in which the parameters of female being were set by the ends of male becoming. Feminism was not a sociology. It was an ontological struggle. The women’s revolution overturned not only the material conditions by which female labour was exploited by patriarchy as its bio-domestic means of production, but also the ontological and spiritual conditions by which patriarchy reproduced women themselves as objects whose bio-domestic reproductivity was now their only means and possibility of becoming women. To identify idoloclasm, as this book does, as a foundational praxis of women’s liberation, is not to ignore feminism’s different historical, social, and intellectual contexts. It is to suggest that all feminisms converge in respect of the view that, as Arthur Brittan and Mary Maynard put it in 1984: ‘domination always involves the objectification of the dominated; all forms of oppression imply the devaluation of the subjectivity of the oppressed’.65 Second wave feminism offered the clearest and most uncompromising critique of female objectification as a stoppage of the human into a thing. The objectification of women, it was argued, denied them full autonomy, agency, and self-determination (demonstrably so when, for example, patriarchal institutions denied women the right to terminate a pregnancy). To say that women are objects rather than unique persons is to say that they are fungible: interchangeable with other female objects. It is also to say that they are violable, that is, they can be treated without respect for the integrity of their bodily boundaries. A woman’s mind and body can be operated upon by a variety of agents regardless of her feelings because, traditionally categorically cognate with children, slaves, and animals, she is not the speaking subject of her own experience.66 Before any physical indignities, this was the ontological indignity of the feminine condition. To objectify a woman is to cast her as that which is seen rather than seeing; silent rather than speaking, legislated rather than legislating. Male subjectivity has been canonically articulated in theology, philosophy, law, literature, and art in which women’s subjectivity is either irrelevant or silenced,

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rendered down to a problem, anomaly, or unattainable ideal. The idolization of the feminine is a de-realization of the self because it voids the self of agency, replacing the conscious, willing subject with an object who desires what its creator desires. Patriarchy, as a worldview, not a collective noun for men, is paradigmatically idolatrous. It does more than promote a set of crude stereotypes and poor role models for girls.67 To be a woman qua projection is to be an object who comes into social visibility, value, and self-knowledge at the flick of a masculine switch, in and as the shadow of the male subject. For the feminine to come into being as the ‘opposite sex’ disables the process of female becoming. It makes her what Germain Greer, in 1970, dubbed a ‘female eunuch’ – a ‘parodic fake woman’,68 devitalized into a range of domesticerotic utilities – dishwashers, incubators, and so forth – that hollow out female being into the form of its function. It was more than just vaguely immoral for one male person to use another female or feminized person as a means to their own end. A radical variant of second wave feminism, best known in the work of Andrea Dworkin, regarded the patriarchal ideology of femininity as, in the end, a pornography: woman’s thingness – her entire phenomenality – was comprehended and de-visualized as a dark passage, no more than a punctured hole or zero. When the history of religion and philosophy denied women their full rational and moral agency it did so in contemplation of that lack, not women themselves. Philosophers, priests, rabbis, and theologians had no idea of who women might be because they had never thought, or wanted, to ask them. Women have therefore received the world from another point of view. Feminism knew that no one has access to unmediated truth, but it wanted each woman to see the world through her own eyes because a person who cannot even try to do that is not in possession of a self who is confident to speak her own mind. She is ideologically alienated or inhabited by someone else. Idoloclasm, both dramatic and quietly insistent, cut across the patriarchal monologue. Breaking women’s idol would break the silence or, more precisely, muteness, of that which has been turned into a thing. Release from their idea would allow women to breathe themselves into communicative speech. It would liberate the patriarchal Word about them into myriad women’s words. Women would begin to speak for and on behalf of herself as an ‘I’.69 Whether the female ‘I’ was possible while women remained inside the institutions that socialized girls into women – at that time, female education towards marriage and motherhood – was a matter of debate. Like other secular leftist feminists of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Alison Jagger urged that women’s liberation was predicated first on the ownership of their own consciousness and then on the practical ownership of their intellectual and reproductive labour.70 Therefore, as Rowbotham also proposed: ‘in order to create an alternative an oppressed group must at once shatter the self-reflecting world which encircles it and, at the same time, project its own image into history’.71

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If idols are fictive ideas that ‘take control over people and their lives, and the breaking of idols means the uncovering of the fictional and illusive character of these creatures of the imagination’,72 then idoloclasm had to be the primary method of women’s liberation. Creatures of the patriarchal imagination formed a composite figure of ‘woman’ – a gender tradition whose claims about women’s bodies, intellectual capacities, emotional range, and temper are bound into the mere outline or suggestion of a woman. In other words, feminism fought not only ownership and control of women’s reproductivity by the state and the Church through heterosexual marriage, it fought the reproduction of women themselves. ‘Anarchism in the realm of the eternal feminine’, to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase, disrupted the production of this mass-reproducible sexual-domestic commodity and invited her into a noisy, diverse, modern movement of individuals united in their political opposition to monocultural, as well as hierarchical, social and natural environments.

Is feminist idoloclasm just a second wave period piece? The principal focus of this book is the literary and artistic idoloclasm of the anglophone second wave, which is usually periodized as running from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s. The book’s discussions are contextualized in some discussion of the third wave period up until about 2010, when the fourth wave began. References to Mary Wollstonecraft’s late-eighteenthcentury writing are made as a way of gesturing to the second wave’s origins in modern emancipatory thought. It is customary to define the women’s liberation movement, which intersected with the civil rights and peace movements, as a network of feminist activists who lobbied and marched for political and legal reform; that established grass-roots consciousness-raising and other support groups, refuges for ‘battered’ women, journals, magazines and literary, academic, and artistic circles. This book focuses less on women’s liberationists’ direct action than on the affective manifestation of its critical turn as operative within the history of modern religious and cultural criticism. For any whose index of sexual-political progress is the professionalization of middle-class women (which has been on more or less masculine terms), this book would be about the past. There would be reason enough to think that feminist criticism of (privileged) women as the bored ornament of culture, and the rest no more than patriarchy’s drudges, offers no less an outdated set of images than the traditional ones they protested. Yet by the end of the twentieth century, with the rise of new digital and cosmetic technologies, women were coming under renewed pressure to conform their appearance to that of an unattainable feminine ideal that must be pursued from youth to the end of middle age.73 Well into the new millennium, women continued to publish books exploring the problematics of stereotypical female role construction using arguments continuous with second wave thought.74 Third

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wave theoretical studies of the 1990s regarded a binarized idea of gender, rather than the idea of the feminine as such, as a vector of social inequality. But a close, if acrimonious, conversation with the second wave continued. Even if second wave aspirations to self-realization had been philosophically problematized, conformity to empty gender norms that refused gender’s own diversities were still the object of resistance. The liberation and realization of the female self was, of course, a characteristically modern feminist project. Much of its energy was directed at social expectations of women that no longer obtain. Contemporary women who make claims on what was once male moral, rational, artistic, and professional territory are seldom considered importunate. Nonetheless, I would not have troubled to write this book if I thought that the modern existential project of female self-realization and self-possession was without philosophical, ethical, and cultural value and relevance. Indeed, one of the intentions of this book is to raise some questions about the price of the postmodern, third wave feminism that superseded second wave feminism. Third wave feminism’s readiness to jettison the idea of a self with interiority, integrity, and authenticity in favour of the performativity of surface alone seemed to have jeopardized the ethical valency of earlier, more urgent, feminist calls to justice and solidarity predicated on the relational nature and impulse of a self-owned subject. I am hardly the first to have pointed this out, but in this book I have used second wave feminist idoloclasm as a means of revisiting the prophetic energy of feminism. Perhaps, too, my research into the second wave has been a re-search for myself as a British woman in the embattled early 1980s, not long past her teens, her political convictions, activities, solidarities, and friendships now filtered through memory tinged with a certain nostalgia. But it is also written in the conviction that postmodernism, whose academic heyday I also lived through, did not take ideology seriously enough, even though the latter’s reactionary force was no less powerful than when it was first theorized.75 I have never regarded the second wave as ‘over’ or discontinuous with other periods of feminist thought before or since, especially with regard to contemporary issues and campaigns relating to women’s appearance, sexuality, and reproductivity as they intersect with a hyper-sexualized mass culture and conservative religion. The explosive force of the idoloclastic project is dissipated by over-zealous distinctions between different types and periods of feminism. So it is not as a history, but as a phenomenology, that this book is written. And it is written in the conviction that, as Helen Freeman put it, the feminist past has energies as yet ‘undetonated’.76 In fact, it was often difficult to know what tense to use when writing parts of this book. On the one hand, openly misogynistic views are no longer in cultural circulation other than within the most conservative religious communities, and even in those, few would be unaware that their views on gender offend modern sensibilities. It is now rare for anyone other than ultra-conservative religionists to assert that sexual difference is entirely

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binary and natural, let alone ordained by God. Even if some, like Sheila Jeffreys and Germaine Greer, whose feminist identity was formed by the second wave, are unwilling to accept that hormones or surgery can make a man into a woman if s/he has not grown up with its predicaments, that gender is increasingly legally and self-defined is an undoubted victory over tyrannously prescriptive gender ideology. On the other hand, the current feminist renaissance testifies to the evident truth that the modern amelioration of the human condition has not run in a straight line towards a kinder, more rational future. Far from being of merely complacent historical interest, second wave criticism is highly pertinent to contemporary assaults on human dignity that include modern slavery, human trafficking, and a range of digitized pornographies instantly available to children the world over. Patriarchal power is concrete, not merely discursive, as the postmodern mood had suggested, and it is systemic, not episodic. There has been a worldwide swing to the cultural, political, and religious right that has re-licensed the dehumanizations of sexism, racism, and homophobia. Climate change; the persistence of despotic political rule in countries that pretend to democracy; ultra-conservative homophobic and misogynistic religion; ever wider disparities of wealth; the development of artificial ‘intelligences’ that are a global threat to human employment and security, are all contributors to, or indicative of, fourth wave intersectional feminists’ claim that ‘everyday sexism’ remains a depressingly familiar feature of women’s lives.77 Many of the fourth wave’s campaigns renew those of the second wave for the new conditions of the digital age, where women feel that their inviolable subjectivity – their ‘freedom to be a person, with the dignity, integrity, nobility, passion, pride that constitute personhood’78 – is still not globally or always even locally achieved. Such is a ‘vision of the self in relation to others which men and women have fleetingly glimpsed within the feminist community’, but seldom beyond it.79 It is, perhaps, in the sex, diet, and beauty industries where most feminists would agree that new technology allows women to be created, once again, in the image of a patriarchal idea, the alienation of the female face and body taking on an ever more spectacular and uncanny doll-like appearance of the same.80 The normalization and digital dissemination of pornographic ideas of women (pornography being less a product than a worldview) has abjected the feminine on a scale and to a degree unprecedented in human history. If, as has already happened, technology were to replace even one woman with a gynoid robot programmed, marketed, and owned by men, examination of how twentieth-century women collectively rehumanized themselves would be of more than historical interest. This is not to say that the manuals of prescribed femininity are unchanging and unalterable. In the nineteenth century, for example, female biological processes were unmentionable in polite society. (Before the late nineteenth century, public lavatories were not provided for women because middle- and upper-class women were expected to remain at home or, if at large, to be

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too ladylike to answer any call of nature or to be seen to enter a building in which they might do so.) The alienation of ‘respectable’ female flesh from its aesthetic idea was often extreme. When the eminent Victorian art critic and philosopher John Ruskin married Effie Gray in 1848, he effectively married an idol. For when, on their wedding night, so the legend goes, he realized she was not made of alabaster but was a woman of flesh with pubic hair who was probably menstruating, Ruskin was so perturbed that he was unable to consummate the marriage. Understandably, Gray turned for love to John Everett Millais, who better appreciated that she was a woman, not a statue, and with whom she went on to have eight children. Although female beauty has always been adulated, fashions in women change. In the nineteenth century, women’s good character was as or more important than her looks: self-control, moderate piety, and moral virtue played a far larger role in conformity to the ideology of femininity than it does today.81 In the nineteenth century, the vanity or vacuity of the bourgeois feminine was sermonized as women’s impressionability; idleness would leave them vulnerable to bad influences if without useful domestic occupation. In contemporary mass culture, moral perfections are of incidental value relative to physical ones. But it is also less candid about the processes of the female body than might appear. Only celebrated beauties are encouraged by magazine editors to expose their pregnant bellies. Lactation and, even more so, ageing must be hidden from public view. It is still the case that when a woman looks at herself in the mirror and wishes her shape, the colour of her skin, or the texture of her hair were different, she is measuring a significant part of her worth against an idol of the feminine. Whether this idol is her ideal, amortal self or some other culturally-politically fantasized and mediated composite perfection, its image is at least a rebuke to her, the more so as she ages. The fashioning of the figure may change over time, but whenever a woman attempts to approximate the figure of the prevailing ideal, its shadow stands over and against her to the point of it becoming unclear who is becoming who, or what. Second wave feminism was right, I think, to locate the cause of women’s dis-ease with themselves – their too often not liking themselves – as the internalization of an admonitory voice and surveillant eye. In failing to be that which will always overshadow them, women risk the humiliations and ostracisms of otherness. Ideological compliance produces a body whose self-discipline is, visibly, its own reward. Ideology intends a woman to devote her best energies to the improvement of her image rather than the political conditions of her own and others’ lives. One of the main reasons for the third wave turn from the second (and first) wave as outdated, skewed, or simply wrong was the latter two waves’ apparent over-generalization of ‘women’s experience’. By the 1990s, earlier feminisms’ account of women seemed too static, too much an idealist criticism of idealism. Patriarchy, it was claimed, was treated as a monolith that victimized all women in the same way, irrespective of race, class, and

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geography. Yet twentieth-century feminist idoloclasm was the very opposite of an essentialist move. The assertion of a truth is not necessarily the assertion of an essence. Germaine Greer understood the open-endedness of feminism as a riposte to patriarchy as itself the ultimate essentialism: ‘we know what we are, but know not what we may be, or what we might have been’.82 The attempt to de-realize natural (female) difference and industrialize its reproduction into more of the standardized same was precisely protested by feminists as the enforcement of an idea that exceeds and exhausts the reality it represents. Although second wave feminism has been criticized as an attempt to speak for all women, to this extent it was an attempt ‘to speak of difference and from difference’. It refused to collude with non-inclusive generalizations about human beings and sought to make space for women’s contributions on their own terms, no longer ‘trapped by categories not of their own making’.83 Granted, the idea of the feminine was not to be so entirely deconstructed that women and men would find themselves unable to engage actual injustices perpetrated against actual persons the world regards as women. But, as Susan Parsons noted, the point of religious feminism was precisely an encouragement to women ‘to join in the proliferation of transformations, in the many processes of making and remaking differences, as one expression of our sharing in the ceaseless creativity of the divine’. More generally, the feminist ‘vocabulary of subjectivity’, was a way ‘to call women forth in whatever language women might recognise as one of completion and truth’.84 When feminists, religious or otherwise, sought to be rid of false images of the feminine as objects of either adulation or abjection, the one being the obverse of the other, they were making a bid for the individuated humanity of women, not for any one female type. Theirs was a variant of twentiethcentury existentialism, in which the contingencies of existence precede any necessary essence or idea, not the other way around. The whole point of a feminist idoloclasm is that it does not reveal some unmediated shiny essence of ‘woman’ trapped inside her ideological shell or husk, whose character is a sexual given irrespective of time, place, and society, ‘squatting’, as Marx would put it, as an abstract being somewhere outside the world.85 Feminism is an affirmation of ‘the utter uniqueness of the human individual, whose particular configurations are unpredictable and continually surprising in beauty’.86 Far from prescribing what women should be, or, figuratively speaking, re-casting a new set of female forms in bronze, second wave feminist idoloclasm had much in common with the making of ephemeral art. Its new images of the feminine were un-ownable and un-marketable. Women’s presence would be beautiful in the now: resilient but finite, protean, breathing, free. Idols are everywhere broken so that culture cannot make monuments of living people or evacuate them into the objects of a covetous, agitated gaze; into spaces where it hoards value. As men have been quick to point out while I have been writing this book, they are also increasingly hurt and reproduced by their cultural idea as virile

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towers of strength and economic power, insensible to friability and grace. Fearful of poverty, mediocrity, and the ridicule of effeminacy, it has long been undeniable that ‘men are as afraid of being despised and rejected as we are’.87 Yet there is incomplete parity here. Even in a post-industrial age, where technology is making farmers, soldiers, miners, and other heroic figures of the masculine obsolete, men, crucially, have masculinity in common with God. For that and other reasons, they are defined by their active social and economic power, not the degree to which their pose might attract attention, desire, and reward. They are not celebrated for beauty alone. Men are not hyper-sexualized or reduced to the sum of their physical parts or the colour of their hair. They were not the objects of a world-constructing religious and philosophical tradition in which the feminine connotes that empty, dark, chaotic space of impurity and otherness, nature, death, and loss.88 Culturally, spiritually, and politically, women have not spoken with authority for men as if men were objects who could not and should not speak for themselves. Until only a few decades ago, women had been described and legislated in the third person by philosophers, rabbis, theologians, doctors, psychiatrists, writers, and artists as if they were not there. In the most conservative religious circles this is still the case. If patriarchal institutions have spoken for women who have, even now, only just begun to be authoritative, speaking, political and cultural subjects under limited and specific economic and geographical conditions, then it is hard to escape the conclusion that for most of their history, women have been regarded as, and sometimes felt themselves to be, somewhat less than a substantive reality.

The intrication of four waves of religious and secular feminist idoloclasm As a study of the criticism of the ideology of femininity in late-twentiethcentury anglophone feminism, this book cannot do justice to feminism’s manifold ethnic, geographic, and theoretical diversities. I have had to be selective, using sources only indicative and illustrative of feminist idoloclastic theory, literature, art, and praxis. In the interests of clarity, the discussion is loosely chronologically ordered by the four-wave model. Reference to ‘second wave feminism’ is in shorthand, gesturing to a liberationist mood that lasted for about 20 years from 1965 to about 1985. By then, the recognition that gender is a spectrum of sexualities and virtues, not a binary, had made non-reflexive discussions about undifferentiated ‘women’ seem not that much more useful than much older discussions about ‘woman’. However, this book’s reading of women’s liberation also defines it inclusively as a movement that, despite its variant forms and directions, has been continuously idoloclastic from its early modern and Enlightenment ‘wave zero’ to its digitally connected fourth wave, which is usually dated as beginning somewhere between 2008 and 2010.

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Useful as they are, these periodizations sometimes better serve the interests of tidy theorization than feminist historiography and its subjects. A ‘wave’ might be an organicist metaphor for a period of feminism but, in practice, it often assumes that the work of one generation of women has been undone or discredited by the next. It should be possible to acknowledge the sometimes dramatically different perspectives of feminist thought and praxis without requiring their isolation and burial in social, historical, and intellectual silos. Clare Hemmings is right that to parcel up and continually re-cite feminism’s decades into artificially discrete, sequential, generational, and institutionalized blocks produces supercessionist clichés: the now deauthorized essentialist feminism of the 1970s, the racially aware 1980s, and the 1990s as the more intellectually sophisticated decade of postmodernism and poststructuralism. Such periodizations delimit the creativity of feminist theory, locking in the richness and complexity of its cross-temporal conversations and activism.89 A linear model that relegates former waves’ insights and possibilities to a deactivated past, or a past that is in remission, obstructs inter-generational and international relationships between women. (Evidence of the strength of which was recently witnessed in rallies held in cities the world over in protest of the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in 2016.) I am also reluctant to hack feminism apart into over-distinct types (especially ‘liberal’ and ‘radical’ as if their interests and concerns never overlapped). Strong distinctions between liberal and radical, and religious and secular, feminisms are, at least in the case of idoloclasm, invidious, and misleading. Just as feminist waves have become boxes, religious and secular feminist thought and praxis finds itself divided into analytical categories not necessarily of its own making. It is a pity, born only partly of practical necessity, that most books about feminism are either religious or secular in focus and allegiance. In a sense, this book does the same and considers a period of about 40 years of religious feminism – Christian, Jewish, and post-Christian or neo-Pagan – in chapters of their own. This is because discrete discussions are probably more usable for their readers. But I have not adopted the more customary approach of examining religious feminism within the politics and practices of its respective religious institutions and communities. Instead, I have situated and interpreted these three religious feminisms within the theoretical context of the women’s liberation movement. It seems important not to wrench religious feminisms from the women’s liberation movement and focus only on their immediate engagement with their own religious traditions, as if the broader women’s movement’s liberation of consciousness had little or nothing to do with Judaism, Christianity, or post-Christian feminist spirituality. (It is notable that in The Second Sex, Beauvoir, whose feelings about religion were at best mixed, the only self-actualized women she could cite were saints such as Catherine of Sienna, Teresa of Avila, and

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Joan of Arc.90 Women mystics have been among the rare women in Christian history to have wielded a measure of political influence.91) Even though a substantial proportion of first wave feminists were Christians, often with evangelical sympathies, it is as if, by the second wave, the women’s liberation movement were suddenly an essentially secular phenomenon. Yet there is little reason to suppose that secular feminisms must be more relevant, radical, and free-thinking than religious ones. It is often, wrongly, assumed that religious feminism is the natural ally of conservative cultural feminism. The popular feminist forgetting of religion as an engine of redemption from slavery was well-established by 1969 when Kate Millett, for example, criticized patriarchy, reproduced and enforced through the family and mediated by literature, as having ‘God on its side’. Millett observed that patriarchal ideology is ordained and sanctified by religion. The male God divinises and humanizes male identity rather than, as with women, sexualizing it. Millett pointed out that it is essential to prove Eve guilty as it is her transgression that justifies patriarchal governance of female misrule.92 Millett’s criticism was hardly groundless, but her knowledge of theology was crude. She was not alone among feminists and other free-thinkers in her assumption that adherence to a religious tradition is, if only by virtue of its being a tradition, committed to the maintenance of the status quo. It was left to feminist scholars of religion and theology to remind women that religious people can be as sharply critical of God and the institutions that mediate him as atheists and secular humanists – and are so on the very grounds of belief. An anthology of Spare Rib articles from 1972 to 1978 illustrates my point. Only one short article by Sheila Rowbotham pays any heed to religion, making some useful historical observations about the history of women’s biblical counter-readings from the medieval through the early modern period, where seventeenth-century proto-feminist Puritan women used the Bible to fund their sexual egalitarianism and resist the backlash from their contemporaries. Apart from that, there is nothing. In an act of breathtaking secular revisionism, the editor of the anthology consigned religion – whose significance, directly or indirectly and for better or worse, in women’s lives cannot be underestimated – to one of several special interests that had to be omitted for lack of space.93 Even though the very title of this pivotal magazine, Spare Rib, was a jibe against the second book of Genesis, the same book whose first chapter has, again and again, funded claims to human dignity and equality, religion was set aside in favour of topics such as education, health, the arts, and paid work. Some of these under-theorized convictions about religion as reactionary or marginal reflect the prevailing, now obsolete, secularization theory that was in circulation in the 1960s and 70s, when the second wave broke. This was an era that privatized and reduced the religious habitus to a set of disprovable or unprovable propositions. It was an era that expected the process of post-Enlightenment secularization to have soon consigned religion to the archives of culture and consciousness. But secular and religious social

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criticism has always been more intricated than most secularists, whether through an informed judgement or untrained prejudice, would allow. Without ignoring their very different convictions and schemata, the religious and secular elements and moments of the women’s liberation movement should not be disaggregated.94 Secular feminism’s origins lie in substantial part in the religious criticism of culture. The Enlightenment’s political reforms, which were predicated on freedom of thought from the tyranny of tradition as a cosmically ordered set of inherited privileges, had their roots in liberal theology. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, built her belief that women’s rights will be finally, rationally, vindicated and ‘all will be right’ in this world upon her faith in the providence and perfection of God.95 Secular feminists reject, a priori, the existence of God and hence the divine ordination of sexual or any other kind of social inequality. But via Marxism, the radical politics of feminist liberation theology, cognate with Latin American and Black liberation theology in the latter part of the twentieth century, considered the God who ordains and polices the feminine as politically self-serving a fiction as secular feminists do. To that extent, secular and religious criticism of the role of religion in the sanctification of patriarchy is not essentially different. Religious feminists, no less than secular feminists, work for the liberation of women from intellectual, emotional, and reproductive bondage to bad religion, even if not from all religion. They share ancient and modern critical methods and narrative tropes, not least that of the redemption from slavery to tyrant powers operating as gods. The ethos, temper, and trajectory of religious and secular feminisms may often separate them,96 but the history of their relationships, campaigns, and theories can be so closely related that the one cannot be properly understood without reference to the other (if or when the one is the other). The philosophical and theological defamation of the feminine has not taken place somewhere outside civil society. Ideas about women as, among other things, the complement of men (rather than men being the complement of women); self-sacrificially enabling of their husbands and children; of such tender and natural sensibilities as to be passive vessels of evil as well as good; too light-minded and childlike to have moral principles or exercise rational judgement, are at least vestigial in contemporary westernized cultures. Unhelpfully rigid distinctions between the sacred and the secular, radical theisms and atheism, not only fail to do justice to the complexity of women’s lived experience, they are unhelpful to the cause of difference. Religion may be of marginal or even negligible immediate significance to many western European middle-class feminist theorists, but with the global resurgence of conservative religion since the late 1980s, contemporary feminist theory cannot afford to marginalize feminist studies in religion and theology as a niche interest. Not only does the excision of religion produce a thin account of the historical, creative, and political vision of the feminist movement,97 if

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intersectionality is to be taken as seriously as it deserves,98 feminist theory needs to acknowledge the pivotal role of religion. At once nourishing and toxic, functional and dysfunctional, women’s religion is the emotional, ethical, and spiritual foundation of the daily life of untold numbers of women around the world. Religious feminists, who know the best and the worst of religion from within, are aware that under specific readings and in specific historical contexts, religion can obstruct female becoming. But they also know that, as a life-shaping commitment to human flourishing, religion is not invariably repressive. Women’s oppression as captives to their false idea may be rooted in religion, but so is their liberation. It is facile to suggest that religious faith is only oppressive sexual politics prayed. Christian and Jewish feminists are so because they believe that their traditions’ attitudes to women have fallen short of their own prophetic ethic, an ethic that obligates them to countermand an unjust status quo, not reinforce it. Although this book does not, I think, stand or fall on the merits of this argument, it hopes to show that religious feminism is underpinned by a more radical feminist politics than is usually supposed. As a modern critical turn rooted in the religious criticism of culture, idoloclasm is one of the common denominators, perhaps the principal one, in the history of feminist criticism to the present day.

Notes 1 Grace Woodward, ‘Can a Feminist Love Allen Jones?’, November 17, 2014, www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/feminist-love-allen-jones, accessed 29.6.18. 2 See Nicholas Wroe, ‘Allen Jones: I Think of Myself as a Feminist’ (Interview), The Guardian, October 31, 2014, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/ oct/31/allen-jones-i-think-of-myself-as-a-feminist, accessed 31.5.18. 3 See Lena Mohamed, ‘Suffragettes: The Political Value of Iconoclastic Acts’, in Stacy Boldrick and Tabitha Barber, eds., Art Under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm, London, Tate Publishing, 2013, pp. 114–125. 4 Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, New York, Harper & Row, 1978, pp. 208–209. 5 Boldrick and Barber, eds., Art Under Attack, p. 17; Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, Abingdon, Oxon and New York, Routledge, 1992, pp. 34–42. 6 Susan Brownmiller, Femininity, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1984, pp. 24–25. 7 Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions, Boston, Beacon Press, 1979, p. 4. 8 In this I follow Jean-Luc Marion’s distinction between the translucency of icons and the opacity of idols. See God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1991. See further on Marion’s distinction between idols and icons, Bruce Ellis Benson, Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida and Marion on Modern Idolatry, Downers Grove, Intervarsity Press, 2002, pp. 190–195. 9 John Armstrong, The Idea of the Holy and the Humane Response, London, Allen & Unwin, 1981, pp. 12–13, 73–75, 166 and passim. See further Melissa Raphael, Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 106–111.

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10 See further Mayra Rivera, ‘Corporeal Visions or Apparitions: Narrative Strategies of an Indecent Theologian’, in Lisa Isherwood and Mark D. Jordan, eds., Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots: Essays in Honour of Marcella Althaus-Reid, London, SCM Press, 2010, pp. 88–90. Compare Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Transcendence, Idolatry and Secularization (Friday, February 6th, 1976)’, pp. 163–166. Levinas regards modern technological secularization’s destruction of the Pagan gods as a condition of the attainment of knowledge, but regards science as a secular idolatry of the same; as having made the world intelligible, banishing wonder with the banishing of ignorance: ‘we have here the birth of thought at the price of a narrowing, which gathers into a point the volume of the human body, which no longer projects a shadow’ (p. 165). 11 Moira Gatens, Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality, London and New York, Routledge, 1996, p. 38. 12 Gatens, Imaginary Bodies, p. 35. 13 Gatens, Imaginary Bodies, p. 39. 14 Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margolit, Idolatry, trans. Naomi Goldblum, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 1. 15 The Prophets, New York, HarperPerennial, 1962, p. 12. 16 After years of studiously avoiding the word ‘feminine’, I am now unwilling to abandon it to the realm of the girlish, ladylike, or otherwise ideologically approved qualities of female appearance or personality. Without ascribing determinate content to ‘the feminine’, I use it here as a noun referring to some self-defining value and quality of female difference that may include but is not reducible to biology. 17 ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, in Audre Lorde, ed., Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, Berkeley, Crossing Press, 1984 [1978], p. 54. 18 See e.g. Julia O’Faolain and Lauro Martines, eds., Not in God’s Image: Women in History From the Greeks to the Victorians, London, Temple Smith, 1973. 19 Lisa Isherwood, ‘Body Politics: A Theological Issue?’, Feminist Theology, 15 (1997), 75–76. 20 The British Empire, for example, was at the height of its power just after the First World War but, in the aftermath of the Second World War, anti-colonial nationalist movements played a central role in its rapid decline. ‘The Empire’ had helped the British to liberate Europe from German expansionism in two world wars and now expected self-government or independence in return. Or again, resistance to American cultural, economic, and political imperialism (for some, the expression of its ‘Manifest Destiny’) was at its peak in the 1960s. 21 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London and New York, Verso, 1989, p. 20. 22 István Mészáros, The Power of Ideology, New York and London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, pp. 10, 12, 21. See also 3–57 for a general discussion of the nature of modern ideology. 23 Sexual Politics, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2000 [1969], p. 26. 24 Changing of the Gods, p. 60. 25 Peter Wagner, ‘Introduction: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts and Intermediality – The State(s) of the Art(s)’, in idem, ed., Icons – Texts – Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality, Berlin and New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1996, pp. 17–18 and passim. 1–42. 26 Mary Daly, Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy, London, The Women’s Press, 1984, p. 95. 27 Nancy Frankenberry, ‘Philosophy of Religion in Different Voices’, in Pamela Sue Anderson and Beverley Clack, eds., Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Readings, London and New York, Routledge, 2004, p. 21.

44

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28 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 31–32. 29 Plato, The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Mineola, Dover Productions, 2000, Book VII, 514a–521d. 30 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 150. 31 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 152. 32 http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/abolitn/abwmat.html, accessed 20.4.17 or see Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Gage, The History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. I: 1835–1860, New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881. 33 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Arnold V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979 [1807], pp. 115–117; Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed., H.M. Parshley, Harmondsworth, Middx, Penguin, 1972 [1949], p. 17. 34 Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley and ed. Joseph O’Malley, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1970, pp. 131–132. 35 Julius Carlebach, Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism, London and Boston, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, p. 315. 36 Anne Foreman, Femininity as Alienation: Women and the Family in Marxism and Psychoanalyis, London, Pluto Press, 1977; Alison Jagger, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield, 1983; see further Janet Trapp Slagter, ‘The Concept of Alienation and Feminism’, Social Theory and Practice, 8 (1982), 155–164. 37 See ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’ in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3, New York, International Publishers, 1975, pp. 296–297. 38 Harmonsdworth, Middlesex, Penguin, 1986 [1894], p. 87. 39 See Alexandra Kollontai, Communism and the Family, London, Pluto Press, 1971 [1920]. 40 ‘The Woman Question: From a Socialist Point of View’, Westminster Review, 125 (January–April, 1896), 207–212, 219–222, www.marxists.org/archive/eleanormarx/works/womanq.htm, accessed 31.5.18. 41 The Female Eunuch, London, Paladin Press, 1991 [1970], p. 25. 42 The Female Eunuch, p. 369. 43 The Female Eunuch, p. 368. 44 Hampson, After Christianity, London, SCM Press, 1996, p. 173. 45 See further Ann Oakley, Housewife, London, Allen Lane, 1974. 46 The Second Sex, p. 219, see further pp. 171–229. 47 The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot, New York, Harper & Row, 1957 [1841], pp. 12, 14, 73. 48 ‘Divine Women’ [1984], in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian Gill, New York, Columbia University Press, 1993, p. 61. 49 Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods, p. 18; Mary Daly, Church and the Second Sex, Boston, Beacon Press, 1968, pp. 150, 186–70. 50 Sarah Nicholson, ‘Neither God nor Goddess: Why Women Need an Archetype of the Self’, Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, 7 (2012), 19–29, p. 20. 51 ‘Provisional Theses for the Reform of Philosophy’ [1843], in Lawrence Stepelevich, ed., The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1983, pp. 156–171. 52 Luce Irigaray, Key Writings, London and New York, Continuum, 2004, p. 166. 53 Anthony Julius, Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Jewish Art, New York, Thames & Hudson, 2001, p. 77. 54 Helen Scott, ‘Crime or Creation?: Iconoclasm in the Name of Art’, St Andrews Journal of Art History and Museum Studies, 13 (2009), 25. See further Willem van Asselt, Paul van Geest, Daniela Müller, and Theo Salemink, eds., Iconoclasm

Introduction

55 56

57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64

65 66

67

45

and Iconoclash: Struggle for Religious Identity, Leiden, Brill, 2007; Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French Revolution, London, Reaktion Books, 1997; Brenda Deen Schildgen, Heritage or Heresy: Preservation and Destruction of Religious Art and Architecture in Europe, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, Karlsruhe, Center for Art and Media, 2002; James Noyes, The Politics of Iconoclasm: Religion, Violence and the Culture of Image-breaking in Christianity and Islam, New York, I.B. Tauris, 2013. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols and the Antichrist, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Harmonsdworth, Middlesex, Penguin, 1968, p. 23. Irigaray comparably thought that in the absence of a divine-human figure made in the image of a woman’s own subjectivity, female being is distorted. Patriarchal colonization, she thought, ‘scatters’ women, leaving them ‘weak, formless, insecure, aggressive’, their minds and bodies given over to the other less for ethical reasons than because they lack self-awareness and authority. (‘Divine Women’, pp. 63–64, 68, 72). Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are, trans. Duncan Large, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2007 [1888, published in 1908] ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, section 5, p. 43. Francis Nesbitt Oppel, Nietzsche on Gender: Beyond Man and Woman, Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press, 2005, pp. 1–5, 15–16, 21–25, 190–191 and passim. For early modern challenges to the subordination of women, see e.g. Christine de Pisan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Rosalind Brown-Grant, London: Penguin, 1999 [1405]; François Poulin de la Barre, The Equality of the Sexes, trans. Desmond M. Clarke, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990 [1673]. A Room of One’s Own, London, Triad, 1977, pp. 35–36. Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of the Women’s Liberation, London, The Women’s Press, 1973, pp. 180–198. Cf., Irigaray, ‘Divine Women’, p. 8. Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin, 1973, p. 26. Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, pp. 3–4. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct in the More Important Duties of Life, London, J. Johnston, 1787, p. 160. The reference is to Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, 13: 12. See further Naomi Jayne Garner, ‘“Seeing Through a Glass Darkly”: Wollstonecraft and the Confinements of Eighteenth-Century Femininity’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 11 (2009), 81–95. Arthur Brittan and Mary Maynard, Sexism, Racism and Oppression, New York, Basil Blackwell, 1994, pp. 180, 199 and passim. Evangelia Papadaki, ‘Feminist Perspectives on Objectification’, in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2015. http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/win2015/entries/feminism-objectification, accessed 30.5.18. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, London, Fourth Estate, 2017, notes that even as powerful a woman as Hillary Clinton described herself on her Twitter account first as a ‘wife’, while her husband Bill’s did not describe himself as a ‘husband’ (p. 31). Men still rarely change their name and identity on marriage to that of their wife (pp. 34–35). A stereotype, whether socio-economic, sexual, racial, or a combination of all three, is cognate with an idol in so far as it is a sweeping generalization that concretizes and reduces individuals to a category, alienating them from their full and incommensurable humanity. Usually prejudicial, stereotypes attribute fixed,

46

68 69

70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

Introduction exaggerated characteristics to all members of a given othered group rendering the whole group an undifferentiated cause for fear and social, cultural, and economic discrimination. Overt sexual and racial stereotyping is no longer acceptable in polite society or in the institutions of a liberal democracy. The Female Eunuch, pp. 10–12. See Rachel Muers, ‘The Mute Cannot Keep Silent: Barth, von Balthasar, and Irigaray on the Construction of Women’s Silence’, in Janet Soskice and Diana Lipton, eds., Feminism and Theology, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 109–120. Muers’ essay adverts to the prophetic possibility of women’s elective silence, as distinct from the linguistic occlusion of the gagged. Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield, 1983. Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, p. 27. Moshe Halbertal and Avishai Margolit, Idolatry, trans. Naomi Goldblum, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 6. Greer Litton Fox, ‘“Nice Girl”: Social Control of Women Through a Value Construct’, Signs, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 4 (1977), 809–810. E.g., Estela Welldon, Mother, Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood, London, Free Association Books, 1988; Joan Smith, Different for Girls: How Culture Creates Women, London, Chatto, 1997; Natasha Walter, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism, London: Virago, 2010. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 19, 33. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010, p. xvi. Writing in 2017, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie notes that women are still too often defined in terms of their reproductive and relational status in ways that men are not. To be considered good-looking and likeable generally matters more to women than to be considered, say, courageous or inventive. In increasingly large parts of the world, female dress is not a reflection of a woman’s self-expressive taste but of her morality. Cultures expect a woman to look as sexually attractive as she can but not to be actively sexual. Even in cultures where equal rights and opportunities are fully legislated, the notion that a woman might propose marriage to a man is still considered faintly humiliating or comical. Most still wait for this life change to be initiated for her. (Dear Ijeawele, or a Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, pp. 31, 34–35, 37–38, 43–44, 52, 56.) See further, e.g., Kira Cochrane, All the Rebel Women: The Rise of the Fourth Wave of Feminism, London, Guardian Books, 2013; Laura Bates, Everyday Sexism, New York: St Martin’s Press, 2016. The Female Eunuch, ‘Foreword to the Paladin 21st Anniversary Edition’, pp. 10–12. Daphne Hampson, Theology and Feminism, Oxford, Blackwell, 1990, pp. 108–109. See Walter, Living Dolls, pp. 2 ff. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, New York, Random House, 1997, pp. 167–169. The Female Eunuch, p. 16. Susan Parsons, ‘The Dilemma of Difference: A Feminist Theological Exploration’, Feminist Theology, 14 (1997), 53–54. Parsons, ‘The Dilemma of Difference’, pp. 59–60. ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’ [1843–1844], published in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 7 and 10 February 1844, www. marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm, accessed 10.8.18. Parsons, ‘The Dilemma of Difference’, p. 59. Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, p. 43. The last years of the twentieth century saw the beginnings of men’s studies in religion which rightly complicated second wave assumptions about the historical and cultural stability

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90

91 92 93 94

95 96

97 98

47

of male sexual, spirituality, and emotional identities. See further Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus: And Other Problems for Men and Monotheism, Boston, Beacon Press, 1995; Stephen B. Boyd, W. Merle Longwood, and Mark W. Muesse, eds., Redeeming Men: Religion and Masculinities, Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 1996; Björn Krondorfer, ed., Men and Masculinities in Christianity and Judaism: A Critical Reader, London, SCM, 2009; Melissa Raphael, ‘Gender’, in John Corrigan, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Religious Emotion, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 181–200. Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 114. See Clare Hemmings, ‘Telling Feminist Stories’, Feminist Theory, 6 (2005), 115– 139 and idem, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2011, pp. 5, 15–16 and passim; Dawn Llewellyn, Reading, Feminism, and Spirituality: Troubling the Waves, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. The Second Sex, pp. 132, 135 and passim; Anne-Marie Korte, ‘Deliver Us From Evil: Bad Faith Versus Better Faith in Mary Daly’s Writings’, trans. Mischa F.C. Hoyinck, in Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Marilyn Frye, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000, p. 85. Irigaray, ‘Divine Women’, p. 63 (hers is an observation made in numerous other studies). Millett, Sexual Politics, p. 46ff. Marsha Rowe, ‘Introduction’, in Spare Rib Reader, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin, 1982, p. 21. For some women, feminism precipitated such a profound change of consciousness as to constitute a non-confessional spiritual experience in its own right (Cynthia Eller, ‘The Roots of Feminist Spirituality’, in Wendy Griffin, ed., Daughters of the Goddess: Studies of Healing, Identity, and Empowerment, Walnut Creek, CA, Altamira Press, 2000, p. 26). A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 43; Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, p. 150. The secularism of first wave feminists such as Annie Besant, inspired by their free-thinking foremothers such as Frances Wright and Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, inherited early-nineteenth-century Owenite feminist criticism of the abjection of women through the Christian idols of God and Eve. The criticism of patriarchal marriage and promotion of free love and woman’s suffrage shaped the secularist societies which were at least formally, and on principle, open to women as men’s equals. Secular societies had committed free-thinking women to the principle of free inquiry and later to the suffragist and suffragette movements of the early twentieth century. See Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1993 [1983]; Laura Schwartz, Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830–1914, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2013. See Dawn Llewellyn and Marta Trzebiatowska, ‘Secular and Religious Feminisms: A Future of Disconnection?’, Feminist Theology, 21 (2013), 244–258. In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a black legal scholar and human rights advocate, pluralized women’s experience by means of the concept of ‘intersectionality’. Contemporary intersectional feminism recognizes that the injustice and discrimination suffered by a range of people, not just women, occurs along axes of inequality and exclusion that include race, sexual identity, class, ability, and ethnicity.

1

The appearance of the feminine

On September 7, 1968, about 150 feminists organized by the New York Radical Women group assembled on the Atlantic City Boardwalk outside the venue for the Miss America Pageant and ritually crowned a live sheep, comparing the beauty contest to a livestock auction at a county fair. They also sold off a large Miss America puppet and threw mops, pots and pans, copies of Cosmopolitan and Playboy, false eyelashes, high-heeled shoes, curlers, hairspray, make-up, girdles, corsets, and bras into a ‘Freedom Trash Can’. By ritually dismantling and throwing away, piece by piece, the idol of ‘the most beautiful girl in America’,1 they were protesting patriarchy’s racist, classist, but otherwise aesthetically arbitrary, standard of beauty that reduced the very women it most promoted to entities whose ontological standing was somewhere between that of a doll and an animal. As Greer would write a couple of years later, ‘The gynolatry of our civilization is written large upon its face, upon hoardings, cinema screens, television, newspapers, magazines, tins, packets, cartons, bottles, all consecrated to the female reigning deity, the female fetish. Her dominion must not be thought to entail the rule of women, for she is not a woman . . . she is a doll’.2 Female beauty is political. One of the most persistent, if undertheorized, claims of second wave, and now fourth wave, feminism is that in a heterosexist culture female beautification is a cause and consequence of women’s subordination to men. Of course, any culture that can aestheticize its feminine ideal is a luxurious one, predicated on its having already met the more urgent demands of survival. Beauvoir notes that ‘the more relationships are concretely lived, the less they are idealized’.3 Modern patriarchy can afford a more elaborate feminine ideal than that of a woman expected to bear a child a year until she dies. In a prosperous modern culture, the essence and function of femininity can be ideologically defined in the more symbolic terms of a set of aesthetic qualities (prettiness or beauty). When their criteria are met, beauty so defined awards its bearer an at least notionally elite role and status, even to the point of re-paganizing her body as an image of the divinity the Abrahamic religions must destroy: a ‘goddess’. Naturally, particular idols of the feminine come and go. It is undeniable that contemporary posts in modern secular public institutions are more

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accessible to women, disabled people, and sexual and ethnic minorities than at any time in their history. A western or westernized female elite is being promoted in increasing numbers to the exercise of authority in the institutions of education, law, finance, and government. An attractive appearance may be strongly in a woman’s favour, but her suitability for the job is primarily judged on the basis of her qualifications and expertise. But even today, and in a culture where images have as much or more power than words, femaleness attracts temporary attention to itself by qualities of appearance before those of personality. That is, the aestheticization of the female body, where its appearance takes precedence over its substance, limits a woman’s social and political impact to the affective dimension before that of the ethical or political. The female body’s conformity to an idea, or failure to do so, locates her primary sphere of operation within that of the spectral and the spectacular. Even to the present day, to fall significantly short of the aesthetic ideal is to run the risk of entering the category and state of those with no image at all. In an insatiably scopophilic culture, to be imageless is to languish, in a sense, to die, outside the charmed circle of belonging, outside the ambit of social, sacral, and cultural regard.4 In a dispensation in which goods from material objects to romantic love are secured on the open markets of desire, to project the right image is an almost unavoidable precursor to their achievement.

The aestheticization of the feminine (or oppression by ‘the figures of beauty’) The kind of human beauty in which a face and body meets and then exceeds all the criteria of an aesthetic norm confers a faux-sanctity on a woman that sets her apart from the common female run. It exempts her, notionally, if not actually, from the profane domestic labours that woman is otherwise created to undertake. That beauty relieves the ordinary burdens of female labour and offers access to a potent combination of material privilege and romantic excitement is why, at least since early modernity, the notion that an ideal woman is a beautiful one – a princess – has captivated women from childhood to old age. Because the perfect instantiation of any ideal is, necessarily, freakishly rare, women must ‘suffer to be beautiful’. That a woman might fail to squeeze her foot, as it were, into the impossibly small ‘glass slipper’ of beauty is, to varying degrees, the cause of anxiety, envy, low self-esteem, and various forms of mental ill-health and self-harm. That the majority of women are or have once been ‘oppressed by the figure(s) of beauty’5 in pursuit of an aesthetically acceptable but transient quality of appearance that will afford some quality of existential fulfilment – a pursuit that may, in the event, cloud their existence with a chronic longing to look like some else – is no less a moral problem than any of the far more drastic and acute causes of human affliction. Indeed, it may be regarded as a symptom of the systemic suffering produced by a whole politics of alienation.

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The appearance of the feminine

In the nineteenth century, young middle-class women were conscious of their appearance and took pains, for example, to cultivate an appearance too pale and dainty to be mistaken for that of a female labourer.6 In late modernity, a far more socially pervasive preoccupation with female appearance demands that one of the primary activities of a young woman is that of the cultivation of a minutely specified image. And it is in that image that her impact and telos resides, not her rational, moral, or otherwise creative agency. Persuading a woman to value the power of attraction over other competences is the work of an ideology. It is the means by which she will learn to subject herself, as much as others will subject her, to a reductive judgement of women’s personal worth, one whose aesthetic character psychologically and politically enisles women while it culturally collectivizes them. Over-rewarding conformity to an idea of female beauty alienates female being from becoming because it renders down female personhood to a resemblance of femininity that is always and everywhere the same. In Islam, a work of art that casts a shadow, namely, a sculpture or relief, may be regarded as an idol. So too, by analogy, when the female body is turned into a three-dimensional work of art this not only leaves those women whose body is not considered art in the cultural shadows, subject to discrimination of various kinds,7 but also leaves beautiful women over-shadowed by their own idol, ghosted, unknowable. The idea of beauty has exhausted her being by aestheticizing it away. Its figure stands over and against her own person. What feminism has variously argued is that when the self is packaged as an aesthetic, that is, essentially spectacular phenomenon, a gift only to the glance, there is more than a risk of its arriving damaged. It is by encouraging women’s ‘dissatisfaction with the body as it is, and an insistent desire that it be otherwise, not natural but controlled, fabricated’,8 that femininity becomes a cultural confection: a substitutive idol or moulding fiction by which ‘woman’ can be patriarchally styled in ways that fix or deny subjectivity. As Firestone would have put it, after Marx, beauty makes women patriarchy’s ‘useful idiots’. Beauty romanticizes the female condition. It transmutes a real female body into a representation of a feminine ideal. An image is ideological in so far as it not merely mirrors its object, but interprets it by a distortive (perhaps inflated or diminished) reflection of its nature and form. An idol is an image of an entity that alienates its qualities by fetishizing them, attributing to that image or its parts greater, or other, powers than its object would naturally possess. Numerous feminist commentators have noted that women in the Christian West lack a stable, usable iconographical tradition that would enable them to identity the cultivation of a centred self with the appearance and operation of an ordinary female body. Female beauty has been at once reviled by ascetic religion as a sign of the ‘femaleness’ of natural, unclean, materiality, and a worldly temptation whose seductive threat is defused only by a woman’s virginity, marriage or death,9 and venerated in the pagan, chivalric, and secular cultures that coexist with Christian ones. In both cases,

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51

whether demonized or glorified, an ideology of femininity as appearance over substance is an attack on its reality and its truth. Clearly, given the right educational and social opportunities, contemporary women can achieve economic, cultural, and political leverage through the deployment of a range of competences that have little or nothing to do with their looks. It would be offensive to suggest otherwise. But it is the location of feminine power in a fantastic appearance that occludes the historicity of women by stopping the body in youth. It is the aesthetic idea of a woman that renders femininity, not specific women, not merely impossible but fictive. Where the cultural value of femininity is aesthetic, the vast majority of (relatively) natural female bodies situated in ordinary (profane) time and space are consigned to cultural sub-visibility. The ideology of femininity as an enchantment of the eye consigns women whose appearance is not especially pleasing to a vast third order of existence within a female ontological order that is already secondary to the male. And even the cultural mark made by a tiny visible minority of hyper-visible women at once demotes and promotes them to the incidental sphere of the ornamental and the imagined. Lisa Isherwood is right that while an older Christian metaphysic did not ‘let us live in our skins’, in modernity, a remarkably similar secular metaphysic has emerged which accords the body an inordinate importance yet seems still to posit ‘a body that is not really there. We are still confronted with make-believe bodies, bodies that have no true value in themselves’, but which remain heavily freighted with cultural meaning.10 Irigaray made a similar point: ‘Female beauty is always considered a garment ultimately designed to attract the other into the self. It is almost never perceived as a manifestation of an appearance by a phenomenon expressive of interiority – whether of love, of thought, of flesh. We look at ourselves in the mirror to please someone . . . rarely for ourselves and in search of our own becoming. The mirror almost always serves to reduce us to a pure exteriority – of a very particular kind’.11 ‘Women’, wrote Elizabeth Grosz, ‘have been objectified and alienated as social subjects partly through the denigration and containment of the female body’.12 A culture puts only its most beautiful things on display. The display of women idolized for their beauty makes an exhibition of them as objects of power and wonder. After Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir’s theorization of the idolized woman (the attribution of magical fertility to ‘woman’ compels men to worship the women for whom they feel sexual desire) laid the immediate foundations for Shulamith Firestone and Germaine Greer’s critique of gynolatry – the idolization of the feminine as a figure of beauty. That an idolized woman is designed, not born, entails that her function and meaning is controlled by her manufacturer. Under patriarchy, to idolize a woman is to hand ideology the remote control of her machinery. By the time modernity had turned natural fecundity into a system of managed industrial production, the production of sons was no longer the sole purpose of the feminine. As a cultural adornment, femininity became emblematic of a

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gender order in which the masculine owns and controls the assets of female reproductivity and ‘female’ nature itself. As such, where masculine technology, not female biology, manages and ensures the survival of a population, sexual beauty, rather than mere fecundity, is women’s best chance of social promotion. But such a promotion is symbolic, not substantive. As Beauvoir put it, ‘All of the idols made by man, however terrifying they may be, are in fact subordinate to him, and that is why he will always have it in his power to destroy them’.13 Images of Mother goddesses with gaping vulvas have long vanished or been pornographically re-purposed. The ideology of femininity now requires no more and no less of a woman’s phenomenality than its being visually admirable. It is beauty, not reproductivity, that wins a woman attention.14 The origins of second wave criticism of the idolization of women lie too deep in the history of theological and philosophical criticism of the idolization of the human to be rehearsed in a single chapter of a book. Of immediate relevance, though, not least because of his intimate and intellectual relationship to Beauvoir, is Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenology of the self-alienating indignities of exposure to another’s mediating, judging, appraising, objectifying look.15 For different reasons, Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas also construed the objectification of persons as a kind of murder. While those twentieth-century continental philosophers whose work made significant efforts to protect the face from its idolization can only be sketched here, it is worth referring to Martin Buber’s early philosophical theology which celebrated the spiritual creativity of the animated, speaking, dancing, selfimagined life of the human as an embodied hypostasis or shape (Gestalt) of presence that reveals itself without determinant substance and content and without western philosophy and spirituality’s hierarchical separation of ideation and flesh.16 Buber died just as feminism’s second wave was breaking, but his relational philosophical anthropology, which refused any reification of the human to an ‘it’ rather than a ‘Thou’ and set all images of the human in open, dialogical relation to the world around them, was familiar even to those who had never read his work. As feminist idoloclasts later did, Buber located human estrangement in the separation of being (Sein) from seeming (Schein) where a carefully arranged, even duplicitous, image of the self is presented to the other as propaganda in place of its being and becoming.17 And he was not alone in his concerns about human alienation in and by their images. Levinas’ ethic, while troubling to many feminist philosophers (though not all) had set an intentionally counter-idolatrous agenda by the middle of the twentieth century. In his 1948 essay, ‘Reality and its Shadow’, he could barely countenance the production of images of people lest they fall prey to substitution by closed caricatures.18 ‘Caricature in the most perfect image’, Levinas wrote, ‘manifests itself in its stupidness as an idol. The image qua idol leads us to the ontological significance of its unreality’.19 Levinas regarded photographs of people, especially close-ups of their faces,

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as lethal insofar as they flatten, disincarnate, and extract a person from their context; interrupting, completing, exhausting, and forgetting their reality in the stoppage of a single image of hallucinatory dimensions.20 The aestheticization of the human as no more than its representation is, for him, its ethical dead end: mere entertainment, it stifles responsibility to the face/presence of the other who suffers.21 The nudity of the face is that of a face turned as an ethical appeal to the other, without reference to a system.22 The face is not spectacular; it is itself properly self-cancelling or idolocastic: ‘the face of the other destroys and surpasses at every moment the plastic image that it leaves behind’.23 There are also contemporary commentators – Claudia Welz, Stephen Pattison, and Roger Scruton among them – whose work, whether sympathetic to feminist criticism or, like Scruton, at best wary of it,24 has Christian commitments that set it on a parallel critical trajectory to that of feminist idoloclasm. Stephen Pattison’s recent theology of the face makes an impassioned plea, in a time of ‘cultural blindness’, for us to learn ‘to see the faces of God and of humans better’; to perceive the face as the mystery of ‘“a deep, but dazzling darkness”’; as ‘what might be seen of God in the external perceptual world’.25 In gender-critical conversation with this essentially theological counteraesthetic, all waves of feminist cultural criticism, including those that do not invoke God, have asked who creates and controls our images of the feminine, and how these images function ethically in both the life of the individual woman and in the socio-political order. Central to feminist cultural criticism and to feminist philosophical anthropology has been the notion that patriarchy is an instrumentalist system that must dehumanize women and all ‘racial’ and economic others in order to effectively exploit their bodies as the machinery and the fuel of their power. But the primary patriarchal dehumanization that abjects women by their elevation is that of their objectification or aestheticization. The more women are perceived as good stock which, in modernity, amounts to, more than it is manifest in, a conformable physical appearance, the less important the particular merits of their personality become. Female beauty is standardized and co-opted as a cultural sign of another, if primary, natural body appointed to the service of a male socio-political order. Moira Gatens may be right that all bodies are culturally imaginary, but that the principle sign of an ideal woman is her physical perfection or beauty is a dehumanization because it makes of her an exhibit or specimen. Less imagined than fantasized, she is abstracted from her own possibility.26 Modern men’s appointment to elite status is variously signalled, but one of them is their capacity to form relationships of unequally distributed power with women of exceptionally high aesthetic value who are almost always younger, shorter, smaller, and less wealthy than themselves. These female bodies are medals, literally, decorations, awarded to men in recognition of their place of honour at the top of a social hierarchy. In contractual

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exchange for her beauty, the hierarchy provides her body and the children it bears not only with a better chance of survival than plain bodies,27 but with all the privileges of a fantastically decorative life to match that of her person.28 Feminism, often dismissed as a politics of envy and (wildly) misrepresented as a campaign of the ‘ugly’ against the ‘beautiful’, regards the aesthetic objectification of women as a primary political demotion. Its roots are theological. Patriarchy, summoning the power it has projected onto the god it calls God, creates women in the image of its own desire in order to secure the dominion over her that God has granted to him in the third chapter of Genesis.29 In remaking the feminine in the reversed mirror image of the masculine, man has become God, for it is only God who has the power to create a human being. The female figures of beauty that are ‘the work of men’s hands’ are idols.30 And the purpose of an emulatory idol is to make mimetic gods of its devotees. The body whose beauty is the crown of a patriarchal order is a false figure of the divine for it has, in fact, no power to arrest its own or its devotees’ deterioration over time. It will die. As the modern human conquest of nature became more certain and the human lifespan began to lengthen, female temporality became something of a cultural aberration. Women had to take pains to avoid time’s natural breakage of the idol of femininity. The aesthetic ravages of their finitude were to be arrested before its exposure of truth cost the feminine its power, sexual power being the only power most women have ever had. When an older woman’s looks have ‘gone’ she must pass out of cultural attention or view, just as women of unexceptional appearance have never been in it.31 The exclusion of women whose bodies do not, or no longer, meet certain aesthetic criteria from public visual spaces is a form of cultural and political disenfranchisement. But more basically, it is an ontological reduction of a woman’s substance to another absence. If she cannot be put on erotic display, she must be put away. Again, it is not beauty as such to which anyone could object, but the promotion of one kind of beauty as the visualization of a feminine ideal that accords some actual women the privileges of existential and cultural appearance, and supresses the appearance of actual others to the point at which they cease to appear in, and therefore to act on, the world. When women have the will (and the wealth) to retain a supernatural appearance of youth, it is because they have signed a self-cancelling cultural contract: they must stand outside the historical world in order to be visible within it.

The sexual politics of female beauty At least since the end of the eighteenth century, when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote about cosmetic beautification as the vacation of female power, feminist theorists have denied that women are empowered by it: ‘It is this system of dissimulation . . . that I despise. Women are always to seem to be this and that . . .’32 If women are ‘taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s

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sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming around its gilt cage, only seeks to adore its prison’.33 Female power becomes ‘absolute [only] in loveliness’.34 It becomes, wrote Wollstonecraft, ‘scarcely possible to divine what remains to characterize [her] intellect’.35 Observing that boys’ toys encourage activity, Wollstonecraft noted that girls are ‘fonder of things of show and ornament; such as mirrours (sic), trinkets and dolls: the doll is the peculiar amusement of the females; from whence we see their taste plainly adapted to their destination’.36 It is the nature of this beauty to be something that adorns something else. And because it is non-intrinsic, the inordinate efforts required to maintain beauty beyond youth become the occasion and excuse by which to deny the feminine its rational and moral seriousness of principle and judgement. Again, female beauty is now less a sign of appointment to biological services than cultural ones: ‘the American woman’ for instance, ‘who would be men’s idol, makes herself the slave of her admirers; she dresses, lives and breathes, only through men and for them’. Beauvoir’s phenomenology of the feminine may, like Wollstonecraft’s, betray a certain distaste for the female and a fascination with the freedoms and privileges of masculinity,37 but that may owe more to her anger at the abjection of femaleness than her internalization of its misogyny. Because a woman has been demoted to ‘a false Infinite, an Ideal without truth, she stands exposed as finiteness and mediocrity and, on the same ground, as falsehood’.38 Women must destroy the false goddesses (or, more recently, the beauty queens) annointed by patriarchy – the ideational grounds of their subordination and de-realization – before those idols destroy them. In The Dialectic of Sex, published in 1970, Shulamith Firestone developed Simone de Beauvoir’s account of the idolization of women, affirming that the pressure on women and girls to measure their appearance against an unrealizable ideational norm is politically intentional. Firestone, irritably, warned that patriarchal aesthetics standardize female being into conformity with a vacuous norm: ‘When women begin to look more and more alike, distinguished only by the degree to which they differ from a paper ideal, they can more easily be stereotyped as a class: they look alike, they think alike, and even worse, they are so stupid they believe they are not alike’.39 Conversely, because a man is not defined by his looks, the more uniquely individual he appears to be.40 That he is under no compulsion to cultivate an appearance confers the ‘natural’ authority of cultural and political substance upon his presence. Like other types of modern criticism of idolatry, Firestone’s theorization of the economy of beauty was inflected by Marxism. In a patriarchal culture, the quality of beauty was, and remains, one that more women and men will desire than can ever possess. As Firestone pointed out, ‘Every society has promoted a certain ideal of beauty over all others. What the ideal is unimportant, for any ideal leaves the majority out; ideals, by definition, are modelled on rare qualities’. As soon as the majority can ‘squeeze’ themselves

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into the ideal, the ideal changes. If it were attainable, what [ideological] good would it be?41 Contemporary with Firestone, Harvey Cox’s radical criticism of culture argued that beauty contests initiate all women, not just the contestants, into a modern cult of infinite upward mobility. Each crowned ‘Queen of Commodities’ can generate almost limitless anxious purchases of goods and services because hers is a body forever just out of reach: an unattainable body inhabiting an unattainable life.42 In a competitive social and cultural economy whose profit and growth requires the exploitation of labour and resources and values objects on the basis of their scarcity, not their plenty, female beauty is a natural sexual currency in which patriarchy can trade.43 Where the aesthetic value of the female body was once an index to its yield, in modernity, the aesthetic value of the female body supplied not only erotic satisfaction and children but other indices of masculine success as well. For reasons such as these, Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, and other second wave radical feminists could describe the treatment and condition of women as that of ‘entities to be taken and possessed – walking, talking currency’.44 Yet The Dialect of Sex is far from puritanically disparaging of female beauty per se. Firestone merely sought to define a beautiful face ‘in a human way’, asking ‘does it allow for growth and flux and decay, does it express negative as well as positive emotions, does it fall apart without artificial props – or does it falsely imitate the very different beauty of an inanimate object, like wood trying to be metal?’45 Attempts to reduce the female body politic down to one single perfectly sexuate body through dieting and other restrictions on the flesh long predated the twentieth century.46 One of the first second wave feminists to popularize criticism of the twentieth-century diet culture was the psychotherapist Susie Orbach. In her 1978 Fat Is a Feminist Issue she claimed that it is gender inequality that makes women ‘fat’. Women put on weight as they might armour: it is an act of rebellion against the objectification and idealization of women. Under such an assault, some women choose to make a tactical retreat of the self behind the defences of its flesh.47 Encased by their flesh, they become, in effect, an obverse image of the idolized woman. Similarly, Kim Chernin identified women’s food cravings as, on the one hand, meeting sensual needs that delight in food and feel nostalgic for the security of maternal flesh, and on the other, as meeting a need to fill and console the emptiness that is femininity left imaginally and politically under-nourished by patriarchy. A woman in her twenties explained to Chernin how she had gained weight trying to bulk out or fill her interior void by food. Personality is the first casualty of a culture of objectification. Chernin quotes the young woman as saying, ‘There is no “I”. . . . There’s just an immense hole at the centre. An emptiness. A terror. Not all the food in the world could fill it. But, I try’.48 Although radical feminist critiques of the cult of female beauty such as those of Una Stannard’s ‘The Mask of Beauty’ had been in circulation since

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the beginning of 1970s,49 it was only during the early 1990s that the popular feminist critique of the diet culture found a mass readership and was followed by a cognate critique of the beauty industry.50 Both critiques were closely related to the second wave feminist critique of pornography, all of them typified by Susan Bordo’s contention that the reproduction of femininity is governed by the norms and expectations of female bodies operative in a given period. Whether by the curvaceous women symbolizing well-fed, nurturant mothers in the hungry aftermath of two world wars, or by lean female executives symbolizing the possibility of success in a masculine, late twentieth-century corporate environment of material surplus, social rules are ‘culturally transmitted more and more through the deployment of standardized visual images’ of women.51 Michel Foucault’s historical sociology of the modern disciplinary powers exercised through eighteenth-century European educational, penitential, and medical institutions proved useful to Bordo and other late second wave and early third wave feminist theorizations of an auto-disciplinary diet and beauty industry. Foucault had charted the gradual redundancy of ideology’s exterior mechanisms as people learned to monitor, discipline, and punish themselves. A modern ideology of femininity can better encourage and monitor female consciousness through the attractive images mediated by popular culture than by direct admonitory force. Chernin (who, it is difficult to resist noting, came into the world in 1940 with her Jewish mother Rose reading Clara Zetkin’s On the Woman Question between contractions)52 was one of the first feminists to advert to the connection between the rise of the women’s liberation movement and that of the diet and beauty industries. Chernin asked, ‘why do we find debilitating conflict [about food and weight] when we might expect freedom and liberation?’ Why is there ‘an epidemic’ of psychological and physical suffering among women ‘at this extraordinary moment when women are stepping out to claim a place for themselves in the world?’53 But it was the publication of Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth in 1990 that established a popular feminist consensus that the diet industry is a central instrument of the backlash against women’s liberation. Just as women had won the battle to expand their impact on the world through a range of new professional opportunities, political solidarities and reproductive rights, late modern patriarchal ideology had staged a counter-offensive. A woman’s individuality could be arrested and contained by expanding the scope and range of the existing diet and beauty culture. A compliant female will is the precondition of a compliant feminine body. ‘Beauty’, Wolf argued, ‘is one of the last remaining of the old feminine ideologies that still has the power to control those women whom second wave feminism would have made otherwise relatively uncontrollable. It has grown stronger to take over the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity can no longer manage’.54 Under the conditions of a late capitalism that is capable of global ownership and exploitation of human and natural resources, vast sums could be made in

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the renewal of patriarchal control over female sexuality, its ancillary nature symbolized as the reward and decoration of men’s leisure. (Only recently has the use of half-naked women draped over the decks and bonnets of luxury boats and cars on display at shows, thrown in, as it were, with the sale, begun to look decidedly outdated.) Radical feminism presented a particularly urgent critique of the ideological programming of women who might fondly imagine themselves to be free, but whose being has been at least intentionally reduced to a twodimensional function of culture.55 One of the casualties of that ontological reduction is a dysmorphic body image. A dysmorphic body image is a mental idea or image of a body that misperceives its actual dimensions. Boys and men can also suffer acutely from a loss of confidence and self-esteem when they negatively evaluate their bodies relative to an ideal. But the primary ideological and economic target of the diet and beauty industry is women. Where women had won access to contraception and legalized abortion, and toleration of some measure of pre-marital sexual experience, their sexual as well as intellectual, cultural, and political self-expression could be demoted by the ever-wider dissemination of demeaning pornographic projections of sexual dominion onto the female body.56 More routinely, women could be demoted by what Wolf called ‘beauty pornography’. In cultures where public nudity is not permitted, women seldom see other naked women’s bodies. Images of naked or semi-naked female bodies may be all around them, but these bodies are not truly naked. These are images of women who have been idolized into: ‘identical humanoid products based loosely on women’s bodies’.57 These images teach a woman that she must be constantly self-vigilant in her attempts to achieve and maintain beauty before she can be sufficiently confident to assert and express her sexuality without shame – without hiding or apologizing for her nakedness; for herself.58 By 2000, Nancy Etcoff had denied that female beauty is a cultural or political construct devised to thwart feminism. Her sociobiological study presented the capacity to perceive beauty as innate rather than learned and as universally and perennially cultivated to signal fertility and attract a successful mate. However, late second wave feminist opinion might be forgiven for thinking that sociobiology is used as a scientific naturalization of patriarchy and a justification or excuse for its ethical deficiencies. Feminism did not deny that beauty is advantageous to female survival in a Darwinian patriarchal order. What it claimed was a direct correlation between the rise of the women’s liberation movement and the rise of a diet and beauty industry that far exceeded the psychological and physical reach of ordinary grooming. Wolf argued that a putatively universal, objective quality of regularity in female bodies described as ‘beauty’ was being increasingly licenced to assign value to women. So much so, women had begun to feel better equipped to gain access to resources largely controlled by men by their beauty than by their relational, intellectual, and practical competencies.59 The imagination of women in ever more homogeneous and diminutive forms had curtailed

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their cultural and political empowerment through a self-surveillant regime of reward and punishment. This backlash against the successes of the women’s liberation movement successfully induced in women at worse, an obsessive and dangerously disordered preoccupation with food as a means of controlling their appearance, and at best an anxious self-consciousness: ‘told to develop her mind, she is simultaneously bombarded with messages that reinforce the ancient message that her body is the primary source of her power, that she is primarily decorative’.60 Under this backlash against feminism, in which a woman is made to compete physically against her own and other women’s image, rather than economically and culturally with men, an ideologically necessary gap must be maintained between the false idea or idol and the actuality of most women’s bodies. Beauty must be her first ambition, not economic or political power.61 In a patriarchal, post-platonic world in which material reality is an imperfect version of the formal ideal, women’s psychic energies were to be rerouted into a struggle for a perfection that keeps images of bodies ‘out of sync’ with their average reality.62 The deepening alienation of a body image from its reality causes almost all women to experience emotions ranging from mild dissatisfaction to chronic anxiety, acute unhappiness and disturbed eating patterns at some point in their life, and often throughout it. Body dissatisfaction leads to vulnerability to depression and impaired selfesteem.63 Although some have suggested that there is insufficient evidence for a clear causal link between mass culture’s unrelenting exhibition of ideal bodies and body dysmorphia or dissatisfaction,64 most would argue that women’s body image (and increasingly men’s as well) is a strong indicator of their self-idea and a measure of their self-worth.65 Two-dimensional images of visually improved people, predominantly women, are virtually inescapable in industrialized cultures. By virtue of their detachment from reality, they aesthetically exceed and stand in judgement on ordinary three-dimensional bodies. The focus of body anxiety might vary from, say, breast and hip size, to the texture of hair and the whiteness of teeth, but its effects are the same. What Luce Irigarary called ‘self-affection’ – ‘the capability of staying in oneself with a positive feeling’, which is a nonnarcissistic condition of embodied spiritual autonomy,66 is not possible when the mirror ‘freezes our becoming breath, our becoming space’.67 Constant critical appraisal of the body is not only self-objectifying. It produces an alienation or division of consciousness that turns the body into a theatre of aesthetic civil war. Women may have been permitted to discard the tightly laced corset in the first decades of the twentieth century but, internalized, it is all the more insidiously effective a means of constricting the mental and physical operations of the female. Persons and bodies are not two separate things. Germaine Greer’s 1999 book, The Whole Woman, identified women’s desperation to conform to a single aesthetic standard of youth and symmetry as evidence of a tyranny that punishes not only old and plain women,

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but all women. Beauty’s standard is set so high that it ensures that every woman will privately find herself unacceptable. Those women’s liberationists who had not fallen prey to complacency after (premature) declarations that the movement’s work was done, would be entirely unsurprised by the fact that most cosmetic ‘procedures’ are performed on women and ‘virtually all the people carving women into acceptable shapes are men’. After all, ‘if the woman-made woman is never good enough, the man-made woman is no better than a toy, built to be played with, knocked about and ultimately thrown away’.68 More than just the trivialization and contortion of female embodiment, the aestheticization of femininity has been both a symptom and a cause of male (and female) misogyny. Patriarchal culture idealizes beauty because the female anatomy is an object of fear and disgust. Its real biological processes must be contained and veneered. Gynophobia inducts women into disgust and fear of deviant bodies (most of all, their own) that have betrayed their idea. Greer wrote that until a woman can drive the ‘plastic spectre out of her own and her man’s imagination she will continue to apologize and disguise herself’. At the same time, women are usually less forgiving of their own bodily imperfections than their partners’ imperfections. Less inclined to idealize men, they are more inclined to affectionate toleration of his ‘pot belly, wattles, bad breath, farting, stubble, [and] baldness’. Unlike women, Greer observed, a man expects to be loved as he is. While his age-related deteriorations may not be considered particularly attractive or distinguished, Greer wrote that that women ‘must make exorbitant efforts to appear something that could never exist without a diligent perversion of nature’.69

Later feminist theorizations of female appearance The second wave theorization of the sexual politics of beauty, early and late, has not gone unchallenged. It has been argued that any social being will at least partially acquire his or her identity and sense of self exogenously through perception, mirroring, confirmation, recognition by others, and self-invention and performance. Most people’s public face is necessarily, even enjoyably, different to their private one. And it is not alienation, but the nature of a mind to observe, even monitor, its own body.70 It might further be objected that the aesthetic regime has changed since Firestone and Greer’s youth. Women have, after all, been weaponizing beauty since at least 1962, when Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl encouraged women to control and deploy their own appearance as a means not to marriage, but to pleasure, social power and economic independence through dieting, make-up and the liberal application of peroxide.71 Although protests against airbrushed images and cosmetic anti-ageing procedures are now increasingly widely aired,72 Laura Mulvey’s well-known second wave critique of patriarchal aesthetics as situating women as the passive object of the male gaze, was later modified by herself and qualified

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by other feminist theorists to the point of rejection. Intersectional factors of sexuality, race, and class complicate any simple binarization of the active male subject-viewer and the passive female object of his possessive gaze.73 Men, as well as women, increasingly feel themselves culturally and personally subjected to an interrogatory gaze that assesses how far their person matches up to the object that gaze projects. In such a culture, women as well as men can and do observe other women and men with a cold, dissecting, sometimes languorous, but always minutely critical, eye. By the 1990s, ‘third wave’ feminism had articulated a Foucauldian phenomenology of power as diffuse and shifting rather than absolutely possessed and deployed by one group of (male) subjects who use power to coerce another group of (female) objects. This (justifiable) complication of the gender binary undermined earlier feminist criticism of the asetheticization of women. Third wave feminist theorizations of power were persuaded by Foucault’s view that ‘we must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms’: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production’.74 In the light of this theoretical redistribution of a shifting, non-absolute, power, third wave feminists refused to accept second wave claims (especially evident in Dworkin, Daly and other radical feminists’ theorization of patriarchy) that all women’s minds and bodies have been colonized by men. To theorize female embodiment as the object of gynolatry would seem to postmodern feminists to be at best an underestimation of women’s agency that cedes too much to a monolith called ‘patriarchy’ and leaves women as passive or colluding victims with pitifully little resistance to the evacuation of their personality or will. Ironically, second wave theorizations of the body seemed to have reified women hardly less than the patriarchy against which it rebelled.75 After Foucault, Judith Butler’s 1990 Gender Trouble was not so much a protest against the aestheticization of women but a kind of embrace. She properly denied that ‘woman’ is a compulsory, essential, reifiable substance – ‘gender norms are finally phantasmatic, impossible to embody’, but went on to say that, genders are neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent, neither original nor derived’.76 There is no ‘truth’ about women from which ‘illusion’ alienates them. Feminism, Butler felt, is undermined, even precluded, by invoking the category of woman. ‘What sense does it make’, she asked, ‘to extend representation to subjects who are constructed through the [heterosexist] exclusion of those who fail to conform to unspoken normative requirements of the subject? . . . Perhaps, paradoxically, “representation” will be shown to make sense for feminism when the subject of “women” is nowhere presumed’.77 It is arguable that in her efforts to question the category of ‘women’ as the subject of feminism, she also derealized female appearance all over again by describing it as performative:

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an ‘effect’ or ‘free-floating artifice’ of multiple and repeated institutional and discursive practices. There is, she claimed, no binary between an inner pre-discursive self and an outer cultural body from whose image women must be liberated. Whereas this book, in the manner of the second wave, regards the patriarchal image or idea of ‘woman’ as false and substitutionary in so far as its cultural performance or impersonation is not only coerced but actually distortive of an interior self, she regarded gender itself as a self-deconstructing cultural performance or ‘stylized repetition of acts’ that can be owned or subverted by abolishing the distinction between interiority and exteriority. Gender is ‘a kind of persistent impersonation that passes for the real’.78 Not dissimilarly, Linda Grant’s 2009 The Thoughtful Dresser was but one example of the third wave celebration of dressing-up; of the assemblages of the feminine that equate self-ownership with self-invention. Claiming that women have no depth without surface, her book was an homage to the elaborate communicative powers of her mother’s lovingly curated wardrobe from whose dark depths an accessorized self; a character inimitably her own, emerged. With rather too scant a regard for those women who cannot afford to satisfy all or many of their sartorial whims, Grant observed that women do not always shop and outfit themselves to fill an inner void of boredom or despair, but because it is a skill and they enjoy it.79 Paula Black also argued for the diet and beauty industry as offering more opportunities for the refreshment or reinvention of the self than for its degradation.80 In fact, second wave feminism did not claim that there is anything inherently wrong with the pampering and ornamentation of a self-loved, even occasionally self-indulged, body. Quite the contrary. Cosmetics were not moralistically condemned as artifice but criticized as a means to disguise a face, that is, a self, considered unfit be seen in public, and sometimes even by a partner, without them. (‘Repulsive’ was the word one of my intelligent and attractive female undergraduate students recently used in class to describe herself without make-up.)81 Nonetheless, over the course of the early twenty-first century, the celebration of style – of a woman’s capacity to be the wardrobe-mistress of her own theatre – became more characteristic of third wave feminism than second. The third wave offered an important corrective to some of the second wave’s bleaker pronouncements on female beautification. Yet the third wave’s insistence that women were at liberty to choose whether and how they beautified, and its denial that there are philosophical or political grounds for moral judgements on those who choose to remake themselves in any image they like, even hyper-feminine ones, curbed protest against the diet and beauty industry. Political and emotional connections between women were variously broken in this period; those who felt far from empowered by idolized images of female beauty lost the voice of their common cause. Fourth wave feminists have recently rediscovered and, being more attentive to intersectionality, improved upon, second wave feminism. Fourth

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wave feminism’s post-postmodern (sic) engagement with the normalization of pornography and of cosmetic surgical procedures which suggest that ‘natural’ women are sexually uninteresting or aesthetically unacceptable, does not reject second wave criticism of the diet and beauty industry, but rather wants it to better succeed.82 Sheila Jeffreys, for example, has recently, in classic second wave style, interpreted ubiquitous beauty practices such as the waxing and plucking of body hair; the injection of muscle immobilizing poisons into the face; surgical inflation of breasts and labia, and the crippling effect of high heels – bunions, hammer toes and shortened calf-muscles – as forms of culturally prescribed self-harm.83 While the less invasive, painful, and expensive of these are accepted by most women as the routine chores of maintaining their appearance, Jeffreys construes them as ways of hobbling female becoming and marking women’s sexual difference as a reproductive underclass. Or again, in 2010 Natasha Walter published an influential popular critique of the newly airbrushed and surgically exaggerated, hypersexualized images of women as ‘living dolls’ whose impossible form girls are taught to emulate.84 It seems difficult to deny that, to a lesser or greater degree, girls continue to be socialized from a very young age into seeing themselves and others as something to be and become looked at. Whether in two dimensions or three, they are encouraged to present themselves as an image, not through one. This is not necessarily a self-celebratory image. More often than not, that image is a petition for attention that amounts to an aesthetic valuation of their person.85 Young women grow up either aspiring to be, or consciously resisting the aspiration to be, an object of desire; to becoming not so much themselves as the image of an ideal. It is not to bifurcate the mind and the body to suggest that if contemporary culture spent a fraction of the energies it devotes to the appearance of its bodies to the cultivation of its minds and hearts, the world might be a more hospitable place. Lovely apparitions are of little spiritual and political use in the building of a better world for and alongside actual others.

Notes 1 Jo Freeman, ‘No More Miss America 1968–1969’, www.jofreeman.com/photos/ MissAm1969.html, accessed 12.4.18. 2 The Female Eunuch, pp. 68–69. 3 The Second Sex, p. 289. 4 See further Melissa Raphael, ‘Idolatry and Fixation: Modern Jewish Thought and Prophetic Criticism of the Technologically Perfected Face in Popular Culture’, The International Journal of Public Theology, 7 (2013), 135–156; Melissa Raphael, ‘A Patrimony of Idols: Second-Wave Jewish and Christian Feminist Theology and the Criticism of Religion’, Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Religions, 53 (2014), 241–259. 5 The phrase is Leonard Cohen’s from his 1974 ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’, written of Janis Joplin: ‘I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel/you were famous, your heart was a legend/You told me again you preferred handsome men/but for me

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10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24

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The appearance of the feminine you would make an exception/And clenching your fist for the ones like us/who are oppressed by the figures of beauty/you fixed yourself, you said, “Well never mind, we are ugly but we have the music”’. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project, pp. xix–xx. Deborah L. Rhode, The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law, New York, Oxford University Press, 2010. Greer, The Female Eunuch, p. 293. Margaret Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West, New York, Vintage, 1991, p. 144. See further Lisa Isherwood, The Fat Jesus: Feminist Explorations in Boundaries and Transgressions, London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 2007, pp. 30–31; Wioleta Polinska, ‘Dangerous Bodies: Women’s Nakedness and Theology’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 16 (2000), 45–62, p. 49. The Fat Jesus, pp. 35–36. Luce Irigaray, ‘Divine Women’, p. 65. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994, p. xiv. The Second Sex, p. 105. The Second Sex, p. 373. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes, London and New York, Routledge, 2008, pp. 276–326. See also Claudia Welz’s discussion of dignity and the phenomenality of the human as that which, whether in a religious context or otherwise, must not be reduced to the index of its visibility alone (Humanity in God’s Image, pp. 243–254). See Zachary Braiterman, The Shape of Revelation: Aesthetics and Modern Jewish Thought, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. ‘Elements of the Interhuman’, in The Knowledge of Man, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith and Maurice Friedman, New York, Harper & Row, Second edition, 1966, pp. 72–88. ‘Reality and Its Shadow’, trans. Seán Hand, in idem, ed., The Levinas Reader, Oxford and Cambridge, MA, Blackwell, 1989 [1948], p. 3; Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1995 [1961], p. 198. ‘Reality and Its Shadow’, pp. 12–13, 137. Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1978 [1947], pp. 52, 55. ‘Reality and Its Shadow’, pp. 11, 14. Totality and Infinity, pp. 74–75. See further Peter Schmiedge, ‘Art and Idolatry: Aesthetics and Alterity in Levinas’, Contretemps, July 2000, http://sydney.edu. au/contretemps/3July2002/schmiedgen.pdf, accessed 31.5.18. ‘Reality and Its Shadow’, p. 3; Totality and Infinity, p. 51. Scruton’s caricature of gender studies is regrettable if for no other reason than that, from a feminist perspective, so much of his criticism (particularly of pornography and of ecological and aesthetic degradation) defends the right values for the wrong reasons. Nonetheless, his sense of defacement as an affront to humanity is not dissimilar to this one. See e.g. The Face of God: The Gifford Lectures, London and New York, Continuum, 2012. Saving Face: Enfacement, Shame, Theology, p. 14. See also pp. 7, 46, 151. Pattison describes the predicament of a woman who could no longer respond facially to others after suffering a stroke. With a ‘wooden’ face, she felt herself fade away as a person (p. 7). And no wonder: ‘if you cannot see a person’s real face and associate it with their identity, then relationships of openness and trust become very problematic’ (p. 46).

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26 Cf., Arthur Asa Berger, Television as an Instrument of Terror: Essays on Media, Pop Culture and Everyday Life, New Brunswick and London, Transaction Publishers, 2007 [1980], p. 137. See Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat, New York, Doubleday, 1990 [1986], pp. 3–4 and passim on dieting as less in pursuit of a particular weight than in pursuit of a fantasy. 27 Nancy Etcoff, Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty, New York, Knopf Doubleday, 2011. 28 Andrea Dworkin, Woman-Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality, New York, Penguin, 1974, pp. 29–46. 29 The first chapter of Genesis suggests that humanity’s ‘dominion’ over nature is consequent on its being the bearer of God’s image. See Genesis 1: 26; Genesis 3: 16. Cf. Psalm 8: 6–8. 30 Ps. 115: 4. See also Deut 4: 28; Ps. 115: 4; 135: 15; Is. 44: 9–20; Jer. 10: 3–9. 31 E.g., the ‘Women, Ageing and the Media’ project, www.wam-research.org.uk; Maggie Wykes and Barnie Gunter, The Media and Body Image: If Looks Could Kill, London and Thousand Oaks, Sage, 2005. 32 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 156. 33 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pp. 82–83 (italics mine). 34 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 93. 35 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 94. 36 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 132. Very young girls are still given realistic baby dolls by which to mimetically socialize them into motherhood by feeding, washing, and nursing their plastic bodies. Later, by dressing their teenagegirl dolls and arranging their limbs into artful poses, girls are inducted into being the potential objects of aesthetic admiration. 37 See Julia Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness, trans. Jeanine Herman, New York and Chichester, West Sussex, Columbia University Press, 2012, p. 104. 38 The Second Sex, p. 218. 39 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003 [1970], p. 144. 40 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, p. 143. 41 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, pp. 143–145. 42 ‘Miss America and the Cult of the Girl’, Christianity and Crisis, 21 (1961), 143– 146; ‘Playboy’s Doctrine of Male’, Christianity and Crisis, 21 (1961), 56–58, 60. Cox’s critique of idolatrous sexual politics is best understood within the context of his criticism of capitalist economics. See further Harvey Cox, The Market as God, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2016. Some contemporary female-oriented celebrity blogs and social media sites are effectively shops selling clothes, beauty products, health foods, travel, and home décor showcased by the celebrity’s body and in the privileged sphere in which thatbody is situated. 43 See, from a Christian perspective, Bernd Wannenwetsch, ‘The Desire of Desire: Commandment and Idolatry in Late Capitalist Societies’, in Stephen Barton, ed., Idolatry: False Worship in the Bible, Early Judaism and Christianity, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2007, pp. 315–330, and ibid., Graham Ward, ‘The Commodification of Religion or the Consummation of Capitalism’, in Stephen Barton, ed., Idolatry, pp. 302–314. 44 Ariel Levy, Introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse, New York, Basic Books, 2006, p. xiii. 45 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, p. 147. 46 Significant historiographical sources on dieting written during the second wave period include Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia, Chicago and London, Chicago University Press, 1987 [1985] and Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat, New York, Doubleday, 1990 [1986].

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47 Orbach recently observed: ‘When I first started, not every woman had an eating issue; not everybody had a body dysmorphic problem. Now everybody does, but they don’t bother to talk about it’. She added, ‘I wouldn’t have predicted the international dimension. I wouldn’t have thought that you’d be going to China and seeing billboards of western women projecting that hey, fuck-me look, selling back to the Chinese the clothes that were made in their factories. It’s a form of imperialism, isn’t it? We’re exporting body hatred all around the world. That’s something I did not expect’. Zoe Williams, ‘Susie Orbach: Not All Women Used to Have Eating Issues. Now Everyone Does’, The Guardian, February 22, 2016, www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/feb/22/susie-orbach-fat-is-a-feministissue-body-dysmorphia-china, accessed 10.8.18. 48 The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity, New York, HarperPerennial, 1986, p. 20. 49 In Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, Women in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, New York, Mentor Books, 1971, pp. 187–203. 50 See e.g. Kim Chernin, Womansize: The Tyranny of Slenderness, London, The Women’s Press, 1983; Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, University of California Press, 1993. 51 ‘The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault’, in Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo, eds., Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989, p. 17; Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 208. 52 Jerilyn Fisher, ‘Biographical Essay on Chernin, Encyclopedia of Jewish Women’, http://kimchernin.com/bio/, accessed 26.4.18. 53 The Hungry Self: Women, Eating and Identity, London, Virago, 1986, p. ix; Womansize: The Tyranny of Slenderness, London, The Women’s Press, 1983. 54 The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, London, Vintage, 1991 [1990], pp. 10–11. 55 Woman-Hating, p. 157. 56 Dworkin, Woman-Hating, pp. 51–90 and Pornography: Men Possessing Women, London, The Women’s Press, 1981. 57 Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p. 136. 58 Wolf, The Beauty Myth, pp. 132–133. 59 Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p. 12. 60 Ruth O. Saxton, ‘Introduction’, in The Girl: Constructions of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women, Basingstoke and London, Macmillan, 1998, p. xxi. See also Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women, New York, Broadway Books, 2006 [1991], pp. 181–210, on the role of the fashion industry in what she calls, ‘dressing the dolls’. See also ibid., pp. 211–240 on the part played by the diet and beauty industry in the backlash against feminism. 61 Wolf, The Beauty Myth, p. 10. 62 The average British woman is around 5ft 3” and weighs eleven stone. Her consciousness, however, is populated by images of women who weigh about eight stone or less and are about 5ft 8” tall. In western and westernized cultures there is a significant decline in girls’ self-esteem during middle adolescence, probably because of the exponentially increasing internalization of socio-aesthetic body norms (Daniel Clay, Vivian Vignoles, and Helga Dittmar, ‘Body Image and SelfEsteem Among Adolescent Girls: Testing the Influence of Sociocultural Factors’, Journal of Adolescence, 15 (2005), 451–477). The authors of this study of 136 British girls aged 11–16 conclude that research indicates the need for early-years education that helps girls make informed judgements about idealized images of bodies in the media.

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63 Patricia A. van den Berg, Jonathan Mond, Marla Eisenberg, Diann Ackard, and Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, ‘The Link Between Body Dissatisfaction and SelfEsteem in Adolescents: Similarities Across Gender, Age, Weight Status, Race/ Ethnicity, and Socioeconomic Status’, Journal of Adolescent Health, 47 (2010), 290–296. 64 Amanda J. Holmstrom, ‘The Effects of the Media on Body Image: A MetaAnalysis’, Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 48 (2004), 196–217. Holmstrom does, however, concede that the cultural inclusion of images of overweight women would make women feel more at ease in their bodies. 65 David Mellor, Matthew Fuller-Tyszkiewicz, Marita McCabe, and Lina Ricciardelli, ‘Body Image and Self-Esteem Across Age and Gender: A Short-Term Longitudinal Study’, Sex Roles, 63 (2010), 672–681. This Australian study found that although women were more dissatisfied with their appearance than men, men were susceptible to body anxiety and considered their appearance as or more important to their well-being than women. 66 ‘Towards a Divine in the Feminine’, in Gillian Howie and J’annine Jobling, eds., Women and the Divine: Touching Transcendence, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 16–17. 67 Irigaray, ‘Divine Women’, pp. 64–65. 68 The Whole Woman, London, Transworld, 1999, pp. 33, 34. 69 The Female Eunuch, p. 293. 70 See further Michèle Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc., trans. Trista Selous, New York, Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 162. 71 Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl, New York, Bernard Geis Associates, 1962. The book dared to suggest that a woman’s sexual agency had nothing to do with her marital status. If questionably feminist in most other respects, Sex and the Single Girl made a significant contribution to women’s liberation by undermining the safe passage of a patrilineal line of assets and name through the traditional institutions of marriage and motherhood. 72 For criticism of the technologically driven aesthetic that sexualizes and commodifies women in contemporary popular culture, see e.g. Walter, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. After refusing to surgically arrest her ageing in order to look like what she aptly referred to in an interview as a ‘mended statue’, Harriet Walters’ self-published collection of her own and others’ photographic images of other women from between the ages of 50 and 100, Facing It: Reflections on Images of Older Women, Facing It Publications, 2011, has also been influential. 73 See e.g. Peggy Zeglin Brand, ed., Beauty Matters, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2000; idem, ed., Beauty Revisited, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2009; Carolyn Korsmeyer, Gender and Aesthetics: An Introduction, New York and London, Routledge, 2004. 74 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin, 1991, p. 194. 75 See Grosz, Volatile Bodies, pp. 15–19, for a typology of feminist approaches to embodiment. 76 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London, Routledge, 1990, p. 141. 77 Gender Trouble, p. 6. 78 Gender Trouble, pp. viii–ix, 140. 79 The Thoughtful Dresser: The Art of Adornment, The Pleasures of Shopping and Why Clothes Matter, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2009. 80 Paula Black, The Beauty Industry: Gender, Culture, Pleasure, London and New York, Routledge, 2004. See also the comparable approach of Frida Kerner

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83 84 85

The appearance of the feminine Furman in Facing the Mirror: Older Women and Beauty Shop Culture, New York: Routledge, 1997, which emphasizes the sociality of women’s grooming. See e.g. Greer, The Female Eunuch, pp. 364–365. In the opinion of Ariel Levy, the feminist campaign against pornography has been American feminism’s most ‘spectacular failure’. In the 1970s and 80s pornography was a marginal phenomenon that carried a good deal of social opprobrium; in the current digital age it has permeated mainstream popular culture, from music to celebrity to underwear, dolls and reality TV. Introduction to Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, p. xx. Beauty and Misogyny: Harmful Cultural Practices in the West, London and New York, Routledge, 2005. Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. Barbara Frederickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts, ‘Objectification Theory: Toward Understanding Women’s Lived Experiences and Mental Health Risks’, Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21 (1997), 173–206.

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Idolized women

When Shere Hite presented over 3000 women with a questionnaire that, significantly, did not ask, indeed was not interested in, whether they were wives or mothers, she turned public attention away from how a woman’s body might passively arouse and satisfy a man and redirected it to the relationship between erotic pleasure and power in the creation of a sexually active female subject. Because women do not invariably experience orgasm through penetrative sexual intercourse alone, the research, published in 1976 as The Hite Report, needed to break taboos on the discussion of female masturbation. In doing so, Hite’s research was idoloclastic, if only in actually asking women to say what awoke their desire and gave them pleasure, rather than instructing them on how to elicit it in others. In a culture that, whether religious or secular, conveyed the message ‘your body is not yours’, her work reminded women that their bodies were integrally sensate and entitled to a pleasure that was inalienably their own. It was not that Hite wanted to procedurally separate sex from love or relationality, nor was she campaigning against heterosexual sex. Whatever the scientific merits of her research methodology, Hite (one of the first of the ‘lipstick’ feminists to abjure the austerities popular culture expected of feminists) awoke women to the possibility of a causal relationship between female sexual pleasure and self-possession. One of the most important consequences of criticism of the idolized woman was a demystification of female sexuality. Hite’s demand for women to be given the time and privacy to discover and articulate their own sexuality was also a demand for the political liberation of their consciousness. Because ‘a woman’s place in sex mirrors her place in the rest of society’,1 social equality was predicated on her becoming the speaking subject of her own unpoliced sexual fantasies. Irigaray’s thinking typified the feminist theorization of patriarchal sex as obliterative of the female self. Far from being a caressive co-creation of a new world – a love-making – patriarchal sex is an act of aggression that breaks open vulnerable, abyssal female flesh. Ideologically speaking, a man must ‘take’ a woman’s self to reproduce himself in the next generation of his sons. Whereas love-making gives gifts; here, in the self-regeneration of the masculine, the instrumental feminine loses selfhood.2 But a liberated woman

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ceases to be what Irigaray called ‘an obliging prop for the enactment of male fantasies’, whose pleasure in such a role is ‘a masochistic prostitution of her body’ to the desire of others, not her own.3 A liberated woman is an inexhaustible, ultimately unknowable, but speaking subject and agent of her own sexual-political vision and praxis. As an attempt to restore ownership to women’s erotic consciousness, Hite’s project was in many ways a work of applied feminist existential philosophy. By now, women’s erotic awakening had become at once the sign and the energy of female becoming. The women’s liberation movement was an erotic revolution. The politics of desire would overcome the stasis, the modesty, of existential passivity. Although expressed in a different idiom to Irigaray’s, Hite’s reclamation of female passion from the prurient, voyeuristic obscenity of pornography belongs with Audre Lorde’s highly influential lesbian or woman-identified conception of eros, written only two years after the publication of The Hite Report. Eros, for Lorde, is the surge of a female spiritual-political power that has nothing to do with the domination of elite individuals over a natural or social mass, and everything to do with the liberation of women’s consciousness of their capacity for vital, communicative, joyous relation with other women and with all that is alive.4 Against the flattening anaesthesia of pornographic idolization, the erotic is a reunion of sensation and feeling without which there is no justice or change. For Mary Daly too, fearless eros is a necessity. Without it, women have no resistance to the powers of patriarchal non-being: ‘Within the sadostate women are ontologically undermined, for the sado-intent is the conversion of female participation in Be-ing into mere being, that is, the conversion of women into things, and into complicity with thinghood. To the extent that phallic lust succeeds, women are reduced to non-being’.5 * Clearly, men self-idolize and idolize other men. The modern political consequences of that are catastrophic. But even ordinary images of masculine prowess advertise, in the broadest sense of that word, his power. They are not posted to signal sexual availability and, in modern democracies at least, compared to women, ideal male bodies have been under-imaged. To that extent, the male body is a real presence, not an appearance, and men exist in their own right. Women may ‘idolize’ men who are attractive, highly intelligent and/or economically successful, but rarely have women been able to attract ‘alpha males’ without first making idols of themselves. By contrast, women have traditionally been described as something that relates to their bodily and relational state: tall, fat, thin, blond, brunette, whore, virgin, mother, wife and when they desist from being that something they run the cultural risk of being nothing.6 Because women, not always reluctantly, devote inordinate amounts of time and energy to ensuring their bodies conform to the prevailing ideal, often at the expense of their own moral and bodily integrity, Germaine Greer, among many others, declared

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herself to be ‘sick of the masquerade’, sick of impersonating someone who hovers on the uneasy edge of non-existence. She described an idolized woman as one ‘formed of the concatenation of lines and masses, signifying the lineaments of satisfied impotence. Her essential quality must be castratedness’, by which Greer meant her erotic energies must be suppressed and deflected by her idealization. ‘She absolutely must be young’.7 An idolized woman is a veiled woman insofar as her personhood is cloaked, rather than manifested, in her form. Aesthetically speaking, she has spared the world her humanity. That is why feminists since Wollstonecraft have insisted that for a woman to be worshipped or idolized is, as Firestone put it, not freedom. For an idolized woman does not exist in her own right but in relation to her idea. Her glorification comes at the price of her being and becoming. Cynthia Ozick has described the modern televisual and cinematic human being as ‘immutable and uniform; everything arrives ready-made, already “processed” already envisioned, and, in effect, already seen’.8 A fortiori, when the modern human is female she is not merely processed, envisioned, and represented by her image, she is her image. Wollstonecraft, Firestone, and Beauvoir’s criticism of gynolatry was reinforced by cultural and other feminists’ pointed reminder that it is not from an apparition, but from a real, living woman’s body that real living beings are made: ‘as women, we engender children. Can one create anything more extraordinary, bodily or spiritually, than a living being?’9

Idolization and female celebrity Given phenomena are usually contextualized historically. In the case of twentieth-century criticism of women’s idolization, it is better contextualized by a future yet to come. It is in the twenty-first century idolization of women, by which time new technologies could idolize women in ever more complex and exaggerated forms, that the idolization of women – the ideological reproduction of the feminine – is most fully comprehended. For an ideology to successfully reproduce a gender ideal it must be self-reproducing. As Beauvoir theorized it, women, existing in a world of unrealizable images of women, at once discover and abdicate themselves through narcissistic self-contemplation, ‘Allowing herself to be an object, she is transformed into an idol proudly recognizing herself as such; but she spurns the implacable logic which makes her still the inessential. She would like to be a fascinating treasure, not a thing to be taken. She loves to seem a marvellous fetish, charged with magical emanations, not to see herself as flesh subject to seeing, touching, bruising’.10 A twenty-first century variant of second wave feminism that might be loosely termed fourth wave now encounters digitally self-manipulated, self-reproduced images of women that reflect the growth of mass surgical and non-surgical cosmetic alteration of the human appearance. In a digital culture, the search for love – achieved through the search for notice – was to produce a blizzard of closely similar,

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globally proliferating and distributed, manipulated images representing a celebrified self: one that is knowable and valuable insofar as it is a visual entertainment; a series of public appearances that attempt to replicate yet more famous appearances. There is a growing literature on the sociology and psychology of celebrity and the manifold implications of the current shift from a logocentric to a digital, oculocentric culture have been widely discussed.11 These literatures need no rehearsal here. What is relevant to this book’s discussion of feminist criticism of the idolization of women is not so much the way that the contemporary mass media manage social attention on a person by means of their appearance in and through an image, as the intensification of an ideology of femininity in which the value of the female self is managed through, and as, the appearance of an idea. The aesthetic merits of a woman’s appearance are no longer the means by which she is promoted to the status of a wife and mother, which, however sexually politically compromised, is at least a relational one. Women’s idolization – their capacity to visualize an idea of the feminine – is now an end in itself. It is the repeated showing of a flattering image, not the adoption of a social role, that now hypostasizes a woman’s value. A mass media’s process of idolization – the making of imaginal ‘doubles’ of men and women – confers power on an ideological order by promising access to the social privileges its images inhabit through access to visibility itself.12 As a late modern marker of status, the ‘cult’ of celebrity is ideological. It is a visual hierarchy in which power and reward are distributed extremely unequally.13 It is the celebrification of an ordinary woman’s appearance that ideologically, if not always actually, grants her public regard. And as a radiant appearance of which the substantive content of memorable speech is neither expected nor required, the more staged, commodified, and narcissistically self-preoccupied the image becomes, the more it is ethico-politically disengaged. The contemporary idolized woman is conjured into being by digital photography and cosmetic procedures in ways that more than redouble the effects of twentieth-century analog photography’s visualization and enhancement of human power as political or cultural celebrity.14 Now, any woman’s worth can be alienated insofar as ‘good’ photographs of her face and body are those that surpass the aesthetic impression of her presence. Her social value can be calibrated by constant, instant, aesthetic judgements that compare how far her image successfully replicates limitless numbers of other re-touchable images, whether those are images of female celebrities, aspirant celebrities, or herself.15 Many women’s (and men’s) lives now play out in two dimensions through social media where technological developments in the exhibition of the feminine reward its most perfected images by their multiplication. That is, celebrities, some of whom are ‘celebrity feminists’, hyper-wealthy entertainers whose fame as ‘public beauty symbols’ is augmented by its use as a platform from which to address certain forms of gender inequality,16 are

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awarded a place at the top of the social hierarchy, with those excluded from public visibility – the poor, the disabled and the old – being relegated to the castes of the socially irrelevant or forgotten. Culture is also at its least forgiving when confronted with its former idols. It finds the idolized woman macabre in her old age. Thus Saul Bellow’s memory of the elderly ‘youth-ravenous’ women who used to sit in the cafes on New York’s Upper West Side. They were ‘rouged and mascaraed and hennaed and used blue rinse and eye shadow and wore costume jewellery and many of them were proud and stared at you with expressions that did not belong to their age’.17 An ageing woman who has enjoyed a lifetime of celebrity might pay a higher price for the privileges of idolization than pity and curiosity. As her looks fade from view, so must she. Brigitte Bardot, for example, has been living as a recluse in her two homes outside St Tropez since 1973. Like other of the twentieth century’s most idolized women (Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana),18 it was in a sense immaterial whether she lived or died because eventually false goddesses can only avoid relegation to the profane heap by withdrawing into an existential subsistence that mimics that of a relic whose sanctity is preserved by semi-darkness or its withdrawal from public view. After youth, the impression of immortality is increasingly difficult to sustain. Greta Garbo, to take another twentieth-century example familiar to second wave theorists, did not die young but turned into the reclusive shadow of her former self after a career of only nineteen years. Even when Garbo was still an actress exposed to the glare of spotlights, she could not be approached. Close-ups were shot with black screens set up around her as if her body was an object of the highest sanctity. She knew that it was nothing of the sort. When asked why she objected to anyone seeing her act, she candidly replied, ‘when people are watching, I’m just a woman making faces for the camera. It destroys the illusion’. Garbo died at the age of 84 in 1990, but in a sense ‘the Swedish sphynx’ ‘died’ almost half a century earlier in 1941. As her youth drew to its close, Garbo famously demanded to be ‘let alone’. She ‘granted no interviews, signed no autographs, attended no premieres, answered no fan mail’. While in one sense she may have simply preferred easy anonymity, in another sense, she had little choice. Off the screen, living a relatively prosaic life, her capacity to be Garbo, to produce ‘the illusion of a most subtle intelligence’, could not be sustained. She had reverted to being Greta Lovisa Gustafsson, as she was christened. In a rare statement she admitted that she only felt able to express herself, perhaps be herself, when playing her roles.19 Without those roles, she disappeared, occasionally snapped by photographers veiled by a drooping hat pulled down over her face. Her mystique was one that the harsh light of day could never be permitted to dispel. When the journalist Caitlin Moran was sent to interview one of the contemporary idols of mass culture – the celebrity Katie Price, also known as Jordon, Price’s opening conversational gambit was to tell Moran that she,

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Price, should be hired to do a mascara advert as her eyelashes were real and not fake. She then ‘prodded her eyelashes with her fingertips to show [Moran] how good they were’. For the next three hours, Price, described by Moran as a ‘a charmless basilisk-eyed tyrant’ whose putative standing as a feminist role model seemed to owe nothing more than to her having earned financial independence from her cosmetically enhanced body, shrugged off every attempt to discuss her views on anything other than herself: ‘Her world consisted entirely of herself, her pink merchandise range, and the constant semi-circle of paps [paparazzi journalists] minutely photographing this ongoing narrative of solipsism. No wonder her eyes were so blank – she had nothing to think about apart from herself’.20 It is not that Moran wants to see the demythologization of female celebrities. She is both entertained by their theatre and aware that when the media humanizes women it is usually just a cruel way of expressing the collective resentment of their success and cutting them back down to size. In any case, as Moran points out, not all ‘female icons’ are the same. Some are role models with talent and something to say. The bisexual Lady Gaga (Moran’s example of a feminist icon) is not idolized. She subverts her sexualization with surreal wit. A woman who dresses in raw meat and wears a lobster on her head, shooting fireworks from her bra is not an idol but ‘an international pop star on the side of all the nerds, freaks, outcasts, intellectual pretenders and lonely kids’. Katie Price, by contrast, is someone who, in all senses, sums herself up as a commodity: ‘“Mememememememe look at ME! And my Katie Price Pink Boutique iPod, 64GB, £399.99”’.21 As exemplified by Price, the contemporary ideological index of a woman’s status as a woman is not so much a consequence of her thoughts or achievements as the visibility and ubiquity of her image. This means that, whether she is a female celebrity or a girl posting selfies on a social media site, ‘looking good’ in ever larger numbers of ‘liked’ photographs is the paramount qualification for entry into privilege. Of course, at least since early modernity, large, splendid portraits of powerful men and their female relatives, occasionally powerful wives and heiresses in their own right, have been displayed in spaces at the generative centre of the social order as indicators of their position at the pinnacle of its hierarchy. These are also enhanced images whose authority might be jeopardized by too much realism. But the early twenty-first century’s democratization of the image has entailed that everyone’s power and authority is invested in images pretending to realism, and especially women’s. (A model recently lost 5000 ‘followers’ after posting ‘real’ pictures of her broken toenails, and of her bleaching her facial hair: ‘I wanted to reveal what life is really is behind the mask’, she said. ‘My life isn’t as pretty as it seems – I suffer from anxiety and have a disabled sibling. No one’s life is perfect’.)22 The reason why women’s magazines and their digital successors have so many readers is because they seem to supply a succinct answer to the question of what it would mean for a woman to thrive in a patriarchal culture.

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In these factories of idols (to borrow a phrase from John Calvin), images of perfected women are rewarded women. But one cannot accrue the powers of an idol or replicant woman without subjection to the constant judgement of a panel of interior and exterior aesthetic judges who will pronounce on her deficiencies and then sell her their remedy. This is an unhappy visual culture that ‘suggests that every woman should throw herself into the conquest of her own femininity, into the construction, which may well become a masquerade, of a self entirely marked by sexualization, which presupposes that one started off as a zombie or as ectoplasm in need of substance’.23

Gynolatry and the sexual politics of romantic love During the 1960s growing numbers of white, middle-class young women began to take undergraduate degrees and participate as activists in mass protest movements. Yet many of them were dismayed to find that male activists’ critical thought and praxis usually preferred to leave the traditional gendered division of labour and childcare more or less undisturbed. Even in the most radical communities, these arrangements were disappointingly similar to those experienced by their mothers’ generation. Much has changed since then, especially for women equipped with education and financial independence. It is nearly half a century since Shulamith Firestone published The Dialectic of Sex. Since then, ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ has in most classes and communities in Europe and North America become a good deal less compulsory than it was. Women no longer need to get married in order to leave the parental home. Women can initiate, as well as end, romantic relationships, and often with people who are younger and less well-paid than themselves. Women are no longer socialized into the courtship and marriage patterns that shaped the sexual politics of Firestone’s generation. Other than for the most conservative of religionists, marriage is no longer a licence for men, as the head of the household, to dominate women. Middle-class women’s access to higher levels of education and professional expertise has afforded them social and economic independence. They have fewer reasons to seek the physical protection and financial security of marriage to a man than had Firestone or her mother and grandmothers. They are far less likely to single-mindedly seek romantic love as the prelude to marriage and are far more likely to regard the beginning of a relationship as the occasion of heightened pleasures that may or may not lead to the establishment of a household in which costs are covered by two incomes. Yet despite significant changes in the composition of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century marriage and family, particularly in the west, there is a considerable feminist literature, second wave and contemporary, that is critical of the texts and institutions that mediate an ideology of female captivation by romantic love. Much of it is founded on Beauvoir and Firestone’s perception of romantic love as gynolatry: as the worship of a woman for her beauty, as desire for an idolized female object and therefore not love

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at all. While female beauty had long been the object of ascetic religious and philosophical distrust as a snare to attract men into relationships that diminish male potency, feminist critics such as Firestone and Beauvoir saw female beauty as doing the reverse. Under patriarchy, women are encouraged to cultivate their beauty, but the only people trapped by it would be themselves. By their own beauty they would be lured into domestic arrangements that would take possession of their possibility. Even today, the consummation of romantic love has been criticized for ambushing women into assuming a set of deeply unglamorous roles after her one magical ‘big day’. Unless otherwise insisted upon, women still usually assume primary responsibilities for domesticity and childcare and therefore, across most economic classes, usually earn lower wages in less prestigious and well-remunerated jobs than men.24 Second wave feminists could be in little doubt that there is power of sorts in a women’s being the garlanded object of a man’s romantic devotion. The problem was that the power of an entity that awakens desire by its appearance, and by the compliant nature of which it is the principal sign, is biologically temporary and symbolically empty. Above all, it is a power that is granted by its petitioner and, if he is successful, will sooner or later be ceded back to him. Exceptionally beautiful women were traditionally permitted to trifle with men’s affections, but only during the short pre-matrimonial period of ritual courtship. Once a woman had conquered a man’s heart and he had paid sufficient tribute – flowers, precious stones, and metals – to win her hand, he was expected to rally his manhood and conquer her body. Mary Wollstonecraft’s not entirely accurate quotation from John Dryden’s opera The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man suggested that marriage turns men’s captivation by women into the captivation of women. Romance initiates a ‘curs’d vassalage, first idoliz’d till loves hot fire be o’er, then slaves to them who courted us before’.25 Little wonder, then, that many first wave feminists who, even when of independent means only rarely had access to divorce, chose spinsterhood and many of the second wave chose political lesbianism, over the institutions of marriage and family.26 Whatever its ecstasies, romantic love was considered dangerous to female selfhood because it comes with a long list of conditions, not least the permanent aesthetic merits of its object. While a man idolizes a woman, he replaces her with something better: his idea of her. Using Theodor Reik’s psychology of romantic love, Firestone maintained that a man, being of higher caste than a woman, must idealize her in order to justify his descent to her lesser caste. The temporary glorification or elevation of her beauty rebalances his temporary subjugation to a member of an inferior human class. Upon marriage, however, a woman can only secure her future by transferring the authority of her father onto her husband and, in need of the advantages conferred by his continued approval, empty herself of such power as she held at the point of their engagement. Her conquest of a man is the very opposite of what it seems: she has delivered herself into his hands and, possessed by him, she cannot but see the world through his eyes. She must become the woman

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he courted. As Firestone put it, if ‘what he wants is the Pepsi–Cola Girl, to smile pleasantly to his Johnny Walker Red in front of a ski-lodge fire’ then that is what she must try to give him.27 She has made an unacknowledged gift of her reality to him. Love has made of her, if not a vacuity, then a cliché. Firestone was hardly the first to warn that romantic love is the sort that dwindles and fades. But her reasons for doing so belonged to the traditional criticism of idols. Such love, she argued, is unstable not because it lacks carefully laid foundations but because it is a counterfeit love. No real woman can live up to its impossible ideal: it is the desire for an insubstantial idea of woman, not for the ‘irreplaceable totality’ of any real and particular woman herself. A man ‘may have let a woman into his heart’, she wrote, ‘not because he genuinely loved her, but only because she played so well into his preconceived fantasies’.28 For Firestone, romantic love invites a destruction of the self which is left vacillating between an all-consuming need for the male love whose approval will raise her from her class subjection and persistent feelings of inauthenticity when she does achieve that love, for she knows it to have been won by illusion. In Freudian vein, she noted that when the male’s infantile sexual advances to his mother are rejected he sublimates his libidinous energies into long-term projects that will win him love in the form of public recognition in place of hers. Women, however, never stop seeking warmth and approval from those in their immediate vicinity.29 They learn to fear that the warmth and approval of heterosexual love is subsequent only on the fictive romantic love that requires skills in what Wollstonecraft called ‘the art of pleasing’.30 A romanticized woman who has acquired the varied arts of pleasing has known all along that her idealization, which she may have devoted her best energies to produce, is illusory. It is only a matter of time before her lover or husband ‘sees through her’’ or knows her to be an imposter, a woman trying to act the role of another woman: the one he really wants, who is culturally visualized all around her, who is always younger and more beautiful than she. Simone de Beauvoir had dismally observed that a man does not like to think of his beloved as engendered: ‘his mother in law is the visible image of the decrepitude to which she has doomed her daughter in bringing her forth. Her fat and wrinkles give notice of the fat and wrinkles coming to the young bride whose future is thus mournfully prefigured’.31 Older men, Firestone also noted, are left bewildered by the all-too-human bodies of their ageing wives. The look of desire turns to one of unspoken reproach: ‘You’re not the woman I married’.32 Of course she is not: the ideology of romantic love has encouraged him to fall in love with an appearance that, like the love it produced, cannot be indefinitely sustained. An eternally lovely woman has never existed. She is herself a romance. If a man has fallen in love with a figure of his imagination it is easy to fall out of love with its human representative when her youthfuls lustre, unlike that of her ‘younger model’, has been worn away by age, domestic, economic, and biological labours, and the vicissitudes of life itself. A broken idol is, after all, just an aperture on

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nothingness. A woman mistaken for her idol has been acquired but, denied life’s substance, never truly held and may well be discarded as she begins to revert to her humanity. Firestone was convinced that romantic love cannot produce genuine love because, by its nature, it grasps at a chimera, not a person. And a woman can only hypostasize the image he has fallen in love with until age or weariness has robbed her of the will and energy required to sustain the increasingly strenuous efforts necessary to maintain her illusion.33 Firestone’s answer to the ‘tired question’ of what women were doing when men were creating the masterpieces of literature, art, and science, was one that echoed Beauvoir’s, namely that while ‘men were thinking, writing and creating’, women ‘were pouring their energy into those men’; their creativity had been diverted into the business of a love that, under patriarchy, was the most reliable way to secure their own and their children’s future.34 Becoming the object of romantic love was to be a woman’s sole or most notable achievement and the guarantee of her worth. Beauvoir wrote that a woman’s identity ‘hangs in the balance of her love life. She is permitted to love herself only if a man finds her worthy of love’.35 Although she and other feminists of the time made short shrift of selfsacrificial agapic love, which may have supererogatory merit for men, but is merely expected of women, it must be emphasized that feminist criticism of romantic love was and is only so suspicious of romantic love because it is so deeply committed to authentic love, in whatever form that might take. Firestone was not at all oblivious to love’s potential to be a situation of vulnerable self-opening to the other; and exchange of selves.36 But in 2012, she died alone at the age of 67, a diagnosed schizophrenic who had withdrawn not only from public, but even her own life, before the age of 30. Significantly, Margaret Fraser, the young psychiatrist treating Firestone, recalled that ‘Firestone suffered from a particularly insidious form of Capgras syndrome, the belief that people are hiding their identities behind masks: Firestone believed that people were hiding behind “masks of their own faces”’.37 It is possible that this belief was not pathological but philosophical, the residual conviction of her idoloclastic project. In hindsight, there is great pathos in her having ended her one great book, The Dialectic of Sex, with a plea for the liberation of a captivated love that would one day flow unimpeded and unpolluted by the sexual-political inequalities that masked, obstructed, and drained its power.38

Sex robots as new idols of the feminine In Mary Daly’s genealogy of the feminine, patriarchal culture replaces real women with ‘fembots’: creatures of the socialization of women into patriarchal womanhood.39 A fembot is an idol that attains a parasitic life of its own by evacuating the mind of any woman it supplants of its reason and will. Writing in a genre akin to slam lyrics, Daly was certain that patriarchal ideologies of femininity are not merely instruments of exploitation, but a way

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to gynocidally replace women with their own robotic creatures. She urged women to leave ‘the demented Male Mother to play impotently with his malfunctioning machine, his dutiful dim-witted “Daughter”, his broken Baby Doll gone berserk, his failed fembot’.40 Daly did not live to see the fulfilment of her prophecies: the gradual remastering of women, first the replacement of living female faces with technologically and cosmetically perfected ones,41 and then with metal and silicone death masks. But when asked towards the end of her life what she thought it meant to be a woman, she answered: What is it to be a woman today? All life is in great, great danger, particularly from bio-engineering and cloning, not to mention all the missile systems; they are bent on destroying the planet. So to be a woman today who is conscious, as opposed to being an unconscious robot or fembot, is in the best sense realising ourselves as not part of that necrophillic or death-loving society and challenging it all the time and living as fully as you can in a life-loving way. To care about others, to care about the earth, to risk our lives for them if necessary – that’s what it should be to be a woman.42 Ideologies of femininity operate in, and are resisted in, different historical, racial, and class contexts. By late modernity, housework had been taken over by machinery. A central plank of the ideology of femininity had lost traction. Domestic service, sometimes even before reproductive service, had once been allocated to low caste females, barely dignified with the description ‘feminine’. But despite a few cultural feminist attempts to reinfuse housework with spiritual, even cosmogonic meaning,43 by the end of the second wave, domestic labour was regarded by most women as a tedious task best shared equally with a partner and completed as quickly and efficiently as possible. (Rich women could still devolve domestic services to the poor and nameless figure of the feminine known as ‘the cleaner’ or ‘my cleaner’.) Although most women in the world, including those regions where feminism originated, are still accorded primary responsibility for housework and the preparation and clearing away of routine meals, the late modern, by now global, mystification of ‘woman’ could no longer be figured as the useful keeper of the hearth. More interestingly glamorous, and therefore more saleable, was the no less demeaning idea of the feminine as the perfect incarnation of a masculine sexual fantasy. The arrival of hoovers and washing machines in the mid-twentieth-century western home weakened the ideological association of female embodiment and domestic purification services. In the twenty-first century, hyper-compliant robotic dolls, gynoid machines with artificial intelligence, have the capacity to make women’s sexual services redundant as well. It is widely argued that, from the late 1980s onwards, new kinds of deterioration in the condition of women coincided with the demise of socialism and the rise of free market capitalism’s commodification of human and material goods. When robots can

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replace mothers and prostitutes, as well as workers and soldiers, a woman’s stock may sink yet further with as yet undetermined consequences. Gynoid robots liberate patriarchy from women. Cybernetic technology (etymologically, the science of steering or governing), complementing the global normalization and dissemination of pornography, offers the final and ultimate instantiation of the idolized woman: a gynoid or feminized android whose sole function is that of sexual availability and service. Technology that is almost entirely owned, designed, and operated by men can now manufacture, at ever lower costs, increasingly ‘life-like’ three-dimensional images of subservient, insensible, women. These are images of women that can not only be bought, sold, exchanged, and assaulted without their consent, they teach women an ontological lesson about women. As a silent kit of parts assembled by men, the gynoid sex robot draws the history of the sexualization of the feminine to its logical conclusion. It is the dehumanizing patriarchal idea of the feminine, rather than its representation. It tells women what they are, which is the captive state of what can never become. This is of wider significance than an instance of the post-industrial patriarchal fascination with ‘tech’ producing a small number of male ‘technosexuals’ who prefer sex with fetishized machines to sex with people. David Levy has predicted that sex with robots will be routine by 2050.44 Some cultural commentators have claimed that sex robots do not mark a significant deterioration in human relationality since it is already possible to purchase non-simultaneous sex with prostitutes who fake desire and have artificially enhanced genitals. Others, however, are exercised by questions such as how erotic experiences with a mechanical sex slave, devoid of will and therefore of love, would allow boys and men to form mutually gratifying, responsive relationships with ordinary, moody, irregular featured, (really) intelligent, ageing human women.45 Although sex dolls were not invented in the twentieth century (fifteenthcentury sailors made female sex dolls from sack-cloth to satisfy their sexual appetites when out at sea),46 in 2010 the first sex doll with a ‘customizable personality’ was launched at an ‘adult entertainment’ exhibition in Las Vegas. ‘Roxxxy’ cost $7000 and was designed to react to touch and to auditory stimulation. The doll was modelled in the image of a set of familiar sexual stereotypes, including ‘Frigid Farrah’ whose programmed reluctance has been criticized as an invitation to the simulated rape that is now a setting on some robotic sex dolls.47 The sex robot is made in the image of a pornographic model whose body is already an imaginary object whose exposure leaves nothing to the imagination. As such, the sex robot is the silicone-covered replica of a replica. It is a three-dimensional caricature of a female pornographic model who is already a woman who has been turned by her image into something so ‘absolutely life-like’, but so invulnerable and insensate, as to be ‘absolutely dead’. Without any of the inconveniences of the real, both female actors promise that masculine desire and feminine performance are one and the

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same orgasmic moment.48 Gynoid sex robots (of which about 90 percent are covered in mimetic ‘female’ flesh – of the 10 percent of robotic sex dolls that are being produced with male bodies, most are bought by gay men) ‘improve’ on contemporary human women’s flesh because they, once more, make compliant imaginary female flesh part of a contemporary patriarchal household’s economy of labour. As another item of property, the sex doll is the very essence of a projective idol, that is, its power is, in the full sense of the word, characterized by its silent form alone. If a sex gynoid is programmed to speak, it is programmed only to use words and phrases that will inflate its user’s sexual ego. ‘Jia Jia’, for example, is a humanoid robot developed at a Chinese university. It has features modelled from the composite face of five women at the university, prompting ethical questions about the role of academia in the development of sex robots and philosophical and technical questions about whether a patriarchally (re)manufactured artificially intelligent woman could ever speak in any other voice than its makers’. Jia Jia refers to the development team’s director Chen Xiaoping as ‘Lord’. If the robot senses that it is about to be photographed, it says, ‘Don’t come too close to me when you are taking a picture. It will make my face look fat’. When otherwise approached it asks how it can be of service.49 Or again, Matt McMullen, director of Realbotix and the very paradigm of a patriarchal ‘puppet master’ (a moniker he did not disclaim in his interview with Christopher Trout), creates female ‘sexbots’ that allow images of the feminine to be controlled by an app. The second of his robotic sex dolls, which he intends to be companionate, is fitted with made-to-order ‘happiness’. It is also designed so that damaged or ‘boring’ parts of ‘her’ can be swapped for new ones.50 McMullen assessed his achievement to date in 2016: ‘I’ve always said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and all I’ve ever done artistically is imitate the female form in all its sizes and shapes. There are obviously limitations to how large we can make [sex robots’] bodies before they become too heavy to move . . . I’ll make a doll in any size or shape if someone will buy it.51 Earlier in this chapter, it was suggested that social equilibrium is traditionally restored to the gender order on marriage: the queen of a man’s heart is demoted to his housekeeper at the moment she conquers it. So too, in a posthuman age, sex robots can be customized to resemble selected celebrities. Perhaps the point of these celebrity dolls – the idols of idols – is not only to adulate a celebrity but also to cut her back down to size, abjected in and by her idol’s non-consensual sexual humiliations, outlawed in any other world than a posthuman one. It is not necessary to be a feminist to object to the gross impoverishment of sex ‘made to measure’ by its mechanization in a sex robot.52 Broadly speaking, Jews and Christians would not regard sex with a robot as morally or spiritually acceptable: it is soulless, non-procreative, masturbatory, and a betrayal of relationships predicated on the covenantal or sacramental sharing

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of love. And more than that, sex with a robot is what Noreen Herzfeld has described as ‘a form of idolatry, a substitute for the living with something made, and thus controlled, by our own hands. [Martin] Buber . . . calls this an idol that happens “when a face addresses a face which is not a face”’.53 Herzfeld’s latter point indicates that the sex robot poses a particular threat to women’s liberation, secular or religious. As Anthony Ferguson notes, the purpose of a sex robot, and the key to their success, is the control of female sexuality: ‘The female sex doll represents woman in her most objectified form. What the users of the female humanoid robot seek is the negation of change and the comfort of always retaining control of the relationship’.54 It is the unblinking doll’s inability to react to its treatment, and especially its inability to reject a man’s advances, which is most attractive to their users. A doll’s eyes can be opened and closed, its limbs moved into any position its user chooses, and, above all, her appearance is fixed in a moment of youth indestructible by motherhood and time.55 A comparison between this posthuman anthropology of woman and that of Donna Haraway’s third wave feminist reimagination of the female as a cyborg is instructive. Whether or not one finds Haraway’s vision dystopian or appealing, her figuration of the feminine marked a counter-idolatrous confusion of the distinctions between the male and the female, mind and body, and humans and machines that was characteristic of feminism in the 1990s.56 She and other third wave feminists had good reasons for welcoming the generation of ‘novel forms’ that ‘need not be imagined in the stock bipolar terms of hominids’. These novel forms were a postmodern counterblast to modern reflective images that endlessly reproduced ‘the sacred image of the same, of the one true copy, mediated by the luminous technologies of compulsory heterosexuality and masculinist self-birthing’.57 Haraway’s ‘technologically articulated, ethnically indeterminate cyborg female figure’, whose chest was a circuit board; her forearms ‘both feline and hominid’, was a figure of transnational feminist liberation precisely because s/he was not finished.58 The gynoid sex robot, by contrast, figures the absolute disengagement of the feminine subject from her historical process. Even a photograph of a sex robot takes the viewer into what a number of theorists since Freud have referred to as the ‘uncanny valley’ – the mix of fascination and revulsion experienced in any encounter with an eerily good replica of a human being who is neither quite subject or object, living or dead.59 By now, it is immaterial whether the dolls’ owners imbue them with personality and treat them with affection – even fall in love with them – or whether they torture and rape them. After all, while the pornologized female body – a real body turned into a sexual fantasy of a body – is present to her user but her mind is elsewhere, the sex robot’s mind is not anywhere at all. Its unseeing stare, similar to that of the dead, sleep-walking, in shock or severely traumatized – signals the vacation of sensate personality from the female form. The robot body, like all sexually idolized bodies, is not really there for sex; it is rather a hole or empty socket by which its users plug themselves into power.

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In the sex robot, life-sized three-dimensional silicone and metal idol-bodies have replaced two-dimensional paper or electronic idols. The makers of pornographic images take no delight in the female body they fetishize.60 Pornography’s two-dimensional images of women are idols insofar as they are powerful substitutes for the actual flesh of women whose bodies, under patriarchy, are screens upon which the fantasy of a body purified of change, illness, sadness, tiredness, and laughter can be projected. Pornologized, odourless, tasteless bodies are the best evidence feminism has of contemporary patriarchy’s neo-puritanical fastidiousness; its prurient gynophobia. Far from being the ultimate liberals, pornographers are prudish about sex and seek to subdue it.61 The pornologized woman is one who has been turned into a womanshaped substitutive effigy by which the force of impersonal, non-narratival sexual desire can be discharged. The loveless violence of sex that replaces a storied person with a female or feminized object punishes a sexuality that controls a man through the arousal of his desire for a form whose aesthetic possibilities are constantly sabotaged by the intrusion of its biological inevitablities. Pornography is not ‘natural’ to human sexuality; it is predicated more on cultural disgust for nature than a drive to create more of it. Feminists who campaign against pornography do so not because they are illiberal prudes. Quite the opposite: they do so because they enjoy sex as its living subjects, not its inert or dead objects.62 It might be recalled that at the centre of second wave feminist criticism of patriarchy was the charge that it is necrophilic. Mary Daly, Carol Delaney, Grace Jantzen and numerous others elucidated religious patriarchy as a ‘deathly imaginary’ mediated through the presiding offices of the church and the armed forces. Male sacrificial bloodshed is a sacred mechanism whereby estrangement between God and the world is overcome. The natural female miracles of gestation, birth, and lactation mediated by female bodies, are set aside as profane. Female natal phenomena are either so ordinary as to be cultically irrelevant or so dangerous as to be actively repellent of the sacred, compromised by their association with the indiscriminate finitude of natural flesh.63 The robotic or virtual sex doll could not be a clearer contemporary illustration of a worldview more preoccupied with the sterilizing power of death than life. The idolization of women instantiates patriarchal necrophilia by its replacement of living women with a dead ideal. One of the initial technical problems that arose from sex with a gynoid robot, now resolved by the installation of an interior heating unit, is that it felt like having sex with a corpse. The dolls’ ‘skin’ generated no warmth which, being chilly to the touch, could dampen desire.64

Idolization and the face of death When Jeremiah disparaged idols as ‘scarecrows in a field of cucumbers’ (10: 5) he may have been suggesting that the point of an idol is to ward off the natural forces of suffering, age, and death that consume all bodies.

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Contemporary technologies that amortalize images of women make scarecrows of their bodies. They empty a woman’s body of its history by freezing her features with chemicals into an indefinitely extended present. Infinitized faces erase the pathos of a person’s temporal and experiential passage through life, which is loss enough. But more than that, the technological redemption of a woman from the marking and corruption of time is a prevention, indeed abolition, of death which kills life in the process. For change is life itself. Whatever is alive is changing. Adrienne Rich once remembered Diderot saying of women, ‘you all die at fifteen’. Yet a perfect living thing is a dead thing. That is why, as time goes on, idolized women begin to look eerie or unheimlich, not at home in their world. They have held onto female privileges by maintaining, at any price, a body whose youth is so expertly maintained that no one can be sure of its age, that is, effectively, if it is still, or ever was, alive. Paradoxically, if an idolized woman is to continue to enjoy life, that is, to attract desire, her body has to cease its living. With each further cosmetic procedure, the face of an idolized woman is gradually fixed into an anticipation of its own rigor mortis. In a state of existential suspension, the idolized woman is estranged from her past and her future. Her finitude concealed, she is neither able to live nor die. Her face is robbed of its history and its futurity. In fact, it is no longer a face at all in the sense that Stephen Pattison describes it, namely, as ‘the prime living expression or manifestation of the self’.65 Far from enjoying a post-Christian eternal life in the form of an eternal youth, an idolized face is a sentence to a death before life. When a face is held in captivity to the longing for its beginning it is also held in captivity to its end. When a culture suffocates flesh by gilding or carving its image into inanimacy, those whose flesh is replaced by its image, and those who imitate them, assume the face of death. The routine cosmetic correction of ever more female faces across the world by cutting open, puncturing, contouring and fashioning them into a single validated image is an act of gynocidal violence. Collectively, culture forgets what a woman over 30, on whose behalf technology has not intervened, actually looks like. Over 50 years ago Shulamith Firestone could already remark that because all women were expected to emulate a few beautiful women, plain women were, if not extinct, then fast becoming ‘exotic’.66 The attempt to make all women resemble a very small number of closely similar bodies is not only an annulment of female subjectivity as expressive character, it also damages the ecology of female difference. A narrowly defined, emulated, and rewarded appearance produces a monoculture in which women’s personhood is aesthetically exhausted by its over-production of the same. In the creation of ‘a sex class’, as Firestone put it, the aura and the genius of the original and the irreplaceable is all but extinguished. The more a woman is exposed to and taught to desire the same female sameness, the more she damages the singularity of her own self. When she has forgotten what she once or might yet have looked like, she has, at least as the hypostasis of own person, died.

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This argument might seem extravagant. And perhaps it is. But it must also be remembered that a given politico-aesthetic culture is accepted as a natural, inevitable or historical given precisely because it is the purpose of ideology to make it seem so. Ideology operates on a person’s will and consciousness in ways to which the subject has not necessarily given rational consent because ideology has made the abnormal, normal. That is its job. Manufactured idols of the feminine are now so familiar and ubiquitous in the global digital environment that, despite increasing awareness of the dysfunctionality of impossible body images and the impossible lives such images inhabit, they subsist as spectral presences independently of actual, immanent subjects. An avatar is a visible proxy for a non-visible person, but the better it does its job the more effectively it displaces and eventually disappears the person altogether. An idol comes to life through the face it has assumed and gradually replaced with its own copy. An idolized woman and any who wish to resemble her become, as it were, the living puppets of wooden ones. (Compare Marx on the idolatry of the false god of money as an alienation of labour and self: the harder the worker works, the more powerful becomes the alien world that he is labouring to create, and so, in turn, ‘the poorer he and his inner world become, the less there is that belongs to him’.)67 This is, I think, why, decades earlier, second wave feminists, both secular and religious, were persuaded that women could not become the subjects of their own experience until they had destroyed their own idol. They could not come alive until they had killed off their own death. This is also why contemporary feminism has sought to replenish the earth with women of different sizes, among other factors of difference: ‘Women who do not fit the anorexic model, finding the inner strength to declare that we are beautifully and awesomely made, may just crack and crumble one pillar of patriarchy and free us to embrace more of our divine/human fullness’.68 There is no small measure of misogyny and gynophobia in the prophetic biblical literature’s figuration of an idolatrous Israel as a prostitute soliciting the favours of the nations’ idols.69 But if the punitive dimension of the Hebrew Bible’s insights into the causal relationship of idolatry and death can be set to one side, its foundational criticism of idols as lethal to their users can help us understand the urgency with which the feminist idoloclastic project, religious and secular, has been pursued. The Hebrew Bible warns that worship of false or fabricated quasi-divine bodies in their spiritless rigor mortis of stone, wood, or metal produces a hardening of the heart. In biblical idiom, idols are silent and unseeing: unresponsive to life.70 That is, they represent the petrification of being; a freezing of human and divine becoming that is a contagious death-before-death because, abrogating the Second Commandment, people slowly turn into the images they fashion and worship:71 ‘The gods we worship write their names on our faces, be sure of that. And a person will worship something, have no doubt of that either. One might think that tribute is paid in secret, in the

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dark recesses of his or her heart, but it is not. That which dominates imagination and thoughts will determine life and character. Therefore it behoves us to be careful what we are worshipping, for what we are worshipping we are becoming’.72 The prophets were in this sense justified in their equation of idolatry and spiritlessness or death. An idol is made of dead matter fashioned into the appearance of living flesh, or otherwise made to look as if it is alive. So too, in reverse, an idolatrous image of a woman turns her living female flesh into the appearance of dead matter. The substitution of the divine image in the human for a human image of the human that attempts to surpass the limits of its createdness is alienated from both its divine origin and its natural history and so, voided, becomes a carrier of death. The golden calf was made at Horeb as a substitute for Moses, the bearer of revelation, who had been up on the holy mountain with God for so long that the people lost sight of who he was and perhaps even forgot what he looked like. In any case, he was merely a man with a mild speech impediment. So they replaced him with an image of a golden creature without language and memory. When Aaron proclaimed, ‘This is your God, O Israel’ (Ex. 32: 4), they ‘exchanged their glory for the image of an ox that eats grass (Ps. 106: 19–20). It was a pantomimic act of substitution that, like Aaron’s proclamation, would be comedic were it not that the idol about whose body they danced cost so many lives. The Hebrew Bible records that, sentenced to death for a kind of treason, the idolatrous people died in great numbers. There is much in this foundational narrative to which feminists might object. Yet it is possible to read it as warning that the consequence of celebrating a beautifully crafted, silent hollow cast of a creature that cannot speak is death. For an idolized form is an occlusion or shutting in of the promissory, orative, communicable condition of becoming. In Deuteronomy 8: 11–19, which censures those who forget divine providence and attribute their wealth and power to human efforts alone, idolatry must be abjured because it was an interruptive, speaking God, not an idol, that addressed history’s protagonists with words and acts that brought them out of the house of bondage. So too, critical feminist speech breaks the silence of idolized bodies with a promise of redemption from slavery to patriarchy – from the narrowed condition of estrangement into an open future.73

Notes 1 Shere Hite, The Hite Report on Female Sexuality, London: Pandora, 1989 [1976], p. 11. 2 ‘The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity, “Phenomenology of Eros”’, in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1993 [1984]. 3 This Sex Which Is Not One, trans, Catherine Porter, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1985 [1977], p. 25. 4 ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’, pp. 53–59.

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Pure Lust, p. 59. Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice, p. 104. The Female Eunuch, pp. 69–70. ‘Introduction’ to Saul Bellow, Seize the Day, London and New York, Penguin, 1996, p. xii. Luce Irigaray, Je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin, New York and London, Routledge, 1993, p. 108. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 373. For a study of celebrity that does not assume its dysfunctionality see Kerry O. Ferris and Scott R. Harris, Stargazing: Celebrity, Fame and Social Interaction, New York and Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2011, esp. 1–10, 33–54. See Daniel Dayan, ‘Conquering Visibility, Conferring Visibility: Visibility Seekers and Media Performance’, International Journal of Communication, 7 (2013), 137–153. Ferris and Harris, Stargazing, p. 2. Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking Through Photography, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1997. On the alienation of female identity and actuality, see Carmen Fishwick, ‘I, Narcissist – Vanity, Social Media, and the Human Condition’, The Guardian, March 2016, www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/17/i-narcissist-vanity-socialmedia-and-the-human-condition. Janell Hobson, ‘Celebrity Feminism: More Than a Gateway’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 42 (2017), 999–1007. Cynthia Ozick, Introduction to Saul Bellow, Seize the Day, p. x. For early discussion of the idolization of Princess Diana, see e.g. Joan Smith, Different for Girls: How Culture Creates Women, London, Chatto, 1997, and Melissa Raphael, ‘False Goddesses: Thealogical Reflections on the Patriarchal Cult of Diana, Princess of Wales’ [2000] in Wendy Griffin, ed., Daughters of the Goddess: Studies of Healing, Identity and Empowerment, Walnut Creek, Altamira Press, 2000, pp. 89–102. Obituary, ‘Greta Garbo, 84, Screen Icon Who Fled Her Stardom, Dies’, The New York Times, April 16, 1990, https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes. com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0918.html?mcubz=1, accessed 16.4.18. How to Be a Woman, London, Ebury Press, 2011, pp. 249–251. How to Be a Woman, pp. 256–257, 261. Heather Saul, ‘Stina Sanders’ Instagram Lost Thousands of Followers After She Shared Realistic Images for a Week’, Independent, Friday November 20, 2015. Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice, p. 103. Carol Smart, Personal Life, Cambridge and Malden, MA, Polity Press, 2007; Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation, Cambridge and Malden, MA, Polity Press, 2012; Wendy Langford, Revolutions of the Heart: Gender, Power, and the Delusions of Love, London and New York, Routledge, 1999; Marilyn Friedman, Autonomy, Gender, Politics, New York, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 115–139. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 147. See Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies, London, Pandora, 1985. The Dialectic of Sex, p. 145. The Dialectic of Sex, p. 44. Cf. The Second Sex, p. 201. The Dialectic of Sex, pp. 121–122. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pp. 61, 132–133, 137. The Second Sex, p. 206. The Dialectic of Sex, pp. 135, 138. The Dialectic of Sex, pp. 134–135. The Dialectic of Sex, p. 121.

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35 The Dialectic of Sex, p. 126. See also pp. 121–125. 36 The Dialectic of Sex, p. 123. 37 Susan Faludi, ‘Death of a Revolutionary’, The New Yorker, April 15, 2013, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/15/death-of-a-revolutionary, accessed 18.6.17. 38 The Dialectic of Sex, pp. 127, 214. 39 Mary Daly and Jane Caputi, First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language, New York, HarperSanFrancisco, 1987, pp. 198 and 232. 40 Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p. 14. 41 See further Melissa Raphael, ‘Idolatry and Fixation: Modern Jewish Thought and Prophetic Criticism of the Technologically Perfected Face in Popular Culture’, The International Journal of Public Theology, 7 (2013), 135–156. 42 Interview with Mary Daly, reprinted in Philosophy Now, Issue 33, https:// philosophynow.org/issues/33/Mary_Daly, accessed 24.7.18. 43 Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi, The Sacred and the Feminine: Toward a Theology of Housework, New York, Seabury Press, 1982. 44 Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships, New York, HarperCollins, 2007. 45 It is for reasons such as these outlined here that, in 2015, Kathleen Richardson and Erik Billing established the Campaign Against Sex Robots. 46 Anthony Ferguson, The Sex Doll: A History, Jefferson, N.C., McFarland & Co., 2010, pp. 1, 16–17. 47 Beth Timmins, ‘New Sex Robots with Frigid Settings Allow Men to Simulate Rape’, www.independent.co.uk/life-style/sex-robots-frigid-settings-rape-simulationmen-sexual-assault-a7847296.html. 48 Roger Scruton, Modern Culture, New York and London, Continuum, 1998, p. 58. See further ibid., pp. 55–67. 49 Daly’s Quintessence:Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto, Boston, Beacon Press, 1998 [2048 BE (Biophilic Era) sic] offers an analysis of late modern patriarchal science’s necrophilia that anticipated this trajectory. Florence Gildea, ‘The Logic of Toxic Masculinity: Pornography and Sex Dolls’, Campaign Against Sex Robots, May 23, 2017, https:// campaignagainstsexrobots.org/2017/05/23/the-logic-of-toxic-mascunlinitypornography-and-sex-dolls-by-florence-gildea/, accessed 1.6.18. See further Kathleen Richardson, Sex Robots: The End of Love, Cambridge, Polity, 2018. Unpublished at the time of writing, it explores the appropriation and alienation of female sexuality through sex robots as symptomatic of the patriarchal property relations that break all attachments between persons. 50 Christopher Trout, ‘There’s a New Sex Robot in Town. Say Hello to Solana’, January 10, 2018, www.engadget.com/2018/01/10/there-s-a-new-sex-robot-intown-say-hello-to-solana/?guccounter=1, accessed 1.6.18. 51 Matt McMullen, interviewed by Georgia Lewis Anderson in Vice, October 18, 2016, ‘A Quick Update: How RealDoll Is Getting on With Its AI Sex Robots’, www.vice.com/en_uk/article/dpkypk/real-doll-artificial-intelligence-sex. 52 Noreen Herzfeld, ‘Religious Perspectives on Sex with Robots’, in John Donaher and Neil McArthur, eds., Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2017, p. 99. 53 Herzfeld, ‘Religious Perspectives on Sex with Robots’, p. 100. 54 The Sex Doll, pp. 4–6. 55 The Sex Doll, p. 81. 56 ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Donna Haraway, eds., Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London, Free Association Books, 1991, pp. 149–181.

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57 Donna Haraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others’ [1992], reprinted in Jenny Wolmark, ed., Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1999, pp. 314–366, p. 319. 58 Harraway, ‘The Promises of Monsters’, p. 356. 59 See Cathy S. Gelbin, The Golem Returns: From German Romantic Literature to Global Jewish Culture, 1808–2008, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 20011, p. 4. 60 See Greer, The Female Eunuch, pp. 279–292. 61 Admittedly extreme, the increasingly popular ‘gonzo’ pornography proceeds on the assumption that sex consists in subjecting women to a series of gross indignities, verbal abuse, choking, and slapping being the very least of the assault. The more hellish the violation, often filmed by the perpetrators themselves, the more intense its viewers’ gratification. Gonzo’s punishing worldview is surely closer to that of ascetics tormented by misogynistic sexual hallucinations than that of people living in a modern, sexually egalitarian society. Perhaps it is no coincidence that a recent survey by Google Trends found that the world’s most enthusiastic illicit consumers of violent hardcore pornography are to be found in the world’s most religiously repressive countries. 62 This argument is presented in more detail in Melissa Raphael, ‘Are Pornographers Anti-Sex?’ BBC Radio 4, Four Thought, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ b07qbcbs, broadcast on 31 August, 2016, accessed 21.4.18. 63 Even philosophers and theologians who lament human evil and write with sincerely restorative intentions generally ignore the need for corporeal healing through natality and sexual-political justice and offer abstract, traditionally post-mortem, resolutions for the victims of evil. See e.g. Grace Jantzen, Foundations of Violence, Death and the Displacement of Beauty Vol. 1, Abingdon, Oxon and New York, Routledge, 2004, pp. 12–21; Deirdre Nicole Green, Works of Love in a World of Violence: Feminism, Kierkegaard, and the Limits of Self-Sacrifice, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2016, pp. 16–23; Melissa Raphael, ‘Feminist Theorizations of Evil’, in Jerome Gellman, Chad Meister, Charles Taliaferro et al. eds., The History of Evil from the Mid-Twentieth Century to Today, vol. VI, of the series The History of Evil, Abingdon, Oxon and New York, Routledge, 2019, forthcoming. 64 Ellen Pearlman, ‘Robot Be With Me’, June 12, 2015, http://artdis.tumblr.com/ post/121376928296/robot-be-with-me, accessed 16.3.17. See also Ferguson, The Love Doll, pp. 42–45. 65 Saving Face, p. 20. 66 The Dialectic of Sex, p. 146. 67 Writings of the Young Karl Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. and ed., Lloyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Cuddat, New York, Doubleday, 1967, pp. 289–290. 68 Isherwood, The Fat Jesus, p. 36. See also Melissa Raphael, ‘Ananei-kavod / Clouds of Glory: Towards a Jewish Feminist Theology of Female Beauty’, Yearbook of the European Society of Women in Theological Research, 18 (2010), 31–42. 69 Deut. 31: 16; Judg. 2: 17; Hos. 4: 12, 13: 2. 70 Wis. 15: 16–17; Jer. 10: 14–15, Is. 3: 8. 71 Ps. 115: 8; Ps. 135: 15–18. 72 Chaim Stern, ed. (quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson) The Gates of Prayer: The New Union Prayer Book; Weekdays, Sabbaths and Festivals Services and Prayers for Synagogue and Home, London, CCAR Press, 2007, p. 240. 73 The word for ‘Egypt’ in Hebrew can connote a ‘narrowing’. This metonym for idolatry is derogatory and can be avoided without losing the sense that idolatry is a constriction or confinement of being.

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In her diary entry of August 4, 1941, Etty Hillesum, living in Amsterdam under Nazi occupation, reflected on the difference between her own unruly intellect, emotions, and appearance and the immaculately poised and groomed visions of female perfection she sometimes passed on the street. She knew that she was probably a more interesting person to talk to than a ‘beautiful and dull’, ‘wholly feminine’ woman, yet there was a part of her that wanted to be a ‘desirable plaything’ and another part of her that wanted to be perceived as a person whose worth and meaning is not confirmed by desire. She wrote of her inner conflict: ‘It is almost too difficult to write down what I feel; the subject is infinitely complex, but it is altogether too important not to be discussed. Perhaps the true, the essential emancipation of women is yet to come. We are not yet full human beings’. The birth of women as full human beings was, she decided, ‘the great task that lies before us’.1 All that lay before Hillesum were the camps of Westerbork and Auschwitz, where she died at the age of 29 in 1943. Writing just a few years later, Simone de Beauvoir considered women to be ‘in a fair way to dethrone the myth of femininity; they are beginning to affirm their independence in concrete ways; but they do not easily succeed in living completely the life of a human being’.2 Beauvoir believed that women’s feelings of non-existence were a consequence of defining them in the terms of their myth. She wrote to correct this misapprehension, arguing that it was the woman who hypostasized a bundle of bewilderingly contradictory myths who was non-existent, not women themselves. Women are freed by the realization that there is no immutable feminine essence; a woman is a product or construct of her environment. As she famously expressed it, ‘one is not born, but rather becomes a woman. No psychological or economical fate determines the figure that the human female presents in the society. It is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine’.3 To claim that femininity is ideological before it is biological or theological is to liberate women from their absolute into the freedom of existential self-realization; of existence in and for themselves.4 Without the determination of any quasi-biological teleology, they can embody the transformative possibility of their own liberation.

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After Beauvoir and Firestone, it is the argument of this book that women are controlled by means of their idolization – that they are re-made in the image of what a patriarchal order wants and needs them to be. For most of human history, this has cost women not merely their freedom of social, political, and professional choice, but the freedom of becoming itself. All feminism is, to varying degrees, existentialism. For feminism is an attempt to establish female subjectivity not only by a woman’s thinking for herself, but by making the decision, at whatever cost to herself and those around her, to become a person whose existence precedes and exceeds any ideologically prescribed feminine essence or distillation of what a woman should be. To the extent that the women’s liberation movement is a revolution against the determinations of an ideological order, all feminists are existentialists, though not all existentialists have been feminists. Whether feminists identified as liberal, radical, cultural, spiritual, socialist, lesbian or heterosexual, they were engaged in a campaign for every woman to be free to choose a life in which her gifts and possibilities would not be commandeered or frittered but used to some purpose and meaning inherent in its own trajectory. This was something to be fought for. Different waves and types of feminism have been more or less constituted by the claim that a masculine order has spoken and imagined for and about ‘woman’ (and the undesirable qualities and hypostases of her shadow) and in doing so have actually more spoken and imagined themselves. While actual women have laboured under the conditions of patriarchy, adapting to, and also adopting, its norms, ‘woman’ under patriarchy has been an ideological construction. It has been hard for those who, for most of recorded history, have been spoken on behalf of to learn how to speak for themselves, or even believe that they are entirely real, that is, not a figment of the masculine imagination. It was to be about 20 years before the second wave broke and women would resume Hillesum’s ‘great task’, urging once again, as Irigaray was to do, that women ‘need to be born to themselves’; that they need to ‘stand centered about their own axis, an axis which passes microcosmically from their feet to the top of their head, macrocosmically from the centre of the earth to the centre of the sky’.5 By the end of the 1970s, after the passing of the American Equal Rights Amendment by the Senate in 1972 and the British Sex Discrimination Act of 1975, second wave feminism had produced significant legal shifts in women’s equality of opportunity, even if white, middle-class women were, and remain, their primary beneficiaries. A combination of liberal feminism and modern patterns of production and consumption had widened women’s access to education and the labour market. As a dimension of secularization, second and third wave feminism had brought alterations in the traditional institutions of marriage and motherhood. As a dimension of religious reform, it had brought alterations in the (liberal) institutions of ministerial leadership. Radical feminists, however, were philosophically uninterested in liberal feminism’s achievement of equality of access to the privileges of an unequal social

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hierarchy; of equality with men who did not think to ask how they might be equal to women. All feminist theorists of a more critical philosophical bent were also, loosely speaking, ‘radical’ feminists insofar as they welcomed the legal prevention of discrimination, but were concerned that the long ethical, spiritual, and epistemic taproots of patriarchy had been left undisturbed. They wanted to know if and why, as well as how, it might be that ‘the majority of women drag themselves along day to day in an apathetic twilight, hoping that they are doing the right thing, vaguely expecting a reward someday’.6

The non-existent woman The best known of all second wave feminists to name women’s sense of emptiness and unreality was Betty Friedan, who asked, ‘Just what [is] this problem that has no name?’ A woman, Friedan argued, could not but feel unreal while she was idealized as no more than a charming advertisement for the vacuities and duplicities of the American Dream; if she was expected to live through her husband’s and sons’ achievements out in the ‘real’ world while herself was confined to the becalmed space of home. Friedan’s critique of the uncertain moorings of the twentieth-century feminine in reality has been given literary form in a number of novels, including Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, where Laura Brown, one of the novel’s main protagonists, undergoes an existential crisis typical of Friedan’s selfvacated wives who have ‘agreed to be harmless in exchange for their keep’.7 As Laura walks downstairs on the morning of her husband’s birthday (a day marking his appearance in the world and her own disappearance from it) she is beset by the recurrent feeling of standing, ill-prepared, half asleep, in the wings of her own play, wondering what is wrong with her, unable to remember her lines.8 The more she attempts to approximate the figure of her ideal – the state of no appreciable difference between herself and a perfect image of herself – the more self-alienated she becomes. Laura tries and fails to ‘get the knack’ of being the mother and homemaker who sits and reads a bed-time story to her son; who bakes as perfect a birthday cake as any photographed in a magazine.9 Her reality is reflected back-to-front in the mirror of patriarchy. Her real life feels unreal because it is not magazine-perfect when actually it is the image of an ideal life that is unreal. In the mirror of patriarchy, everything looks all wrong. The birthday cake that was to be a culinary demonstration of her dexterity in the art of being a woman comes out lopsided. She has no aptitude for the frozen poses and tableaux of perfect womanhood; her entropic reality keeps letting her down. The cake, and therefore the feminine confection it symbolizes, cannot live up to its idea and keeps reverting to reality. Laura, and her cake, have failed to attain their pleasing unreality, so she throws the cake, the truth, into the dustbin. She has discarded her own self because neither she nor her world want or require it. Laura therefore tries to be the calm and kindly mother reading to her child; she wants to be the wife who sets a perfect table for her husband. ‘She does not want, not at all, to be the strange woman’.10

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Laura Brown wants so much, in fact, to be loved, that she herself cannot, in the end, afford to exist. But the sheer effort involved in becoming an impossible woman is so great that she finds herself longing to give up the struggle. She is depleted. She has begun to want to stop living. She wants nothing more than to read novels in bed all day, to inhabit another set of fictional lives than her own. Only in solitude might she stop being a projection of other people’s expectations. But she cannot kill off her idol or false idea without turning that violence on herself. The one is not readily detachable from the other. Only by departing or erasing her life altogether will she be carried away by the same slow river of forgetting as the suicidal woman whose book she is reading, Virginia Woolf. Modernity knew itself to be peopled by hollow gods and men. The false note struck by Nietzsche’s idoloclastic tuning fork on the tin idols the world calls gods,11 was ringing in everyone’s ears, not just feminists’. With God already not much more than ‘the survival of a lost thought’, there was a good deal of iron in the modern soul after industrialization and mechanization. The First World War’s cruel absurdities, barely comprehended, had traumatized and killed a generation of men and left its working-class survivors facing unemployment. T.S. Eliot evoked his century’s hollow men in his eponymous poem of 1925. These were the autumnal Guys, effigies stuffed with straw for whom children beg pennies. Leaning together, they were, to paraphrase Eliot, figures between whose idea and reality, motion and act, fell the shadow of alienation.12 When women began to discard their ideologically prescribed roles in the 1960s, they did so because those roles were hollowing out their forms into shapes or images of women that, not of their own making, evacuated them of character and possibility, that is, evacuated them of themselves. The origin of their existential malaise was much older than that of other modern existentialists. For built into the very foundations of western culture was a Graeco-Hebraic monogenetic account of creativity whose anthropology posited the male ‘seed’ as the active, intelligent ingredient of creation, with the female body offering the cavity in which to carry it.13 This is why, for example, Judith Plaskow began her critical career with the wry, ‘only partly’ facetious, observation that traditional Judaism is like colourblindness: women pass it on to the next generation of boys but ‘rarely contract it themselves’.14 Just as in the later kabbalistic symbolism that has infused Jewish spirituality to the present day, ‘masculinity and femininity are correlated respectively with the power to overflow and the capacity to receive’,15 Jewish and Christian anthropologies, incorporating a mix of biblical and Greek ontobiology, posited the female as mute matter to the masculine creative word, thought and spirit. The masculine word is God’s word, transmissible through the generation of sons. It is the sons of the commandment, in a sacred conversation that has lasted about 3000 years, who constitute the messianic line. Although banished from the sacra as cultically and congenitally impure (as a menstruous container subject to the periodic leakage of life), ‘woman’ have been idealized in modern conservative traditions (Orthodox Judaism,

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evangelical Christianity, the Church of the Latter Day Saints, to name but a few) as requiring no more than minimal educational and cultic access to the sacra because they are already ‘naturally’ more spiritually exalted – better, in a way – than men. To religious feminists, this attempt to keep modern women ‘on board’ would seem a thin and contradictory compensation for any number of exclusions, and worse, a foreclosure of women’s spiritual and intellectual becoming. Existentially, irrespective of any practical confinements, a combination of elevation and abjection had left ‘woman’ with nowhere to go. Apart from earning her own redemption (but not that of any others’) by quotidian and menial forms of self-sacrifice, her existence, as body, had all the opacity of a dead end. Under this anthropological concretion, female bodies were preoccupied, in all senses, by materiality. Occlusive of becoming, the appearance of the unprecedented and the unforeseen in history could not happen in a woman’s body. Unable to stand and move beyond themselves (as in existere, to emerge, step forth, appear) idolized women were non-existent women. It needs hardly be said that to speak of the non-existent woman is not at all to claim that women who know themselves to be real, living, unique persons are deluded. I hope that no one reading this book would think that to speak of the non-existent woman is to imply that any particular woman is a non-entity by any other name. On the contrary, it is to say that to be a woman is to experience an existential ‘doubleness’ as ‘both socially constructed by the long history of expectations and stereotypes surrounding women and, at the same time, also the product of individual agency’.16 Idolization of the feminine may be an ideological attack on women’s individual agency, but it is rarely more than partially successful. While no one does, or should, make wholly unconditioned, a-contextual decisions about their lives, and women outside totalitarian states and ultraconservative religious communities can and do choose from a range of affiliations and postures, to speak of women’s captivity to their idea is rather to say that they do not enjoy the same ontological standing as men. Insofar as the achievement of a woman’s person is measured against the index of a fallacious idea of the feminine manifest in its images, she is at best conditioned by that idea and at worst more or less identical with it, namely, an image that will fade with age. Older women are too often looked through as if they are made of clear perspex, as if they are not there. The first two chapters of this book discussed how younger, idolized women become mirrors in and by which masculinity admires itself. These women are non-existent insofar as masculinity achieves itself at their expense and femininity must achieve itself in the image of the masculine requirement. Idolized women are, to use Irigaray’s terms, the speculum by which the male achieves subjectivity.17 Their existence images ‘a male concept of woman which serves to mask the fact that actual women, having their own subjectivity, are nowhere to be seen’.18 To speak of the non-existent woman is, then, to question a woman’s capacity to exist – that is, to step outside the frame or terms of her ideological

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construction. It is to question how a woman might realize not some essence of ‘woman’ or, indeed, of her own self, but become the subject of her own becoming. This is not to suggest that female becoming is that of a woman turning herself into some underived sui generis human entity for which there is no model or idea. It is, after all, extant models and ideas that have made her, and will continue to make her, intelligible to herself and others. The problem is the origin and purpose of those models and ideas. The female subject is as yet and foreseeably unimaginable because the patriarchal world is the only one the world has ever known. The entire knowable history of the human has been the history of various modalities of patriarchy. The conditions for a post-idolized woman are unprecedented. Until the 1970s, when second wave feminism began to achieve some initial equalities of opportunity in the liberal wings of some of the world’s regions, classes, and ethnicities, no long-term social experiment in sexual liberation had ever been conducted. Hence, the existential question that has shadowed the women’s liberation movement: ‘if I am not a wife, a mother, a girlfriend, who am I?’19 And to misquote the rabbinic sage Hillel the Elder, if a wife, mother, daughter or girlfriend is only what she is, ‘who is she, and, if not now, when’? As we shall see in the eighth chapter of this book, some women of the later second wave period tried to understand the who and the when of their becoming by identifying themselves with a cosmogonic Goddess in whose female principle they and all other living things existed. Others, in the earlier secular years of the second wave, started over again by recalling the selfpossession of the child they once had been. Sheila Rowbotham sought to revisit the unformed consciousness of the child who, oblivious of tradition, surveys the world with an unclouded eye and cannot but do what comes naturally to her. (Compare Daly’s conviction that somewhere within each woman’s consciousness is a lost, forgotten, almost unimaginable Sister Self. A woman only has to remember that this authentic self ‘IS her. She is her Self’.)20 But it was only in Rowbotham’s feminist anamnesis of the freedoms of her ‘unremembered childhood’ that the extent of her cognitive and somatic colonization was revealed. We learn ourselves, Rowbotham thought, from men as the exceptional, as an occasional footnote, as ‘any other business’. With the peripheral status of an after-thought, female consciousness assumes ‘an elusive and disintegrating feeling. We are the negative to their positive. We are oppressed by an overwhelming sense of not being there’.21

Dangerous work: idoloclasm and the (de)realization of the female self Female becoming, that is, a woman becoming the full subject of her own choices and experiences, was recognized by second wave feminists to be at once an impossible, perhaps meaningless, project and a necessary one.22 No one thought that it would be easy to reassemble an authentic female

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self from the smashed fragments of a false one. Its difficulties could seem almost insurmountable. There was no such thing as an ‘untainted’ feminist theorization of the feminine. It seemed as if, at best, only the blind-spots and ethical and substantive lacunae of patriarchal ideologies could be challenged or counter-read.23 For a woman to elect her own personality as undefined by any relation to masculinity was so unprecedented in human cultural history as to ‘amount to a mere dream or a utopian view: in fact, a sort of madness or psychosis’. When ideology has so sapped the imaginative faculties that only what is precedented is possible, female becoming is also impossible: it ‘makes no sense, apart from being subjected to what already exists: for example, rules, norms, and stereotypes’.24 As such, an ‘impossible woman’ is not a colloquial term for an irrational, mad or otherwise troublesome woman, but the iatrogenic condition of a woman deprived of her own existential possibility. Not even secular feminists could ignore the role of theism in the evacuation of women’s full humanity. The exclusively masculine character of God renders masculinity (as distinct from actual men) representative of transcendence. ‘Man’ assumes the glory of his humanity by the transcendence of his flesh, which latter is generally coded as feminine. A patriarchal ideology of femininity ordained by God precisely denies women the exercise of free choice in who or what they would be beyond the immediacies of the immanent. While the masculine has self-transcended by leaving his home and acting in the history through which God is revealed, the feminine is left, in all senses, ‘carrying the baby’. The function of ‘woman’ is to be the domestic and biological facilitator of masculine activity. Feminist criticism of this existential impasse did not deny that women could find existential fulfilment in the daily round of marital and maternal relationships, however sexually politically compromised their institutions might be. But by the end of the first feminist wave it had become apparent that not every woman wanted marriage and motherhood, and not all who did had found a man who would provide them. Women who affirmed their meaning and sufficiency of women as women, irrespective of their relational status, were derided, pitied or feared as dangerous eccentrics who were at best incompletely feminine. It was therefore a basic premise of late first and early second wave feminism that patriarchy has created in women a fractured or divided self.25 The alienation of women’s consciousness had split it into two competing ‘voices’ or identities – that of the authentic voice of the self and her false, ideological counterpart. This latter voice tyrannized her into compliance with the norms of feminine appearance and behaviour. Mary Daly conceived of patriarchy as a form of mind and spirit-possession; an invasion of false consciousness that saps a woman’s resistance to the false idol-self that inhabits her consciousness: ‘Her false Self possesses her genuine Self. Her false Self blends with the Possessor who sedates his beloved prey. She turns against her sisters who, themselves invaded and carried into the State of Possession, turn

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against her Self and against their Selves. The divided ones, the self-Selves, shelve or sell their Selves. They become ever-hardening shells of their Selves, suffocating their own process. They become iron masks, choking their own becoming, hiding their own knowing, substituting deception for knowing’.26 In a 1970 essay entitled ‘Woman and Her Mind’, Meredith Tax diagnosed the condition of women as that of a state of ‘female schizophrenia’. If a woman did not belong to a man, she belonged ‘nowhere, disappeared, teetering on the edge of a void with no work to do and no felt identity at all’.27 In a better known study published fifteen years later, Elaine Showalter (like Daly) applied Ronald (R.D.) Laing’s 1960 The Divided Self and his 1964 Sanity, Madness and the Family, which insisted that schizophrenia was not a disease or abnormality but a legitimate protest against the family, to the female condition. In Laing’s analysis, psychosis is not ‘insanity’ but a mirror to the alienation of a modern society that divides the mind from the body, the former becoming a detached spectator of its latter object.28 Writing, as second wave feminists did, in a Cold War era that could calmly contemplate mutually assured destruction (known as MAD) in a global nuclear war, Laing, as much a counter-cultural prophet as a psychiatrist, regarded madness as a mode of self-discovery and visionary agitation, not a disease.29 Similarly, feminism used psycho-politics to argue that female ‘insanity’ was actually a ‘rational’ response to women’s erotic, social, and intellectual repression.30 If women outnumbered men in lunatic asylums,31 it was because they were driven ‘crazy’ by the confinements and dissipations of their energies. The madness lay not in women’s breaking the patriarchal image that divided her from her own self, on the contrary, to do so was eminently sane. What was irrational was a political dispensation that denies women the possibility of an integrated self and treats their biology superstitiously as a vulnerability to mental states fearfully defined as disorderly by men.32 The ‘madwoman in the attic’ was none other than the disruption of a repressed female self, her rage and desire at once heated and punished by her incarceration, who dared to protest the cramped conditions of her life.33 Showalter ended her study by noting that ‘when women are spoken for but do not speak for themselves, such dramas of liberation become only the opening scenes of the next drama of confinement. Until women break them for themselves, the chains that make madness a female malady, like Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles”, will simply forge themselves anew’.34 If first and second wave feminists were ‘mad’ to decline the role of a mother in a patriarchal family, there were few alternative models or postures for them to adopt. Sheila Rowbotham tried on a number of alternative identities in the 1960s in a bid to be ‘real’ and avoid being turned into the ‘sleeping, walking, crying, talking Living Doll’ that Cliff Richard had acquired in song in 1959. Initially, D.H. Lawrence, Wilhelm Reich, Jack Kerouac, Colin Wilson, and Sartre and others whose books and personae had formed the ‘beat’ canon, provided an attractive alternative. The beat intellectual had, quite appealingly, chosen to travel through life as an outsider to the

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bourgeois family and its commercial enterprises, enjoying no small measure of sexual adventure on the way. But, as Rowbotham later remembered, ‘the fact that the girls invariably got a rough ride in the beat movement never really dawned on me until later’. Even countercultural male becoming was achieved at women’s expense: ‘the sexual liberation of Lawrence and Miller was one in which women were projections of male notions of the man’s sexual freedom’. It took time for her to discard masculinist radical identities as ‘a lot of absent-minded clutter’ before she ‘finally clambered off onto a completely new way of seeing’.35 The problem was that all Rowbotham could see when she ‘finally clambered off’ was that she could no longer be certain of the truth of anything she saw. Although some radical feminists would conclude that nothing short of separation from men into women-only communities would allow their self-realization as women, Rowbotham reminded separatists that no woman can assume themselves to have been ‘mysteriously uncorrupted by living in the real world’. There is no state of moral innocence, even among the liberated. All selves are warped by their sexual, racial, and economic oppression and collusion. Marx’s observation was pertinent to women’s liberation: ‘Power in the hands of particular groups or classes serves like a prism to refract reality through their perspective. Under capitalism the prism of the media creates its own version of revolutionary movements which become incorporated into the revolutionaries’ own image of themselves’.36 Revolutionaries have as distorted an image of themselves as anyone else: ‘We learn ourselves through women made by men. . . . It is all a clever sleight of hand. Even our fears of what we might become are from them’. Feeling ‘sliced in two’, seeing herself through male eyes, she remembered how half of her ‘was a man surveying the passive half of me as a woman-thing’.37 Seeing the world through the only lens available to them – one that men had made for women to see themselves through – ‘we had no means of relating our inner selves to an outer movement of things. . . . We lumbered around ungainlylike in borrowed concepts which did not fit the shapes we felt ourselves to be. Clumsily, we stumbled over our toes. Lost in boots that were completely the wrong size. . . . We clowned, we mimicked, aped our own absurdity. Nobody else took us seriously, we did not even believe in ourselves’.38 Groping about for a self in what felt like the pitch dark was hazardous. Shulamith Firestone knew that to question fundamental biological and social structures that had been in place for as long as recorded history was ‘insanity’. ‘Why’, she asked, ‘should a woman give up her precious seat in the cattle car for a bloody struggle she could not hope to win?’39 Affluent, attractive, well-educated white women had a good deal to lose by wrenching themselves out of the security of their sameness into the outcast freedom of otherness. Not least of the many prices of freedom is the disorientation, anxiety, and loneliness of nonconformity. As Adrienne Rich attempted to imagine ‘the existence of something uncreated’ and break out of her role as wife and daughter-in-law to become a radical lesbian feminist, she ‘began to

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beat the walls with her body’. She warned that for those ‘who are not fair’, who dare ‘to cast too bold a shadow or smash the mold straight off’, the sentence punishing replacement of a charming illusion with an incontrovertible substance would be ‘solitary confinement’ and there are ‘few applicants for that honor’.40 Germaine Greer was also prepared for the worst. The ‘abandonment of slavery is also the banishment of the chimera of security. The world will not change overnight, and liberation will not happen unless individual women agree to be outcasts, eccentrics, perverts, and whatever the powers-that-be choose to call them’.41 It was for reasons such as these that Genevieve Lloyd, a pioneering feminist philosopher, was reluctant to urge women to transcend the feminine. To invite departure from a familiar world without having established a conceivable, let alone a better, one is irresponsible: ‘There is no realm for which she can leave and leave intact’.42 Luce Irigaray also feared that women’s breaking out of the state of enclosure into ‘an order of forms inappropriate to us’, would also destroy them: ‘Instead of being reborn, we [may] annihilate ourselves’.43 The women’s liberation movement began with an attempt to purge the false consciousness of those who had been ideologically inducted into the belief that to be and become a certain image of a woman is to be and become a woman. But it was not long before women began to report that the process of destroying idols of the feminine was leaving them feeling vulnerable, uncertain of who and what might remain in its aftermath. There was a danger that idoloclasm, an inherently and irrevocably destructive moment, would prove to be another existential blind-alley if for no other reason than that the destruction of a nothing produces a double negative: more nothing. Only God can create ex nihilo. In 1976, the German literary critic and sociologist Elisabeth Lenk posited women’s liberation as the moment in which women took possession of their own imagination by exorcizing the fictitious presences that had structured and peopled their ‘internal architecture’. Only then was it possible for a woman to stop ‘being that strange, alienated being who can be circumscribed by the gaze’. Yet Lenk was all but defeated by that strange woman (the very same whom the fictional Laura Brown did not want to become either). Quoting Flaubert, Lenk wrote: ‘In the heart of every one of us there is a Hall of the Kings. I have walled it up but it is still not destroyed’.44 Lenk felt suspended in a state of existential nothingness. As a feminist, she was conscious that she did not yet exist for herself and yet as the projection of a male idea, she was an ‘alien being’; a figment of her own and others’ imagination. As a real, embodied woman she knew herself to be more than an abstraction, but even her embodiment was, as Beauvoir had pointed out, defined by her relationship with a man and ‘in large part man’s invention’.45 Her purported goal as a woman was to become ‘everything’ to him – his all – but in achieving that she would find herself on the way to

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being nothing: ‘Being all, she is never quite this which she should be; she is everlasting deception, the very deception of that existence which is never successfully attained nor fully reconciled with the totality of existents’.46 Some feminists were justifiably uneasy about Beauvoir’s adoption of Sartre’s ‘life and death struggle’ to be the looker, rather than the looked at. Such, after all, would merely establish a new set of human objects.47 Beauvoir’s was a phenomenology of the feminine in Husserlian mode.48 She described the feminine as it appears in the world, towards a woman’s appearance or showing of herself-in-herself, simply ‘seen’, separated from the idea superimposed upon her. But whether it was possible to be a woman uninterpreted by patriarchy, taken, in all senses, at face value, as an individual whose patriarchal idea could be bracketed out, would prove more than uncertain. There is no end to idol-breaking. Eventually it can consume the self itself. A woman’s attempt to become not-a-thing ran the risk of becoming nothing at all. During the 1970s, a number of women’s liberationists were experiencing the psychological ramifications of this philosophical dilemma first-hand. Lenk was worn out by the process of ‘accusing’ all the insistent ‘false gods’ that inhabited her consciousness. After all, it was these gods who had granted her the only self she had ever known. And it was only insofar as she had lived up to her idols, as she put it, that she had ever been able to measure her own worth.49 Without them, she was experiencing acute existential anxiety: ‘There are still the terrible moments when woman searches for herself in the mirror and cannot find herself. The mirror image has got lost somewhere, the gaze of men does not reflect it back to woman’.50 If existential reflection is ‘the attempt on the part of consciousness to become its own object’,51 Lenk did not feel well-equipped for the task. There may have been developmental-psychological, as well as political factors, that militated against Lenk and other women’s attempt to selfrealize. Traditional ideologies of femininity had not equipped women to embark on a psychological process of self-differentiation. Traditionally, girls turn into women not by existential choice but by a natural process of biological change. One traditionally ‘becomes’ a woman after undergoing menarche, marriage, defloration, and motherhood. (With those who have only experienced the first barely having counted as women at all.) By contrast, as argued by Nancy Chodorow’s 1978 study, The Reproduction of Mothering, masculine personhood is consolidated by its self-differentiation from the female not-self. As the nurture of children is almost universally the work of women, boys self-actualize as separate individuals by modelling their personality and behaviour on the father figure and repudiating the female and the effeminate, generally by means of a fear of ‘female’ emotion and (at least public) denigration of its intimacies. Chodorow suggested that girls, far from rejecting their nurturers, are actively encouraged to replicate them. Accordingly, they are enculturated into a more diffuse sense of self and a non-oppositional ontological telos, if any at all.52 Conversely, a boy’s

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attachment to the enveloping, oceanic feminine that once met all his infantile needs is increasingly discouraged as that which will stifle his masculine becoming. It will cling to him. He must put an ever greater distance between his masculine horizon and the female home of his birth. (Thus Irigaray, ‘Surely a man favours the visual because it marks his exit from the life in the womb? His victory over the maternal power and his opportunity to overcome a mother whom he experiences as amorphous, formless, a pit, a chasm in which he risks losing his form?’)53 At best, the feminine amounts, in the end, to an empty nest, a residue; that which gets left behind. But few feminists would want to self-realize by loving and leaving their mothers in the patriarchal mode. Mary Wollstonecraft had urged women not to break the mirrors in which they had been checking their appearance since childhood’s early induction into coquetry as a solicitation to the male gaze,54 but rather to look into them for self-knowledge, to see who they might be. This was not necessarily helpful advice for twentieth-century women in search of an authentic self. Etty Hillesum, her world collapsing around her, was still recording in her diary feelings of diminishment and irritation at the amount of time she spent ‘peering’ at herself. Fighting her constant impulse to take off her glasses and look into their lenses for a ‘dazzling’ exterior to put on display to an admiring world, she tried to feel indifferent to her appearance. She tried and largely failed to turn her ‘innermost being into a vast plain, with none of that treacherous undergrowth [of inner “clutter” and chatter] to impede the view’.55 Lenk had gone further in the attempt to catch sight of her existential horizon. She had smashed her hall of mirrors only to find that it had given her the only identity she knew. Now she had to self-reconstruct from no more than a pile of dangerously sharp shards of scattered light. Just as Daly had warned that ‘the becoming of women involves a radical encounter with nothingness’,56 after Lenk had destroyed her own mythos, there seemed to be nothing left.57 Her attempt to ‘come back to herself’ (as Irigaray would put it) and repossess her consciousness from its fictions had triggered something of a nervous breakdown. And no wonder. If the social and political environment does not provide the right conditions, or any conditions, for female becoming, there is a risk that abolition of the spectral woman, already a chimera, may give rise to experiences like Lenk’s, which was akin to that of the horror of looking into a mirror and seeing not merely a different face to one’s own, but no face at all. When a plaster idol has been smashed, nothing is liberated because that idol is, by its nature, hollow inside. It was as yet uncertain what, if anything, a woman might be in excess of her idea. Irigaray affirmed that a woman can awaken from the dehumanized state of being an object (or what might be called an idol), but still she had to ask what might happen if and when that object recovered and began to speak.58 Atheism had said that in modernity, to borrow Jean Genet’s words, ‘a miracle had happened, and the miracle was that “there was no miracle . . .” God was hollow, just a hole with any old

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thing around it’.59 If women were, after all, made neither in the image of a God who had, by now, disappeared into his abyssal nothingness, nor in the image of men, their self-creation had little left to go on. Because ‘everything that has been created, all universal values, all notions of what we are, have been made in a society in which men have been dominant’,60 any ecstatic transport into what is still inconceivable is to jump off a cognitive and social precipice into a gap or caesura between one’s actuality and one’s possibility. It is a gap that demands a destruction of a former self, not an annihilation, but it is one that might never actually close.61 In the 1991 film Thelma and Louise, the eponymous friends find themselves on the run after Louise shot a man who was attempting to rape Thelma. At the end of the film, cornered by a squad of armed police, they turn their car around and drive (or fly) off the edge of the Grand Canyon, away from and into their death; their freedom (‘Just keep going . . . Go!’).62 In Daly’s Outercourse, published just a year after the release of Thelma and Louise, her becoming was also less the occasion of an emergence than an existential vanishing-point. Daly’s radicalism was now so ‘far-out’ – she had gone so critically ‘overboard’ – that there was nowhere left for her to go but an otherworldly no-world: ‘This is the Time, the Space. Race, Mary, Race, Into the expanding Now. Follow that cow! Jump over the moon, sooner than soon. Now’.63 There had come a point, certainly by the late 1970s, in which the sheer force of Daly’s idolclastic blast had propelled her far beyond any church, ‘womanchurch’ or otherwise.64 Hers was now an inter-stellar trek: she would boldly go where no woman had gone before. Her mission was to cross the last frontier into an undiscovered, uncolonized space where no man, weapon or factory had gone before. But, almost an anchorite in sole charge of her own Craft, there was a terrible loneliness out there in space on the other side of the moon. No one could hear her now. Spiralling through metapatriarchal time and space, the fog of patriarchal pollution may have cleared, but her lunar destination would surely reveal itself to be a barren rock on which nothing grows or blooms. The great pathos of her self-realization was that such was only possible in a space without any other selves. Towards the end of her life, in Quintessence, Daly entered into dialogue with ‘Annie’. But Annie was an imaginary woman, a friend of her own invention, from a post-patriarchal future. At least philosophically, Daly’s self-in-relation with other real selves – perhaps the only possible kind of self – had effectively died. Efforts to demythologize the feminine seemed to have stripped it of the elemental powers patriarchy feared, envied, and appropriated without supplying much more in return than a liberal feminist model of a woman rejected by radical feminists as the invitation of an honorary man into his ranks. If no woman could live or, in the whole of human history, has ever lived, outside the patriarchal conditions of human production, female becoming would have to relocate, as Daly had done, to a mythic, extra-historical dimension. Here, it was hoped, the debris of broken idols would prove to be the broken

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shells or husks from which a new, hyper-natural rather than supernatural, species of the feminine would emerge to repopulate the feminist imaginary.65 In the event, relatively few feminists signed up to another exile from history, especially not one that was an exile from the common natural order as well. In practice, most feminists had not, in fact, risked the equation of emancipation with the jettisoning of every ordinary domestic and social activity associated with being a woman.66 For most women, the point of the women’s movement was not to propel women into a supra-natural dimension, but simply to dispense with as many of the restrictive laws, attitudes, and industries of sexism as possible. But for pioneering feminists inclined to more introspective social criticism, idoloclasm could take a very heavy emotional toll. It is difficult to tell whether the suicidal tendencies of, say, Mary Wollstonecraft or Virginia Woolf produced their criticism of the idolized woman or were produced by it. After all, the only way to destroy your shadow is to either step out of the light or destroy the body that casts it. Radicalism quite literally uproots the social order, and with it, as an inextricable part of that order, the intelligibility and connectivity of the self. Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl’ (1955–1956) lamented that the idoloclastic ‘best [male] minds’ of his generation had been destroyed by their own liberation. Hallucinating, suicidal, they were ‘dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts’.67 Second (and third) wave idoloclasm’s counter-ideological pursuit of a non-mimetic self – uncertain, discontinuous, boundless, dispersed, and multiple – might have begun as a romantic quest for a narratable self, but it could end as a loss or de-realization of the self altogether.68 It is possible that Firestone’s battle with schizophrenia was triggered by her struggle to destroy a normative idol of femininity that had set up a competing and irreconcilable split within her own consciousness. She had smashed her image by smashing its reflection in the patriarchal mirror. But, in the process, the person she had recognized as herself since childhood had fallen to pieces. As she wrote of herself in the third person in Airless Spaces, eventually she could no longer read her own face, let alone books: ‘She could not read. She could not write. . . . She sometimes recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan’.69 Not all women, it turned out, were well-supported in their radical critical endeavours. The women’s liberation movement could be as unkind in its factions as any other mass movement. Firestone went into self-imposed exile from the movement, and eventually sociality itself, after her leadership of radical feminist meetings in New York was challenged. When The Dialectic of Sex was published, her sister Tirzah recalled that their father called it ‘“the joke book of the century”, and refused to read it’. At her memorial service, Susan Faludi remarks, ‘It was hard to say which moment the mourners were there to mark: the passing of Firestone or that of a whole generation of feminists who had been unable to thrive in the world they

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had done so much to create’. So too, Kate Millett’s publication of Sexual Politics in 1969 had provoked strong and not invariably positive reactions: ‘The emerging lesbian wing browbeat Millett into revealing that she was bisexual, and then denounced her for not having revealed it earlier’. Millett had a breakdown and was committed to a mental hospital. In her autobiographical Flying (1974), she recalls in broken prose: ‘That night’s dream. The trial of the movement. Figures of women ranged about a room question and cut at my life. . . . That probing, wounding judgemental quality one so fears in friends’.70 It was in the religious feminist communities that had emerged within the women’s liberation movement by the end of the 1970s – the subject of the next five chapters of this book – that the realization of a female self from its false image would generally be better supported. The ideological redemption of a Christian, post-Christian, or Jewish women’s self was taken up into, and carried by, a greater theo/alogical scheme. Women’s liberation from a false idea was co-powered by, and co-dependent, and co-temporal with, the very liberation of God from God’s false idea. Christian, post-Christian and Jewish idoloclasts had access to ritual, liturgical, and pastoral means of reorientation and re-assimilation into a practical order. Their communities, discursive and social, offered a renewed sacral identity that not only (re)assembled the self but situated it within a continuous historical and metahistorical span of memory, value, and hope. In short, a religious feminist subject was one who was cosmically, historically, and socially grounded in a past that was always going out into a transformed but knowable future. Yet by the end of the 1980s, the idea, associated with Beauvoir, of a woman who individuates through autonomy had fallen out of step with the relational, ecological ethic of religious feminism. By now, autonomy was an object of considerable suspicion. In fact, there is a world of difference between a masculinist autonomy in which a person is an unconditioned law unto himself and a liberative idea of autonomy in which a person operates without coercive interference in their ability to behave in ways that reflect their needs and values. No oppressed person would abjure this latter kind of autonomy.71 Nonetheless, a new organicist social and environmental feminist ethic began to give the concept of autonomy a wide berth. It had begun to seem little more than an Enlightenment bid by middle-class white men to wrest sovereignty from God, the Church, and the aristocracy and confer it on themselves. Modern feminist existentialism was losing ground in other quarters as well. For black and for socialist feminists, notions of self-actualization seemed tainted by a strain of bourgeois self-assertion and entitlement. Such notions seemed to proceed on the assumption that one’s class and ‘race’ would make no difference to the liberation of the self; as if black women had never been subordinate to, indeed the servants of, white women; as if middle-class women’s lack of intellectual or creative fulfilment was the most demeaning thing that could happen to a woman. And not only so, without

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the revolutionary transformation of the public conditions that produced and sold goods, that reproduced persons of all colours and castes, a woman’s private existential liberation would be, if not impossible, then a futile gesture.72 Beauvoir and Firestone’s account of female becoming had sought to relieve itself of maternity. For it was maternity that had traditionally consumed women’s adult lives, leaving them without the years or energies to embark on anything else. But not all women wanted to take a route into existential freedom that demeaned maternity and domesticity all over again. By the 1980s, maternity, and its crafts and sensibilities, was the very mode of being that cultural feminist ethicists of care (Sara Ruddick, Nel Noddings, Carol Gilligan, and others), were celebrating.73 Maternalist philosophy shared with spiritual feminism a revalorization of the sanctuary of domesticity. This latter was a central legacy of first wave feminism and was not without its own theoretical pitfalls. Yet it was not, at least, an abscission of the feminine that cast aside some of the most profoundly rewarding, and contra Firestone, not necessarily the most tedious, experiences of so many women’s lives. Feminist existentialism, liberal and radical, did not add to the sum of female happiness when it trivialized maternity and domesticity as of negligible significance to the conduct of a woman’s history. In this same period, Irigaray’s idoloclasm, which was a bid not for equality but for female inimitability, noted that it is patriarchy that abstracts ‘woman’ from her body.74 Feminism should not follow suit. The mystery of the female, which is at once open to the other and closed to its own violation, is not a describable essence but a pregnant possibility that, for Irigaray, lies concealed between a woman’s lips, inside, as it were, their labial cleft. The feminine would be liberated not by its abolition, but in the diffuseness of its eros, at once maternal and plural, and virginally self-contained. Precisely as sexuate, the female self could not be reduced to one thing: ‘I am not “I”, I am not, I am not one. As for woman, try and find out . . .’75

Third wave idoloclasm and the re-evacuation of the female self The abolition of the feminine as a bio-cultural category was underway before feminism’s postmodern turn. In Shulamith Firestone’s 1970 secular radical feminist utopia, which drew as heavily on Marx as it did on Beauvoir, science fiction and biotechnology, modernity itself would free women from the tyranny of the biological family. Biology was a servitude into which women were entrapped by romance, which, Firestone thought, merely dressed up men’s desire for possession as love. Just as the abolition of economic classes and class privilege required a proletarian revolt and its seizure of the means of production, so too the abolition of sexual classes required women to revolt and reclaim ownership and control of their own means of sexual reproduction. In Firestone’s case, preventing the patriarchal reproduction of the feminine required liberating women from the reproductive

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process altogether. Beauvoir’s negative account of motherhood had fed into Firestone’s view of maternity as preventative of female individuation. Biotechnological revolution would, she thought, abolish the need for sexual equality with men through the elimination of sexual difference altogether. No longer reducible to a childbearing caste, female sexual difference would disappear. Anticipating feminism’s third wave of idoloclasm, women would in some sense cease to be women at all. Firestone, in other words, smashed all images of women, not just some of them. Although she and other second wave feminists, unlike those of the postmodern third wave, proceeded on the assumption that a self could be recuperated from alienation, to destroy the idol ‘woman’ she had to all but abolish femaleness as well. By the end of the second and the beginning of the third wave, women had become more ‘impossible’, not less. Liberal and academic feminists were disassociating themselves from cultural and radical feminisms’ putative re-mystification of women in moral, spiritual, and practical opposition to masculinity. In the liberal opinion, such had succumbed to the same stereotypes of ‘real women’ – obligingly nurturant and so forth – that the women’s movement was supposed to have liberated them from. From a postmodern philosophical perspective, any attempt to rid the image of the feminine of its historical distortions in pursuit of a quasi-religious ‘true image’ was an attempt to define the feminine subject by means of its oppositional relation to a masculine object. Doing so was not to smash the mirror of patriarchy, but to polish it. In some ways, postmodern feminism, a philosophical current running through the third wave, was the most systemic of all feminist idoloclasms. Postmodern feminism’s preference for ‘troubling’ – parodying or ironizing, performing and queering gender – shattered even feminist ideas of the female. To that extent, third wave idoloclasm’s perpetual deconstruction of ‘woman’ was the end of idoloclasm or, more precisely, its indefinite duration. This was almost inevitable: if an idol is a definitively empty idea, nothing is liberated in its breaking or, perhaps, there is nothing to break or stop breaking. Briefly stated (the relevant texts merit a closer analysis than can be offered here), postmodern feminism understood that if women are impossible, inconceivable, a cavity encased in a form that can only be substantiated by the masculine, it is because the idea of otherness itself has been gendered as feminine in the history of western thought. During the 1980s and 90s, French feminism demonstrated that continental philosophy had rendered the feminine a philosophical aporia, the principal signifier of the unrepresentable, as difference itself. Emmanuel Levinas’ view of the feminine, for example, as a kind of nocturnal welcome, caress or embrace seemed to some feminist philosophers to typify the aporia of the feminine in western thought: ‘Femininity’, he wrote, ‘appeared to me as a difference contrasting strongly with other differences, not merely as a quality different from all others, but as the very quality of difference’.76 It is not that Levinas thought that the feminine was simply different to him or that the other was only

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female. More subtly, he deployed the feminine to elaborate ontological difference itself. Others, like Freud and Sartre, had been less complimentary. Here, the feminine had been the Sartrean ‘obscenity’ of a slimy gaping hole – a nought or nothing, a mere ‘appeal to being’, to the phallus that will fill its vacancy.77 Woman was that which is castrated and has, and is, nothing to see. This ‘woman’ is a modern iteration of the traditions of ‘woman’ as a uterine cavity; as a suffocating maternity to be shaken off before a man can come of age, as a modest silence or simply as unfathomable. (Hence the epigraph to Christine Battersby’s feminist philosophical study of female selfhood, which cited the question of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 53: ‘What is your substance, whereof are you made, that millions of strange shadows on you tend?’)78 In the masculine imaginary, there is not yet a symbolic, a language, for the woman to come. An idol in the shape of a female body makes of it a cavernous mystery: a boundless symbol of the night whose somnolent suspension of activity is lit only by the stars of masculine rational activity that shine in its vast, silent, impenetrable darkness. Luce Irigaray and other French feminists of the écriture féminine school argued that the disclosure and construction of the feminine has occurred only in relation to masculine subjectivity and becoming. To that extent, the new woman was impossible, unimaginable. In a world produced by a masculine imaginary, women constitute the unrepresentable, the uncanny or the absent presence.79 That is, a woman is the occasion of a masculine presence precisely as the site of her absence. ‘Woman’ is (a) nought. She is what Roland Barthes used to call ‘a metaphor without brakes’. She is ‘simply what men are not. . . . The world of the female is constituted by a series of negations. She is simply what he happens not to be. Her identity becomes defined by a lack – the lack of autonomy, the lack of independence, the lack of the phallus. The narcissistic male takes her to be just like himself, only his opposite’.80 By the 1990s, poststructuralism’s announcement of the death of the subject, male and female, had also left the meaning, worth and possibility of a project for female self-realization in more than doubt. Under Judith Butler and others’ theorization of gender, the momentum of feminism as a modern existential project was dissipating fast. Postmodernism’s repudiation of the ‘metaphysics of substance’ precluded the achievement of a self-identical instantiation of the feminine. The idea of a sovereign woman was now just an ideological product or ‘effect’ of modern feminism itself. The truth and worth of such a figure of the self was denied as a merely liberal reformist demand for the modern European autonomous male subject to confer his rights on women of his own kind. Second wave feminism now seemed too dependent on the oppressive subject-object duality it descried. Feminism could not have it both ways. If it wanted to abolish the female object it was going to have to abolish feminist subject. Both the object and the subject were mutually reinforcing sides of the same gender-oppressive coin. The one entailed the other.81 I remember conference workshops of the early 1990s

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when feminist scholars even debated whether their own name should go on the cover of the books they had written. It always did, but was often accompanied by a series of prefatory postmodern disclaimers. During this time, the feminist academy procedurally broke all single figurations of the female condition, including that of the women’s liberationist herself. In pursuit of inclusivity, postmodern feminism’s deconstructive project ‘queered’ or destabilized even its own subject in ways that were classically idolocastic. It broke the possibility of the same and the fixed by casting the self as an actor whose role was learned by its repetition. In the academy, women’s studies gave way to gender studies. Gender was a disassembled bricolage of fictions that prevented any transhistorical and trans-geographical female identity standing over the self. (Only now there was no self over which it might stand). For those many whose sexuality was not that of a male/female either/or and whose colour was not white, the third wave feminist idoloclastic turn was every bit as liberative as any idoloclasm should be. It lent multidimensionality and locality to accounts of gender and power and prevented the generalization of the human under a single hegemonic norm.82 There were good reasons for denying that one group of women can redefine the female self for everyone else, as if it were a transhistorical, transcultural, and transracial sexual essence. But to the extent that second wave idoloclasm had not understood female being as an essence but as a process of becoming, and that female becoming now had no telos, female being was cancelled and female becoming was indefinitely postponed. As Alice Jardine put it at the time: ‘The attempt to analyse, to separate ideological and cultural determinations of the “feminine” from the “real woman” – seemingly the most logical path for a feminist to follow – may also be the most interminable process, one in which women become not only figuratively but also literally impossible’.83 The peculiarly twentieth-century existentialism of the women’s liberation movement seemed not have survived the end of the second wave. The female self was lost just as the second wave thought it might have been found. In fact, the final twist in this idolclastic tale was that to re-evacuate the idea of the feminine of its broad, stable associative content was to return it to that of a non-substantial appearance (again). Moreover, postmodern feminism undid a great deal of the second wave’s idoloclastic hard work to give women not just a voice, but their own voice. In 1989, Carol Christ, who had spent her adult life helping women to find that different voice, therefore had grounds to disagree with those who considered feminism and postmodernism to be natural allies. Only the former, she thought, had ‘the potential to better the world’.84 Third wave deconstruction necessarily left self-identified women (and men) unable to ‘speak truth’ to outrageous power in a voice and with words they could own. Sisterhood, as a collectivist metaphor and basis of ‘power-with’ other female agents in a unified global movement of solidarity in resistance to

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those exerting ‘power-over’ others (which is not to assert that everyone in that coalition is the same), was an ideal that feminist philosophy had reduced to rubble and ordinary women the world over could ill afford to lose. While many were liberated by the indeterminacies and ambiguities of the third wave, others perceived it as a subtle robbery of their pride and pleasure in being a (liberated) woman. They felt pressurized by other feminists into abjuring or relinquishing womanhood less than 40 years after it had been reclaimed. This seemed at best premature while, ‘a large part of the world’s population continues to be thought of and to think of itself as female: as girls and women, suffering and celebrating commonalities in women’s experience and representation’.85 Third wave feminism had rightly complicated neat binary distinctions between male and female, but as second wave feminists have continued to point out, almost all human societies, for good reasons and bad, continue to distinguish between men and women. While sexual difference is clearly not absolute but a spectrum, sexual reproduction still requires the union of two genitally different sexes and menstruation, pregnancy and so forth are biological facts generally considered to be a necessary, if not sufficient, definition of a woman. As long as patriarchal societies continue to put boys and men first and, in many and different ways, to oppress women and girls, it remains necessary for at least some women to focus on women and girls and their experiences. Those broadly committed to the achievements and theorizations of second wave feminist theory insisted that feminism needs to take account of the experiences of all those who are perceived as, or consider themselves to be, women.86 But perhaps not all was lost. A woman’s impossibility was not necessarily her termination. As we shall see in the final chapter of this study, it is precisely the quality of no-thingness released in the breaking of the idol that contains it which suggests a radically free, undetermined, indeed divine, field of female being and becoming. Or again, by the early years of the new millennium, the queer feminist liberation theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid, who died in 2010, was quite literally on the scent of an image of a ‘oneself’ that was perhaps more complex and elusive, more intrigued by the mirrors and masks that revealed the self in the glancing light or in the shadows of its concealment, than that of previous feminists who had been in search of a true image or icon of the self. Althaus-Reid’s was a self that, summoned in a few words, seemed both properly impossible and just within reach: ‘To see oneself’, she wrote, ‘one needs a reflection and a hiddenness, a way to apprehend the slippery, ghostly reunion of thingness, spirit and love’.87 But on a wider cultural front, by the second decade of the new millennium, the idea of becoming oneself in the singular, as a real presence rather than a series of stylized digital versions, was looking decidedly antique. On social media there was no longer any pressing need to engage female personhood in and of itself or even to know if a woman existed at all outside

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cyberspace.88 Here the social fiction of the universal woman was necessarily and technologically re-broken. In cyberspace, femaleness was disconnected from its embodiment and from any affective or moral predisposition a real presence might suggest. In some senses, technology had completed the task of women’s liberation: there was now no limit on who or what a woman might become in her ‘second life’. Irrespective of third wave feminism, patriarchal technology had, ironically, opened up opportunities for women to adopt multiple, deviant, hybrid, and transitory avatars (idols, again) outside the range of patriarchal surveillance.89 Technology was breaking every image in its path, liberating any particular self from its ‘thingness’ by its virtual omnipresence in an omni-absent world. Together, by the beginning of the new millennium, postmodern theory and technology had left a woman’s quest for an actualized self looking naïve, apolitical, or perhaps simply old-fashioned.

Notes 1 Etty: A Diary, 1941–3, trans. Arnold J. Pomerans, London, Triad Grafton, 1985, pp. 48–49. 2 The Second Sex, p. 31. 3 The Second Sex, p. 195. 4 Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, p. 11. 5 Irigaray, ‘The Gesture in Psychoanalysis’, trans. Elizabeth Guild, in Teresa Brennan, ed., Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, London, Routledge, 1989, pp. 133–134. 6 The Female Eunuch, p. 315. 7 Michael Cunningham, The Hours, London, Harper Perennial, 2010, p. 12. 8 The Hours, pp. 43. 47. 9 The Hours, p. 79. 10 The Hours, p. 101. 11 See his preface to The Twilight of the Idols, in The Antichrist (with Twilight of the Idols). 12 T.S. Eliot, Selected Poems, New York, Harcourt, 1964 [1930], p. 77. 13 Carol Delaney, Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of the Biblical Myth, Princeton and Woodstock, Oxfordshire, Princeton University Press, 1998, pp. 8, 14, 18, 27 and passim. 14 Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2016, p. 52. 15 Elliot Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson, New York, Columbia University Press, 2009, p. 204. ˙ 16 Christ and Plaskow, Goddess and God, p. 60. 17 An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill, London, Athlone, 1993 [1984], p. 63. 18 Hampson, After Christianity, p. 170. 19 Judith Plaskow remembers this question arising at a meeting of the Yale Women’s Alliance during her time at graduate school, Goddess and God, p. 51. 20 Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, London, The Women’s Press, 1978, p. 338. 21 Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, p. 35.

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22 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Philosophy, Subjectivity and the Body: Kristeva and Irigaray’, in Carol Pateman and Elizabeth Grosz, eds., Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1986, pp. 125–143. 23 See further Elizabeth Grosz, ‘What Is Feminist Theory?’, in Carol Pateman and Elizabeth Grosz, eds., Feminist Challenges, pp. 190–204. 24 ‘Towards a Divine in the Feminine’, p. 15. 25 For Daly’s debt to R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (1960), see Hedwig Meyer-Wilmes, ‘About the Schizophrenia in Women’s Beings: A Re-Reading of Mary Daly’, Feminist Theology, 6 (1994), 75–79. 26 Gyn/Ecology, p. 337. 27 See also Naomi Weisstein, ‘Kinder, Kuche, Kirche as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female’, in Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From the Women’s Liberation Movement, New York, Vintage, 1970 [1968], 205–220. 28 The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980, London, Virago Press, 1987 [1985], p. 227. 29 The Female Malady, p. 229. 30 The Female Malady, p. 222. 31 The Female Malady, p. 3. 32 The Female Malady, pp. 4, 237. 33 The Female Malady, pp. 4, 7, 10, 14, 18. 34 The Female Malady, p. 250. 35 Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, pp. 15–16. 36 Rowbotham, Women’s Consciousness, Man’s World, p. 29. Compare Daly on ‘the Looking Glass Society’ in Beyond God the Father, pp. 195–198. 37 Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, p. 40. 38 Rowbotham, Women’s Consciousness, Man’s World, p. 30. 39 The Dialectic of Sex, p. 11. 40 See further Gertrude Reif Hughes, ‘“Imagining the Existence of Something Uncreated”: Elements of Emerson in Adrienne Rich’s Dream of a Common Language’, in Jane Roberta Cooper, ed., Adrienne Rich: Reviews and Re-Visions 1951–81, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1984, p. 45. 41 The Female Eunuch, p. 367. 42 The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy, London, Routledge, 1993[1984], p. 103. 43 Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, p. 109. 44 ‘Die sich selbst verdoppelnde Frau’, first published in English as ‘The Self-Reflecting Woman’, in Gisela Ecker, ed., Feminist Aesthetics, London, The Women’s Press, 1985, p. 56. 45 The Second Sex, p. 228. 46 The Second Sex, p. 229. 47 Lloyd, The Man of Reason, p. 94. 48 For a brief (non-feminist) discussion of Husserl’s phenomenological attempt to distil a reality from an idea, see Bruce Ellis Benson, Modern Idolatries: Nietzsche, Derrida and Marion on Modern Idolatry, Downers Grove, Intervarsity Press, 2002, pp. 27–29. 49 ‘The Self-Reflecting Woman’, p. 54. 50 ‘The Self-Reflecting Woman’, p. 57. 51 Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes, New York, Washington Square Press, 1966, p. 806. 52 The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Berkeley and London, University of California Press, 1978.

112 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66 67 68

69 70 71 72 73

74 75

76 77 78

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‘Divine Women’, p. 59. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, e.g., pp. 131–133. Etty: A Diary, pp. 42–43. Beyond God the Father, p. 32. Lenk, ‘The Self-Reflecting Woman’, p. 57. Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1985, p. 135. Cited in Kate Millett, Sexual Politics, Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2000 [1969], p. 346. Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, p. xi. See Danelle Gallo, ‘Ecstasy Through Self-Destruction’, Philosophy Now, 107 (2015), p. 13. Thelma and Louise (dir. Ridley Scott, 1991). Outercourse: The Bedazzling Voyage, London, The Women’s Press, 1992, p. 344. See also ibid., p. 1; Lisa Isherwood, ‘I Jumped Over the Moon: An Interview With Mary Daly and Catherine the Cow’, Feminist Theology, 6 (1994), 86. See Debra Campbell, ‘Be-ing Is Be/Leaving’, in Sarah Lucia Hoagland and Marilyn Frye, eds., Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly, pp. 177, 187–189, 191–192. See my Thealogy and Embodiment: The Post-Patriarchal Reconstruction of Female Sacrality, Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1996, pp. 183–219; ‘Thealogy, Redemption and the Call of the Wild’, Feminist Theology, 15 (1997), 55–72; ‘Thealogy and the Parthenogenetic Reproduction of Femaleness’, in M.A. Hays, W. Porter, and D. Tombs, eds., Religion and Sexuality, Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1998, pp. 213–225. See also Jane Caputi, Gossips, Gorgons and Crones: The Fates of the Earth, Santa Fe, Bear and Co., 1993. See further Greer, The Female Eunuch, p. 366. Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems 1947–1980, New York, Harper & Row, 1984. Cf., Louis Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought, New York, Basic Books, 1992. Both modern and post or late modern feminisms’ deconstruction of a received female self is a variant modernist thought where destruction of visual and discursive traditions can endanger more than liberate the self. Cited in Faludi, ‘Death of a Revolutionary’. Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2000 [1974], p. 37. Friedman, Autonomy, Gender, Politics, pp. 5–6, 115–139. See Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, p. xii. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace, Boston, Beacon Press, 1989; Nel Noddings, Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1984; Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, MA and London, Harvard University Press, 1982. This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 123. This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 120. The genitality of Irigaray’s reformulation of ‘woman’ met with a very mixed postmodern feminist response on account of its putative essentialism. See Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, Difference, New York and London, Routledge, 1989, pp. 70–72. Time and the Other (and Additional Essays), trans. Richard Cohen, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1989, p. 89, cf. Levinas, Existence and Existents, p. 85. Being and Nothingness, p. 782. The Phenomenal Woman: Feminist Metaphysics and the Patterns of Identity, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998.

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79 See Luce Irigaray, ‘Sexual Difference’, in Toril Moi, ed., French Feminist Thought: A Reader, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1987, p. 120; cf. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 151, 258, 260. 80 Seyla Benhabib, ‘The Generalized and Concrete Other’, in Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell, eds., Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 85; See also Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 9, 14. 81 Gender Trouble, pp. 5–6, 25. 82 See e.g. Jill Julius Matthews, Good and Mad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth-Century Australia, Sydney and London, George Allen & Unwin, 1984. 83 Gynesis, p. 37. See also ibid., pp. 34–35; 73, 82. 84 ‘Embodied Thinking: Reflections on Feminist Theological Method’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 5 (1989), 14. See further Esther D. Reed, ‘Whither Postmodernism and Feminist Theology?’, Feminist Theology, 6 (1994), 15–29. 85 Christ and Plaskow, Goddess and God, p. 154. 86 Christ and Plaskow, Goddess and God, pp. 137–138. 87 ‘Feetishism: The Scent of a Latin American Body Theology’, in Virginia Buriss and Catherine Keller, eds., Toward a Theology of Eros: Terrifying Passion at the Limits of Discipline, New York, Fordham University Press, 2006, p. 142. 88 See Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1993 and Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2001; Hubert L. Dreyfus, On the Internet: Thinking in Action, London, Routledge, 2001, p. 82. See also his updated 2008 edition, with a new chapter on the virtual sphere of ‘Second Life’. 89 Eliza Claudia Filimo, Heterotopia in Angela Carter’s Fiction: Worlds in Collision, Hamburg, Anchor Academic Publishing, 2013, pp. 108–110.

4

Idoloclasm in Christian feminist theology

It is rare now, though not unknown, for students of theology and religion to experience the world-tipping power of a paradigm-shift when introduced to the feminist critique of exclusively masculine images of the divine. Even when conservative religionists are unwilling to countenance the use of feminine, and still less, queer, religious language or images to evoke the nature and activity of the divine, the arguments for such are no longer, to use a phrase of Hermann Hesse’s, ‘strange news from another star’. This was not the case when I went to Oxford in 1980, a young Jewish woman embarking on an undergraduate degree in Christian theology (in the absence of any similar courses in Jewish theology and in the hope that the experience would be imbued with a sense of the numinous that had been notable by its absence in my secular Jewish home). There, I spent three years reading books about an exclusively male God, written only by men, and taught exclusively by men. If my tutors, usually clerical, were unused to teaching women, let alone Jewish women, I cannot say that I felt unwelcome in the Faculty of Theology and several of them encouraged me to continue my studies at postgraduate level. But it was not until 1990, when I took up a university appointment to teach theology and religious studies, and colleagues in my all-male department were visibly relieved to be able to assign to me the modules it shared with the women’s studies degree, that I was first exposed to feminist theology and feminist studies in religion. The first books I bought for my new courses were Susannah Heschel’s On Being a Jewish Feminist and Plaskow and Christ’s Womanspirit Rising. Others quickly followed. Under this new tutelage, at once exhilarating and disturbing, I began to realize that I had not so much been welcomed to the study of Christian theology, as that my femaleness (more than my Jewishness) had simply been ignored. I was an honorary male student or none at all. This was, I think, why, throughout my time as an undergraduate at Oxford, I had felt ‘spacey and slightly ill’, as Judith Plaskow recently described her own state of mind as a student of theology and religious studies at Yale.1 It was because, intellectually speaking, I had spent day after day in what was then the Faculty of Theology’s sepulchral basement library in

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Oxford’s Radcliffe Camera, reading and writing in the unremitting absence of something for which I had no concept: my own female voice. Unlike Plaskow, who had first challenged the masculinization of God as a child of about nine,2 at no stage of my undergraduate studies had I even noticed that God was represented as exclusively male in character; that not one of my tutors was female; that not one of the Bible’s many birth stories concerns the birth of a daughter,3 and that not one of the texts I had studied was written by a woman or by any man who was not white. I was, of course, more than aware of a women’s movement I assumed to be secular and had written one undergraduate essay on Latin American liberation theology, conscious that my Oxford tutors had given that topic only the most scant and wary attention. But at no point of my undergraduate or postgraduate studies had I made any connection between women’s liberation and theology. I deferred to my tutors as the gate-keepers of religious knowledge and none of them had even mentioned, let alone validated, the pioneering religious feminist turn that Plaskow, Christ, and others had inaugurated well before I graduated from Oxford in 1983. My condition was that of the Jewish son who, at the Passover Seder, occupies the last and most ignominious place in the liturgical order of the four sons who each present a question to the table about the liberation event: I was the son (or more precisely, the silent daughter) who does not know how or what to ask.

The dismantling of idols begins Clearly less obtuse, older, and better intellectually and politically connected than me, by the mid-1960s a small group of Christian women, mainly postgraduates and scholars born in the United States between the late 1920s and the late 1940s, had begun to criticize their tradition as idolizing its own concepts and figures. They did so in the light of modern emancipatory theory and the tradition’s own, closely related, prophetic engagement with the problem of idolatry.4 Recent years have seen Christian feminist theologians engaging less in systemic criticism of the tradition and more in close readings of specific theological doctrines.5 But the Christian feminist theologians who were writing between about 1975 and 2010 – the subject of this chapter – were some of the first female graduates to have taken degrees in theology. They were in a unique position to draw on at least three types of idoloclasm: a long history, rooted in that of ancient Israel, of intra- and inter-denominational Christian ‘iconoclasm’; modern atheistic criticism of alienation by cognitive idols, and feminist theorizations of the patriarchal ideology of femininity as the source of false or objectifying images of women. The correlation of these idoloclastic discourses produced a theologically inflected and substantiated account of women’s liberation as redemption from slavery to idols. As a growing body of feminist scholarship made the gendered nature of the Christian symbology and scheme increasingly apparent, Christian feminists began to question the tradition’s claim

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to the revelation of universal, objective truth. Reading scriptural and theological texts through a new feminist ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ suggested that their writers’ and traditional readers’ allegiances might be less to God than to the human, ideological creations that lent their Church its authority and power. In this, feminism took its place in the charges and counter-charges of idolatry that have been a constitutive theme from the early to the contemporary Church and in all directions of its geographic compass. Although Christian feminist theology is a global phenomenon whose practitioners are situated in highly diverse locations of power, privilege, and its lack,6 this chapter suggests that circulating in the body of late-twentieth-century American and British feminist theology was the theory and praxis of the women’s liberation movement, itself a modern iteration of the prophetic, dissenting will to overcome estrangement by the breaking of idols. As Rita Nakashima Brock observed, feminist theologians such as ‘Rosemary Ruether and Mary Daly stand in a long line of iconoclasts such as Freud, Nietzsche, Fromm, and Hartshorne who have attacked the negative impact of denying persons their full humanity through authoritarian and punitive images of divine power’.7 This latter was a tradition of criticism whose sexual-political implications had been articulated by women since the eighteenth century, most notably by Mary Wollstonecraft. The ‘religious fervour’ that permeates Wollstonecraft’s writing is usually overlooked, but her radical politics of female dignity was predicated on a theology of the divine image, implanted in all human beings.8 Although she was brought up in an Anglican family that had distanced itself from the Church, Wollstonecraft attended services regularly for most of the 38 years of her life, and her sexual politics was informed by an engagement with the biblical tradition, particularly that of the creation of woman in Genesis 2. Even her later free-thinking allegiances did not rob her of her faith but consolidated it. In 1792, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she wrote that she had built her argument on ‘the perfection of God’. Human rights, not least women’s rights, had been mandated by God – ‘the notion of a secular Enlightenment would have confused Mary Wollstonecraft’.9 It was God, not ‘man’, who funded her ‘utopian dreams’ and her criticism of ‘the mistaken notions that enslave my sex’. She readily gave ‘thanks to that Being who impressed them [her utopian dreams] on my soul, and gave me sufficient strength of mind to dare to exert my own reason’.10 She did not reject Christianity, but the ‘impious’ theology that sanctified the untruth of inequality.11 Wollstonecraft asked why God had created woman if for no better reason than to submit to a man she would fritter away her life in pleasing. She regarded womanly submissiveness as the condition of one stunted by false worship. To be forced to obey a man is to bow down to him as to a false god. It is God, alone exalted above her, whom Wollstonecraft believed to be the only proper object of obedience. As Barbara Taylor has noted, ‘pushed to the limit of their revisionary potential, teachings pertaining to the equality of souls and human likeness to

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God offered [women who shared Wollstonecraft’s views] a vision of sacralized selfhood sharply at odds with worldly subordination’.12 Indeed, ‘This affirmation of women’s capacity to apprehend and identify with the divine, expressed in nearly all female writings of the period, was so fundamental to women’s sense of ethical worth, and so far-reaching in its egalitarian implications, that it can properly be described as one of the founding impulses of feminism’.13 Certainly, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Christian feminism was less apparently focussed on the problem of female subjectivity than on giving women philanthropic and, later, professional and ministerial opportunities to serve. In the work of campaigners such as Ellice Hopkins, first wave Christian feminism made a fundamentally practical, public, theological contribution to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century health and social care through reform of its educational, ecclesiastical, and philanthropic institutions and their ethico-sexual norms.14 First wave Christian idoloclasm would be the subject of another book, but a passing example of its recognition of women’s emancipation as that of their subjectivity by any other word, might be found in one of Dorothy L. Sayer’s stories, Unnatural Death. Here, Sayers, an early-twentieth-century Anglican humanist novelist and commentator on what was once called ‘the Woman Question’, alluded to John Milton’s remark about Eve (‘he for God only, she for God in him’) with a ‘splendid priest’ affirming that such was not good doctrine. Agreeing with him, Miss Climpson said, ‘One must get the proportions right’, and it is ‘out of proportion to see everything through the eyes of another fellow-creature’.15 Perhaps the earliest indication of the development of second wave Christian feminism’s idoloclastic theology was Valerie Saiving’s well-known article of 1960, which observed that while the characteristically male sin is that of hubris, women’s socialization and circumstances offer no political occasion for vaunting ambition, let alone pretending to the power of gods. If anything, the ‘sins’ or shortcomings of female Christian piety arise from women’s lack of ego and their self-sacrificial facilitation of the lives of all those around them but their own. The essay gained little or no traction until about 20 years later when it was included in the 1979 landmark anthology Womanspirit Rising (and even then, it did not take long for it to be dismissed as generalizing about women’s experience).16 Nonetheless, insofar as Saiving’s article prompted the realization that aspirations to a quasi-divine self-idolizing power that diverts worth-ship from God to itself are gendered, it was one of the immediate origins of Christian (and through Plaskow, Jewish) feminist theological idoloclasm. The necessity of such was first clearly articulated eight years later in Mary Daly’s 1968 book The Church and the Second Sex. Here, and in works produced over the course of the rest of her life, Daly’s ‘kick in the [patriarchal] imagination’17 was delivered with more precision and force than that of any feminist theorist before or since. In 1968 Daly was still a Catholic

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reformist feminist hopeful of the Church’s capacity for change. Until the early 1970s, and thereafter as trace, her redemptive scheme was situated within a subverted Christian tradition underpinned by Paul Tilich’s Protestant existentialist criticism of idolatry and the basic tropes of the Catholic philosophical theology in which she was steeped. At this early stage of her thinking she conceded that no serious male theologian regards God as literally, biologically, if supernaturally, male. However, she and others argued that there is a direct causal connection between an exclusively male idea of God and women’s low status and self-esteem. The monosexual masculinity of monotheism placed men at the top of any hierarchy. It excluded, a priori, the female from divinity and from the exercise of interventionary reason and morality as derived from God’s eternal perfections. This not only hurt women’s interests. It hurt their minds. Daly lamented women’s failure ‘to recognize what a powerful grip such images have on the imagination even after they have been consciously rejected as primitive and inadequate’.18 It was her 1971 ‘sermon’, ‘The Women’s Movement: An Exodus Community’, delivered at the Harvard Memorial Church that both preached and enacted her point of no return. Setting out a position that would form the basis of her 1973 book, Beyond God the Father, Daly’s diagnosis of the female condition was one of alienation; of women being ‘divided within ourselves and against ourselves’, in ways characteristic of all oppressed people. She argued that women have been created for, and are born into, membership of a planetary caste system whose exploitation of women varies only in its mode and degree. Women’s struggle for an authentic being that can ‘say its own name’ entails nothing less than their new creation. Women must be recreated in God’s image for ‘the Face of God – the “Eternal Thou” – can hardly be discerned in a species that condemns half of its members to remaining faceless’.19 This cannot be a gradual, negotiated recreation as the patriarchal status quo is maintained by ideological force, backed up by physical force. It was pointless, she believed, for a few token liberal feminists to avail themselves of equal professional opportunities while both their domestic and professional roles continued to be shaped, in all senses, by alienated images of women. Nothing less than a cathartic idoloclastic drama was required.20 And like any act of creative destruction, this feminist ‘exorcism’ of false consciousness and its demons-in-the-head would take courage: ‘the courage to be and to see in the face of nameless anxieties that surface when a woman begins to see through the masks of sexist society and confront the horrifying fact of her own alienation from her authentic self’.21 The women’s revolution was to be ‘in a real sense the first and final revolution’, one that is a destruction of the alienated self and the recreation of a post-patriarchal self. For such a radical and irrevocable act, the revolutionary ‘no’ to the ‘eternal feminine’ would have to have ‘the force of an explosion’. The idoloclastic ‘no’ of the women’s uprising was to be a resurrective ‘yes’ to female becoming. Daly knew that before the women’s revolution could be a political awakening, it would have to be an ontological awakening subject to no

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spatio-temporal limits. That is, the women’s liberation movement would have to be a revolution of cosmic dimensions and reach. To flatten out women’s liberation and ignore its bid for transcendence would rob it of radical possibility. Women’s liberation was to be an ultimate, not an interim, reality that would stand over and against the false ideology of the entire historical world order. And more than that, the force of its idoloclastic blow would need to be powerful enough to shift women’s consciousness inwards and outwards towards a power of female being beyond the range of any of the gods who had stolen it. What happened on the 14 November 1971 at the Harvard Memorial Church was not just the delivery of an unnerving, even shocking, sermon. It was also a direct action in which Daly called for a physical exodus. It invited women and men to join her, then and there, in walking out of a building that stood at the heart of a Christian social establishment. Practically and symbolically, the moment staged an eschatological event. This was a moment of collective metanoia – repentance – in its literal sense as a turning round and walking in the opposite direction. When women and men got up and followed Daly out, theirs was not so much a severance from the ekklesia as an ingathering or new assembly. They rose from their seats and went out into the light as an exodus community leaving enslavement to idols in the land of the fathers towards the new space of freedom and flourishing promised by the women’s liberation movement. At this time, sisterhood was, for Daly, an ‘anti-Church’ still defined, if negatively, by the Church. Daly’s sermon was not, as is often thought, urging women and men to leave the Church, but to walk towards a new and better kind of Church. Indeed, the very moment of departure was proleptical of true Church for whatever had once been authentic in the Christian tradition ‘seemed to be very much present’ in this feminist crisis of decision: women’s kairos or time had come. Women had only to go out and meet it. Like Emily Culpepper, many who were there on that day perceived this moment as an emancipatory walking towards Church, not away from it. As a redemptive moment that returned women to life, it was the occasion of great rejoicing. Mary Rodda of the Boston University Divinity School wrote at the time that when she left the memorial Church with Daly she did so with a big smile on her face: ‘As I left, I looked at the different faces in the pews – and kept on smiling. I saw leaving women I knew, old women, middle-aged women, their children, husbands, young women, all kinds and sorts of people. I knew that we were leaving to do whatever we had to do to become persons’.22 But Daly’s patience was already running out. Her critique intensified and her work was conceived in ever less constructive terms. She began to dismantle the tradition. In Beyond God the Father, published in 1973, she described women as ‘the essential victims of the archaic God-projection’ and demanded a full-scale idoloclasm. Only by ‘smashing images that obstruct the becoming of the image of God’ in women would be they be free, alive, equal, and fully human.23 Beyond God the Father identifies three false

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Christian gods: the god of ‘explanation’ who covers up for men by justifying their wrongs rather than righting them; the god of ‘otherworldliness’ whom women must counter with the creation of a living, biophilic divinity that is actually present to this world; and the god who is ‘the judge of sin’, principally female sin in Eve, whose internalized voice wounds women’s selfesteem and vacates their will, degrading them into passive obedience to the earthly lords their heavenly lord has set over them.24 Some feminists would come to see the perichoretic nature of the Trinity as an oxygenation of binary, fixed or ossified concepts of both God and gender. (Irigaray’s painterly images of divine women as half creatures of the air and of the sea, and of the trinitary God as ‘father, son-fish, spirit-bird’, are particularly memorable.)25 But Daly regarded the three persons of the Trinity, however variously figured and related, as enacting an infinitely self-absorbed ‘one-act play’: ‘the original Love Story’ about an all-male family, ‘performed by the Supreme All Male Cast’.26 According to Daly, the Christian god called God had been set up in the high places to preside over an oppressive social hierarchy. Modelled after the patriarchal ruling class, God’s idol exists to normalize and sanctify its own system, rendering it beyond theo-political change. Daly’s infamous syllogism, ‘if God is male, then the male is God’,27 was the slogan of a theory of projection, not the literal syllogism it has been widely misunderstood to be. The patriarchal God-projection, consisting of images of male superiority indelibly impressed on consciousness, had first to be exorcized from women’s consciousness and only then from their cultural institutions. Idoloclasm – ‘the dethronement of false Gods – ideas and symbols of God that religion has foisted upon the human spirit’ – was to precede any other act.28 At this period of her life, Daly was confident that as the women’s liberation movement progressed, ‘women’s growth in self-respect will deal the death-blow’ to the ‘demons dressed as Gods’. It was precisely from their position on the prophetic margins that women could topple this rigid ‘deadly deception’ of a deity from its exalted position on ‘the scale of human delusions’.29

The early charges of idolatry Most subsequent second wave Christian feminist theology took its cue from Daly’s early analysis. Moderated rather than set aside, the intemperate criticism of idols set out in Daly’s The Church and the Second Sex and Beyond God the Father did not merely influence second wave Christian feminist theology – it had laid its foundations. Even though she, above all others, came to represent the position of post-Christian feminism, perhaps even post-post-Christian (sic) feminism, it is because her call to idoloclasm was answered by Christian feminist theology that her work belongs within this chapter. Of course, not all Christian women think alike. Christian feminists’ theoretical and sexual allegiances differ and their attitudes to images are often denominationally inflected. Yet more than an echo of Daly can be

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heard right across the Christian denominational spectrum from Elizabeth Johnson, a Catholic Sister of St Joseph, to the evangelical Protestant Elaine Storkey. While Storkey’s 1985 What’s Right With Feminism, for example, was persuaded that Christian patriarchy is redeemable by women, Storkey was no less convinced than the early Daly that the idealization of Christian femininity and the imposition of traditional roles stunts women’s growth into maturity and distorts the image of Christian womanhood through its grip on their mind.30 Other, less conservative, Christian feminists than Storkey who were writing during the late 1970s and early 1980s covered very similar ground to the early Daly, and their arguments were not all that much more conciliatory in tone than hers. After Daly, the Catholic theologian Elizabeth Farians was among the first of the second wave feminists to condemn the divine ordination of a rigidly hierarchical ‘natural’ ideological order whose subordination of women cannot be challenged without defying God and incurring his displeasure or wrath. ‘This’, she wrote of the patriarchal Christian dispensation, ‘is idolatry. It is the remnant of phallic worship in modern disguise’.31 The Father and the Son are empty symbols of masculine power when their masculinity is used to represent divinity and justify women’s exclusion from leadership and liturgical functions: ‘What these men have done is to make God in their own image and likeness and what they worship in God is themselves’.32 Christian feminist theology is multi-perspectival but has been minimally defined as an attempt ‘to articulate adequately the Christian witness of faith from the perspective of women as an oppressed group’.33 Yet early feminist theology did something more radical than that. A cross-denominational range of feminist commentators of the period – Daly, Farians, Ruether, McFague, and others – suggested that for Christian feminist theology to be perspectival at all is idoloclastic. That is, it makes the counter-traditional assertion that women are ontologically, rather than incidentally, capable of witness. Women are not the vessels who receive divine revelation without seeing, speaking, and hearing it. It was the Christian tradition’s distortion by the ontological degradation of women, even before any socio-religious discrimination against women, that second wave Christian feminist theology sought to expose and correct.34 Second wave Christian feminist theology understood the tradition to have been distorted (though not irrevocably or exhaustively) by its own idolatry. Patriarchy had stolen God’s power and conferred it onto its own structures and institutions of power by means of its creation of a false image of God. The task of this exclusively male god called God was to stand as guarantor of a status quo that served the interests of a masculine hegemony. Rosemary Ruether, claiming that it was idolatrous for men to see themselves as more ‘like’ God than women, spoke for a generation of Christian feminists in regarding sexism as the true ‘Original Sin’.35 Ruether described the ‘dominology’ of patriarchy in terms of interconnected structural sins ‘based on top-down epistemology and a concept of the self and its relation to other

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humans and nature’. This dominology is ‘the root of the evils of sexism, racism and imperialism’.36 It colonizes minds and wills (divine and human), bodies (male, female, and animal), and the land they live on by its means of their misrepresentation. Christianity had been more than complicit in the politics of dominology. It had presided over it. In 1982, Anne Carr therefore wondered if a Christian feminist theology was possible at all. How, she asked, might the Church’s idolatry be stripped away when it had so thoroughly infinitized masculinity and its symbols had become substitutes for the divine?37 A year after Ruether published Sexism and God-Talk in 1983, Elizabeth Johnson, equally aware that imaging and naming God as exclusively female would be idolatrous, summarized feminist theology as a prophetic idoloclasm: The critique brought by women theologians against the exclusive centrality of the male image and idea of God is not only that in stereotyping and then banning female reality as suitable reference points for God, androcentric thought has denigrated the human dignity of women. The critique also bears directly on the religious significance and ultimate truth of androcentric thought about God. The charge, quite simply, is that of idolatry.38 Over the whole course of her vocation, Johnson has insisted that the imagination and conceptualization of God in terms of exclusively and comprehensively masculine forms and models of finite power produce only the theological equivalents of graven images. Johnson is aware that the tradition pays more than lip-service to the apophatic. The three great principles of apophatic Abrahamic theology are that it be indirect, non-literal, and manynamed.39 And yet the same tradition’s categorical refusal to name God in terms of female modes of being grants its own images functional equivalence to God: ‘More solid than stone, more resistant to iconoclasm than bronze, seems to be the ruling male substratum of the idea of God cast in theological language and engraved in public and private prayer. In this context, naming God she has profound theological significance for understanding the truth of God. Simply stated, it smashes the idol’.40 To name God ‘she’ is not to reify God. Female names are used oratively as a way of calling to God by a name that suggests, by analogy, a beloved quality, not an essence. Female names are used to liberate the fulness of the living God by way of correcting final and certain masculinist dogma, not to replace all masculine imagery for God, which is not inherently or only oppressive, with a new set of exclusively feminine images. With other women, Johnson called upon the triune God as Mother and Child of Peace, bound by the Spirit of Love. Theirs is a God who ‘comes to us in the birth of the infant Christ’, who sweeps the heavens with her ‘starry skirt of night’ and polishes ‘the eastern sky to bring light to the new day’. These are Christian theologians who see the face of God in a grandmother’s

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‘soft, worn hands’ that have peeled the thousands of potatoes that have fed her family,41 which is not to sacralize drudgery but to release a revelation of the beauty, truth, and goodness of the everyday from the bindings of mere feminine glamour. Christian feminism regards patriarchy, not the supposed sins of Eve and Adam, as humanity’s actual fall from innocence and freedom into the state of estrangement and enslavement that is the expulsion from Eden. Patriarchy is a self-idolatrous system that structurally estranges and enslaves. Its false theological anthropology establishes, by divine right, its own divine-human lordship over a populace of non-elite men, women, children, and slaves. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza interpreted the rapid degeneration of an originally egalitarian Early Church into an institution marked by social and gendered inequality of access to the sacred, its mirroring of the offices and character of imperial political power, as just such a fall.42 From the early 1970s, she and other Catholic women who had not experienced the changes Protestant women had done since the early nineteenth century (women preachers, deacons, and eventually, priests and bishops), were particularly inclined to criticize ‘the alienation fostered by patriarchal religious structures [that] has shaped not only social relations but also people’s selves’. As Denise Carmody went on to note, ‘Feminists dealing with this fact frequently find themselves calling for a new spirituality. By this they mean a personal prayer and commitment to social justice that would heal women from within’.43 Christian feminists, then, were as or more unsparing in their criticism of the Christian tradition as secular feminists. They knew from the inside how centuries of glorification of asexual femininity had produced the degraded female virtues of passivity, patience in the face of abuse, silence, and stillness. Christian feminists had seen in the life of the church around them how the negative virtues of a self-effacing demeanour can lead to collusion and moral listlessness. When Luther recommended that a wife should sit still at home, ‘like a nail driven into the wall’, as he put it, while her husband rules her, the home, and the state,44 he was endorsing precisely the qualities of will that an ideology of femininity required, namely those that would present no challenge to the prevailing order. No less than the patristic images that demonized the sexuate female body as a ‘devil’s gateway’, a ‘temple built over a sewer’, or a gaudily painted sepulchre, these are the qualities of a caricature, not of living persons. It is easy to focus on notoriously atrocious images like these and dismiss Christian theology in its entirety on their account alone. Second wave Christian feminists’ readings of their tradition had to be detailed and nuanced in ways that secular feminists’ generally cursory remarks about it were not. Christian feminists knew precisely where their tradition’s history and texts could be read as countermanding its own patriarchy. However, they rejected, no less vehemently than their secular sisters, the omnipotent and omniscient male God as an idol. All feminists would agree that this figure is a projection of male power named as Lord, Father, and King to secure its own

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socio-political purposes. But it was left to theistic feminists to actually break the idol. It was the task of feminist theology not only to reimagine God but also to explain why exclusively male images of God matter. It fell to feminist theology to elaborate an argument that it did not invent: man-become-God makes the perception and operation of divine agency indistinguishable from his own. Human and divine masculinity co-licenses the divine male’s untrammelled power over animals, children, women, and the (female) earth itself. To understand the nature of patriarchal idolatry may therefore be to understand the nature and origin of oppression itself. Thus Ruether: ‘To the extent that . . . patriarchy incarnates unjust and oppressive relationships, such images of God become sanctions of evil’.45 And to the extent that idolatry arrogates divine power to itself, it drains mystery and possibility from the world. As Luce Irigaray asked: ‘Does not, perhaps, the key to or the beginning of the world’s mystery lie in man’s desire to keep the center of the whole in himself? . . . [H]e cannot endure the mystery of the other and, instead, conceives a god made in his own image in order to encircle, if not to dominate, the horizon of every mystery’.46 Because idolatrous images of the masculine-divine and the masculinehuman are continuous and mutually reinforcing, second wave Christian feminist theology urged a dual idoloclasm. The destruction of an idolatrous image of God constituted the same bid for freedom and equality as that of the destruction of a false image of ‘man’. Only by the demystification of gender – female as well as male, divine as well as human – would the inequalities of the cosmic order be exposed as those of the social order writ large. But unlike secular feminist theory, second wave Christian feminist theology was not reductionist; it was theology, not sociology. It asked how existing Christian institutions could affirm the humanity of women while their tradition teaches or assumes that women do not normatively or fully image God. Augustine’s reading of Paul’s statement in his first letter to the Corinthians that a man is the image and glory of God, while woman is the glory of man, was, for example, indicative to Rosemary Ruether and others that, unlike ‘man’, ‘woman’ was not theomorphic; she was ontologically incapable of imaging God.47 That a woman bears the image of God only secondarily by virtue of her complementary marital relationship with a man was experienced as distortive of Christian women’s relationship with God, men, and themselves. Although the present discussion is not so much about sexism in the Church or its doctrines, but about Christian women’s negotiation with their ordained image, it is worth noting that such was not an entirely retrospective exercise. Even in the mid-twentieth century, the most distinguished of all Protestant theologians, Karl Barth, had interpreted the divinely ordained gender order as consisting of a series of pairings in which the subordination of women under male headship was divinely ordained. Just as God, in Barth, is paired with Christ and Christ with the Church, man is paired with woman. The woman must submit to the man, who was created first, just

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as the Son comes after the Father. Man and woman are not equal in function or origin. Even though Barth may not have understood the cosmos as a straightforward hierarchy of domination and subordination running from the heavenly Father through his Son, men, and finally to women below them all,48 for secular women’s liberationists, such subtle distinctions were merely an esoteric detail of an irrelevant scheme. Yet secular feminists’ view of religion as a primary agent of harm to women also ignored the ways in which prophetic religion both upholds patriarchy but also stands in judgement upon it. More prepared to give liberal religion the benefit of the doubt than the secular majority in the women’s movement, Christian feminists recognized that sexism has been both sanctioned by the tradition and countermanded by it. If, on the one hand, Christian doctrine sanctions the abuse of women, on the other, its general proscription of idols offers women a critical praxis by which to overcome their particular estrangement from themselves and from the God in whose image they are made.

Counter-idolatrous apophaticism in Christian feminist theology Christian women’s political theology was assembled under the banner of biblical prophetic witness, which urged an interconnected liberation from idols and social oppression. It also thought and spoke about God under the quieter banner of the apophatic, which approached knowledge of God by way of contentless negation. Women’s theological imagination would be liberated not by storming its citadels but by waiting: stilling the tradition until its silence spoke. This conceptual pause, attended by plural, provisional, shifting models of God and the rejection of closed canons, meant that in spite of their refusal to accept or make authoritarian distinctions between orthodoxy and heresy, Christian feminists’ account of liberation from idols did not create the kind of destructive ideational vacua I described in the previous chapter of this book. Christian feminist theology of the second wave period was methodologically committed to addressing the transcendent only from the situation of the immanent (which was why its conservative critics believed it to be a ‘back door’ secularism, more concerned with women’s empowerment than God). Necessarily, its immanentism orientated Christian feminist confession towards one of tactical agnosticism. Suspending its own theology over the gap between knowledge and agnosis, the liberated God was to be both experientially available to women and apophatically incommensurate with anything yet known or knowable under patriarchy. God, after all, is uncreated and has no likeness. Quoting Aquinas, Elizabeth Johnson reminded her readers that, ‘to know that one knows nothing about God and that God can never be adequately articulated, is the highest form of human knowledge’.49 To affirm this of divine being is also to say that female being, made in God’s image, cannot be fully articulated, that is, exhausted, either.

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What is particularly significant about the apophatic theology favoured by Christian feminist idoloclasts is that it obviates the possibility of false images of God by obviating the possibility of true images. (Or rather, a true image is a self-cancelling one.) Sallie McFague, an Anglican feminist theologian, did not so much break images because she thought that they were false, as deny that we can know the object they claim to represent. ‘We must not forget’, she wrote, ‘the crack in the foundation beneath all our imaginings and the conceptual schemes we build upon them. That crack is exemplified in the “is not” of metaphor which denies any identity in its assertions’.50 While Ruether and others were aware that traditional, apparently genderneutral, apophatic theology can conceal androcentric assumptions beneath its abstractions,51 their deployment of the term ‘God/ess’ made divinity literally unsayable. Its interruptive forward slash rendered gendered words and ideas about God either impossible or incomplete. This procedural agnosticism was not inconsistent with a form of prophetic atheism. By this I mean that second wave Christian feminists, for whom feminist theory and Latin American liberation theology had been more or less equally formative, drew on Marxist theology, an instance of the modern religious criticism of religion cognate with feminism’s, to pose a primary critical question. If Christianity worships an idol that presides over the status quo, providentially blessing the powerful and keeping the poor in their abject place, then who are the real atheists? For insofar as the Christian God does not demand the end of dehumanization and oppression, its theism is an atheism. It has no faith in an active, redemptive God whose love is his justice; it worships a conveniently inactive, unresponsive false god or idol who does not, cannot, challenge injustice, not least because he is non-existent.52 In asking and answering this radical question, Christian (and Jewish) feminist theology contributed one of the most radical moments of the women’s liberation movement – one that is too often overlooked by critics assuming, wrongly, that religious feminism had been tamed by a maternalist, domesticated piety. In fact, the cultural feminist tropes and practices of caring motherhood that did so much to shape the women’s spirituality movement during the mid-1980s had a relatively slight impact on Christian feminist theology.53 The publication of books such as Margaret Hebblethwaite’s Motherhood and God in 1984 may have encouraged personal meditations and significant liturgical innovations that included addressing God as Mother,54 but potentially conservative or essentialist maternal images of God were not as theologically decisive for Christian feminists as one might expect. In Metaphorical Theology (1982), McFague equated literalism and idolatry and reminded her readers of an older, mystical ‘symbolical mentality’ that knew metaphors to be just that: non-identical with their object, at once revealing and concealing something of the reality of God in human experience.55 On the understanding that an idolator is not a polytheist but a monotheist who mistakes sole claims to the truth of God for the oneness

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of God, McFague and others advocated the use of multiple personal and non-personal relational models of God. It was these that would prevent the emergence of a new feminist idolatry. These models included but did not prioritize motherhood. Nelle Morton similarly contended that new realities can only be ushered in by images that shatter traditional, conventional, imitative ideas by listening to the silence left behind. Silence is not always the privation of speech. It can make aural room for women to begin to ‘hear one another to speech’.56 In asking whether ‘God the Father’ is a model or an idol,57 McFague’s Metaphorical Theology argued that it is not so much the characterization of God as masculine to which feminist theology objects, as it is the naming of God as Father, King, and Lord, which situates God in a nexus of images denoting national and familial governance that excludes women and then forgets that these images are images at all. The distinction between an image and the reality it images collapses. In God the Father, a model has become not merely absolute but a cataphatic (positive) description of who and what God is, and to that extent it is an idol. Patriarchal theology is idolatrous, McFague argued, because it is deficient in apophatic and hypothetical elements that withdraw an image as it is drawn. To forget that God-talk is provisional is to forget the mystery of divinity as pure difference or wholly otherness. Patriarchal orthodoxies forget God when they become not one way of understanding God, but the only permissible way. The properly unbridgeable line between God-talk and its intentional object has been crossed. A few years later, when McFague was writing Models of God, she had come to see patriarchal, imperial, and triumphal images of God ‘in an increasingly grim light’. These images were not just inimical to women’s interests but opposed to love and the continuation of life itself. In a nuclear age, in which the earth was treated as an expendable theatre of war, this God’s power, like any death-dealing idol, was not on the side of life.58 McFague’s idoloclasm may have been founded on the apophatic, but a purely negative theology would not be able to do the personalist work of Christianity as an inclusive, egalitarian gospel of love for the oppressed. An idol may be the projection of various powers, but love is not one of them. Because an idol is, in a sense, a fence for stolen power that neither gives nor receives unconditional love, love is one of the only attributes that can be predicated of God without risk of idolatry. Only a year later, in 1988, Rita Nakashima Brock was to say almost the same thing as McFague: love is the well-spring of a living God and living people over and against their dead idol. If Christian theology is to remain true to its claim that ‘divine power is love in its fullness, and that the community of divine power is one of justice and peace’, ‘we need theologies that reveal the Heart of the Universe’ as love.59 God’s love is only known in and through the stories of human relationships. As such a theological text is closer to a work of fiction than a scientific description of the divine operation. McFague encouraged women to conduct thought experiments in which God’s love could be conceived and manifest in

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relational models such as mother, lover, friend or body of the world.60 It may be difficult, now, for a liberal reader to find these word-images provocative. But feminist theology, no less than any other kind, is supposed to ‘disrupt our usual ways to seeing’ and, at the time, McFague’s work did so. Only as such would it open a religious imaginary that had ‘for too long been locked against interpreting the divine-human relation except in one dominant mode’.61 Here, McFague’s apophatic strategy was not that of emptying the mind of images, but of filling it with new ones. If God is love, then divine reality is radically inclusive of difference as well as being difference itself. Claims to the one true image could be broken by the introduction of the many. There needs, she thought, to be a profusion of complementary models of God if justice is to be done to the density and complexity of the divine-human relationship. For in the moment that images of God as father or king (or mother) cease to be interpretive and proscribe any image, and therefore any relationship, other than the authorized ones, theology becomes idolatrous.62 Provisionality and plurality was still being introduced into Christian feminist theology in 1990, when Mary Ann Stenger noted that, in the light of evidence that the Hebrew Bible was in large part a repudiation of matrifocal religion and the New Testament was influenced by the patriarchal household codes of the day, ‘a first step toward reform is to recognize that patriarchal theology is relative to time, culture, and most importantly God. If God alone is absolute, then all theological expression, as human and finite, is subject to change and correction in relationship to God’. Christian feminist theology, like any good theology, had to reconcile the ultimate reality of God and the relativity of God as a historical concept.63 Elizabeth Johnson would be the first to acknowledge that feminists are not the first modern theologians to remind the Church of God’s unknowability. Hans von Balthasar was one of many who cited Augustine’s counter-idolatrous principle – ‘Si comprehendis non est Deus’ (‘If you think you have conceived something, what you conceived was certainly not God’), – as foundational to theology.64 So too C. S. Lewis had famously remarked, ‘My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? . . . And most are offended by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not’.)65 Johnson used such insistences on the theological necessity of an unknown and unknowable God to develop the argument that women’s human dignity is only affirmed when there is no necessary or comprehensive relationship between God’s self-revelation and the gender-exclusive language and categories that have shaped the history of Christian theology.66 Feminism rejected all patriarchal theology (not just some periods and types of it) as a kind of natural theology that peered down the well of tradition and saw none other than its own masculine face. This entailed that accounts of the divine nature and will that are read off with certainty from the prevailing conditions of a given polity, including a feminist one, could not be justified. As Catherine

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Keller recently noted, ‘in its attention to its own aporias, feminism at points resembles a mysticism or negative theology suspended between knowledge and ignorance whose “prolific manifold” will always queer its own truth claims’.67 McFague was one of the earliest feminist theologians to suggest an apophatic turn from patriarchal idolatry. At that stage, the point was rather basically made. By the twenty-first century, feminist theologians had joined a whole host of theologians from Meister Ekhart, who famously prayed to God to rid him of God, to Karl Barth, Thomas Merton, John Caputo, and on to Jacques Derrida who complained that ‘the divine has been ruined by God’. All of them had rediscovered the humility of apophatic theology. Not least in the light of modern projection theory, late modern or postmodern apophatic theology’s unsaying of God was cognate with that of feminist theology. Negative theology is, after all, an excellent way of renouncing one’s ideological interest in God. Apophasis resists the creaturely invention of the divine as a mistaking of the finite for the infinite that violates the integrity of the human and the wholly otherness of the divine. That it is a silent theological rebuke to theology makes it more powerful, not less. By the late twentieth century, Christian apophaticism had divested itself of negative theology’s traditionally ascetic aspiration to move beyond the limits of the body and even beyond being. Just as Barth knew Christ to be most divine in the moment of his greatest bodily suffering, modern and postmodern apophatic theology held on to the living, suffering, real body, for it is in and through its pathos that God is made known.68 Knowing theirs to be a politically counter-intuitive move, Keller, Kathryn Tanner, and other feminist theologians did not practice apophasis as indifference to the world around them. As Denys Turner would put it, apophatic theology does not say that God is nothing and nor does it say nothing about God. On the contrary, Turner advocates, as McFague did, imaginal prolixity as a way of signalling the proper failure of all theology in a world where everything tells us something important about God. For that very reason, and by its nature as a human word, theology is forever perched on the brink of theolatry. The apophatic must therefore be in constant dialectical relationship to the cataphatic.69 The cognitively aniconic tendency of Christian feminist theology, including that of Catholic feminists who had not been enculturated into the plain speech and distrust of images more traditionally characteristic of Protestant churches, did not, then, paralyse its energy, hope, and vision.70 On the contrary, feminist theologians wrote, taught, and worshipped confident not only of God’s love as the ultimate antidote to heartless idols, but of their own books, art, liturgies, and rituals’ capacity to open women’s imagination to a God lost and yet to come. After all, a forgotten, unnamed, unimaginable God of women, who themselves number so prominently among the subvisible, forgotten, and unnamed, might be none other than the God once proclaimed to the Athenians by Paul: ‘For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, “To

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an unknown god”. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you’.71

Marcella Althaus-Reid and the queering of idols This chapter began with Mary Daly and ends with Marcella Althaus-Reid. Althaus-Reid’s advocation of a theology that refused to sanitize or de-realize the image of all those who deviate from the heteropatriarchal norm closes this chapter as a bridge from late-twentieth-century Christian feminist idoloclasm into that of the new millennium. Daly’s idoloclasm eventually took her as far from the life of the Church (though not always from its intellectual genius) as it was possible to go, and then further. But Marcella Althaus-Reid’s incitement to ‘dis-graceful’ deviance from the Church’s normative images and ideas emerged from within its ordinary, messy, local, life, thereby presenting perhaps the most radically and innovatively idoloclastic of all Christian feminist theologies. Idol-breaking is nothing if not a provocation, and in this Althaus-Reid excelled. Just as earlier radical feminists had taken a speculum to their vaginas to learn how to look out into the world by first looking into themselves – to see who they were from the inside, rather than from their image in the mirror of patriarchy – so too Althaus-Reid found liberation from the vacuity of white heterosexist idols in acts of ‘indecent exposure’. By the end of the twentieth century, the hybridity of Jesus as the God-man had suggested a queer Christ, every bit as queer as his virgin-mother Mary. Although others had been queering the gospel since the 1990s,72 AlthausReid was an Argentinian feminist whose liberation and queer theology needs to be understood in that formative context: Argentina in the 1970s, where political oppression included gender oppression. Heterosexist codes of sexual dress and behaviour were enforced by the threat and actuality of violence. Here, the urban poor and the ‘deviant’ developed a distinctively Latin American ‘passion for freedom and ambiguity’.73 Her theology was one that was affiliated to the people on their own streets. In the traffic of those who can be seen and heard going about their daily business was God. In the stories of poor Latin American women, gay men, sex workers and all the other excluded others who are theologically silent and invisible, AlthausReid found Christianity’s hegemonic transcendent idea joyously, painfully, subverted and deviated back to its expressive, dirty, immanent reality on the ground. Althaus-Reid’s theology refused to pretend that women are mere odourless appearances. Her women are fully materialized; never selfsubstituted or pretending to be themselves. In the first few pages of her book Indecent Theology, published in 2000, Althaus-Reid invited her readers to go with her to see the women who, perhaps wearing no underwear, sat in the marketplaces of Buenos Aires selling lemons and parsley whose scent was mixed with the musky waft of their sex. Although not all readers wanted to be party to what they saw as AlthausReid’s voyeuristic invasion of the sexual privacy of women of colour,74

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Indecent Theology, like her later book, The Queer God (2003), also dared to ‘bare the gods’ behinds’.75 She got to the truth not by prying but turning everything upside down, including the tradition’s divinities, looking to see the unreality of what is (and is not) there. ‘What does the Guadalupana have under her skirts?’, she asked.76 By looking under the skirts of Mary, AlthausReid not only realized Mary and those who love her impiously, but also the theologian who was doing the looking. Academic theology is no more ideologically neutral than any other hegemonic discourse.77 Theologians themselves, she suggested, must come clean about their own embodiment, their own desire. One cannot be an idoloclast, or in her words, one who ‘undresses’ the theological project: que(e)rying and exposing its ideological covers, offering a new (per)version of the tradition, without exposing one’s own humanity. One cannot be a truthful theologian without, at least metaphorically, going without underwear. It is notable that the Hebrew term for idolatry is avodah zarah – literally, service or worship of the strange or foreign. Althaus-Reid, however, broke idols by refusing to exclude the strange from theology. On the contrary, she welcomed the odd, the undecidable, the mixed, and the uncanny as that whose power to unnerve would break open the mould of the stale, authorized, passively received, tradition. She embraced the colonially demonized energy of the fetish. She treasured the little Brazilian statues of the Umbanda goddess Maria Mulambo, with their naked bodies and long black hair, precisely for their materiality, vulgarity, and impurity. For fetishes, like those who are entranced by them, teach us about who and what validates and invalidates the theological process; about who and what is and is not permitted to speak the name of the divine.78 A messianic narrative in which the seed of the Davidic line is carried by a female vessel limits redemption to a strictly heterosexual conception. But in the castigated biblical kingdom of Sodom, transgressive sexual otherness was the norm.79 Althaus-Reid’s ‘sodomising hermeneutics’ was an idoloclastic reading of bible and culture in which the energy and truth of lives can in all senses ‘come out’ as queer. What is queer is not necessarily gay. It is the unregulated other: the ‘stranger at the gate’; the restless dead; the homeless. It is that which has been displaced and confined to the dungeons and attics, graves and cardboard boxes of culture and its subconsciousness, but gleefully refuses to go away.80 Althaus-Reid likened the continual alienation of the other to someone at a funfair booth sticking their head through the cutout hole above a painted figure.81 Indecenting ‘outs’ or restores the reality of the other by removing the screen – drawing back the curtain – and revealing the identity of a whole person, liberated from images that either suppress otherness or force it to conform to a general norm. Althaus-Reid’s mockeries sometimes descended into hyperbole, silliness, and apparently gratuitous offence. It was nothing if not goading to urge the church to ‘undress the father of power and glory and leave God sitting in the cold while the Queer community occupies the Trinity’.82 But a ‘descent’ into

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the depths of the profane that is, paradoxically, an ‘ascent’ into its holiness, is hardly unknown in the history of religion. And like that of all holy fools and mockers of idols, Althaus-Reid’s was a task of the highest seriousness. A combination of heterosexism and colonialism has assaulted the sexual and indigenous other by violence and exploitation and genocide respectively. Christendom expanded its realm by the enslavement and forced conversion of racial others. Anything but ‘good news’ for these, it punished their dissidence by the destruction of their sacra, trashed as ‘fetishes’ – not even as ‘idols’. What Althaus-Reid’s theology did was to pronounce that the Catholic Church’s heterosexist God, a product of its gynophobia, homophobia, racism, and fear of natural, pagan disorderliness, is itself an idol. It cannot be anything but an idol, since it is an image constructed from and gilded by the products of colonial injustice. The purpose of a queer liberation theology, unlike a classic Marxist liberation theology which did not willingly set places for women and gays at its revolutionary table,83 was therefore to let the excluded and the dead of a hegemonic culture back into life and let them tell their sacred stories from below, from the underside: from the dark and unsafe alleys of the city.84 I find it difficult to share Althaus-Reid’s enthusiasm for the sadomasochistic subcultures that funded her theological imaginary. I find them, as others have, too excited by, too dependent on, the very cultures of cruelty, abjection, and exploitation that their parody has turned into a sexual game. Yet it is arguable that Althaus-Reid was sacralizing neither the patriarchal duality of male dominance and female submission, nor God the master and Jesus his servant. She was reading S/M practitioners, who often switch roles, through the lens of eschatological reversal, that is, as proleptical of a pleasurably dangerous subversion of those ‘tops’ who rule and punish the submissive feminized ‘bottoms’. She construed S/M as the theatrical performance of a radical sexual-political reversal and reorganization of power.85 It is hard not to cheer Althaus-Reid’s irrepressibly obscene gesture to the idolaters of perfection; to their plastic women, which she referred to as ‘dollies’.86 Sweeping those aside, she made theo-cultural space for the complex actualities of the many. Like other modern critics of idolatry, she recognized that the hegemonic centre oppresses the sexually and economically marginal by means of ‘a simple case of the reproduction of false consciousness’.87 Their liberation would be a liberation of grace and power from the Church’s institutional dead centre to the edgy localities of its daily life.

Notes 1 2 3 4

Goddess and God in the World, p. 46. Goddess and God in the World, p. 36. Hampson, After Christianity, p. 196. For a critical Christian literature on idolatry, see Stephen Barton, ed., Idolatry. (The articles in this collection, like other current studies of idolatry, do not use gender as a category of analysis.) Most studies are written from within the

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6 7 8 9 10 11

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discipline of biblical studies, often from an evangelical perspective. Examples would include, Gregory K. Beale, We Become What We Worship: A Biblical Theology of Idolatry, Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2008; Edward P. Meadors, Idolatry and the Hardening of the Heart: A Study of Biblical Theology, New York, T. & T. Clark, 2006, and Benson, Graven Ideologies. E.g., Serene Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2000, which uses feminist theory and women’s experiences to constructively elucidate, for example, Calvin’s apparently unpromising views on sin. Margaret Kamitsuka, Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference, New York, Oxford University Press, 2007. Journeys By Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power, Eugene, OR, Wipf & Stock, 2008 [1988], p. 50. Arleen Ingham, Women and Spirituality in the Writing of More, Wollstonecraft, Stanton, and Eddy, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 78. Dominic Erdozain, ‘Loving the Enemy: Christianity and the Enlightenment’, www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2016/05/16/4463468.htm, accessed 28.3.18. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 72. Peter Francis Murphy, Feminism and Masculinities, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 1. Wollstonecraft’s was not a lone voice. In 1792, the same year that had seen the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel’s proto-feminist work ‘On Improving the Status of Women’ (1792) attacked the notion that women’s subjection was a punishment from God and advocated the restoration of their natural and equal rights (The Status of Women: Collected Writings, trans. and ed. Timothy F. Sellner, Bloomington, Xlibris, 2009, pp. 127–302). Barbara Taylor, ‘The Religious Foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Feminism’, in Claudia L. Johnson, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 99–118, p. 103. Taylor, ‘The Religious Foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Feminism’, p. 107. See e.g. Melissa Raphael, ‘J. Ellice Hopkins: The Construction of a Recent Spiritual Feminist Foremother’, Feminist Theology, 5 (1996), 73–95; Sue Morgan, ‘Faith, Sex and Purity: The Religio-Feminist Theory of Ellice Hopkins’, Women’s History Review, 9 (2000), 13–34. Lord Peter: A Collection of All the Lord Peter Wimsey Stories, New York, Harper and Row, 1971, p. 461. See further her commonsensical ‘Are Women Human?’ and ‘The Human Not-quite-Human’, in Unpopular Opinions, London, Gollanz, 1946 [1938], pp. 106–116 and 116–122, respectively. Rebekah Miles, ‘Valerie Saiving Reconsidered’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 28 (2012), 79–86. Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 190. The Church and the Second Sex, Boston, Beacon Press, 1968, p. 181. See also pp. 180–183 and passim. ‘The Women’s Movement: An Exodus Community’, Religious Education, September – October, 1972, p. 328. ‘The Women’s Movement: An Exodus Community’, p. 329. ‘The Women’s Movement: An Exodus Community’, p. 331. ‘The Women’s Movement: An Exodus Community’, p. 335. Beyond God the Father, p. 29. Beyond God the Father, pp. 30–31. ‘Divine Women’, p. 60. Gyn/Ecology, p. 38. Beyond God the Father, p. 19. Beyond God the Father, p. 29.

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29 Beyond God the Father, p. 31. When later Daly broke with reformism, she intensified her Nietzschean criticism of monotheistic religion as a nihilistic vitiation of natural energy by urging women to reclaim the divine energy manifest in the sacrality of sisterhood itself. 30 What’s Right with Feminism, London, SPCK, 1985, pp. 119, 129. 31 ‘Phallic Worship: The Ultimate Idolatry’, in Judith Plaskow and Joan Arnold Romero, eds., Women and Religion, Missoula, Scholars Press, 1974, p. 86. 32 ‘Phallic Worship’, p. 87. 33 Pamela Dickey Young, Feminist Theology/Christian Theology: In Search of Method, Minneapolis, Fortress, 1990, p. 60. 34 Elizabeth Johnson, ‘The Marian Tradition and the Reality of Women’, Horizons, 12 (1985), p. 119. 35 Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology, London, SCM, 1983, pp. 173–183. 36 Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization and World Religions, Lanham, MD, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005, p. 124. 37 ‘Is a Christian Feminist Theology Possible?’, Theological Studies, 43 (1982), 279–297. 38 ‘The Incomprehensibility of God and the Image of God Male and Female’, Theological Studies, 45 (1984), 441–465, www.womenpriests.org/classic/johnson3. asp. This article would be expanded into She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, New York, Crossroad, 1992. 39 ‘Naming God She: The Theological Implications’, The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, 22 (2001), 141. 40 ‘Naming God She: The Theological Implications’, p. 142. 41 ‘Naming God She: The Theological Implications’, pp. 137–138. Johnson cites the Episcopal priest Mary Kathleen Schmitt’s 1993 prayer for Christmas Day (p. 138) and Presbyterian ordinand Linda Reichenbecher’s 1993 meditation on the face of God (p. 137). 42 See Fiorenza’s foundational In Memory of Her: A Feminist Reconstruction of Christian Origins, New York, Crossroad, 1987. John Elliott, among others, has argued that such reconstructions of Jesus’ ministry and the early Church as having founded a community of equals lack historical and textual evidence. See ‘Jesus Was Not an Egalitarian: A Critique of an Anachronistic and Idealist Theory’, Biblical Studies Bulletin, 32 (2002), 75–91. 43 Denise Lardner Carmody, Women & World Religions, Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1979, p. 181. 44 ‘Lectures on Genesis’, in Jarolslav Pelikan, ed., Luther’s Works, vol. 1, St Louis, Concordia, 1955, pp. 68–69. 45 Sexism and God-Talk, p. 66. See further Karen Bloomquist, ‘Let God Be God: The Theological Necessity of Depatriarchalizing God’, in Carl Braaten, ed., Our Naming of God: Problems and Prospects of God-Talk Today, Minneapolis, Fortress, 1989, pp. 45–60. 46 To Be Two, trans. Monique M. Rhodes and Marco F. Cocito-Monoc, New York and London, Routledge, 2001, p. 73. 47 Rosemary Ruether, ‘The Liberation of Christology from Patriarchy’, in New Blackfriars, 66, 1985, p. 326. See Edmund Hill’s response to her article in the same volume, p. 503. Ruether’s reply to him was published in New Blackfriars, 67 (1986), 92–93. 48 See further Paul S. Fiddes, ‘The Status of Woman in the Thought of Karl Barth’, in Janet Martin Soskice, ed., After Eve: Women, Theology and the Christian Tradition, London, Marshall Pickering, 1990, pp. 138–155. I have followed Fiddes’ reading of Barth’s commentary on 1 Cor. 11: 3 (which explains to the community

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50 51 52

53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

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in Corinth that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God). Johnson, ‘The Incomprehensibility of God’, p. 453. Johnson’s Quest for the Living God: Mapping Frontiers in the Theology of God, London and New York, Bloomsbury, 2007, which was pronounced ‘inadequate as a presentation of the Catholic understanding of God’ by the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Doctrine in 2011, makes this point throughout: that the living God is the holy mystery of love that cannot be contained in words, however beautiful or authoritative they might be. Models of God: Theology for an Ecolgical, Nuclear Age, Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1987, p. xii. Sexism and God-Talk, p. 67. Antonio Pérez-Esclarín, Atheism and Liberation, trans. John Drury, London: SCM Press, 1980 [1974], pp. 1–2. See also Dominic Erdozain, The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx, New York, Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 221–261. See Sariya Cheruvallil-Contractor and Gill Rye, ‘Editors’ Introduction: Motherhood, Religions and Spirituality’ in the special issue on ‘Motherhood, Religions and Spirituality’, Religion and Gender, 6 (2016), 1–8. London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1984. Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language, Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1982, pp. 167, 145–192. The Journey Is Home, Boston, Beacon Press, 1985, pp. 86–101, 194–198. Metaphorical Theology, pp. 145–192. Models of God, p. ix. Journeys by Heart, p. 50. Models of God, p. xi. Metaphorical Theology, pp. 62, 146. Metaphorical Theology, pp. 9, 10, 77, 128, 145. ‘Feminism and Pluralism in Contemporary Theology’, Laval théologique et philosophique, 46 (1990), 292. ‘The Unknown God’, in M. Kehl and W. Löser, eds., The Von Balthasar Reader, New York, Crossroad, 1982, p. 182. See also ibid., p. 184. A Grief Observed, London, Faber, 1966, p. 52, cited in Johnson, ‘Naming God She’, pp. 10–11. ‘The Incomprehensibility of God’, p. 443. For further material on religious feminism and the unknowable God, see Plaskow and Christ’s discussion in Goddess and God, pp. 143–145. Catherine Keller, ‘The Apophasis of Gender: A Fourfold Unsaying of Feminist Theology’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 4 (2008), 905–933. Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, ‘Introduction’, in idem, eds., Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality, New York, Fordham University Press, 2010, pp. 2–6. Denys Turner, ‘Apophaticism, Idolatry and The Claims of Reason’, in Oliver Davies and Denys Turner, eds., Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 11–34. Hugh Rayment-Pickard, Impossible God: Derrida’s Theology, Aldershot and Burlington, Ashgate, 2003, p. 151. Acts 17: 23. See further Johnson, ‘The Incomprehensibility of God’, p. 461. Sources for queer Christian theology are too numerous to list here, but see e.g. Elizabeth Stuart, with Andy Braunston, Malcom Edwards, John McMahon, and Tim Morrison, Religion Is a Queer Thing: A Guide to the Christian Faith for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered People, London and Ohio, Pilgrim

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Press, 1997, esp. Stuart’s ‘The Queer Christ’, pp. 76–85. Creative expositions of queer theology include, for example, Jo Clifford’s ‘The Gospel According to Jesus, Queen of Heaven’, first performed in Glasgow in 2009, which invited the audience ‘to imagine the Christian gospel of love fully applied to the battered people, planet and politics of our time, and filtered through the sensibility of someone who finally refuses the “privilege” of masculinity’, www. scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/theatre/joyce-mcmillan-jo-clifford-keeps-faithwith-controversial-play-1-4153363. Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics, London and New York, Routledge, 2000, p. 83. In her response to Indecent Theology, womanist theologian Emilie Townes was not insensible to Althaus-Reid’s services to the oppressed but urged feminists to recall how the Hottentot Venus’ living black body was displayed for white consumption. Even in death, her privacy was not respected: her body was still an exhibition: dissected, catalogued, and discussed. Townes wondered if AlthausReid’s lemon vendors were to meet the same fate, objects of interested white observation, stripped of their historicity and sociality. Emilie M. Townes, ‘Panel Response to Marcella Althaus-Reid’s Indecent Theology’, Feminist Theology, 11 (2003), 170 and in Isherwood and Jordan, eds., Dancing in Fetish Boots, pp. 61–67. The Queer God, London and New York, Routledge, 2003, p. 149. See also Susannah Cornwall, ‘Stranger in Our Midst: The Becoming of the Queer God in the Theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid’, in Lisa Isherwood and Mark D. Jordon, eds., Doing Theology in Fetish Boots, 95–112. Indecent Theology, pp. 60–63. Indecent Theology, p. 19. Indecent Theology, pp. 151, 154–155; The Queer God, p. 36. Indecent Theology, pp. 85, 93, 106. See further Maya Rivera Rivera, ‘Corporeal Visions or Apparitions: Narrative Strategies of an Indecent Theologian’, in Lisa Isherwood and Mark D. Jordan, eds., Dancing Theology in Fetish Boots, pp. 80–81. Indecent Theology, pp. 47–48; Queer God, pp. 89–90. Indecent Theology, p. 75. Marcella Althaus-Reid, ‘Demythologising Liberation Theology: Reflections on Power, Poverty and Sexuality’, in Christopher Rowland, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 125. The Queer God, p. 34. Indecent Theology, pp. 109, 134, 160–162 and passim. Indecent Theology, p. 162. Indecent Theology, p. 51.

5

Second wave feminist Christology and Mariology in a counter-idolatrous mode

Christolatry from a post-Christian perspective After years of campaigning for the ordination of women in the Anglican Church, Daphne Hampson left the church in 1981. In After Christianity she gave her reasons. Christianity, Hampson argued, is a harmful myth that has served to legitimize male power and female subordination. The church has divinized a scandalously particular first-century male body it claims to have been unmarried and without sin, that is, without sexual desire for women. She noted that there is nothing in Jesus’ teaching that criticizes injustices in the gendered division of labour or suggests any awareness that it should be reformed. Jesus envisaged no change in women’s ritual or devotional obligations and, given, his historical situation, could hardly be expected to have done. His focus was almost entirely on men; few of the women in his circle are named and their roles are almost entirely domestic and familial. The feminist assumption that a woman should be accorded, or better, accord herself, the standing of ‘a mature human being with moral responsibility’ is nowhere reflected in Jesus’ teaching. Hampson could only conclude that the figure of Jesus is that of an empty divinity, the miraculous powers and teachings attributed to him being at best irrelevant to feminism.1 An inclusive anthropology by means of which women can embody and articulate their own hopes and vision cannot be derived from the life and death of one particular man called Jesus.2 At a loss to understand why a feminist would choose to invest in a dualistic Christian anthropology to which femaleness is either irrelevant or a threat, Hampson acknowledged that many feminists are content with the proposal that it was in Jesus’ humanity, not his masculinity, that women and men are together redeemed. The classic reformist answer to Ruether’s primary Christological question of 1981, ‘can a male saviour save women?’,3 is that while Jesus may have been genitally male, he incarnates God as a full human being. He is God, not masculinity, incarnate and is, as such, the renewed image of God in the human. Soteriologically, his masculinity is incidental or contingent rather than necessary. Once this is accepted (and Hampson did not) a priest, for example, is no longer required to be male.

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A man or a woman officiating at the mass is alter Christi because both are human bodily representations of Christ’s humanity. On this account, women are eligible for priesthood and other leadership roles in the church. A woman, or person of any other identity, can be consecrated to stand at the altar (not just in the pastoral pulpit) as a representative of Christ who represents all of humanity to God. Yet Hampson was not persuaded by this, one of the most important of all feminist Christological moves and perhaps the most important of all arguments in favour of the ordination of women. Even under such an inclusive Christology, she, not unreasonably, observed that it remains the case that a representative man is believed to include all of humankind. That a woman might comprehend the whole of humanity is, whether symbolically or actually, almost inconceivable. Even if offered in more measured tones, Hampson’s post-Christian position was not essentially different from that of Mary Daly and other women who had left the Church. Daly regarded all Christology as Christolatry: the divinization of man, again, into a god-man who, having little or nothing to do with the first-century Palestinian Jew, Jesus, compounds patriarchy in his person rather than liberating women from it. The fate of Jesus, from a post-Christian perspective, seems to exemplify the dysfunctionality of the patriarchal family. He is an obedient son whose loving trust in his father is betrayed. This is a father who will allow, for reasons best known to himself, his only son to be tortured to death on a rubbish dump outside Jerusalem’s city walls, cornered into taking the entire weight of a collective punishment for sin on his own blameless person. This is not a man who can save women from the abuses of the patriarchal world his father created and over which his father presides, should women need saving by a man at all. It would have been difficult for Christian feminists to ignore or simply discount the post-Christian position, yet its rational arguments may have paid insufficient heed to the complexities and contradictions of Christ’s masculine identity. Under a Christian reading of Isaiah 53, for example, Christ was the ‘despised and rejected’ Suffering Servant. But after the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century, when Christianity became an imperial religion, this Christ, divine in his abjection, was discarded. No longer much ‘acquainted with grief’ the servant now assumed the dispassionate gaze of majesty and a mantle of absolute power over not just the state, but the cosmos itself. Now Christ would conquer sin and death by the subjugation of the earth and its peoples under the sign of the cross. Post-Christian feminist criticism not only ignored the way in which images of Christ could subvert the status quo as well as buttress it, depending on where and how they were received, it also underestimated the history of Christian attempts to counter its own Christolatry. The Church has fought for millennia to hold together the poles of Jesus’ divine and human nature in a stable somatic unity. As a co-temporal, consubstantial embodiment of

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the divine and the human, the imagination of Jesus is, properly, impossible. If liberal theology’s binary distinction between the historical man Jesus and the resurrected Christ of faith is too glib, then Jesus can neither be stripped of his divinity as ‘only’ a first-century Palestinian Jewish man, nor overwhelmed by it as the Godhead walking on earth. Nor can his incarnation be a confusion of his divine and the human natures into a composite nature that risks leaving him neither divine nor human. On these and other grounds, second wave Christian feminists would have found it simplistic to claim that the figure of Jesus is only, and without remainder, a masculine idol to be broken. During the second and third centuries, for example, the Church Fathers, their gynophobia and misogyny notwithstanding, left Christian feminist idoloclasts a potentially significant legacy: their rejection of Docetism as heretical. Docetists confessing only the heavenly Christ were charged with denying the earthly Christ any soteriological function. It was not acceptable to safeguard Christ’s divinity by denying or ignoring that he entered history in the flesh. To assert that Christ’s living, dying, and rising body was only apparent, that he was uncompromised by his humanity (dokéō, literally, to seem or to appear), was heretical. It was tantamount to proclaiming Jesus as an idol – an appearance of the human in a false image of a male body. Patristic theologians, notably Ignatius, but also Polycarp, Justin, Tertullian, and Clement, insisted that Christ’s passion could not be the semblance of one. He could not be ontologically detached from the possibility of suffering. He must, as Ignatius wrote to his readers in Smyrna, ‘truly suffer and rise that we might be saved’; he must be ‘in truth of the family of David according to the flesh’ while also being God’s only Son so that ‘all righteousness might be fulfilled in him’. It is significant that Ignatius criticized Docetists as having no empathy for the oppressed, writing to the Smyrnaeans: ‘Pay close attention to those who have wrong notions about the grace of Jesus Christ, which has come to us, and note how at variance they are with God’s mind. They care nothing about love: they have no concern for widows or orphans, for the oppressed, for those in prison or released, for the hungry or the thirsty’.4 Conversely, the over-humanization of Christ was also pronounced heretical. Those who confessed this reduced Christ were charged with reintroducing polytheistic idolatry: they were worshipping a created human being as God. Any demotion of Christ (typical of Arianism) as having been created by a God who is, alone, without beginning was to deny Christ’s standing as consubstantial and co-eternal with God. Such was eventually pronounced a heresy in 325 at the Council of Nicea, with the strife rumbling on at least until 381. Even this, the most cursory of sketches (and one that skates over the political violence that patristic theology both reflected and produced) suggests that had Christology been pure Christololatry, it would have made nonsense of orthodox Christianity’s entire redemptive scheme. From the doctrinal outset, traditional Christology proscribed worship of a man, Jesus, as God.

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The Church Fathers laid the ground, if stony and compacted, for robust Christologies that would be able to tell the difference between the mere ‘seeming’ of an idol, and an image of a real, embodied Christ who bleeds, weeps, and sweats precisely because he is not an idol, that is, not made of wood, gold, or stone. Real, oppressed human bodies may be liberated in this powerfully powerless body, which is not that of virility triumphant. His is a poor, broken, thirsty, bleeding, Jewish body hanging from a cross at the foot of which only women have remained and to whose resurrection women are the first witnesses. It should also be emphasized that Christian feminists could hardly be unaware that all denominations, including Catholicism and Orthodoxy, have been opposed to idolatrous iconographic representations of Jesus. To worship an image of Christ would be to worship a creature of the human imagination. No Christian image of Christ’s body, of whatever denomination, invites worship because it is an image of suffering flesh voluntarily self-emptied of its divinity. It can only be in a human body that the human is redeemed. Just as the Catholic Counter-Reformation’s Catechism of the Council of Trent of 1566 proscribed praying to, or otherwise imputing divine power to, an image as idolatry, so too an Orthodox icon is a window onto truth, yet is not itself the truth. An eikon is not a copy of a person, worshipped. It is an illumination of being; a visible image through which the viewer sees, in contemplative prayer, what cannot be visualized. Not even Jesus’ flesh made God’s form visible, for God has no form, only glory. Christ is rather the image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15). And only to that extent, can Jesus, in John’s gospel, say to his friend, ‘Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the father’ (14: 9).

Idoloclastic feminist Christologies A rehearsal of the long, often traumatic, theo-political history of Christology and iconoclasm from the eighth-century Byzantine iconoclasm to the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation in northern Europe and on to the present day cannot be the task of this chapter. Late-twentieth-century feminism’s idoloclastic Christology was an inseparable part of this history but was also, and more immediately, a new political theology that emerged in dialectical relation to the modern criticism of idols as ideological projections of political power. There was, of course, a sense in which it was necessary, as well as inevitable, that Jesus would live for a given age in the image of its values and concerns. Only as a mirror to the age would Jesus himself remain an idoloclast, liberating humanity in the liberation of his own image. Hence, Jesus spoke to the mid-twentieth-century western Church as, variously, a (Jewish) revolutionary (Samuel Brandon for the counter-cultural activists of the 1960s)5 and as a first-century feminist (Leonard Swidler, not unproblematically, for

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second wave feminists in the early 1970s).6 More recently, Lisa Isherwood’s fat-positive Jesus reflected late second wave feminist criticism of women’s experiences of bodily self-estrangement in a gynophobic patriarchal mass culture. For Isherwood, ethics, not the doctrinal magisterium, produces a liberation feminist Christology.7 The diet and beauty industry is unethical because its treatment of women’s bodies as designer fashion accessories leaves women unable to ‘claim passion and power within the world’. Under patriarchy, the fat body, reviled as no more than uninhabited excess flesh, functions as the abject: that on which culture projects its disgust for corporeality as such. Isherwood’s Christology urged women to re-inhabit their own flesh and care for it, rest it, and feed it because real flesh is the ground of female being and becoming as an incarnation of the living, dancing, divine.8 In Isherwood’s question, ‘Is incarnation about fixed categories or fluidity, embracing and developing within the historical moment, enlivening and expanding – or in a very concrete way remaining the same for ever?’,9 she issued a new call to break idols. The fat Jesus is a human and divine riposte to patriarchal fear of all the unruly, uncontainable living things whose energies it must subdue. The fat Jesus ‘represents multiplicity, a bulging, open body in the process of becoming which is completely out of keeping with a bounded theology and a bounded society’.10 After Nelle Morton’s, Isherwood’s ‘journey home’ is the journey back to the body, ‘to a place of once again inhabiting this vacant flesh that holds within it the divine incarnate’.11 This is a sensate material body, not an idea of a body, that is expansive; that breaks bread and fills its cup at the festive eucharistic table. What Isherwood called ‘body theology’ belonged to a wider counterauthoritarian immanentist turn in the latter part of a Christian century that was both reeling from the trauma of two world wars and totalitarian hubris and regenerating itself in the modernist, liberalizing, spirit and method of Catholicism’s Second Vatican Council and Protestantism’s demythologization of the New Testament. It was not feminist theology alone that sought to reunite the transcendent with a politically and ecologically renewed, flourishing world. A modern preference for images of Jesus’ earthy humanity and victimization over images of him as (a) man glorified was already widespread. (Stanley Spencer’s painting of Jesus sitting on the ground letting a scorpion walk all over his tender peasant hand, not stamping on it as God had licenced him to do, is illustrative of the mood of the time.)12 It was women’s liberationists’ commitment to women’s human bodies as the site of injustice and control, suffering and resistance, freedom and pleasure that Christian women mapped onto Jesus’ body in ways that made political sense of his incarnation. His suffering human body presented a critique of the power of ideology to destroy bodies. Sometimes, it might seem as if Christian feminism’s radically inclusive humanization of Jesus came at the cost of bracketing out the historical and theological particularities of his Jewishness; his androcentrism, and his miraculous command over natural finitude. Yet these were not so much ignored as trumped in the feminist

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reading of Galatians 3: 28 as a proclamation that the estrangement of all human difference is overcome in Christ. The verse was not read as suggesting that in Christ there is no longer any difference in status and character between a Jew and a Gentile, a slave and a free man, and a man and a woman because all difference – or at least that of people in the Church – is subsumed by baptism into the one male body of Christ. Such might, of course, have been a reasonable interpretation of the verse. But the preferred kerygma was that, in a counter-idolatrous church, all difference will be served in freedom, humility, and love.13 The liberative power of Rosemary Ruether’s prophetic Jesus was therefore to be a function of his rejection of dominion and its hierarchical privileges and his option for the economically, gendered, and raced poor. Jesus’ vision of the kingdom is that of a radical social iconoclast.14 In him, the God of the prophets had conferred on the Church an iconoclastic obligation that it had signally betrayed.15 Ruether’s Jesus can, nonetheless, be a male saviour for women because he is the embodiment of a gospel of mutual service (as distinct from servitude) and empowerment for the othered, for those who have the least interest in the perpetuation of patriarchy.16 Ruether’s Christology did not limit the meaning of Christ to the historical Jesus. She conceived the relationship between redeemer and redeemed as a mutual and continuing process of liberation. Where Christ is the image of a liberated humanity, the scandal of his masculine particularity is overcome. The Christ is not a perfection of the masculine, nor even of the human, who appeared on earth 2000 years ago, but rather goes ahead of the church, calling it to yet uncompleted dimensions of human liberation.17 In denying that Jesus’ historically particular masculinity defines the ontological particularity of the Christ,18 second wave Christian feminism protected its own Christology from Christolatry. It could not and did not simply feminize Jesus. Rather, it overcame the scandal of Jesus’ masculine particularity by (not un-traditionally) Christologizing creation itself, dissolving distinctions between male and female, sacred and profane, human and non-human creatures. Most immediately, it Christologized community. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Diann Neu, Mary Hunt, and Rosemary Ruether were among the first to call that new egalitarian community in Christ, ‘women-church’ (ekklesia gynaikon). As evident in the title of a 1981 conference, ‘Women Moving Church’, women-church was a new female image of Christ on earth.19 This was not a new iteration of the Church as the bride of Christ the bridegroom. Women-church, for Ruether, was the manifestation of a liberation theology, a leaderless network of ‘gathered communities to support us as we set out on our exodus from patriarchy’.20 For Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, women-church was the collective embodiment of a hermeneutical principle, a community of feminist biblical interpretation. Women-church was also not a synonym for a semi-separatist ‘womanchurch’, ‘woman’ being too generic and insufficiently inclusive of the social pluralities that women-church embodied and embraced.

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Women-church was both in opposition to the wider Church, and it was an integral part of it.21 Yet its vision had radically idoloclastic roots, as articulated in Daly’s Beyond God the Father. Here, Daly had imaged women’s collective power as an Anti-Church that would free women from the bonds of slavery to their false image in sisterhood’s ‘bonds of freedom’: ‘In its depth, because it contains a dynamic that drives beyond Christolatry, the women’s movement does point to, seek, and constitute the primordial, always present, and future Antichrist. It does this by breaking the Great Silence, raising up female pride, recovering women’s history, healing and bringing into the open female presence’. For Daly, the Second Coming that is the women’s liberation movement is an arrival that ‘means the removal of the primordial victim, the “Other”, because of whom [quoting Tertullian] “the Son of Man had to die”. When no longer condemned to the role of “savior”, perhaps Jesus can be recognizable as a free man’.22 Daly’s ‘Antichrist’ was not, as it sounds, a figure of evil but of Jesus’, as well as women’s, liberation from ‘enchainment’ to an idea. The reformist women-church and Daly’s Second Coming of women as the Antichrist might appear to be different projects, but their anthropologies and their ecclesiologies were ideationally continuous with one another. Rita Nakashima Brock’s Journeys by Heart (1988) also offered a communal Christology that was critical of Christologies, even feminist ones, that accorded unilateral redemptive power to Jesus.23 Such Christologies, she believed, reflect the patriarchal idolization of the sole hero and establish, under his paternalist leadership, a church too closely allied to psychological and social structures of control. Instead, Brock reimagined Christ as ‘Christa/Community’. Here, the Christ is brought into being as the cocreator of community and as the connectedness of its members, friends who ‘live with heart’. Christa/Community is the living, embodied, relational flow of an ‘erotic’ power that transcends any individual agency, including that of Jesus himself. It is the ‘myriad embodiments and playful manifestations’ of Christa/Community that lead to the living heart – ‘the self in original grace’ that redeems humanity into a community of ‘whole and compassionate being’.24 It is the Christic heart that that heals the heartlessness of patriarchy under whose yoke Jesus’ body was broken. Yet it was not easy for a woman to become the subject of her own experience in a patriarchal Church. There is little, Brock thought, in the history of its doctrine to free Christian men and women from a dependent relation to their transcendent father. Brock was critical of the Marxist liberation theology of her period as emphasizing Jesus’ ministry to the poor and dispossessed while the spectre of patriarchy continued to haunt its Jesus. Liberation theology’s Jesus is too closely modelled on the hero or warrior who, whether fighting on behalf of a class or gender, more or less single-handedly defeats the forces of alienation and injustice. On that account, Brock (like Fiorenza and Carol Christ) was not persuaded that Ruether’s feminist liberation theology could move to a fully relational paradigm. Ruether’s Christ was,

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Brock thought, conceived in the image of the male biblical prophet, isolated from the people in and by God’s revelation to him alone; a God whose sovereign will he must by any means protect. Ruether’s Christ is the prophet who liberates and empowers oppressed others, but too much as objects to be acted upon. Brock believed that only a dialogical ‘Jesus’ iconoclastic and serving relationship to the world is evidence of his right to be called Christ’.25 Love first enters the world in and through embodied persons, not through a political ideology, even a liberative one. Women and men do not finally belong to categories or classes but are ‘concretely present – as a black tall man, Latin old woman, Korean small newborn, blond fat man, and so on. We come to love each other not through abstractions, but through the complex, ambiguous realities of our own unique existences. . . . Our ideas and images well up from there’. The wholeness of the Christa/Community cannot be contained or summarized by one life, not even Jesus’.26 Brock was as convinced as any other feminist theologian of the time that the ‘iconoclastic’ function of the Gospels is ‘essential to the shattering of complacency and entrenched power structures’. Iconoclasm dislodges dominant modes of thinking and forces people to think in new ways. ‘However’, wrote Brock, ‘the shattering is only half the story. . . . Anger is an essential step toward liberation, but liberation is one element in relationships. Iconoclasm remains too polarizing to sustain’. Brock urged Ruether and other feminist idoloclasts to move on from idoloclasm insofar as she thought it re-projected all falsity onto the patriarchal other and was too negative a process upon which to build new selves in community. As outlined in the third chapter of this book, ‘without alternative relationships, the iconoclastic shattering of power over [sic] is also the fragmentation of self. We require relationships that support us to develop the play space that can see through destructive powers, even our own’.27 By the end of the twentieth century, some feminist theologians’ criticism of idolatrous anthropologies had begun to move away from a classically second wave gynocentric methodology. Kathryn Tanner’s approach is illustrative of those who began to seek a more constructive engagement with the tradition: one that was committed to a public theological recovery of the tradition’s benevolent God, a tradition which could be re-appropriated and re-articulated without apologizing for its demeaning of women.28 Tanner remains a liberationist insofar as the gift God makes to the world in the incarnation of his son is one made for the liberation of humanity in bondage to masters. Jesus himself suffers under the oppressive will of these masters and he dies as a subversive. But where Tanner’s work signals its difference to that of the second wave is in her conviction that a Christian theology can only break idols when it begins with Christ rather than with reflection on women’s experience. It is not that what women think and feel is unimportant, but, as in the title of her 2009 book, Christ the Key, it is Christ who releases the world from

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its captivity to idols. The counter-idolatrous incomprehensibility of women cannot be comprehended without that of Christ. Humanity is made in the image of an incomprehensible, but gift-giving, benevolent God whose image is Christ, the second person of the Trinity. It is only in the light of the Trinity that women, in Christ, can become uncontainable images of the incomprehensible. Women do not incarnate Jesus any more or less than men do. A Christocentric anthropology in which Jesus and the human are not identical will alone stabilize the human tendency to self-idolize. Such a Christology properly withholds something of the divine from the human. The human is not an image of God even if it is made in God’s likeness. The human only reflects the divine insofar as its image is conformed to Christ’s, which is the perfect and natural image of God. Christ alone reveals the wholly otherness of the image of God to the human. Only in relation to Christ can humanity know and transcend its finitude. Only in Christ can the creaturely find its true plasticity. The power to become what one is not yet is in the gift of Christ. Christ is the radical mystery and power of becoming. In him alone is human – female and male – becoming in the image of God. Tanner’s theology may be too Christocentric for some, but it is effectively idoloclastic. In her Christological order, God cannot be made in the image of the human as an idol. In the fire of Christ’s glory, all human waxworks melt. Human (and divine) nature is unfixed – liberated – by Christ as second person of the Trinity. Emptied of power by virtue of becoming truly creaturely, that is, finite, human personhood is no longer that of a vessel or screen for a controlling power. Personhood attains fulness, but not comprehensiveness or completion, in being filled by the power of the third person of the Trinity, which is, as the invisible, uncontainable Spirit of God, a loving power of reconciliation, not alienation. In short, without Tanner needing to write for women or even about women, the idoloclastic commitments of a feminist theology can be honoured in ways that are at once progressive and conservative. The divine image is not a potency resident within the human body, male or female. Only insofar as the Christian is on her way to imaging God through her relationship with Christ will her image become truly teleological, not substantial, as that of the woman yet to come.29

Second wave criticism of Mary as an idol of the feminine Theological debate over the liberativity of the image of Mary has sharply divided feminist theologians and scholars of religion. None of them would deny that the image of Mary has been idolized as and when it has been expedient for the Church to do so. What is in question is whether there is, as it were, another image of Mary behind the image of Mary who exceeds or breaks her own idol. Those who most insistently deny the possibility of a metapatriarchal Mary, generally post-Christian feminists, claim that ‘no Christian symbol has more effectively circumscribed women’s gender identity in church and society’

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as she has done’.30 No figure of the feminine has more effectively hypostasized and institutionalized women’s subordination to the masculine will.31 Leaving aside the not uncoincidental point that Mary is most esteemed in churches in which sacral roles are most closed to women,32 it is claimed that no single image of woman can summarize the value of all women and still be a woman. On this count, one might be forgiven for thinking that Mary, who was once a first-century Jewish mother, is no longer a woman at all. Or, if she is now a virgin, she cannot also be a biological mother to her son. In Mary, the principle of submission and receptivity is at once feminized and unsexed, purified of any relation to embodied female desire. Indeed, that Mary births God in human flesh may render her image so aporetic as to cancel out the possibility of her being either divine or human. For those of Ludwig Feuerbach’s opinion that, to the extent that men worship an impossible feminine ideal such as the Virgin Mary, they can dispense with real women,33 Mary is a masculine projection of idealized femininity. Whereas the men who represent and mediate divine power on earth are not mere emblems of virtue but whole rational and moral agents whose acts reveal God’s redemptive will in history, Mary hypostatizes the secondary, passive virtues of feminine receptivity and acquiescence to masculine divine and human rational and moral will. In a tradition that has encouraged women to regard their femininity as ‘the sin-prone part of the self’,34 Mary’s conception as, in all senses, immaculate, binarizes the feminine into a polar relation of Eve and Mary. She is the paradigm case of a two-dimensional image of unblemished female perfection that alienates women from their ‘Eve’; their three-dimensional, imperfect selves. Christian women must choose Mary or risk being Eve. Institutionalized by Pope Pius IX in 1854, the doctrine of Mary’s own Immaculate Conception guarantees her freedom from Eve’s original sin. Mary is therefore more than just what Naomi Goldenberg called the ‘good girl’ of Christianity. Her sinlessness binds her necessarily and forever to the sinfulness of Eve, which she corrects and reverses. The greater Mary’s glorification, the greater Eve’s demonization. Eve and Mary are to that extent two faces of the same woman: the one aspect credited to the account of women, and the other its debt. Mary exists as the single antidote to the sin of Eve, in whom all women are calumniated. Where all other women are left congenitally impure in relation to the sacred and innately prone to transgression (the latter being recently reaffirmed by a conservative Protestant theologian),35 Mary’s singular goodness consists in her docility, leaving women bereft of an educative model of active agency by which to attain ethical maturity. The figure of Mary, both reinforcing and compensating for women’s moral lack, has significantly contributed to Western philosophy’s Christian and secular judgement that women are incapable of acting on rational and moral principle. They have been at best accorded the limp Marian virtues of obedience and compassion. Moreover, it is arguable that the image of Mary, like that of Eve, is an idol insofar as it bears only a formal resemblance to that of a woman. As a

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sub-sexual image of the ideal mother,36 the figure of Mary is the embodiment of a dissemblance. (Protestantism, it is sometimes said, may have no female images of the divine, but a false image of the divine feminine is worse than none at all.) Purified of the sting of her own desire, she is a ‘safe’ image and object of subdued desire for Catholic male celibates. Standing silent, with down-cast eyes, in Catholic and high Anglican churches the world over, she offers women few grounds to celebrate or identify with her. As Daphne Hampson observes, she is never portrayed ‘with her mouth open, laughing or speaking, let alone as a sexual being showing affection for her husband, a subject in her own right’. Mary is only the mother whom her son needs her to be.37 Much of the criticism of Mary as an idol stems, as does most feminist criticism of idols, from Simone de Beauvoir. In The Second Sex, Beauvoir noted that although the first patristic theologians (Origen, Tertullian, and Jerome) thought that Mary ‘had been brought to bed in blood and filth like other women’, Ambrose and Augustine prevailed: ‘The body of the Virgin remained closed’.38 The image of woman is perfected and glorified only as servant of the Lord, kneeling before the divinity of her son.39 Unlike the demoted mother Goddesses or Queens of Heaven who preceeded the Christian Mother of God, in Mary’s cosmos, God, as King, rules alone, with his son as his right-hand man. Daly and other post-Christian feminists would follow Beauvoir in her account of Mary as a repressed, domesticated, sanitized replacement of the ancient Semitic Queen of Heaven whose title alone she inherited. While the latter, especially Isis, rising from the sea, crowned with a crescent moon and garbed in a star-bordered mantle, exercised autonomous power,40 Mary is merely the handmaiden of the patriarchal Lord (a predecessor, perhaps, of Offred, one of the young women enslaved into a breeding caste for the Republic of Gilead in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale).41 Beauvoir’s criticism of Mary as an idol of the feminine was given a more detailed phenomenological, historical, and ecclesiological context by feminist theologians and scholars of religion who, from the mid 1970’s, situated Mary within the operations of a Church whose sacramental institutions are governed and dispensed by men alone. This is a ‘mother church’ to the world that sacramentally replaces human mothers to their children. The mother church presents, in the dead body of a man, offered by male priests, the ‘gracious’ gift of eternal spiritual life. The finite, life-giving flesh of the daughter is replaced by a set of sexless perfected divine and human beings in whose spectral bodies the world is now birthed anew. In God’s name, and Mary’s, the biological labour of real, human, maternal bodies is at once appropriated and discarded. In 1985 Nancy Jay theorized all sacrificial religion as a masculine remedy for men having been born of real women. Here, and in a later book, she argued that women of childbearing age are excluded from a given cultus, their blood cast as a pollutant of the sacred, because the inter-generational

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continuity, and therefore peace, of the masculine political, historical, and territorial order depends on clear evidence of unilinear, patrilinear, descent. Biological childbirth generates unproven kinship ties. Social chaos must be controlled by replacing natural, female, childbirth with the mechanism of sacrificial bloodshed in which collective life is now bought with the death of a male body. This is why so many feminists regard patriarchal Christianity as necrophilic. Women are rendered spectral by the holy ghosts of the Church: they ‘give birth to children but have no descendants’.42 These gender reversals have produced and been produced by an imaginary in which the female body represents the distraction of matter. Female sexuality, as dispensed with in Mary, is the occasion of death, of the Fall. In a series of what Daly called priestly ‘androcratic invasions of the gynocentric realm’, the baptismal font, for example, could be understood as a stone replacement womb whose masculine waters wash the newborn of the ‘impurity’ of the female body and blood that gave it finite life. Purified in the ‘living’ waters of Christ’s blood, they are resurrected from birth into life eternal.43 So too, in Mary, the female becomes ‘little more than a hollow eggshell; a void waiting to be made by men’.44 And into this Church of stone wombs and virgin mothers, come headless women. That is, women whose head – their face and will – has been replaced by the headship of her husband, through whose head or mind she must now encounter the world.45 Headship is the Christian instantiation of false consciousness. Symbolically, headship, however courteously it might be rationalized by its apologists as guidance, requires the evacuation of a woman’s mind and eyes, and their replacement with her husband’s. Under the decisive authority of his headship, she is rendered as blind and silent as an idol. It is little wonder, then, that second wave critics argued that the figure of Mary as theotokos – bearer of God – is an ideological replacement for real motherhood. Not even motherhood, for many, not the definition of femaleness but one of the decisive moments of female being and becoming, has been left to them by Mary. And if Mary sacralizes the mother-son relationship, which is questionable, she certainly does not sacralize the mother-daughter relationship. She attains her standing as mother of God only through her son. Mary is also blessed among women because she is the only mother in the history of humanity who was also a virgin when she conceived and bore her son. It was often pointed out by second wave feminists that Mary’s assent to Gabriel’s proposition is not to be confused with the giving of her consent. She does not give her permission to God. That Mary’s sexual desire is so thoroughly bypassed or irrelevant suggests that there is a connection between Marian devotion and the sexual alienation and exploitation of women. Mary produces a divine son after she, a young girl, has been ‘raped’, as Daly construed it, by a male God. She has been impregnated with his ‘Supreme Seminal Idea’.46 God has turned Mary, who was betrothed to Joseph and could have become a real mother, into his idea of a mother.

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Thenceforth, Mary, a ‘faded and reversed mirror image’ of the Great Mother Goddess, herself ‘raped’ by patriarchy, is only a traumatized shadow of her former self: ‘catatonic, dutifully dull and derivative and drained of divinity’. Presciently, Daly observed that, the destruction of the Great Goddess as the source of life, compounded by the evacuation of Mary into a womb shaped idol whose actual womb is otiose, ‘has paved the way for the technological elimination of women’.47

The Christian feminist defence of Mary as an icon of the feminine Other feminist readings of Mary could hardly have been more different. It has not been the purpose of this book to evaluate or rank feminist positions but to present them in the form of a literary phenomenology of feminist idoloclasm. In this case especially, I would not presume to arbitrate in a feminist debate over Mary that, as a Jew, is not my own. I therefore turn to a very different set of perspectives on Mary, wanting to show that Christian feminists do not necessarily agree on the difference between an icon and an idol or on how the latter might be broken. Although feminist criticism of the figure of Mary did not necessarily map onto any simple denominational split, inevitably, Marian theology plays a more prominent role in Catholic and high Anglican churches than it does in low Protestant churches. It was therefore among second wave Catholic feminists that a renewed Mariology could most often be found. For Catholic women, the figure of Mary was not, after all, an abstract ideological and ontological problem. She was a real, daily, presence in their lives.48 Catholic women’s liberationists experienced Mary as more than a fireside divine companion in the private sorrows and joys of life. Mary was also a divine activist in the feminist movement, as she was in the political work of other Catholic liberation theologians in Latin America and other parts of the world. It was as a lived, political, tradition that the figure of Mary was perceived by Rosemary Ruether, Elizabeth Johnson, Tina Beattie and other Catholic feminists as both idol and icon. Mary may herself be a captive of her own idol, and hold other women captive by it, but she can also, in the context of a liberative praxis, be reclaimed as a figure of women’s liberation. Sanitized, mass-produced images of Mary as a painted plaster statue to women’s obedience, the very type and apparition of an impossible, nonexistent woman (whose sightings grew in number in the modern period rather than declined),49 were not images of Mary. A feminist, truthful, image of Mary reveals the capacity of every woman to represent God. Catholic feminist Mariology, as typified in the liberation theology of Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer, finds in the Lukan Mary of the Magnificat not an idol but a divine woman whom feminists can liberate from her idol.50 Far from subdued or traumatized, this is the Mary of Luke’s Gospel, not Matthew’s. In Matthew, Mary’s impregnation is set in the context of a male

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genealogy, Mary’s anxieties and the threat of social disgrace. Luke sets her experience in a narrative of rejoicing. In Luke’s gospel, Mary’s older relative Elizabeth is also pregnant and Elizabeth’s baby leaps in her womb at the very sight of Mary, who has come to share the last months of Elizabeth’s pregnancy. The baby, profoundly alive, ‘dances’ in anticipation of the joys of which Mary, a prophet of social justice, sings.51 It is as such that Elizabeth Johnson and other feminist liberation theologians regard Mary as a sister to marginalized women who live unchronicled lives in oppressive situations. It is to them, the poor, that she sings, in the line of the great biblical singers Miriam, Moses, Deborah, and Hannah. Hers is a song of good news to the poor: the mighty will not be exalted forever. It is only when patriarchy privatizes her piety or reduces the meaning of her motherhood to a relationship focused on Jesus alone, that the image of Mary becomes a stranger to Mary.52 In Mary, Jesus has a real mother: Miriam of Nazareth. Johnson images Mary as a poor Jewish village woman living in violent times under Roman imperial rule, not a minor divinity whose feminine compassion corrects the deficiencies in God’s. Mary has only deteriorated into a false image when she has been relocated into a heavenly version of the late Roman empire’s civil patronage system where clients come to petition a powerful patron who might hold their fate in his hand. It is as a function of this unequal hierarchy that Mary has been elevated as an intercessor – as ‘a friend in high places’ – who will plead for lesser beings before God’s throne. Johnson argues that the image of Mary must therefore retain plasticity. She must not be cast, as it were, in imperial marble.53 Christian communities must make images of a Mary who engages their own circumstances, not from a plinth, but on the ground: An adequate theology of Mary must be clear on this point: There is no eternal feminine; there is no essential feminine nature; there is no ideal woman. In contrast to a dualistic anthropology that so separates head and heart, a liberating view of Mary grows out of an egalitarian anthropology of partnership that respects male-female difference while refusing to stereotype gifts that are freely given. It affirms that sex combines with race, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, historical, geographical and social location and cultural makeup to define each person as unique. The human race exists in irreducibly pluralistic ways. Relieved of the burden of being the ideal feminine woman, Mary can be simply herself. A poor woman singing her Magnificat about the downfall of tyrants and full bellies for the hungry, she takes another step toward rejoining us in the community of saints.54 Interpreted within a lived tradition, rather than withdrawn from it, the Mary whose image stands silently in a dark corner of a church may not, in fact, be that of her subscension into idol. For the biblical prophets, the demonstrable falsity of an idol consisted in the unresponsive muteness of its

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crafted materiality. But Rachel Muers found it possible to ‘unseal’ Mary’s closed lips by letting Mary quietly treasure God’s word in her heart, as she did in the second chapter of Luke. Mary’s silent image can hold within itself ‘the whole Gospel narrative, because it gathers together the words of prophecy spoken at the birth of Jesus and carries them forward to their fulfilment’. Her silence is a waiting, pregnant, silence, pointing to ‘the incompleteness, the openness to new speech, of this or any theological narrative’; ‘to the limitless, unassimilable and endlessly generative grace of God’.55 Gabriel’s announcement to Mary that she will conceive a child outside marriage is not an assault on her person. It marks the joyous possibility of an encounter between her, all women, and the divine that is not mediated by her husband. Her annunciatory ‘yes’ inaugurates a new moment of the divine becoming of women and a decisive moment in the figuration of divinity.56 Mary’s motherhood marks a significant disruption of a gendered hierarchy which relegates it to a secondary, immanent, realm that can only legitimized by marriage to a man. Even the early Daly could concede that Mary’s status as an unmarried and virgin mother suggests her self-possession: it is a theological demonstration that women need not be defined by relationships of social, practical or sexual dependence on men.57 It was possible to interpret an Immaculate Conception of a woman as the possibility of female self-de-idolization: a self-conceiving and knowing moment of ontological emancipation. Even Daly recognized that a woman born free from original sin could be construed as prototypical of the woman who does not need to be ‘saved’ by a male. Mary being herself immaculately conceived could connote not so much her exemption from women’s responsibility for original sin, but a means to abolish the myth of feminine evil altogether and inaugurate the end of humanity’s Fall into the sin of patriarchy.58 Of course, for Daly, this possibility was not enough to extricate Mary from the actuality that was the historical alienation of her narrative and doctrinal idea. And to the rather more literal post-Christian mind, Daly was right that the figure of Mary originated only in the anticipation of her son’s divinity and his purity from the female taint of sin. Maintaining a sexual hierarchy, Mary does nothing to heal a divided female self, which can only be mended by ‘breaking the idols that have kept it torn apart’.59 But it may be that Daly and feminists of her philosophical and political temper had lost the theological, that is, the intellectual and emotional, knack of reading Mary. Those who deny that Marian theology necessarily worships a false image of the feminine can point to a long history of reading Mary in ways that are highly conducive to women’s spiritual-political flourishing. Tina Beattie, well aware that an idealized account of Mary can conceal misogyny and disfigure women’s ‘bodily sense of self’,60 argued that smashing images of Mary has not helped women. A history of Protestant iconoclasm has left us, she wrote, with ‘faceless Madonnas and empty niches in churches and cathedrals across Britain’. These empty niches do not attest to a hollow idol but to ‘the ferocity with which the maternal dimension of Catholic Christianity

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was expunged from Protestant religious consciousness. The destruction of Marian images was not an organic process, but the violent repression of a dimension of religious thought and practice that suffused daily life, in contexts that were often of particular significance for women’.61 Women in the early church, for example, may have experienced Mary’s humanity as ‘the counterpoint to God’s divinity, and it was the chiasmus, the point of intersection between the two, that constituted the space of the incarnation’.62 Or again, Caroline Walker Bynum argued that as the medieval period did not know the modern gender binary, women could once relate to Christ and Mary in images where gender was not fixed but was subject to constant slippage. The medieval Church produced images of Christ that depicted him as capable of lactation and even childbirth from the wounds of his crucified body. It produced images of Mary that subverted and complicated its own misogynistic teaching on female sinfulness in Eve. Medieval religious women, Bynum found, ‘paid surprisingly little attention’ to their supposed incapacities. There is at least historical precedent for inclusive, fluid, Christian images of both the man Jesus and the woman Mary that, together, do not alienate women from their spiritual power, but enable them to realize it in union with the divine.63

Notes 1 After Christianity, pp. 69, 284. 2 Theology and Feminism, Oxford, Blackwell, 1990, pp. 50, 120. 3 To Change the World: Christology and Cultural Criticism, New York, Crossroad, 1981, pp. 45–56. 4 Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 6: 2. 5 Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1967. 6 ‘Jesus Was a Feminist’, Catholic World (January 1971), 171–183. Although there was much for Christian feminists to welcome in Swidler’s article and his subsequent books on the theme, his method was anachronistic and, problematically for Jews, suggested that Jesus was a something of a sole exception among firstcentury Jewish men in showing respect for women. 7 The Fat Jesus, p. 143. 8 The Fat Jesus, p. 144. See also idem, ‘The Fat Jesus: Feminist Explorations in Fleshy Christologies’, Feminist Theology, 19 (2010), 20–35. 9 The Fat Jesus, p. 142. Isherwood notes that the ‘fat’ Jesus has much in common with Marcella Althaus-Reid’s ‘obscene’ Jesus. 10 The Fat Jesus, p. 142. 11 The Fat Jesus, p. 143. See further Lisa Isherwood and Elizabeth Stuart, Introducing Body Theology, Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. 12 The Scorpion, from Spencer’s Christ in the Wilderness series, 1938–1939. In Luke 10: 19, God granted Jesus the power to tread on snakes and scorpions and confront dangerous enemies while remaining unscathed. 13 Ruether’s theology, for example, pivots around this verse. For an early articulation of her critical liberationist interpretation of Pauline theology, see ‘The Subordination and Liberation of Women in Christian Theology: St. Paul and Sarah Grimké’, Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 61 (1978), 168–181. See also idem, New Woman/New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation,

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14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29

30

31 32 33 34 35 36

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New York, Seabury Press, 1975, p. 63; Sexism and God-Talk, pp. 135–136; Women-Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1985, p. 22, where Ruether suggests that the egalitarianism of the early church had broken normative images of female subordination. To Change the World, pp. 17, 47. The Church Against Itself: An Inquiry Into the Conditions of Historical Existence for the Eschatological Community, New York, Herder & Herder, 1967, p. 202. Sexism and God-Talk, p. 137. Sexism and God-Talk, p. 138. Elizabeth Johnson, Consider Jesus: Waves of Renewal in Christology, London, Geoffrey Chapman, 1990, p. 107. See Mary Hunt, ‘Women-Church: Feminist Concept, Religious Commitment, Women’s Movement’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 25 (2009), 85–98. Women-Church, p. 5. The women-church movement, ‘a community of liberation from patriarchy’, produced new rituals, liturgies, and worship groups (ibid., pp. 5–6; see also pp. 57–98). Ruether’s account of an ‘exodus’ from patriarchy is not to be confused with Mary Daly’s ‘exodus’ from the Church. J’annine Jobling, Feminist Biblical Interpretation in Theological Context: Restless Readings, Aldershot and Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2002, esp. chs. 3 & 8. Beyond God the Father, p. 96. Journeys by Heart, pp. 50–70. Journeys by Heart, p. 52 and elsewhere. Journeys by Heart, p. 65. Journeys by Heart, p. 62. Journeys by Heart, p. 66. Joy Ann McDougall, ‘Closed Eyes and Blocked Visions: Gendering Tanner’s Theology of Sin and Grace’, in Rosemary P. Carbine and Hilda P. Koster, eds., The Gift of Theology: The Contribution of Kathryn Tanner, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2015, pp. 235–256, esp. pp. 236–238. My paraphrase of Tanner’s Christology synthesizes several of her works: Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2001; Christ the Key, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 1–57; and idem, ‘In the Image of the Invisible’, in Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, eds., Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality, New York, Fordham University Press, 2010, pp. 117–136. Joy Ann McDougall, ‘Keeping Feminist Faith with Christian Traditions: A Look at Christian Feminist Theology Today’, Modern Theology, 24 (2008), 106, 103–124. See also Pamela Sue, Anderson, A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 1998, p. 149; Amy-Jill Levine and Maria Mayo Robbins, eds., A Feminist Companion to Mariology, New York, A. and C. Black, 2005. Elizabeth Johnson, ‘The Marian Tradition and the Reality of Women’, Horizons, 12 (1985), 119. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Mary: The Feminine Face of the Church, Philadelphia, Westminster Press, 1977, p. 7. The Essence of Christianity, p. 26. Susan Parsons, The Ethics of Gender: New Dimensions of Religious Ethics, Hoboken, Wiley, 2001, p. 80. Werner Neuer, Man and Woman in Christian Perspective, trans. Gordon Wenham, WheatonIL, Crossway Books, 1991. There is a considerable literature on the history of Christian sexualization of the feminine as a locus of impurity. For that which shaped the experience of women in the Church of England in the early twentieth century, see Teresa Jones,

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49 50

51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59

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‘“Unduly Conscious of Her Sex”: Priesthood, Female Bodies, and Sacred Space in the Church of England’, Women’s History Review, 21 (2012), 639–655. After Christianity, p. 174, citing Don Cupitt. The Second Sex, p. 200. The Second Sex, p. 203. See e.g. Ruether, Mary: The Feminine Face of the Church, p. 18. London, Vintage, 1996 [1985]. ‘Sacrifice as Remedy for Having Been Born of Woman’ in Clarissa Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret Miles, eds., Immaculate & Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, Boston, Crucible/Beacon Press, 1987 [1985], pp. 292–293. See further Nancy Jay, Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion and Paternity, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992. See Rosemary Ruether, ‘Women’s Body and Blood: The Sacred and the Impure’, in Alison Joseph, ed., Through the Devil’s Gateway: Women, Religion and Taboo, London, SPCK, 1990, pp. 7–21. Daly Gyn/Ecolgy, p. 83. Daly is paraphrasing the words of Anne Dellenbaugh. See Wayne Grudem’s defence of headship in ‘The Meaning of Kephalē (“Head”): A Response to Recent Studies’, in Wayne Grudem and John Piper, eds., Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism, Wheaton, Crossway, 2006 [1991], pp. 425–468. Gyn/Ecology, p. 85. Gyn/Ecology, pp. 85, 88. See e.g. Robert Orsi’s ethnography of Marian devotion in the lived religion of Catholic Italian immigrants in New York, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, Second edition, 2002 [1985]. Barbara Corrado Pope, ‘Immaculate and Powerful: The Marian Revival in the Nineteenth Century’, in Clarissa Atkinson et al., eds., Immaculate & Powerful, pp. 192–196. Ivone Gebara and Maria Clara Bingemer, Mary, Mother of God, Mother of the Poor, Tunbridge Wells, Burns & Oates, 1989. See also See Deborah Sawyer, ‘Hidden Subjects: Rereading Eve and Mary’, Theology and Sexuality, 14 (2008), 305–320. Luke 1: 46–55. Elizabeth Johnson, ‘Mary of Nazareth: Friend of God and Prophet’, America, The Jesuit Review, June 17, 2000, www.americamagazine.org/faith/2000/06/17/ mary-nazareth-friend-god-and-prophet, accessed 4.6.18. Depending on one’s taste, this principle is not without some notable exceptions. Sculpted from marble, the pathos of Mary as represented in Michelangelo’s Pietà (1498–1499, in St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City, carved when he was only 24 years old) has been ecumenically iconic of all mothers (including Eve, who lost her son Abel in an act of fratricide) who have ever mourned their children or held their dead bodies in their arms. Even here, though, there is theological idealization: the grieving Mary is represented as little more than a virginal girl, not as a woman at least approaching middle age, which she would have been at the time of Jesus’ death. Johnson, ‘Mary of Nazareth: Friend of God and Prophet’. Muers, ‘The Mute Cannot Keep Silent’, pp. 117–118. Irigaray, ‘Toward a Divine in the Feminine’, pp. 19–20. Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 84. Beyond God the Father, pp. 84–85. Beyond God the Father, p. 81.

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60 God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate: A Marian Narration of Women’s Salvation, London and New York, Continuum, 2002, p. 20. 61 ‘Redeeming Mary: The Potential of Marian Symbolism for Feminist Philosophy of Religion’, in Pamela Sue Anderson and Beverley Clack, eds., Feminist Philosophy of Religion, London and New York, Routledge, 2004, p. 110. See also idem, Rediscovering Mary: Insights From The Gospels, London, Burnes & Oates, 1995 and God’s Mother, esp. pp. 172–193. 62 Beatie, ‘Redeeming Mary’, pp. 113, 107–122. 63 ‘Female Imagery in the Religious Writing of the Late Middle Ages’, in Caroline Walker Bynum, Steven Harrell, and Paula Richman, eds., Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, Boston, Beacon Press, 1986, p. 261.

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Strangeness, in Jewish religious thought, is a quality of idols. Idolatry, avodah zarah in Hebrew, is service or worship of the strange or foreign; that which does not belong. When the early second wave American-Jewish women’s liberationist, Vivian Gornick published her 1971 article about female ‘strangeness’ the word had a critical resonance that not all her readers would have heard. Gornick observed that the outsider status of men, say, Van Gogh, Nietzsche, or the fictional Steppenwolf, lent them the aura and lucidity of ‘tragically unfiltered vision, distended emotion, unbearable honesty’. Jewish women, she wrote, are also outsiders to their own tradition. But they are so for no other reason than that they are women. Theirs is a biological state, not a heroic existential or creative possibility. They are defined, that is idolized, by their sex but never realized in it. Just as Shylock, ‘a Jew created by a Gentile’, asked Solanio and Salario, ‘Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?’, Gornick, at once anguished and angry, asked a notional rabbi the same question of women. Likening her position to Shylock’s, she at once implored and demanded that he acknowledge her humanity, her soul, over a stereotype that alienated her substantive subjectivity from her appearance; that made of her an absent presence.1 Gornick, like other Jewish women of her generation, was severally othered. Not only was her femaleness other to the masculinity of the divine/ human norm, she was also othered by the androcentric laws and customs of her religious tradition, and by her belonging to a community of immigrant ‘aliens’ from eastern and central Europe who were ethnically, culturally, and religiously other to both white and black America. Such was the situation of the American (and Anglo-) Jewish women who, from the late 1960s, became part of a secular and inter-religious coalition of feminist theorists and activists who believed that false images of women are not one of the pitfalls of patriarchy but its very symptom and cause. There had been, of course, a first wave history of Jewish feminism in Europe and America, but by the late 1960s a specific concatenation of religious, social,

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cultural, and political circumstances had produced sufficiently powerful feelings of alienation to motivate Jewish women to join the women’s liberation movement in disproportionately large numbers relative to the size of the Jewish population at that time.2

Jewish feminists and feminist Jews Not all the Jewish women who affiliated to the women’s liberation movement did so as Jews. Many, who might be referred to as ‘feminist Jews’ rather than ‘Jewish feminists’ regarded their Jewishness as of incidental or minimal significance to their feminism. Feminist Jews were women’s liberationists who did not make emphatic ethical and emotional connections between their Jewishness and feminism. They did not deny or repudiate their Jewishness but did not draw a single straight line between their cultural, familial identity and their sexual politics. Judith Butler, for example, would not appreciate categorization of any kind, but could be loosely characterized as a feminist Jew whose theory is sometimes inflected by her Jewishness, but not defined by it. In her view it is precisely Jewish ethicality which may sometimes require feminist Jews to put their ethics before their more immediate ethnocentric concerns for the Jewish people.3 Others were, and are, secular Jewish feminists. These could be women’s liberationists who were also secular humanists who regarded the progressive, justice-seeking dimensions of their Jewish background as directly formative of their feminism. Like many non-religious Jews who live Jewish lives that have little or nothing to do with Jewish religious observance, their secular Jewish values and ideas were loosely derived from scriptural traditions and more directly from those of modern central and eastern European Jewish radical politics, not least those of the Labour Bund.4 They had embarked on the feminist project for specifically Jewish ethical reasons as well as broader sexual-political ones. Others Jewish feminists lived their feminism as part of a religious tradition that shaped life at home, in the synagogue and the wider Jewish community. They objected to the normative figuration of the Jew as male and were convinced that no Jewish woman would become the speaking subject of her religious experience until she had broken free from the tradition’s idea of her role and status as a woman. Initially at least, many of the Jewish women who brought the women’s liberation movement into their religious communities were from liberal Jewish denominations that had been variously committed to the introduction of more modern, sexually egalitarian forms of Jewish observance for about a hundred years. Other Jewish feminists were attracted to the neo-Hasidic Jewish Renewal movement, which, under the leadership of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, combined Orthodox spirituality and alternative, countercultural lifestyles in ways far more hospitable to feminist spiritual politics than mainstream Orthodoxy.5 The impact of Modern Orthodox Jewish

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feminism on religious education, leadership, and family life took a little longer to make itself felt, but has been growing in momentum since the early 1970s, though most quarters of Orthodoxy are resistant to feminism to this day. Feminism has had an incalculably powerful culminative impact (if not always acknowledged) on almost the entire Jewish community, cultural and religious. All religion is a living social, political, and cultural engagement, not just a repository of truth claims. It encounters concrete realities in ways that make spirit and matter far less of a duality than it might seem. This is particularly true of Judaism, where Jewishness is traditionally a matrilineal status irrespective of belief. In modernity, religious identities are broadly elective. Jewish modernity left confessional Judaism separable from cultural Jewishness, but there is nothing otherworldly about Jewish religious institutions. The Hebrew word olam is translated both as eternity and world. The slippage between secular and religious Jewish feminisms is such that it is not always easy to tell where feminist Judaism and secular Jewish feminism begin and end. Yet it is probably neither possible nor desirable to make absolute distinctions between Jewish feminists and feminist Jews, despite their different emphases and situations. Both religious Jewish feminists, whether liberal or Orthodox, and secular Jewish feminists live in this world together, not in two different dimensions.6 Judaism is not a theologically introspective tradition and even its religious identities are practically expressed in family and communal life more than in abstract public confession. Although they may move in different circles, many Jewish women’s values and experiences are held too much in common for any commentator to be able to make hard and fast distinctions between Jewish feminist and feminist Jewish idoloclasm. The origins of all Jewish feminist protest against the dehumanization of women lay in the critical encounter between its own tradition and modernity, just such an encounter between tradition and modernity that was playing out on the larger stage of the women’s liberation movement itself. A couple of examples should suffice. Although not immediately apparent, traditional Jewish values informed Susan Brownmiller’s 1983 book Femininity, a study of the psychological coercions of the ideology of femininity, written as the sequel to her more famous book that argued that women are politically coerced by the physical threat of rape.7 Femininity begins by reflecting on how, from childhood, idols inducted Brownmiller into the ideology of femininity: ‘Being good at what was expected of me was one of my earliest projects’. Having once ‘loved being a fairy princess, for that was what I thought I was’, she describes growing increasingly confused by the mixture of ‘little courtesies and minor privileges’ that rewarded conformity to her idea and threats of disqualification from the comforts of love and affluence that accompanied resistance. The more a woman perfected her femininity, the greater was her capacity to compete for two resources – husbands and money.8 In other words, the more feminine a woman’s behaviour,

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the more she approximated her idol, the better would she complement the masculine idea. Under patriarchy, this was perhaps the primary purpose of femininity: to realize and secure the power of the masculine idea. Brownmiller remembers how a rigid cultural code for femininity was imposed on the natural process of her maturation into a woman. This psychological imposition on her biological process gradually distorted her personhood into that of someone ‘in limbo’ between a person and an idea. She was terrified of catching sight of herself in the mirror, disorientated by contradictory requirements that she comport herself through, ‘in equal parts, modesty and exhibition’.9 Chapter by chapter, Brownmiller initiates a process of female self-recovery by dismantling and exorcizing the spectral idol of the feminine from a woman’s body – hair, clothes, voice, skin, and movement – to her emotions and ambitions. Brownmiller later stated, ‘I never stressed my Jewish heritage in my writing. Yet the heritage is still with me, and I can argue that my chosen path – to fight against physical harm, specifically the terror of violence against women – had its origins in what I had learned in Hebrew School about the pogroms and the Holocaust’. She was ‘surprised, and ultimately heartened, during the heady days of women’s liberation to see the emergence of committed, observant, Jewish feminists who took on the task of creating equality within organized religion’.10 Judaism and Jewishness also more than inflected Betty Friedan’s secular campaign for women’s liberation from their ‘mystique’. One of the first times her Jewishness became fully apparent to her was on 26 August 1970, in New York, when she led 50,000 women on a Women’s Strike for Equality on the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the vote for women: At the defining moment of the march, as Friedan came forward to address a vast, cheering throng in Bryant Park behind New York’s Public Library, she found herself speaking – and revising – the ancient Hebrew prayer which Orthodox Jewish men recited every morning. ‘Down through the generations in history’, Friedan declared, my ancestors prayed, ‘I thank Thee, Lord, I was not created a woman’. From this day forward women all over the world will be able to say, ‘I thank Thee, Lord, I was created a woman’. Friedan said that she could not remember having heard the prayer before, but as Joyce Antler remarks: ‘the joining together of her feminism to her Jewishness at this historic moment was not as strange as it seemed. Friedan confessed to having always had “very strong feelings” about her Jewish identity; it is not unlikely that this Orthodox prayer, emblematic of gender differences in Jewish religious roles, now emerged from the recesses of Friedan’s memory. It had become necessary for Friedan to confront “the anti-woman aspects of the Jewish tradition in order to accept both feminism and Judaism”’.11

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Friedan saw that her secular idoloclasm had brought her to its Jewish roots: breaking ‘through the feminine mystique to affirm my authentic full identity as a person, as a woman, [had] brought me to confront my Jewish identity’. Previously identifying as an atheistic humanist, with no particular affection for Judaism, after the 1970 rally she became a self-identified Jewish feminist. Friedan went on to support the development of a women’s movement in Israel, to become co-chair of the American Jewish Congress’ Task Force on Jewish Women, and to challenge popular culture’s caricature of the Jewish mother.12 This chapter, with its cultural focus, was only reluctantly divided from the next, which examines Jewish feminism’s counter-idolatrous theological engagement with the tradition. They were written as separate chapters only to keep them from becoming too long and to maintain some distinction between theistic and non-theistic Jewish feminisms, not to divide the religious and ethical operations of Judaism from Jewishness as culture.

The alienation of mid-twentieth century Jewish women The historical and religious factors that predisposed Jewish women, whether they identified as religious or secular, to feminism as an idoloclastic critical method and praxis are too manifold to be exhaustively rehearsed in a single chapter of a single book. But we might begin by noting that the combination of intra- and extra-Judaic estrangement in Jewish women’s consciousness indicated in Gornick’s article did not originate in post-war America. It originated in the modern social contract forged between modern Europe and its Jewish population, especially in Napoleonic France. In return for emancipation, for the status of an insider, Jews would have to divest themselves of their former (archaic) image as an outsider. Yet Gentile toleration was often too chilly a desistance from persecution to prevent Jews feeling alienated from, and nostalgic for, the familiar, heimishe, world of their foremothers and fathers. Modern Jewish estrangement, whether from the tradition by modernization, or from modernity by tradition, only deepened as it confronted the Holocaust, an abyssal break in the history of Jewry, Christendom, Europe, and humanity. The unprecedented scale and method of the Holocaust left European survivors and their American children in a community of the living densely populated by a spectral community of the dead. Second wave Jewish feminists of Gornick and Firestone’s generation grew up in a community which, even in families who had arrived in America several decades before the Holocaust, bore ‘its scars without its wounds’ (to borrow a phrase from Arthur Cohen). Jewish identity is that of an inter-historical and inter-temporal people or family traditionally known as Israel. Jewish women’s liberationists grew up on the other side of a genocide in which every European Jewish man, woman, and child had been systematically reduced from ‘a who to a what’. All of those people were actually or notionally family. Many second

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wave Jewish feminists would engage othering and objectification not only as a philosophical problem but as young women who had grown up in survivor families and survivor communities, over-identified with the trapped and the dead. Emily Silverman, for example, who was born well after the end of the second world war, remembers that her childhood identification with Jews dehumanized during the Holocaust was both traumatic and constructive. It gave her nightmares, but it also made her closely empathetic with the history of black Americans and all enslaved and oppressed peoples.13 Silverman’s queer feminism was born of her post-Holocaust conviction that human identity is not to be identified by its image. Physical attributes such as the colour of people’s skin or the shape of their nose are aspects of difference that cannot be permitted to ‘other’ them into a ‘what’ rather than a ‘who’. ‘What’ is an essence. ‘Who’ is a self. Racism and sexism objectify and obliterate selves by their reduction of a person to a silenced, standardized ‘what’. Silverman cites a formative passage from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition: ‘In acting and speaking, men [sic] show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and sound of the voice. This disclosure of “who” in contradistinction to “what” somebody is – his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide – is implicit in everything somebody says and does’.14 An earlier generation of Jewish feminists growing up in post-war gentile America were less confident of their welcome than Silverman’s. Many of their parents had worked hard to both retain links to their Jewish identity while also trying to secure their future by assimilation: abandoning the Yiddish language, adopting modern western secular dress, and moving out of the inner-city tenements into the more prosperous suburbs. Nonetheless, Betty Friedan, who was to become one of the first leaders of the women’s liberation movement in America, remained powerfully aware of her family’s Jewish otherness. Barred from membership of the Peoria country club where her gentile friends belonged, her family’s increasing detachment from the Jewish community left Friedan estranged on almost every front: as a girl to boys, as a Jew to gentiles, as a Jew to her own Jewishness. As in Britain, American middle and upper-class gentile culture of the period was socially exclusive, and acceptance of Jews into its circles was conditional on at least public relinquishment of their ethnic markers. This would prove futile,15 especially when images of the Holocaust entered cultural circulation and the Jewish body became re-markable as that of the quintessential victim. It was in this profoundly uneasy milieu, one whose modern Jewish self-image Hannah Arendt had theorized in 1944,16 that Betty Friedan, born in 1921 in Illinois, reached maturity. Among the less specifically Jewish vectors of Friedan’s otherness was her intellectuality. It was considered socially intimidating and had to be concealed from her male

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student peers lest she found herself left, like an unsold object gathering dust, ‘on the (marital) shelf’. When she married Carl Friedan in 1947, she claimed to have found her burgeoning image as a ‘career woman’ so alien to her Jewish and American culture, so difficult to sustain, that she gave it up, exchanging it for the image of a 1950s suburban housewife. Trapped in a false image of the feminine, hers was to become the dream-like death-in-life that she would dissect in The Feminine Mystique.17 Betty Friedan was by no means the first female political activist in post-war American Jewry. But when she published The Feminine Mystique in 1963 she seemed to speak for all those post-war, white, middle-class, American women, not just Jewish women, who sensed that their charmed suburban lives were just that: fatally soporific. Friedan’s theorization of female selfalienation was extreme. The mystique’s dependencies not only infantilized women, she claimed, they also destroyed women’s self-esteem and ‘bur[ied] them alive’. She likened the psychological ills of women living in comfortable homes to those experienced by people in concentration camps. Leaving aside the sheer egregiousness of this analogy, what Friedan was trying to evoke was the problem of women’s dehumanization. She was suggesting that, in ways analogous to, but hardly the same as, the victims of the Holocaust, of whose experiences less was known then than it is today, women are psychologically and politically stripped of the energies and resources of resistance to their condition.18 Friedan wanted to say that women would languish in a half-life, not truly alive, until they had killed off their idol as the figuration of a biological presence in cultural absence. (A similar point was made, if with greater subtlety, by Ozick just a few years later when she lamented the centuries of Jewish history’s unremarked and un-mourned cultural and spiritual excision of the female from the creative heart and mind of the Jewish people.)19 Friedan’s book was not without significant shortcomings: its middleclass assumptions and focus ignored the different conditions of women in working-class and black communities. It did not acknowledge that many ‘housewives’ were actively socially engaged. Jewish women had long participated in liberal religious, educational, political, philanthropic and cultural networks, organizations and movements, many of them Jewish. Since the late nineteenth century, when the National Council of Jewish Women was founded by American women who refused to be the mere hostesses of political and philanthropic causes, Jewish women had been drawing on skills and energies that were not only domestic, but also ethical, cultural, and intellectual.20 Even so, Friedan’s idea of the American housewife as little more than a perfected replica of the real, intractable woman whose will she had evacuated and replaced with her own – a secular idol – was compelling to many at the time. Although she did not sustain her early radicalism,21 Friedan, more effectively than any other feminist, brought feminist criticism of the patriarchal idea of a woman whose being was a substitute for their own becoming

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to a very wide popular audience. The Feminine Mystique also had considerable impact on other Jewish artists and commentators. Friedan was even a character in Ira Levin’s 1975 novel, The Stepford Wives,22 which fictionalized her critique. Here, the men of Stepford ban her ideas from the town as the first move in their backlash against the women’s liberation movement. Only by excising Friedan’s liberative idea from women’s consciousness, can they enhance their wives’ appearance and turn them into living posthuman sexual-domestic automata. In the same year, 1975, the Jewish feminist artist Martha Rosler filmed herself in The Semiotics of the Kitchen where she played a TV cook whose show was supposed to present a perfect performance of domestic competence. Over the course of the film, Rosler’s robotic performance becomes increasingly distraught. Her kitchen becomes chaotic, a symbol and product of an anger and distress that is all the more effectively communicated by her comedically exaggerated efforts to suppress them.23 Joyce Antler has observed that while the housewives who appear in The Feminine Mystique seem to have no specific ethnicity, they bear a more than passing resemblance to Friedan’s ‘impossible’ mother Miriam Goldstein. After giving up a stimulating job as a woman’s page editor on a local newspaper to get married, Goldstein was left (as her daughter was) profoundly dissatisfied with her role as housewife and mother. Despite enjoying the privileges of a luxurious home, Miriam had to live vicariously through her daughter’s literary and political achievements. In this, Friedan’s housewives resemble many of the Jewish mothers who appear in novels written in the 1950s and 60s by Herman Wouk and Philip Roth – Marjorie Morningstar, Goodbye Columbus, and Portnoy’s Complaint – images of Jewish women whose inability to realize their potential is also destructive to those around them.24 Before Jewish women’s history developed as a discipline that would lend dignity and substance to the image of Jewish women, there was little or nothing to counter a Jewish popular culture that was amply furnished with images of Jewish mothers that were little better than caricatures. Early second wave feminists could not and would not recognize themselves in these images. The ‘yiddishe mama’ – a poignant figure of Jewish maternity who recalled the mothers who had never left eastern Europe for America and who did not survive the Holocaust – may have been sentimentalized, even patronized, by her sons (notably in popular song), but she was also respected by them. As the women of her generation passed into memory, mid-century anglophone Jewish women were exposed to a more contemptuous image of the older Jewish woman. In comic novels, stand-up routines, film and TV shows, Jewish mothers – women who came from a line of mothers who had survived or died during late-nineteenth-century pogroms, early-twentiethcentury immigrant privation, and mid-century genocide – were routinely, if affectionately, humiliated. They were stereotyped as suffocatingly overanxious, over-feeding, over-protective women for whom long-suffering husbands laboured tirelessly, thanklessly, and, subject to their incessant talk, without speaking roles.25

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As the community recovered from the trauma and stress of the first half of the twentieth century, the image of the neurotic Jewish mother gave way to that of her more affluent and self-centered daughter: the Jewish American Princess of the 1970s and 80s. Even today, the Jewish Princess, irreligious, excessively glamorous (vain), and hyper-materialistic, is at once desired and derided by many young Jewish men and ironized and aspired to by many young Jewish women. By the end of the twentieth century, the Orthodox community was reimagining its ideal Jewish woman. Orthodoxy compensated for the destruction of European Jewry by promoting the institution of the Jewish family as the reason for, and locus of, Judaism’s historical survival. Ultra-Orthodox or Haredi Jews maintained a high birth rate by encouraging early marriage and hostility to feminism. Feminism was, and still is, castigated as a secular movement that discourages women from having children. Its influence on the family life of the liberal or secular Jewish majority would thereby grant Hitler a posthumous victory. After the Holocaust, ever more stringent in its reconsolidating observance, Orthodoxy promoted a Jewish feminine ideal whose character was the obverse of the light-minded Jewish Princess: a modernized ‘Woman of Valour’, modelled after the eshet chayil of Proverbs 31. This figure of the Jewish feminine was, and remains, the pious mother of as many children as she has reproductive years to bear. She is uncomplainingly and unfailingly hospitable to exceptionally large numbers of Sabbath and festival guests; a supremely competent cook, mother, and, especially among the ultra-Orthodox, often a breadwinner in place of her husband whose energies may be almost exclusively devoted to Talmudic studies. By the 1960s, Jewish daughters and granddaughters drawn to the women’s liberation movement began to take university degrees and develop political and professional personae that opened cracks in their relationships with their mothers and grandmothers. Mutual alienation and resentment could grow when young women refused to be made in the image of women whose identities had been formed by early marriage, large families, and, with greater affluence, economic dependence on a male breadwinner.26 After 1971, with the founding of Ezrat Nashim group, and 1972 with the first ordination of a woman to the American Reform rabbinate,27 attitudes to feminism did not necessarily map onto a Jewish woman’s age, not least because some older Jewish women had been activists on the political left for decades. Yet Lucy Dawidowicz, for example, herself a distinguished historian, born in 1915, condemned Jewish feminism as not merely uncommitted to Judaism but as ‘a kind of ideological sh’atnez, the mixture of wool and linen prohibited in Jewish law’.28 Whether they remained as reformists within Jewish communities and institutions or abandoned them, when mid-twentieth-century Jewish women broke and re-made the image of Jewish women, their idoloclasm could be met with feelings of betrayal and incomprehension among their family and friends. And into this perfect cultural storm of alienation and estrangement came the additional factor of

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intra-feminist anti-Judaism. With the growth of Christian and post-Christian feminist theo/alogy came the charge, usually implicit, of deacide and deicide. The ‘Old Testament’ prophets had engaged in wholesale destruction of the universal cult of the Goddess, and Jerusalem’s priestly establishment had been responsible for the killing of Christ, the putative proto-feminist who, alone among his compatriots, had respected women.29

Women in search of a usable Jewish self Jewish women began to contest their post-war intra-communal stereotypes, especially those of Jewish mothers and daughters, at the same time as Jewish men began to contest and remake their own image, that is, during the period of Israel’s victory in the two decisive wars of 1967 and 1973. It was in and by the establishment and defence of a Jewish state that Jewish men, and the world at large, reimagined Jewish masculinity. Ideologically, if not actually, in a nation state, Jewish masculinity could put two millennia of exile and persecution behind it. After a modern history of male abjection and death at the hands of among others the Cossacks and the Nazis came 1948, and the Israeli soldier’s heroic defence of his new land. His newfound capacity to protect his family, national and biological, was, and still is, reflected in images of his resilient, tanned body, toned by agriculture and war. Now, after 2000 years, the male Jew could be recast as an Israelite warrior redivivus, whether actually defending the state of Israel or potentially from the safe distance of the galut (the Jewish dispersion outside Israel). By contrast, after 1948, the military and agricultural competences of young Israeli women were, predictably, sexualized as functions of their appearance, their images concealing institutional discrimination and other aspects of their social realia. The rendition of Jewish women’s labour into an aesthetic ideal also predated 1948. Lesley Hazleton’s description of the images it produced is evocative of their ambiguous charm: The soft focus of old photographs gives them a lazy, dreamlike quality. Beautiful young women, dark eyes shining, smile out at us [in 1977] from seventy years ago. They have pitchforks slung over their shoulders and wear long cotton dresses and tough work shoes. Standing in the middle of a cornfield, oxen and cart beside them, they glow with health. A lamb under each arm, their faces shine with contentment, as they herd the sheep out into the hills. These are the halutzot, the women pioneers who left their comfortable middle-class homes in Eastern Europe to follow a vision of socialism, equality and justice in Palestine.30 Yet as Alice Shalvi remembered, lacking a Mary Daly, Israeli women, from about 1948 to about 1975, were in thrall to a false image of women as the political equals of men, epitomized by the woman pioneer and soldier and the leadership of Golda Meir. And even after 1975, feminism, considered

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particularly alien to Sephardi Israeli culture, had a far less secure foothold than it did in the United States.31 In America, under different ideological, political, and cultural conditions to those of Europe and Israel, Jewish men, as well as women, were in search of a usable self. Ashkenazi (eastern and central European) Jewish masculinity was an object of nostalgia and celebration, the latter being exemplified on screen by Woody Allen whose unathletic form, rapid-fire wit, and voracious intellect secularized the traditional attributes of the Talmudic scholar. It was as such that Allen represented himself as sexually attractive to women. Like the Talmudic rabbis who were ‘unmanned but not desexualized’; desiring subjects and themselves objects of desire,32 Allen’s masculinity was, in all senses, immaterial: he was philosophically literate and could make women laugh. Jackie Mason, a former rabbi turned comic, was another whose wry insistence on Jewish men’s practical ineptitude paid a back-handed rhetorical compliment to their intellectual, political, and business acumen, which required more sechel (a Yiddish term connoting ‘brains’) than muscle. The Jewish feminists who wanted to break out of the associative constraints of their mid-twentieth-century image and find one more in step with the times were in a more difficult position than men. Whereas Jewish masculinity was being recalibrated after centuries of relative defencelessness to attack by non-Jewish men, Jewish women were in search of a religio-political subjectivity that was already and inalienably available to Jewish men, irrespective of their historical predicament. Faced with the sheer paucity of usable images from which to construct a liberated self, from the early 1970s, Jewish feminists created new images of Jewish women’s agency from their collective memory. Esther Broner’s book Her Mothers (1975) was one of the first to reimagine Jewish mothers, ancient and modern, as active historical subjects and agents in their own right.33 Other figures, not just mothers, could be resurrected, ‘fleshed out’ or re-read midrashically, to encourage contemporary women to break the patriarchal mould. Since almost the entire history of Jewish culture was inseparable from its scriptural tradition, all Jewish feminists, religious or otherwise, trawled through a common mythography of the feminine for images that would bridge the gap between their feminism and their Jewishness. Sometimes in academic collaboration with Christian feminist biblical scholars, Jewish feminist scholars of the biblical, talmudic, and midrashic literature brought scriptural images of Jewish women to life by giving them a voice and a past that would provide precedents, stories, and symbols for an as yet open future. Such could not be directly ‘read off’ from the texts. While the Hebrew Bible presented a number of potential role models, not least the prophetesses Miriam and Huldah and the military leader, Deborah, such figures were far outnumbered by matriarchs, other wives, concubines, prostitutes, beleaguered daughters, and ‘foreign’ women, not all of them even named, whose agency was defined and circumscribed by their power to sexually attract powerful men, even when, like Judith or Esther, they

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were saviours of the nation. Nonetheless, their sparsely worded, ambiguous stories, interpreted from a feminist perspective, yielded a considerable volume of material from which to create and own new histories, rituals, and egalitarian models of female leadership. Some women chose to figure their new feminist self in the image of Lilith. In Jewish legend, Lilith was Adam’s first wife. Lilith and Adam separated after her demand for equality went unmet. Together, God and Adam settled on the penalty for her leaving Adam. She was to be banished to the menstruous depths of the Red Sea, where one hundred of her children were to die every day. Unrepentant, and in defiance of a God whose secret name she knew and, at whatever cost to herself and his creation, was prepared to utter, Lilith departed, never to return. The divine and human masculine power that had degraded and punished her was not powerful enough to prevail over her. She suffered, but she was free. However, Lilith, liberated and remodelled as a Jewish radical feminist, was not for everyone. Many women, especially those like Lynn Gottlieb and Leah Novick in the neo-Hasidic progressive-orthodox Renewal Movement, found in the rabbinic and mystical tradition a less traumatic figuration of the divine feminine in exile: the Shekhinah.34 Under her sheltering wings, Jewish feminist spirituality and liturgy found an icon of their own Jewish presence in absence, her face a moon or mirror to the female face, human and divine. Not all Jewish women found the re-mythologization, indeed re-cosmization, of women politically helpful. More often, the Jewish feminist art and literature of the period was characterized by its insistence that women are, as typified in the title of Adrienne Rich’s 1976 book, ‘of woman born’. For those feminists whose Jewishness was expressed in, say, art, politics, or historiography, rather than ritual or liturgy, there was little appetite for either the idealized Shekhinah or the demonized Lilith.35 Jewish feminism needed to remember who and what a woman might be, not a contemporary embodiment of her old idea as either a threat or a consolation to the social order. Whether a mythography idealized or demonized women, the one tendency was the gynophobic obverse of the other. Nor did liberal Jewish feminists wish to reembody the wife and mother who had been the traditional mainstay of the Jewish household (akeret habayit). She had been patriarchally modelled on the biblical book of Proverbs’ paragon of the tireless eshet chayiI (‘Woman of Valour’) and the virtuous Dame Wisdom made in the reverse image of the shameless, ‘foreign’ (pagan) seductress Dame Folly. It was, after all, precisely figures such as these that, in different ways, lay at the root of Orthodoxy’s exemption of women from the performance of most time-bound commandments, an exemption so comprehensive as to effectively prohibit them from undertaking them altogether. For Jewish women committed to full participation in Jewish life’s daily educational, religious, and political institutions, supernatural or otherwise impossible images of Jewish women were best kept at arm’s length. These had their liturgical and private devotional uses, but in

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the day to day run of intra- and extra-Judaic sexual politics, most Jewish feminists prioritized the development of a normalized, familiarized idea of female agency, equal in its religious operation, or at least not essentially different, to men’s.

Idoloclasm and Jewish cultural criticism As a foundational criticism of culture, Judaism’s proscription of idols brought ‘women and men to a better oppositional acquaintance with oppositional stances, with the ultimate other, and not only the otherness of gender, ethnicity, and class’.36 By the twentieth century, Marxism had promised Jewish socialists and Jewish women’s liberationists a material liberation of the classed and gendered self from alienation that was compatible with (and at least in part produced by) Judaism’s ban on idols, now cast as the ideological figures or projections of false consciousness. However loosely interpreted and applied, after western Marxism had been filtered through feminist theory and other critical engagements with religion and culture, second wave Jewish feminist thinkers could revisit their religious tradition equipped to read it as one that not only alienated the female self but also criticized that alienation. Both shattered and shattering, Judaism at its critical best was an induction into idoloclasm; into release from the containment of idols through the breakage of traditional cultural forms, not only others’, but their own. In modernity, Jewish sources could be read and practiced as those of an urrevolution against the cosmic and historical status quo. Judaism, from an idoloclastic perspective, releases sacral power by breaking the hardened cultural carapaces that suffocate life as created and sustained by God. Breaking is an inaugurative moment. In Jewish mysticism’s mythopoetical account of creation, the very heart of God – of ayn sof – implodes under the pressure of its contained energy and breaks into myriad shards of light to make space for the world’s own becoming. The forms or shells (kelipot) of the holy cannot contain the uncontainable light of the divine as it shoots and falls through time and space. Their forms shatter, just as, in the midrash (narrative commentary), the 13-year-old Abraham shatters the idols made by his father Terah and, in the Torah, Moses shatters the biblical tablets of the law at the foot of Sinai in rage at the people’s idolatry and in doing so liberates the word from the silent stillness of stone into the clamour and jostle of history. And it is from the ruined sacrificial altar of the second of Jerusalem’s destroyed Temples, built as was the destroyed first Temple from stone and wood to be the house of God, that God’s presence goes out with the people and Judaism is reborn as an order of commandment and prayer. The shattering must go on through all the generations: it is from the glass broken underfoot by the groom at every Jewish wedding, that a new, joyous history is released from the fragments of an old and tragic one.37 As Leonard Cohen, whose lyrics can be as good a source of Jewish theology as any other, sang

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in his ‘Anthem’ of 1992, there is ‘a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’. The criticism of avodah zarah (literally, in Hebrew, the worship of alien things), is Judaism’s defining moment; the very activity that the rabbinic literature claims defines a Jew: ‘the litmus test for being a Jew is seeing things in the created order for what they are: natural objects of finite value and duration’.38 A Jew is one who, in the spirit of the Second Commandment, breaks idols.39 Idoloclasm, then, is also the quintessentially Jewish moment of any feminism that identifies as Jewish, whether non-theistic or theistic. Second wave Jewish feminists had two options in the search for a Jewish subjectivity. Those inclined to a cultural Jewish identity that was nonconfessional and not, or only minimally, halakhically observant, could situate that identity in a modern Jewish history of utopian ethics and radical politics correlated with and contributory to those of feminism. Those whose feminist identity was theistic and to a lesser or greater degree halakhically obligated, enjoyed access to a wider Jewish hermeneutical circle. They drew inspiration not only from the modern history of radical Jewish political ethics but also from their critical feminist re-reading of its well-springs in the biblical, rabbinic, and modern theological patrimony. It was the ultimately humanistic ethical theology of these whose synergies, first and last, regenerated their Jewish being and becoming. Rabbinic tradition, for example, takes verbal humiliation or defamation of character very seriously indeed. It is an act of violence akin to murder. Jews do not have permission to mock anything other than idols. That mockery of idols is permitted because it disenchants them. It is a way of ensuring that no attraction or charm (khen) can be ascribed to idols.40 Since the postbiblical period, idol-breaking has been a cognitive process, not an assault on a material object, but the nullification of a problem of false consciousness. Not only Jewish philosophers saw their task as idoloclastic. By the mid twentieth-century, the Jewish visual and literary arts were producing images and words that could break the hold of false ideas with irony alone. While early-twentieth-century Jewish revolutionaries, mostly but not invariably male, engaged in theoretical and militant struggle against oppressive structures of power with pretensions to ultimacy and unassailability, Jewish comedians broke idols by wit; with laughter. Even before the feminist movement took root in the Jewish community, Jewish women novelists, dramatists, entertainers, and comedians had been standing up and ‘talking back’ at the images of the self-effacing Yiddishe Mama, the overbearing Jewish mother, the vacuous Jewish Princess and the tireless Orthodox ‘Woman of Valour’. Sophie Tucker, Fannie Brice, Gertrude Berg, Joan Rivers, Bette Midler, and Sandra Bernhard were among a significant number of twentiethcentury Jewish women entertainers whose acts subverted the caricatured image of Jewish women in very Jewish ways, that is, by a laughter that was self-deprecating but not cruel. Sending themselves up as much as their hapless husbands, they broke their own idol by mocking it.41 Dismantling

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powerful images by comedically cutting them down to (a human) size was a traditional Jewish idoloclastic strategy that, in a secular or religious liberal cultural setting, offered new possibilities for female self-representation.42

Four Jewish feminist artists who broke images of women by making them Other Jewish women rehumanized their image through visual art, which by the early twentieth century had become a central medium of Jewish selfexpression that was also integrated with the ethical concerns and historical moments of a wider gentile culture. Second wave Jewish feminists benefitted from increasing recognition that, while the tradition is broadly literary, the Second Commandment’s prohibition of the making and worshipping of graven images does not entail a blanket ban on visual art. By the time Jewish feminist artists began to paint their liberation, it had become apparent that the Second Commandment had not so much prevented figurative art as produced a culturally critical approach to the making of images that stabilized human power. Jewish feminist artists could, and did, make images that both expressed their Jewish obligation to criticize idolatrous images and, at the same time, their feminist obligation to criticize the idols of femininity. Jewish feminist art was an important bridge between its practitioners and viewers’ feminism and their Jewishness. All feminist art, by its nature as feminist, breaks old images of women by making new, more truthful, images open to their undetermined future. Without claiming that all feminist art is Jewish, Jewish art has an aniconic dynamic that subverts all images by making images that are open, self-subverting, ironical, in short, counter-idolatrous. While there is no space here to survey Jewish feminist art’s entire oeuvre, four Jewish feminist artists of the second wave period who made counteridolatrous images, sometimes to the point of making images of idols themselves in ways that told the truth about their falsity, may be taken to exemplify the pivotal contribution Jewish feminist art made to both the women’s liberation movement and to Judaism, both of them modern critical engagements with the image. Jewish feminist art demonstrates that Jewish feminism and feminist Jewishness did not operate in a space apart from the wider women’s liberation movement. This is indicated by the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the daughter of a Modern Orthodox rabbi, who, from 1969, refused the idolization of women by performing, on the streets of New York, her demythologization of women. Her ritualized street-cleaning performances reminded their viewers that women are ordinary, often tired, human beings, most of them labouring with little economic reward and even less glory to make this world a slightly cleaner, more hospitable, place than they have found it. Ukeles, who has held the post of artist-in-residence at the New York Department of Sanitation since 1977, performed her 1977–1980 Touch Sanitation piece over eleven months with 8500 New York cleaners, some

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men among them. While affirming, in avant-garde, modernist vein, that life itself is art (‘Everything I do is Art’), the piece told the truth about the reality of almost all women’s and feminized men’s lives as those of an ancient maintenance caste whose Sisyphusian physical labours keep the world clean from germs and disease – not merely tidy, but alive.43 Ukeles’ work re-evaluated female labour, but, as was evident from the first part of her Manifesto for Maintenance Art, she refused to sanctify women’s purification of the world: ‘maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.). The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom’. She asked women: ‘how [do] you feel about spending whatever parts of your life you spend on maintenance activities; – what is the relationship between maintenance and freedom; – what is the relationship between maintenance and [your] life’s dreams’?44 Other feminists of the mid 1970s, notably the British feminist Ann Oakley, had similarly noted that in a modern world of work that was beginning to question its gendered inequalities, one occupational role had remained entirely feminine, namely domestic labour: ‘No law bans men from this occupation, but the weight of economic, social and psychological pressures is against their entry to it’. Not only does the feminization of housework remain ‘basic to the structure of modern society’, ‘Housework is work directly opposed to the possibility of human self-actualization’.45 All but the most affluent of the world’s women belong to a cleaning caste, either as cleaners of their own homes, of other people’s homes, of public institutions, or all three. This is a caste defined only by its labouring body, not its reason or affects. It is a caste confined to the sphere of the profane or ordinary, often toiling in public spaces at anti-social times of the day – late at night after other workers have gone home or long before they arrive, that is, precisely when their labouring bodies are least visible. And yet it is these unremarked, invisible but comprehensively materialized women who are the primary target of patriarchal culture’s emptiest fantasy. Here, women are translated by the hand of chance (rather than justice) from economic obscurity to the charmed sphere of the idolized woman, typically, in modernity, an idol of the screen and magazine. Ironically, these celebrated women who occupy a vaulted position at the opposite end of the caste spectrum are also absent-presences. They too are rarely glimpsed. But rather than being so profane as to be sub-visible, celebrated women are (especially in the digital age) so hyper-visible as to be uncanny. Their sighting, especially doing ordinary things like eating or walking a dog (never cleaning), occasions a kind of numinous awe, whose image is to be captured and reproduced in photographs circulated immediately, globally, for closer inspection. It was Ukeles’s task to make invisible women visible without making them uncanny, that is, without idolizing them. In the same year as Mierle Ukeles was performing her Touch Sanitation piece, Hannah Wilke’s critique of the idolized image of femininity offered a very different realization of female truth. Her 1977 poster Marxism and

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Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism presented herself in an unbuttoned shirt opened to reveal her naked shoulders, breasts, and stomach above a pair of provocatively low-slung jeans. Wilke’s looks could easily have been taken for those of a successful model, but her own images of herself refused immaculacy. She deliberately marred or defaced the glamour of her pose by dotting small lumps of chewing gum over her face and torso like small growths or spots. In fact, they were neither. Wilke had modelled bits of chewing gum into vulvic shapes that she called ‘wounds’ and ‘cunts’. The poster formed part of her S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974–1982) which consisted of about 50 photographic self-portraits in which Wilke satirized the poses of ‘soft’ pornography and fashion models. She had idolized or, to use her own term, ‘starified’ herself into a patriarchal image but the gum revealed the truth about the damaged, disposable women behind the image of perfect women: ‘I chose gum because it’s the perfect metaphor for the American woman – chew her up, get what you want out of her, throw her out and pop in a new piece’.46 Wilke was not uncritical of the women’s liberation movement and nor did her work always meet with the unqualified admiration of feminist art critics of her day, some of whom, like Lucy Lippard, regarded her art as a narcissistic sexual exploitation of her own body in which her attempted self-objectification reinforced the sexualization of the female image that it claimed to subvert.47 But Wilke’s repeated, even obsessive, self-imaging may be better understood as a compulsion shared by many feminist artists preoccupied with the problem of women’s ideological preoccupation by their own idol. She was, I think, arguing that women’s objectification was so total as to make it impossible to tell where female self-objectification begins and that of others’ ends. In her images, women cannot see themselves through their own eyes, however hard they try. If Wilke was a narcissist, it was because (as Wollstonecraft had argued 200 years earlier) patriarchy had made her one. She was unable to see herself other than in patriarchy’s cultural mirror, reflected back at herself in no more than a series of images, one for each stage of her life. At the end of her life, undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, she again self-iconized in her Intra-Venus series of photographic self-portraits (1992–1993). Bald and swollen, she had been divested of her former sexual persona – Venus – and by February 1992 she had assumed the posture and image of Mary as a Jewish mater dolorosa. Not long after, death took over her role as an idoloclast, destroying her perfect image for her. Joan Semmel’s Sex Paintings series of the 1970s did not ironize the exhausting superlatives of the idolized/traumatized female body as Wilke had done. She refused them altogether. This series, in which her body usually appeared cropped and faceless, was painted in New York soon after she joined the feminist movement. The paintings were renditions of photographic self-portraits where a combination of mirrors and lenses confused the viewers’ perception of the image and ensured that they saw only what she saw, looking down or at her own body from no one’s point of view

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but her own. She took cultural possession of her body as that of a subject whose interiority was no longer alienated by its reification as pure exteriority. Her bid for unmediated perception was by the reproduction of herself into images of no more and no less than her own pale, solid, ordinarily inhabited and yet defamiliarized flesh. Although, like any feminist idoloclast, she denied that her images of herself were identical to herself, Semmel’s self-directed gaze renderd her body inexhaustible and only partially present to reductive view. As such, her paintings are both feminist and Jewish, echoing the traditional Jewish aesthetic of incompletion halakhically codified in the sixteenth century by Rabbi Joseph Caro where images of faces, the very site and moment on and in which the image of God is made manifest, must be partial, defaced or broken. Images of people may traditionally be given, say, only one eye or a broken nose if they are to be a halakhically legitimate representation. The Hebrew Bible does not prohibit the making of statues or images for cultic purposes,48 and it does not forbid the making of images as such. But it is the incompletion of images that is both a messianic sign of human freedom from the totalizing gaze and, at the same time, a sign of brokenness or fragmentation in captivity.49 For Semmel, an unfinished woman was a free woman, but she was not a whole woman until she was liberated from patriarchy. In the early 1990s, Semmel’s work took the figuration of the female in a new idoloclastic direction. She began to paint images of women over some of the unsold canvases left over from her Second Erotic Series – many of them of older women, and some of them, as in Flash (1992) of herself. These paintings explored how time, like death, is an idoloclast, by layering one female image over another, until their bodies remembered the finitude, rather than the spectrality, of their presence. In a later series, which included SoHo Display (1996), Hot Lips (1997), Stacked (1998), and Sisters (1998), her criticism of idols was more explicit. These were (prescient) paintings of a world that living women had to share with dead mannequins. They illustrated how women’s bodies are used to sell everything, including themselves. Constructed, crated up, shipped off, and displayed, Semmel, not dissimilarly to Friedan, saw women’s oppression as their fixed positioning in a life that is little more than patriarchy’s shop window. Now, towards the end of her life, she paints her own body’s finitude, as in Untitled (2014), which is something of a study of translucence over opacity. Here, her body, old, never idolized, inalienably her own, has become its own icon. Disappearing behind a gauzy sheet, a disk or halo of white light behind her head, her body is becoming translucent to her own truth. Time is turning her flesh back to energy, to pure light.50 Since 1976, Laurie Simmons has been questioning how patriarchy brings dead plastic women to life and kills off the living ones of flesh, making it ever more difficult to tell them apart. She has been making, even to the point of living in, dream-like dolls’ houses and photographing the ‘lives’ of life-sized uncannily realistic dolls. Very Jewishly, she has been actively breaking the

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Second Commandment in order to insist on the urgency of contemporary culture’s observing it.51 In Simmons’ first photographs of the mid 1970s, she posed small housewife-dolls in tiny rooms. Over time, though, the images expanded in size to fill her own domestic space, just as they had been doing in her own consciousness and in her socio-cultural space and its collective consciousness. Dolls had made themselves silently at home inside her. In what had once been her mind and was now their space, dolls could, as cognitive colonialists, freely roam. By the late 1980s, her Walking Objects series had rendered an image of the feminine little more than a pair of legs topped by a large roof. For The Love Doll series (2009–2011), Simmons photographed a fabricated woman, and later a female companion for her, whose sexuality was life-like, rather than alive, staged, rather than acting. This series offered one of the earliest feminist critiques of the new, more sophisticated, generation of latex sex dolls. Day One [new in box], surely a referential nod to the creation of a woman for Adam in Genesis 2, protests the commodification of the female as a custom-made male/mail-order purchase, a dumb dummy of a woman that arrives from the factory of the feminine by next-day delivery. Simmons’ recent How We See exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York in 2015 demonstrates that the Jewish, Christian, and secular critique of women’s idolization spans the entire women’s liberation movement from Wollstonecraft in ‘wave zero’ to the fourth, digital, feminist wave. The identically vacant gaze of Simmons’ six photographic models suggests that women blind themselves in order to be seen. (Thus also argued Elisabeth Lenk: inducted into narcissism, a woman is turned by her beauty into an unreal object who is loved, but can love only her reflection; who is seen but cannot see beyond herself.)52 Only gradually does the viewer realize that the models’ eyes are closed but are made-up to look open. Unseeing eyes have been painted onto the models’ eyelids, recalling the slow-blinking image of the contemporary human Doll Girls, who, with their thousands of followers and imitators, comprise a largely female internet subculture devoted to the substitution of themselves for the living image of a doll.53 Bearing ever closer physical resemblances to a variety of cartoon characters, Disney princesses and Barbie dolls, these young women have combined the traditional religious imitation of a divine object of devotion with that of popular secular gynolatry. Taking both to their extreme, Doll Girls worship girl dolls by imitating them to the point of becoming them, letting their idol lead their life in their stead. Whether the dolls operate on social media sites or in person, it makes no difference which. As one critic pointed out, the ‘uneasy feeling’ Simmons’ photographs of these living photographs elicit ‘might be familiar to those who spend time on social media. It’s the stone in the stomach that comes with realizing you’ve checked your Instagram feed six times in 30 minutes, or knowing more about a Tumblr celebrity’s life than a real world acquaintance’.54 All of Simmons’ dolls, in their different ways, remind their

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viewers that human being and becoming may be only as good as its objects of worship. They make an urgent petition for a new heart of flesh (Ezek. 36:26).

Idoloclasm and the queerness of the Jewish self The passage of Barbie from a false image or idol of femininity derided by feminists to a celebrated queer icon is a nice illustration of the third wave complication of second wave idoloclasm. Barbie was born, in a sense, Jewish. She was created in 1959 by Ruth Mosko Handler, the daughter of Polish-Jewish immigrants, for her daughter. Handler gave Barbie the long legs, ice-blue eyes, tiny waist, blond hair and snub nose that she and most other women of Polish-Jewish origin did not have and some of them might have preferred. But Barbie’s figuration in precisely the image of a white racial ideal that Nazi Germany had promoted only 20 years earlier, and in precisely the image of a femininity assembled from an extensive and luxurious wardrobe, made the doll a symbol of several poor role models for girls at once. She stood, or rather posed, for every racial, sexual, and economic stereotype to which the men and women who would not buy her for their children objected. When Barbie was a 30-year-old plastic 20-year-old, the BLO (Barbie Liberation Organization) was formed not so much to destroy the dolls as to destroy their image. Engaging in a kind of toy-shop terrorism that, again, used wit rather than violence, the BLO took advantage of the 1989 Christmas rush and switched the voice-boxes of 300 Barbie and GI Joe dolls, replacing their anodyne programmed comments with bleakly truthful utterances such as ‘Dead men tell no lies’. Mattel toys, which manufactures Barbie, were probably unfazed by these exploits. Nonetheless, since then, it has ensured that the image of Barbie, and her wardrobe, has moved with the times. Even if her form remains as impossible as it ever was, Barbie is no longer uneducated – she can be a doctor or a vet if she wants to be; she has black and mixed-race friends.55 However, Erica Rand, a Jewish femme dyke, acknowledging the influence of her family’s commitment to social justice and unapologetic Jewishness,56 argued in her 1995 book Barbie’s Queer Accessories that feminists’ ritual destruction of Barbie dolls was an interpretive mistake. Barbie does not necessarily ‘steal our daughters’. Whatever her manufacturer’s intentions, the meaning of Barbie, like any feminine cultural artefact, is contextually multiple and dependent on its ownership.57 In other words, by the end of the twentieth century, gender-activists regarded even stereotypical images of women not as objects murdered by their patriarchal imagination but as existing in a protean, complex, living relation to culture. The refractive nature of an image means that it is constantly reacting to its context. An identity is not a single thing, but an active composite. It is what the Jewish queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in

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her bid for freedom from the violence of a policed, single, gender signification, described in 1993 as an ‘open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constitutive elements of anyone’s gender aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’.58 Again, Jews could subvert gender norms as part of a lived tradition whose culture’s humanistic values they could confess without accepting the exclusive, centralizing singularity and unity of its monotheistic scheme. Without suggesting that all queer theory is a ‘Jewish’ theory, there is little doubt that its radical subversion of images was resonant to Jews negotiating gender oppression within and outside the Jewish community. Judith Butler’s 1990 landmark study, Gender Trouble, the book that would become the signature text of third wave feminism, was, she acknowledged, psychologically shaped by her Jewish upbringing. Being Jewish had not only provided her with religious education classes that, as an adolescent, she had found intellectually stimulating, but also a labile sense of self. The women in Butler’s family, she related in an interview, were no strangers to reinvention: ‘I grew up with a generation of American Jews that understood assimilation meant conforming to certain gender norms that were presented in the Hollywood movies. So my grandmother slowly but surely became Helen Hayes. And my mother slowly but surely became kind of Joan Crawford’.59 Butler’s work would prove foundational for Jewish theorists who situated their understanding of the cultural and material production of gender in queer and other readings of the rabbinic anthropology.60 Butler, would, nonetheless, be the first to deny that her call for the confusion of the cognitive categories that bind gender identity together into fixed, binary forms was a ‘Jewish’ response to her experience of mid-twentieth century Jewish alienation. Her task was a larger one. In permitting the gendered body no ‘metaphysic of substance’, Butler overcame the objectification of a woman as a reifed, fixed thing which she might succeed in being. Yet in doing so, she also effectively closed-down second wave cultural feminism’s quest for a natural, authentic, pre-discursive female subject (including any Jewish feminist’s attempt to retrieve the metahistorical connection of her own Jewish self to that of her foremothers). By the third wave, the liberated self was not so much a self as ‘an open assemblage that permits of multiple convergences and divergences without obedience to a normative telos of definitional closure’.61 Gender Trouble and her 2004 study Undoing Gender,62 criticized the violence done by gender norms to vulnerable people who ‘fail’ to, or do not wish to, conform to them. For those whose gender was neither, nor, but in between, Butler’s idoloclasm was undoubtedly liberative, though it did not so much break down the bolted doors of gender as point out that they were already open. Those feminists who agreed with her could no longer regard themselves as in captivity to femininity as the abjected side of the compulsory gendered either/or. No woman whose life has been made unliveable by the gender

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binary need any longer live in captivity to a ‘false’ self if there is no absolute taxonomic reason why she should not choose another one; why she cannot live ecstatically, that is, sexually, emotionally, and politically ‘beside herself’. Gender is autonomous insofar as it is not a given; its hard-won rights are over a passionate body, provisional, self-diremptive, transported, whose gender and sexuality is ‘done’ or performed so can also be undone. This is a social body not the true or false casing of a pure interiority. Under this theorization, a woman’s body does not, and never did, constitute a perfect, extra-ideological integrity that, retrieved, is once more her own.63 For Butler, the ultimate figure of the indeterminacy and performativity of gender was the Drag Queen, whose repeated mimicry or parody ‘reveals the original to be nothing other than the idea of the natural and the original’.64 Although she later modified her earlier position on the Drag Queen as a paradigm of gender transgression,65 many feminists (bell hooks, Marilyn Frye, Janice Raymond, and others) regarded the exaggerations of drag as a pantomime of the feminine that ridicules women as no more than the sum of their fetishized accessories. But whether or not Butler is sufficiently critical of drag artists, she sought to liberate women from more than their costumes. Her account of theatrical agency was not the superficial assertion that different clothes will make a different woman. Gender, for her, is not clothing, but a compulsory assignment ‘never quite carried out according to expectations’.66 Butler is, then, a feminist critic whose existential neither/nor so comprehensively liberates female becoming from female being that she may be said to have liberated women from women’s liberation. What is of particular Jewish significance in Butler’s intervention in the feminist idolocastic project is that it gave a theoretical opening to Jews of all sexual orientations who wanted to talk about Jewishness as itself a gendertroubling signifier of difference.67 Towards the end of the twentieth century, Jewish scholars and activists, usually lesbian and gay, but not exclusively so, took the feminist critical search for a usable self in a new direction and began to read Jewish history, culture, and scripture against its grain, making connections between Jewishness and queerness that would complicate any binary account of gender, including that of second wave Jewish feminism. The first premise of second wave feminism was, after Beauvoir, that the female is the dualized Other of and to the male. By Jewish feminism’s third wave it was becoming increasingly apparent that women were not alone in having been feminized: falsely, unjustly, imagined. Jewish men’s studies and queer studies presented a history of European anti-Judaism and antisemitism that had both defamed and destabilized Jewish masculinity. Anti-Judaism had hyper-feminized the male Jew as a passive victim of its persecutory power, casting the circumcised, ‘wounded’, Jewish man as a type of menstruant woman. Yet from around the second half of the fifteenth century it had also cast him as a diabolical beast – a ‘Jew-devil’ – at war with the forces of salvation and, sexually predatory, a risk to the moral safety of gentile women. As a figure of indeterminate and shifting gender, the Jew

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had been lethally dehumanized, for where a human being is either male or female, the Jew is not human because s/he is neither.68 Not only had anti-Judaism queered male Jews, queer Jews had recovered a non-binary taxonomy of sexualities in their own tradition, in the Mishnah, Talmud, classical midrash, and halakhic codes. To the surprise of non-specialists, since late antiquity, the tradition had been legislating on a multi-sexual basis. Its various classifications included the tumtum, a person with ambiguously or indeterminately male or female genitalia; androgynos, a person with both male and female sexual characteristics; ay’lonit, a person who is identified as ‘female’ at birth but develops ‘male’ characteristics at puberty and is infertile, and saris, a person who is identified as male at birth but develops female characteristics at puberty and may lack a penis by ‘nature’ (saris hamah), or through human intervention (saris adam).69 It was not that the rabbis, whose account of gender was a broadly complementary one, intended such classifications to be liberative or that they valued the complexities of sexual difference as such. Rather, Judaism’s acknowledgement of a spectrum of sexualities enabled queer theorists like Daniel Boyarin to celebrate the Jewish ‘sissy’ in Unheroic Conduct and other works through a methodological synthesis of Orthodox and Jewish feminist sensibilities. Even if Orthodox Judaism was unambiguous in its condemnation of male homosexual intercourse, Boyarin, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz and others proposed that the male Jew was multiply queered, whether in his homoerotic, covenantal ‘marriage’ to the male God of Israel;70 in the relation of male and female elements in the kabbalistic model of God, or in the phallocentric symbolism through which (exclusively male) mystics sought and described their visionary experience. By now, the antisemitic feminization of the Jew; popular Jewish culture’s celebration of a clever, decidedly non-macho Jewish masculinity, and homoerotic elements in the rabbinic and mystical literature, intersected with other ambiguities and instabilities in the Jewish construction of masculinity. Together, these far from insoluble gender constructions made older feminist criticism of the fixed and single norms of an oppressive gender ideology seem less plausible. After Sedgwick and Butler, criticism of idols of the feminine began to seem redundant. It was not any longer that there should be no idols of the feminine, now there are no idols. Or maybe that should be: everything is an idol, and that is too is a liberation from idols. Queer theory was and is a powerful riposte to the dehumanization of women, men, and everyone else, on account of their gender. For, as Jay Michaelson pointed out in 2005, ‘the opposite of queer is not straight; the opposite of queer is normal. In this sense, of course, many, many people are queer, which is precisely the point; queer sexuality is everyone’s sexuality. . . . The claim of queer theory is not that straight men are all secretly homosexual; it is that men, women, and everyone else do not fit neatly into categories such as gay and straight, or, to the extent they do, they do so as a matter of anxious choice. Queerness is connected to soul, not genitals’.71

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Jewish men, as ‘the queers of the religious world’ and as the first idoloclasts of the Abrahamic order (Michaelson asked at the end of his piece, ‘What old/new idols will we shatter tomorrow?’), had historicized and denaturalized Jewish masculinity not just in theory, but in their own persons. And in doing so, they had historicized and denaturalized the complementary ideological construction of Jewish femininity. In one sense this was radically liberative – it completed the work of Jewish women’s liberationists and extended its benefits to everyone else. But in another sense, it was at risk of undoing about 30 years of Jewish feminism that had tried to stop women ‘disappearing’ behind their image. Jewish queer theory may, in effect, have once more displaced the female Jewish subject, returning her back to the question with which her feminism began. (As Ann Pellegrini, herself a queer theorist, has asked, if all male Jews are female, then what are women; how are they Jews?)72 But perhaps that is the point, and problem, of idoloclasm.

Notes 1 Vivian Gornick, ‘Woman as Outsider’, in Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, eds., Women in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness, Ontario, Mentor Books, 1971, pp. 70–78. See also idem, ‘Twice an Outsider: On Being Jewish and a Woman’, Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture & Society, 4 (March/April, 1989), 29–31 and 123–125. 2 See Joyce Antler, The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America, New York, The Free Press, 1997, p. xii; idem, Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices from the Women’s Liberation Movement, New York, New York University Press, 2018. 3 See Judith Butler, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, New York, Columbia University Press, 2013 and ‘Response’ to a symposium on Parting Ways, Political Theology, 16 (2015), 392–399, passim. 4 The Bund was a late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Jewish socialist mass movement that mobilized Jews in self-defence and revolutionary activism in Russia and Poland. Although it travelled as an immigrant politics to earlytwentieth-century England and America, the Holocaust and the Soviet Union brought the eastern European history of the Bund to an end. 5 Dana Densmore, ‘Feminism and the Transformation of Judaism: Women and the Jewish Renewal Movement in Philadelphia 1975–1986’, PhD thesis, University of Wales Trinity St David, 2017. 6 David Biale, Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2011, pp. 2–4. 7 Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1975. 8 Susan Brownmiller, Femininity, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1984, pp. 16–17. 9 Femininity, pp. 14, 19. 10 Statement, Jewish Women’s Archive, https://jwa.org/feminism/brownmillersusan, accessed 19.6.16. 11 Antler, The Journey Home, p. 259; Betty Friedan, ‘Women and Jews: The Quest for Selfhood’, Congress Monthly, February/March, 1985, p. 7. 12 Antler, The Journey Home, pp. 266–267. 13 Edith Stein and Regina Jonas: Religious Visionaries in the Time of the Death Camps, Durham: Acumen Press, 2013, pp. 4–5. Silverman’s troubled sleep was not untypical of children born in the post-Holocaust era.

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14 Edith Stein and Regina Jonas, p. 22, citing Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 179 (emphasis Silverman’s). 15 Cosmetic attempts (usually American) to minimize the impression of ethnic otherness were seldom successful. The comic singer and actress Fanny Brice, for example, straightened her nose in 1923. This was a mis-judgement: the operation may have left her more conventionally attractive but it cost her the affection of audiences who had appreciated her formerly distinctive looks. She had ‘cut off her nose to spite her race’ as Dorothy Parker acidly remarked at the time. (Antler, The Journey Home, p. 149.) In a later period, after she had, ironically, played the role of Fanny Brice in Funny Girl (1968), Barbra Streisand’s Jewish nose became ‘iconic’ in an entertainment culture that claimed to take pride in its ethnic diversity. 16 Hannah Arendt, ‘The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition’, Jewish Social Studies, 6 (1944), 99–122. 17 New York: Dell, 1974; Antler, The Journey Home, pp. 259–267. 18 Betty Friedan’s Jewish Identity, https://jwa.org/weremember/friedan-betty/antler, accessed 17.3.18. 19 ‘Notes Towards Finding the Right Question’ [1979], in Susannah Heschel, ed., On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader, New York, Schocken Books, 1983, pp. 133–138, 120–151. 20 Hasia Diner, Shira Kohn, and Rachel Kranson, ‘Introduction’, in idem, eds., A Jewish Feminine Mystique?: Jewish Women in Postwar America, New Brunswick and London, Rutgers University Press, 2010, pp. 1–4; Raymond Mohl, ‘“Some of Us Were There Before Betty”: Jewish Women and Political Activism in Postwar Miami’, in ibid., pp. 13–31. 21 Friedan’s The Second Stage, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1998 [1981], retracted some of her earlier criticism of the nuclear family. 22 New York, Random House, 1975. 23 Rosler’s video, semiotics of the Kitchen can be viewed on www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Vm5vZaE8Ysc . 24 Antler, The Journey Home, p. 266. 25 See Joyce Antler, You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother, New York, Oxford University Press, 2007. 26 See further Deborah Lipstadt, ‘Feminism and American Judaism: Looking Back at the Turn of the Century’, in Pamela Nadell and Jonathan Sarna, eds., Women and American Judaism, Hanover, Brandeis University Press, 2001, pp. 291–308. 27 Ezrat Nashim was a New York Jewish women’s study group whose name referred to Orthodox synagogues’ separate gallery for women. In 1972, Ezrat Nashim presented its research on Jewish religious discrimination against women to the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly in a document entitled ‘Jewish Women Call for Change’. 28 Lucy S. Dawidowicz, ‘Does Judaism Need Feminism?’, Midstream, April 1986, pp. 39–40. 29 Feminist anti-Judaism did not go unchallenged. Among others, Rosemary Ruether, Carol Christ, Judith Plaskow, Annette Daum, and Susannah Heschel wrote sharply critical articles on the subject. See e.g. Judith Plaskow, ‘Blaming Jews for Inventing Patriarchy’, Lilith, 7 (1980), 11–12 and Annette Daum, ‘Blaming Jews for the Death of the Goddess’, Lilith, 7 (1980), 12–13; Judith Plaskow, ‘Anti-Judaism in Feminist Christian Interpretation’, in Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, ed., Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Introduction, New York: Crossroad, 1993, pp. 116–129, reprinted as part of a ‘Special Section on Christian Feminist Anti-Judaism’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 7 (1991), 95–133; Katharina von Kellenbach, Anti-Judaism in Feminist Religious Writings, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994.

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30 ‘Israeli Women: Three Myths’, in Susannah Heschel, ed., On Being a Jewish Feminist, p. 65. 31 See further, Lesley Hazleton’s Israeli Women: The Reality Behind the Myths, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1977, an excerpt of which is reprinted as, ‘Israeli Women: Three Myths’, in Susannah Heschel, ed., On Being a Jewish Feminist, 65–87; Alice Shalvi’s account of sexual politics in Israel between the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s in ‘The Geopolitics of Jewish Feminism’, in T.M. Rudavsky, ed., Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition, New York and London, New York University Press, 1995, pp. 231–242, esp. p. 235. 32 Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997, p. 2. 33 Her Mothers, New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1975; See also, e.g., Anita Diamant’s 1997 The Red Tent, a best-selling initiation of Jewish women into a dramatically matrifocal version of Judaism, bringing the figure of Dinah to life from her sparse outline in the Hebrew Bible (London, Pan, 2002 [1997]). 34 Leah Novick, On the Wings of the Shekhinah: Rediscovering Judaism’s Divine Feminine, Wheaton, Quest Books, 2008; Lynn Gottlieb, She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of a Renewed Judaism, San Francisco, Harper San Francisco, 1995. Gottlieb, like Marcia Falk, invokes the divine using a whole catalogue of divine names and metaphors to prevent any of them hardening into an idol. See also, Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism From a Feminist Perspective, New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990, pp. 141–142; Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust, London and New York, Routledge, 2003, pp. 60, 111, 154. 35 More recent literary studies of female Jewish subjectivity include Eve Harris’ The Marrying of Chani Kaufman, Dingwall, Scotland, Sandstone Press, 2013, and Naomi Alderman’s Disobedience, London, Viking, 2006. 36 Jean Axelrad Cahan, ‘The Lonely Woman of Faith Under Late Capitalism; or, Jewish Feminism in Marxist Perspective’, in Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, ed., Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2004, p. 114. 37 This precis of Jewish sacral history as built from a sequence of breakages derives in large part from Jeffrey Salkin’s, The Gods Are Broken: The Hidden Legacy of Abraham, Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society, 2013, pp. viii–ix. 38 Kenneth Seeskin, No Other Gods: The Modern Struggle Against Idolatry, West Orange, Behrman House, 1995, p. 20. See also Sanhedrin 93a. Sources on idoloclasm as the originary principle of Judaism are too numerous to list here. However, see e.g. Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, 3.27–28 and Mishneh Torah, Book 1, ch. 1 Laws Concerning Idolatry and the Ordinance of the Heathen; Jeffrey Salkin, The Gods Are Broken; Lional Kochan, Beyond the Graven Image: A Jewish View, Basingstoke, Hampshire and London, Macmillan, 1997. 39 BT Megillah, 25b. 40 BT Avodah Zarah 20a on Deuteronomy 7: 4–5. 41 The phenomenon of Jewish women’s critical engagement with culture through comedy has recently been explored in the television series The Marvelous Mrs Meisel (2017), created by Amy Sherman-Palladino and inspired by twentiethcentury Jewish women comedians such as Joan Rivers and Totie Fields (Sophie Feldman). 42 Joyce Antler, ed., ‘Introduction’, Talking Back: Images of Jewish Women in American Popular Culture, Hanover and London, Brandeis University Press, 1998, p. 3. 43 See Jessica Weisberg, ‘The Hardworking Artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles Is Here to Clean Up Your Mess’, Tablet Magazine, July 22, 2013, www.tabletmag.com/

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jewish-arts-and-culture/138254/mierle-laderman-ukeles, accessed 20.12.15. Also available in Kathy Deepwell, ed., Feminist Art Manifestos: An Anthology, London, KT Press, 2014, ebook, no page numbers. Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969, www.arnolfini. org.uk/blog/manifesto-for-maintenance-art-1969, accessed 14.3.18. The Sociology of Housework, London, Martin Robertson,1974, p. 29; idem, Housewife, p. 222. Elizabeth Manchester, notes on the poster Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism, part of Wilke’s S.O.S. Starification Object Series (1974–1982), September 2008, www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/wilke-marxism-and-art-bewareof-fascist-feminism-p79357, accessed 4.3.18. See Amelia Jones, ‘Intra-Venus and Hannah Wilke’s Feminist Narcissism’, in Intra Venus, exhibition catalogue, New York, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, 1995, pp. 4–13; Julia Skelly, ‘Mas(k)ectomies: Losing a Breast (and Hair) in Hannah Wilke’s Body Art’, Third Space: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Culture, 7 (2007), http://journals.sfu.ca/thirdspace/index.php/journal/article/view/ skelly/48, accessed 19.3.18. E.g. 1 Kgs. 6: 29–32, 8: 6–66; 2 Chr. 3: 7–14. Caro ruled that two-dimensional paintings of human figures were permissible as long as they complied with a counter-idolatrous aesthetic of distortion such as was commonly found in illuminated medieval Ashkenazi manuscripts that used birds’ heads, blank faces, veils, helmets, crowns, or rear views to portray the human face. The aesthetic of incompletion reminded the Jewish people that their lives are incomplete until Jerusalem is eschatologically rebuilt. See further Melissa Raphael, ‘Judaism and Visual Art’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Religion, New York, Oxford University Press, 2018, published online, April 2016, http://religion.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/ acrefore-9780199340378-e-98. See Maryse Holder, ‘Another Cuntree: At Last, A Female Art Movement’, Off Our Backs, 3 (1973), 11–17; Richard Meyer, ‘“Not Me”: Joan Semmel’s Body of Painting’, www.joansemmel.com/ftp.joansemmel.com/Essays.html, accessed 22.3.18; Eleanor Heartney, ‘Through the Object’s Eye’, in Through the Object’s Eye: Paintings by Joan Semmel, unpaginated exhibition catalogue, Albany, University Art Gallery, 1992. Laurie Simmons, The Love Doll, ed. Lynne Tillman and intro. Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Tokyo, Salon 94/Tomio Koyama Gallery, 2012. Elisabeth Lenk, ‘The Self-Reflecting Woman’, pp. 56–57. A historical context for this phenomenon may be found in Kamil Kopania, ed., ‘Dolls, Puppets, Sculptures and Living Images from the Middle Ages to the End of the Eighteenth Century’, The Aleksander Zelwerowicz National Academy of Dramatic Art in Warsaw with The Department of Puppetry Art in Białystok, Białystok 2017; PDF available from Wikimedia Commons. Deidre Hering, ‘The Lifeless Eyes of Laurie Simmon’s Human Dolls’, July 22, 2015, https://hyperallergic.com/224074/the-lifeless-eyes-of-laurie-simmonss-humandolls/, accessed 5.4.18. Erica Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories, Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1995, pp. 5, 118 and passim. Barbie’s Queer Accessories, p. ix. The literary image of Yentl, a girl with the body of a woman and the mind and soul of a man, who decided to dress up in a man’s suit so that she could study in an all-male Jewish seminary, is another such case in point. Conceived and written by a man, Isaac Bashevis Singer, she was iconized when brought to the screen and played by Barbra Streisand in 1993. Singer disliked the film intensely and thought Streisand’s fame and self-idea had ousted Yentl’s. Later, Deborah Kass’s

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Double Red Yentl Split (My Elvis) (1993), itself mimetic of Warhol’s studies of iconicity, made Yentl something of a transgender Jewish icon. For a discussion of Kass’ work, see Matthew Baigell, Jewish Art in America: An Introduction, Lanham, Rowman and Littlefield, 2007, p. 224. Tendencies, Durham, Duke University Press, 1993, p. 8. Eugene Wolters, ‘Judith Butler Discussing Jewish Upbringing’s Influence on “Gender Trouble”’, www.critical-theory.com/judith-butler-documentary/, accessed 26.6.15. Miriam Peskowitz’s Spinning Fantasies: Rabbis, Gender, and History, Oakland, University of California Press, 1997, uses Marxist theorizations of ideology to examine rabbinic accounts of gender as cultural and material productions rather than biological givens. Gender Trouble, pp. 8, 15, 22. New York and Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2004. Undoing Gender, p. 20. Gender Trouble, p. 31. CK. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, Abingdon, Oxon and New York, Routledge, 1993, esp. 125–128. Feminists critical of some of the claims of transgenderism accept that many women and men are disinclined or unable to conform to stereotypically masculine and feminine roles and attributes, but do not consider gender purely elective. Experience is, for better as well as worse, gendered in culturally, psychologically, and physically formative ways that are not easily dismissed. (See Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism, Abingdon, Oxon and New York, Routledge, 2014.) Bodies That Matter, p. 231. Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, eds., Queer Theory and The Jewish Question, New York, Columbia University Press, 2003. Matthew Biberman, Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature: From the Satanic to the Effeminate, Abingdon, Oxford, and New York, Routledge, 2016 [2004]. See further R. Elliot Kukla, ‘A Created Being of Its Own: Toward a Jewish Liberation Theology for Men, Women and Everyone Else’, http://transtorah.org/ PDFs/How_I_Met_the_Tumtum.pdf, accessed 15.3.18. A growing literature on and by gender non-conforming Jews includes Naomi Zeveloff et al., eds., Transgender and Jewish, New York, The Forward Association, 2014. Eilberg-Schwartz, God’s Phallus. ‘Toward a Queer Jewish Theology: Thirteen Principles’, www.metatronics.net/ spirit/queertheo.htm, accessed 3.3.18. ‘Interarticulations: Gender, Race and the Jewish Woman Question’, in Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt, eds., Judaism Since Gender, London and New York, Routledge, 1997, p. 51.

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‘Whatever is contained must be released’ The ‘rescue’ of women and God by the Jewish multimedia artist Helène Aylon from the 1970s to the present is something of a visual summation of second wave feminist idoloclasm in general and that of Jewish feminist theology in particular. Aylon opened her career with The Breakings series, in which she poured linseed oil onto large panels. The oil dried into a skin that, when lifted, produced a sac which, when burst, sent oil seeping or gushing down the panels to make a new image, just as the amniotic sac bursts and spills water when the womb opens to release new life. Aylon’s visceral, orgasmic, wrinkled, and torn non-images of the female body were intended as counter-images to what Aylon called ‘the Playboy body’: the idolized image of the female in the dominant culture. Feminism was, for her, a rebirth of the female image from a demeaning tradition in which the breaking of all images is both a Jewish gesture and a natural process of change. From the 1980s, these amniotic sacs morphed into feminine ‘earth sacs’, domestic pillowcases that were filled with earth, stones, and seeds rescued from ecologically threatened sites, and, from the 1990s to 2017, Aylon has spent 20 years rescuing God from God’s patriarchal projection. The first part of the The G-D Project: Nine Houses Without Women, digitized in 2004, was The Liberation of G-D, a multiple installation in which the Pentateuch, in Hebrew and English, was placed on stands with translucent parchment glued onto the pages. Beneath the transparent pages, the glue had buckled the text, allowing women to ‘see through’ the distortions of their representation to the truth of their (dis)appearance from and in the text. In this and other parts of the project, Aylon used a neon pink highlighter pen, as a teacher might ‘correct’ an essay, to draw attention to where patriarchy had spoken (in error) over God. The pink defaced the text in order to show where women and God had been defaced, that is, absented and silenced by the text, as if ‘man’ had dominion over God as well as women. An idoloclastic pink slash tore through, or drew the feminist line, at the misogyny and cruelty that had been attributed to God. In passages where the female was absent, she represented it with the insertion of a vertical pink

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line. In recent times Orthodoxy has come to put a reverent dash between the ‘G’ and the ‘d’ when the word God is written in English. This ensures that if the text is discarded, God’s name will not be desecrated. Aylon, however, who defines herself as ‘post-Orthodox’, uses a pink dash between the letters ‘G’and the ‘d’ wherever the word ‘God’ appears. This is not to preserve the honour of the patriarchal God but to mark G-d’s radical openness and incompletion both as infinite and as having a gap where, as yet, a feminine face is missing. Aylon’s final piece for The G-D Project, Afterword: For the Children, includes The Air Commandments (2017). These are two metal outlines that turn the stone tablets of the commandments into air, into two doorways through which a woman can walk. As she enters the Torah, a reversal occurs: the spectre of the feminine becomes flesh, and the tradition’s patriarchy, spectral. As Aylon told Ann McCoy in an interview about the piece, ‘I made a sculptural six-foot metal image of the tablet icon. It resembles a drawing in space and there are no words engraved in stone. I call it The Air Commandments because just the sight of that – there’s something spiritual about the shape of the tablets, they need not be filled in. God is like air and air makes us breathe. We breathe it in, we breathe it out, and that’s enough. Again, the invisible is stronger than the visible words, especially the patriarchal words attributed to God’.1 Classically, relentlessly, Aylon has winnowed down the tradition until what seems to be the end and nothing is left is once more the beginning: ‘what is left out is the only thing that keeps me looking at the Bible. Just to keep searching for what is left out. Everything else that is in there is problematic because it represents a man-made patriarchy. I always said that the forefathers perhaps sought something spiritual but found themselves instead’.2 Now, finally, even Aylon’s pink highlights are made of a vanishing paint. Her marks onto the words of the Torah that God did not, could not, say, disappear as the patriarchal God falls silent. Aylon’s art is careful to abjure any hubristic power, including its own. Her wordless gestures have the proper humility of all that will be one day fade and be forgotten, while the Torah beneath the Torah will endure forever.

Women’s creation in God’s image, not ‘man’s’ To Jewish feminist commentators, the immediate biblical material on idoloclasm was unpromising. The prophetic polemical equation of idolatry and spiritlessness or death was problematic in a number of respects. The chief feminist criticism of the biblical prophets, most notably of Hosea, was that they likened the people’s defection from their one God to ‘whoring’ after false gods. Idolators were imaged as adulterous wives who had sexually betrayed and shamed their husbands. A pornographic depiction of female sexuality was more than analogous to Israel’s faithlessness and the gross public indignities of their divine punishment.3 (‘Now will I unconver her

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shame in the very sight of her lovers, and none shall save her from Me. . . . Thus will I punish her for the days of the Baalim, on which she brought them offerings; when decked with earrings and jewels, she would go after her lovers forgetting Me’.)4 Although the tradition praises meritorious women for their resistance to idols and censures those who capitulated to idols, there was too much ambiguity in its conception of the relationship between women and idols for it to have provided a theological template from which to cut a prophetic feminist theology. The rabbinic ascription of a susceptibility to light-mindedness to women owes too much to the prophetic idea of women as instances and images of Israel’s weakness for foreign gods. While the midrash explained away Rachel’s attachment to her family idols, the tradition could not and did not exonerate the women who wove magical hangings for Asherah (2 Kings 23: 7), baked cakes for the Queen of Heaven (possibly Asherah) (Jeremiah 7: 16–20 and 44: 17–19), and sat at the north gate of the first Temple, weeping in annual lamentation for the death of Tammuz (Ezekiel 8: 14). Needless to say, traditions last too long for consistency. In contrast to the biblical material that associates foreign (strange) women with foreign gods and compares idolatry to fornication with prostitutes, there is also a midrashic tradition that applauds women’s resistance to idolatry. According to the medieval midrash Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, the women of Israel would not surrender their gold jewellery to make the golden calf, though they had been glad to do so for the making of the Tabernacle, and had been rewarded thereafter with a holiday from work at each New Moon (Rosh Chodesh). The Yemenite midrash (Ki Tissa 32:2) added that this piety merited permission for women to enter the Land of Israel at a time when it was denied to men. It records that all Israelite women other than Miriam entered the land, even Moses’ 250-year-old mother, Yocheved.5 Or again, rabbinic literature tells the story of a widow, Miriam Bat Tanhum, who is glorified by God when, after the last and youngest of her seven sons, a three-year-old child, is beheaded by the Roman Emperor Hadrian for refusing to bow down to his idols, she throws herself from the roof.6 It is Genesis 1, rather than sundry narratives about women and idols, that underpins women’s bid for the integrity and sacrality of the female self as made in the image of the divine, not the masculine. Although the ineradicable image of God (tselem elohim) in the human has been variously construed by Jewish and Christian theologians as an original endowment of rational or moral goodness, or as a stamp of approval or of authenticity, the tselem can be as readily understood as a dimension of the human appearance. Here, the primordial truth of an image is that of one that is, truly, encountered as a presence or face, not a usable thing. After the creation of the human, male and female, in the image of a God of love and justice, it is, above all, in the face, its humanity open and exposed to the other in all the vulnerability of its finitude and need, not masked, that the divine is present in historical relationships. It is in the love and justice of those relationships

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that images become part of the transmissible knowledge of God. This is evident to the (admittedly androcentric and heteronormative) biblical mind where the image is transmitted through sexual love between a man and a woman from a father to his son. When Adam is 130, he begets a son ‘in his likeness’, after his image, just as God had created him (Gen. 5: 1; 5: 3). That image is so precious that God goes so far as to impose the death penalty for whoever harms or destroys it (Gen. 9: 6). As I have explored elsewhere,7 from rabbinic to modern Jewish theology – from Rabbi Ben Azzai who claimed that the creation of the human in the image of God is the klal gadol (great principle) of the Torah (JT Nedarim 9: 4), to Franz Rosenzweig, who approaches the face as ‘a vessel for receiving and expressing God’s truth’,8 and Emmanuel Levinas who affirms that ‘the dimension of the divine opens forth from the human face’,9 a theology of image has proscribed the ideological creation and superimposition of an alien identity or mask on a human face. With the Second Commandment having not so much proscribed images of the human as having reminded their makers that they must be produced and reproduced in ways that avoid or criticize idolatry, it is clear that for all Jews, not just feminist Jews, images of persons must be stabilized in such a way that their idea can neither add to nor subtract from their reality. The biblical Second Commandment, crucially prefaced by the First Commandment which proscribes the substitution of God by any other gods, protects the creation of the human in the divine image. As no one face in creation has ever been the same as another, the image of God in the face signals the absolute non-fungible value of its historical particularity. One person cannot be substituted for any other for she or he is divinely created and loved to be this woman or man, who is her or him and no other. God’s presence as the coming of the Sabbath Bride as dusk falls on every Friday evening is another theological instantiation of the counter-idolatrous appearance of an image of God in whose refractive light no human face can be reduced to the sum of its appearance as another thing in the world. For in the peace the Sabbath brings in her train is a cessation of the making and the completion of all things. In her light, the limits of human creativity are cosmically established. Her presence sets temporal and spatial limits on the power of any cultural fabrications. In the lighting of the sabbath candles, her face is invited into the world and all other energies for its construction are extinguished. Of the 39 prohibited categories of work (melachot) – building, demolishing, smoothing, marking, and so forth – it is the prohibition of the finishing touch that is, I think, most significant to our discussion. Makeh pabatish, originally and literally that final hammer blow that completed the biblical portable desert tabernacle, imagines a culture that refrains from the making and inflation of idols. More than the proscription of, say, modelling with clay on Shabbat, it is in the proscription of the finishing touch that all patriarchal tools are laid down. With an idoloclastic, destructive, not constructive, hammer blow, all images of the

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human are left impermanent, unfinished, incomplete, and the divinely created image is reunited with itself in an eternal Shabbat on earth. An objectified image of a person will always, from Shabbat to Shabbat, overcome its estrangement from its subject and from other subjects because that person is made in the image of a forgotten, hidden, or as yet unknown God: the I AM. To be made in the image of a God called by this non-substantive name, mysterious in the very no-thingness of its being and becoming, is to be a person whose image cannot, finally, be baked or hardened into an idol. Masculinity cannot be worshipped in place of the God who will be who God wills God-self and all selves to be.10 This is a God who names God-self in purely existential terms: I AM or I will be who I will be or I am who I am (Exodus 3: 12). As made in the image of this God, the being and becoming of women is situated in its co-presence to God’s: as God is I am/ You are, who I am/You are. I will be/you will be who I/You will be. If Jewish women, whose being and becoming is not separable from that of the whole community of Israel, are made in the image of this God and this God’s divine activity in the world, then their true image is inalienable, even a figure of the not-yet that is the messianic. It is significant that God self-names in the context of the Exodus narrative, of the going out from slavery into freedom. For it is the unbounded being of the Jewish God that makes God, God and the human, human: the dynamic promise or futurity of existence itself. This is the God who, in Buber’s translation of Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, is called and calls us to be called, ‘I will be there as I will be there’, ‘that is to say, in whatever appearance I will be there’.11 This is a God known in and through a counter-idolatrous sense of the necessarily unstable, permeable, dispersive boundaries of the human, natural, and the divine.12 Divine and human being and becoming are a continuous process. A Jewish feminist idea of God/self is therefore ‘not the strategist of our particularities or our historical condition’ but rather the mystery and hope of our futurity.13 This is a God whose back alone we see because it is a God who is always going on before; named as the place, Ha Makom, of wherever we are sojourning, if marked by little more than the way-marker of a small pile of stones (Gen. 35: 11–12).

Making an exodus from idolatry In 1979, the Jewish novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick pointed out that the whole point of the Torah is to countermand the ways of the world. It must be set against the way the world ordinarily, patriarchally, is. That is what constitutes its sanctity. Ozick reminds Jewry that in ‘In giving the commandment against idolatry, Torah came face to face with a society in competition with the Creator’ and turned away from it.14 She therefore finds it a scandal of ‘mammoth’ and ‘terrifying’ proportions that the Torah’s own ethic, or at least its mediation, does not extend to criticism of the dehumanization of women as property, as non-juridical adults, exempted, excluded, debarred, demoted, demeaned.15 This gaping ethical omission and the incalculable

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cultural and spiritual losses it has, over the centuries, incurred, led Ozick to propose, in grief and righteous indignation, an Eleventh Commandment: ‘Thou shalt not lessen the humanity of women’. This was a commandment proposed not for the sake of women, but for the sake of the Torah itself. With this new commandment she was, in effect, charging the masculine order – mundane and cosmic – to refrain, in the name of its own humanistic ethicality, from tyrannizing over women and then congratulating itself for the leniencies of its tyranny;16 from turning women into another of its idols.17 Ozick’s feminist commandment is drawn directly from the biblical and rabbinic literature. The Talmudic tractate Avodah Zarah (‘Idolatry’) includes a criticism of the wider culture of damages in which idolatry developed.18 The rabbinic interpretation of the commandment to Jews not to follow ‘their’ practices (Leviticus 18: 4 and its rabbinic midrashic interpretation in Sifrah 13: 5) is not necessarily the offensively dismissive criticism of the non-Jew that it sounds. It is a rejection of the entire cultural habitus of idolators, not of the nations as such. That is, rabbinic discourse on idolatry is not only a narrow consideration of what objects or images may or may not adorn the place of worship, but a philosophical judgement on a given dispensation’s moral, spiritual, and epistemological error. Understandably, contemporary thought finds the concept of ‘error’ philosophically and politically unpalatable. But it is possible to read, from a contemporary perspective, what the rabbis understood about the Second Commandment’s prohibition of making images and worshipping them as warning that a culture that is accountable to a human image and idea of power rather than to God, is a tyrannical, dehumanizing one. God can and will protect God’s own face – and therefore all those made in God’s image – from the ‘death’ of that face or relation by its idolization or forced conformity to a human idea. The rabbis attributed the departure of the Shekhinah (a female figure of God’s indwelling presence) to the hiding of God’s face: the sin of idolatry. The Shekhinah departed while Israel was punished for the sin of making the golden calf.19 God turns his face from sin (Is. 59: 2). All categories of sin, not just immediate violations of the Second Commandment, are a privation of divine, and therefore human, presence and are comprehended in the sin of idolatry which is a doubled hiding of God: a human defacement of the image of God in the human that thereby voids or occludes God’s face/presence from the world. It is not that God’s presence is a jealous one that will not countenance an idolatrous world. Rather it is that a world governed by idols – the ideas of those pretending to the power and status of gods – is a dangerous, oppressive one from which Jews are commanded to depart, carrying the liberative vision of a better world with them. As Maimonides argued in the tenth century, long before Feuerbach, the most powerful idols are those that live in the head. Substitutive idols are made of words as well as stone and their reiteration or reproduction in

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consciousness is used to induce the collective forgetting of truth in the interests of their own power.20 Oppression is ideological before it is material. In 1910, the anarchist Emma Goldman, on this same Jewish liberative trajectory, said that before women could ‘become human in the truest sense’ – each woman would have to clear her mind of ‘every trace of centuries of submission and slavery’. So too, Goldman told women that their emancipation would begin ‘neither in the polls nor in the courts’, but with the liberation of women’s minds from ‘internal tyrants’.21 One of the most significant sources of a Jewish feminist theology of the world and God’s redemption from patriarchal alienation is therefore the foundational Jewish narrative of redemption from slavery as enacted annually at Pesach. Ezekiel likens Pharaoh to a great heavy crocodile basking in the reeds, croaking and snapping to all who pass by that the river Nile is his own and that he created it for himself.22 The midrash on Ezekiel regards Pharaoh as the very paradigm of an idolator because he is claiming to be the creator and master of the entire world. Again and again, Moses asks this Pharaoh, the king of all patriarchal self-idolizers, to let the Israelite people leave his realm. Egypt, here, is not so much a country in which slaves once laboured under cruel taskmasters, as a narrowed state of mind, one that is enslaved to the world’s generic Pharaohs, those who licence the few to alienate the material and psychic labour of the many to fuel their own egos and other hubristic projects. During Pesach’s celebration of liberation from slavery, Jews desist from consuming yeast for eight days. Yeast is a metaphorical criticism of the selfaggrandisement of Pharaohs whose empty illusions of power swell until they have displaced even God from their own scheme. God’s response to the vacuity or vanity of self-idolatry is to demonstrate in no uncertain terms that the only real power over nature and history is his own. At this point, even a patriarchal model of God has its uses. He parts the Dead Sea so that slaves can leave Egypt in freedom and equality and journey towards a land in which no man can claim, like Pharaoh, the crocodile in the reeds, that he created it or that it belongs to him alone. By 1975, that journey of emancipation had reached the Israeli city of Haifa where Esther Broner, Marcia Freedman, and Naomi Nimrod held the first feminist Seder. Theirs and other feminist haggadot were among the many notable hermeneutical and midrashic experiments of the period.23 In these commentarial texts, women broke their silence. Their image came to life and interrupted or, in this context, deflated a masculine conversation of the mere hot air that had kept their subjectivity captive for millennia.24 In the inter-textual space between the Hebrew Bible and the Haggadah, women who had played active roles in the Exodus story – the nursemaids Shifra, Puah, and Moses’ sister Miriam – had been silenced and disappeared. Traditionally, it is only the father leading the Seder, the rabbis, the youngest son and the Four Sons, wise, wicked, simple and the one who does not understand enough to ask, who are cited in the Haggadah or who have a voice

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at the Seder table. It was only now, at a feminist Seder that the daughters were finally able to ask why they had never been invited to ask their questions. It was only now, when lesbian Jewish feminists first put an entirely non-traditional orange on the Seder plate as a symbolic celebration of their otherness,25 that Jewish women caught their first glimpse of the end of their existential captivity to false images of Jewish women, and women in general. This bright fruition marked an end to women’s desert wanderings of exclusion, even while still in them. The Exodus story is, then, the narrative centrepiece of feminist theological criticism of, and liberation from, idols. It knows idolatry as a Pharaonic hardening of the heart: a carrier of death as a captivation of the freedom that is becoming. An idol is not comfortable in living, finite, woundable flesh. Its power is best concentrated, controlled, and mediated by representation in an image fabricated into an appearance of life from the inert (deathless) materials available only to power – silver, gold, and marble. One of the first Jewish feminist theologians to inaugurate the struggle to liberate a Jewish woman’s life from the ideational casings of its tradition, was Rachel Adler. The title of her now classic 1973 article – ‘The Jew Who Wasn’t There’ – connoted the phantasmagoric nature of the feminine at the same time as it criticized its captivity to a form weighed down by the burden of its ideological and practical servitude. Judaism’s social, cultural, and religious history had constructed woman as a servant with no power to name and express her own creation, whether that of her self-creation or her creation by God. Adler said it was time for patriarchy’s female figure modelled from heavy clay to open her mouth and speak: to demand a soul, to be liberated from its manipulability into life. ‘For too many centuries’, wrote Adler, ‘the Jewish woman has been a golem, created by Jewish society. She cooked and bore and did her master’s will, and when her tasks were done, the Divine Name was removed from her mouth. It is time for the golem to demand a soul.26 It was also God’s time to be God, a God uncreated and unnamed by patriarchy; a God who would no more be a creation whose will was at his master’s bidding than women.

The ideology of femininity in modern Jewish thought Second wave Jewish feminist theology is, or should be considered to be, a late entry into the canon of modern Jewish religious thought. As much a part of the women’s liberation movement’s attempt to overcome the relational estrangement between men and women as it is part of modern Judaism’s engagement with the spiritual-political problem of twentieth-century relational estrangement in the light of classical Jewish sources, Jewish feminist theology takes its place, and more, in the twentieth-century Jewish theological canon. It is important to know something of this latter’s modern construal of the relation of the feminine to the divine and to the human in order to understand what Jewish feminist theologians were drawing on and

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rejecting in their own reimagination of what it could mean to be a Jew and a liberated woman. Twentieth-century Jewish religious thought, from about 1920 to about 1990, has different moments, norms, and locations, and its trajectories were, of course, irrevocably and irreparably altered by the Holocaust. However, it can be broadly characterized as a relational, life-orientated, hermeneutical conversation between the Hebrew Bible, the mood and tropes of the mystical and Hasidic traditions, German philosophy (principally Kant, Hegel, and Husserl) and the cultural and political, as well as spiritual dimensions of modern, plural, Jewish existence after the collapse of the Orthodox consensus. For the most part, modern liberal Jewish thought did not use genderliberation as a category of analysis. It did not engage specific feminist concerns and campaigns even when it invoked the feminine. Having said that, one of the ways in which modern Judaism had distinguished itself from Orthodoxy since the mid nineteenth century had been its relatively progressive attitude to women. It is not unexpected, then, that Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas, the most influential and widely known of all modern Jewish religious thinkers, were far from misogynists. On the contrary, while they often romanticized the feminine, and as men of their time, could not but write about it from a male perspective, they did not derogate the feminine, nor did they displace it from the sphere of revelation. In The Star of Redemption (1921), Rosenzweig, for example, situated revelation outside the masculine sphere of world-historical political events and within the liturgical, artistic, and domestic round of ordinary material, embodied Jewish life – love, sex, soup, poetry, and art – of which women were an integral part. He may have figured the transmissibility of the tradition as the relationship of a father to his son, but it was nonetheless a biological, embodied, domesticated transmissibility, not that mediated through the lonely masculine offices of faith and reason alone. Writing against idealist abstraction and, in Levinas’ case particularly, totalizing systems whose ideology conquer everything in their path, there is no dualistic repudiation of home and flesh in this particular canon. To love a woman is to know God: ‘When a man loves a woman’, wrote Buber, ‘so that her life is present in his own, the You of her eyes allows him to gaze into a ray of the eternal You’.27 Granted, while his phrasing makes woman an icon onto the divine, a man’s love takes a woman’s life up into his life, rather than her love for a man assimilating his into hers. But she is not an idol. Buber’s dialogic theology of the I-Thou relation does not allow the substitution of the presence of anyone, male or female, human or animal, for their image. For a woman, like any other living thing, is not an object of admiration; she is not an It, but a You. Or again, feminist readers might be pleased or irritated, depending on their sexual-political tastes, to read that, for Buber, we emerge from the primeval darkness of the Great Mother’s womb into relationship.28 ‘Woman’, here, is at least not the disastrous, seductive Eve, she is Chavah, em chol hai, mother of everything that is alive (Gen. 3: 20).

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Modern Jewish religious thought may not have been written by women or for women. Yet as Leora Batnitsky has observed, its project is cognate with feminism, particularly cultural or maternalist feminism, because it is predicated on vulnerability and dependency, not power.29 Neither Rosenzweig, Buber nor Levinas advocated the realization of an atomized self in relation to an object through reason, law, and power. Writing phenomenologically, against idealist abstraction, they understood male being and becoming as something of a ‘feminine’ process that demanded a posture of openness to the other. All of them drew not only on the scriptural traditions of feminine receptivity to life,30 but on their predecessor Hermann Cohen’s account of the role of compassion – Mitleid (in Hebrew the word is cognate with that for the womb) – in securing justice and human flourishing, while letting aspects of Cohen’s rationalism fall away.31 Again, it is more than arguable that stereotypically idealized feminine traits are appropriated in ways that offered no immediate socio-political benefit to women. Nonetheless, taking a longer view, it also needs to be acknowledged that the Jewishness of modern Jewish thought disinclined it from philosophy’s traditional preoccupation with death. Jewish philosophers produced a celebration of the living, of choosing life over the death that the twentieth century had set before them (compare Deuteronomy 30: 19). At the end of Totality and Infinity Levinas wrote: ‘Life is love of life, a relation with contents that are not my being but more dear than my being: thinking, eating, sleeping, reading, working, warming myself in the sun’.32 Feminist debate over the meaning and value of Levinas’ idea of the feminine was particularly heated during the 1980s and 1990s – the period in which second wave Jewish feminist theology, always a minority discourse within the Jewish feminist community, began to consolidate its position with books such as Judith Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai (1990) and Rachel Adler’s Engendering Judaism (1998). Some of these arguments about Levinas are rehearsed here because Jewish feminist theology’s negotiation with the ideology of femininity took place in the context of its Jewish philosophical and theological studies as well as in the reading, and writing, of women’s liberationists’ texts, the one set of texts informing the other. Simone de Beauvoir opened the discussion. In a footnote at the beginning of The Second Sex, she criticized Levinas’ representation of woman as ‘an assertion of male privilege’: the masculine is cast as the Absolute Subject to whom the feminine is the mysterious Other. The idea of ‘woman’, if not her actuality, is denied conscious agency and defined by reference to him, not him to her.33 There is some truth to this claim. Like other continental philosophers, Levinas seemed to have found actual, complicated, empirical women less philosophically interesting than woman as an analogy for whatever man was not.34 The feminine was too often little more than a cipher by which men could arrive at their own thought. But Beauvoir had only read Levinas’s early Time and the Other (1947). His idea of the feminine developed over time. In 1961 in Totality and Infinity,

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woman is a peaceable figure of welcome and hospitality; of the embrace; of the safe space of home, inhabitation.35 Tina Chanter’s critique of this image of the feminine was in much the same vein as Beauvoir’s: Levinas had once more relegated the face or presence of a woman to the apolitical, ahistorical ‘serene abode of the domicile, the dwelling’ maintained by her domestic labour, its drudgery romanticized as the ‘feminine touch’. Not only does he re-identify woman with domesticity, he also deprives her image of speech. Self-effacing; a kind of secret remedy for the masculine, the female face is not that of a political actor, indeed cannot assert itself at all since its modesty is its ‘discretion’.36 At this point it seems as if Levinas’ image of woman is one more image of ‘woman’ to reject, its very benignity a more insidious illusion than an easily dismissed demonization. Despite his view of the suppression of a person’s identity as ‘violence’, he himself has subjected the feminine to a masculine definition and generalization of its identity, here as one of pure responsibility: ‘Far from leaving blank the space titled “woman” and inviting her to fill it in herself, Levinas writes all over this space, inscribing it with his desires, his needs, his missions, in terms of which the feminine is never a for-the-sake-of, but always an in-order-to, a means rather than an end’.37 Once more, a woman is generalized as ‘woman’ and suffers another alienation of her identity and of the independent, responsible, agency that is the precondition of any ethical engagement between her and the world. By the time he published his last work, Otherwise than Being, in 1974, Levinas, who was well aware of the controversies attending his image of the feminine, had recast ‘maternity’ as not merely the condition of ethics, but ethics itself. In this very high account of the feminine, Levinas recognized that the maternal relation is not a relation of power but of unconditional responsibility to the dependent body of the other. In ‘maternity’, in the ‘gift’ of one’s ‘own skin’, the natural becomes ethical.38 It is in the light of this and other essays by Levinas that Claire Katz has argued that feminist critics of Levinas – Irigaray especially – have neglected the Jewishness of Levinas’s idea of the feminine.39 Interpreting Levinas’ biblical and talmudic reading of the creation story ‘And God Created Woman’ as one in which the woman and the man together create a new future, Katz reminds her readers that for Levinas, as for Rosenzweig, love, including sexual love, is messianic because it always aims at a more human future.40 Moreover, it should be remembered that in modern Jewish thought the messianic is a utopian vision that counters the totalitarian in being radically open-ended. Forever the not-yet, or what is always on its way, the messianic represents the possibility of the unprecedented and the unforeseen. In other words, to associate the feminine with such is precisely to dispel its oppressive idea rather than to consolidate it. In his 1965 essay, ‘Judaism and the Feminine Element’, for example, Levinas understands biblical women (their

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‘charm’ notwithstanding) as active agents of the messianic (if in the figure of Elijah).41 In Eve, they are the condition of all knowledge.42 Granted, Levinas’ ‘maternity’ labours for the messianic future that she does not herself quite inaugurate. Levinas draws on rabbinic tropes to signal the messianic dimension of the feminine as Shekhinah, who is an invitation to Elijah, a masculine figure of the arrival of the messianic itself. But in modern Jewish thought, the messianic is not at all a surging of triumphal power, indeed it can be an imperceptible process, indefinitely deferred, even (in Walter Benjamin) the voice of the dead calling for justice. The world-transformative process is driven by eros and loss, not force. And in ‘Judaism and the Feminine Element’ the feminine is not an abstraction. Levinas firmly rejects any notion of ‘the Eternal Feminine’ as un-Jewish. Women are active sacral agents on the ‘edge of invisibility’. Indeed, it is because they are on the edge of invisibility that they are not things to look at; not biological utilities.43 Above all, Levinas’ figuration of the feminine as presence, as Shekhinah, over absence and abandonment, offers a criticism of masculinist reason and its violence that has characterized a good deal of Jewish feminist theology, including my own Levinasian theology of female divine and human holocaustal presence.44 Levinas’ account of the feminine is, in short, not a single idea. That alone goes some way to breaking the idol of the feminine. It is decidedly not one thing: Levinas stood in absolute opposition to the twentieth century’s monistic schemes of ‘totality’ that had produced a series of totalitarian hells on earth. The Other was not the alien but a separate identity or universe whose subjectivity is always ethical or relational, not sealed into its own interiority. In this sense the Levinasian anthropology is the very opposite of an idolatrous one. Morny Joy has attributed Levinas’ idea of the feminine to his Orthodoxy. She may be right in terms of his sources. But one might also speculate that, as a man who grew up in an Orthodox household in Lithuania, which was one of the epicentres of the Holocaust, Levinas’ idea of woman is also, perhaps, not so much a general idea as a memory. She is, perhaps, the presence of a historical, genocidal absence: the lost Jewish mother. His (talmudic) idea of woman as ‘home’ remembers and anticipates sanctuary: a ‘feminine’, greeting, community of subjects maternally present to the need of the stranger. Levinas’ ethic stands in absolute opposition to a politics of alienation.45 If ‘the feminine’ is ‘on the edge of invisibility’46 that is because its sanctuary lies in ruins, fallen to tyranny, not because it must stay in the background. If femininity is spectral, it is as a fading back-projection of a woman who is still there, in the windows and doorways of the world whose destruction he witnessed in the 1940s. As the gentle face of remembered welcome, she is the Jewish past. But far from the mere haunt of the dead, hers is also the figure of a real, active, body that makes time and space for a more human future.

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Levinas’ image of the feminine is, after all, no mere sexual distraction. She is not a reification or a pornography. The idea of any human being as a spectacle, or worse, an entertainment, is one that Levinas is right to find ethically abhorrent. Romantic love, for Levinas, is no more than captivity to a magic spell; to ‘voluptuousness’. Levinas’ image of the feminine is not one of voluptuousness but a messianic figure of living, erotic relation that stands over and against ‘the [masculine] world in which reason becomes more and more self-conscious’. For Levinas, as for feminists, traumatized by modern violence against persons, ethics is politics, understood as properly one and the same. He finds the modern world as inhospitable as any other relational thinker. This world ‘is not habitable. It is hard and cold’, like a ‘supply depot’ or the ‘factory hangars’ in which are accumulations of things not given, but for sale.47 Against what a feminist might call patriarchal modernity, where all production, including the production of dead bodies, has been industrialized, Levinas’ image of the feminine as the tender figure of habitation is a rebuke to the totalitarian camps, or more accurately, ‘supply depots’ that, during his lifetime, were filled to the rafters with human persons turned into resources, stock, or slaves and corpses. Levinas’ idea of the feminine as a maternal body that has space within it for other bodies is not at all to say that ‘woman’ is a cavity or empty vessel. Nor is it to deny that actual women have colluded with, benefited from, and sometimes perpetrated, violence. It is the very generosity or capacity of the feminine that is a prophetic criticism of the triumph of masculinist abstraction in which real suffering bodies are excluded from its Lebensraum; from a world that has no space in it for the other. She is not a vacuity, she withdraws to make room for being in a habitable, peaceful world, just as God self-shatters or withdraws from the world, in Jewish mysticism, to create space for the history of becoming. Levinas’ God is a God who does not send in his troops; who does not command ‘man’ to colonize or expand himself like the patriarchal yeast of hubris that the Exodus narrative proscribes. So too, Levinas’ woman is not an object of mere contemplation. She is withdrawn from her world because that world her labours once made habitable no longer, after the Holocaust, exists. But she withdraws in humility and service, not modesty and servility, into a world she is always counterworking to recreate. As in cultural feminist ideas of the feminine, which should not, I think, be carelessly discarded, she is a figure of the criticism of patriarchal violence. Although my own Jewish feminist theological anthropology has been more than inflected by Levinas’, I must hasten to add that neither Levinas in particular, nor modern Jewish thought in general, supplies a ready-made feminist anthropology. Levinas’ apparently conservative account of the domesticity of the feminine is rather that of an anamnetic ethical space and moment, not a mandate for women to stay at home. The tradition, especially the modern one, must be, as all Torah should be, ‘turned and

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turned again’. It has its female golems but Levinas’ idea of the feminine is not one of them.

Procedural idoloclasm in Jewish feminist theology Early second wave Jewish feminism had either to re-read the traditional and modern resources that it considered variously derogatory or idealizing of women, or set them to one side. Either way, it needed to show women and men the truth of what femaleness actually looks and smells like. It needed to help women to see and touch themselves and other women as real, living bodies, not images of something or someone else than themselves. It was perhaps no coincidence that of the twelve women who produced the book Our Bodies, Ourselves, first published by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective in 1971, nine were Jewish. This book, which became a best-seller in 1973,48 attempted to overcome women’s alienation from their own image and embodiment by its title’s implicit rejection of any other claim to ownership or categorization of women’s bodies than their own. As an introduction to themselves, it invited women to an intimate diagnostic self-examination. They were handed back, from the medical profession, their gynecology. The book’s feminist demystification of female sexuality – its sites of pleasure and its discharges and ordinary ailments – not only denied that femininity was a leaky vessel, that is, a moral and medical problem, it also helped women overcome religio-cultural estrangement from their own bodies as at once over-profaned and over-sanctified, despised, desired and acquired. Yet for those Jewish feminists who wished to remain practicing Jews, lessons in feminist biology were a necessary but not sufficient condition of bringing women back to life. As reformists, some Jewish religious feminists felt that if they were not to relinquish all ties with categories and texts that had given them their historical religious identity, they were probably ‘stuck with’ the god called God. In the mid-1990s, the feminist biblical scholar Athalya Brenner, for example, noted the irony that the Jewish God who demands that idols be broken is himself an idol. And it is an idol that she, as a divorced, non-religious Israeli woman, could not escape: ‘This is my heritage. I am stuck with it. I cannot and will not shake it off. And it hurts’.49 As indicated in the previous chapter of this book, modern Jewishness can be an ineradicable but non-confessional cultural identity that is separable from Jewish religious observance, which is entirely voluntary. For secular Jewish feminists, if God is his human projection, constituted without remainder by a masculinity that is not incidental to his personality, he is a fictive God that can be ignored. Even should he exist, alienation from him might, in any case, and very Jewishly, be preferable to alienation from their own Jewishness. Not even Naomi Goldenberg, a Jew and, one of the principal feminist idoloclasts of the period, became a Goddess feminist after her declaration of the death of God. In her 1979 Changing of the Gods she was more interested in the sexual-political and psychotherapeutic possibilities

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of the Goddess as a liberative idea or archetype than celebrating the female divine in an alternative feminist theology.50 In fact, most Jewish feminists of the time were not persuaded that the first task facing Jewish feminism’s re-humanization of women was a theological one at all. Most had no theological training and, in any case, were not untypical of Jews who had long perceived theology as a Christian discipline alien to the practical, polyphonic, unsystematic, non-doctrinal nature and temper of Judaism. Even though Cynthia Ozick admitted that a Jewish feminist ethic is a theological one, and that theology was sometimes unavoidable, she regarded women’s inequality to men as a sociological, not a theological problem. In her 1979 essay, ‘Notes toward Finding the Right Question’, she argued that the feminist remedy for Jewish patriarchy lay in the political and legal, halakhic, reform of Judaism, not in the feminist reimagining of God, which she considered to be no less idolatrous than any other imagining of God. The majority of Jewish feminists, especially Modern Orthodox feminists, agreed with her. Led by its founding president Blu Greenberg, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA) was eventually established in 1997 to provide just such opportunities for women to express themselves fully in communal life and thereby transform not just their own lives, but that of the entire Jewish people. Judith Plaskow, however, thought that it was not enough for Jewish feminists to militate for halakhic reform. There seemed little point in merely gaining access to a study and practice of religious legislation previously denied them and then deferring to its androcentric terms. And even though her project was to give voice to Jewish women, as a liberal Jewish feminist, she had little investment in doing so under halakhic terms.51 Liberal Jews like herself conceded that rabbinic Judaism may be aware of the need to protect the needs of women and other vulnerable members of the community, but its very paternalism had intellectually, spiritually, and politically muted and immobilized women, and too often on the sexualizing grounds of preserving their modesty. Less conservative forms of Jewish feminism than that of Modern Orthodoxy remembered the unretiring women who publicly sang, danced, prophesied, and drummed in Iron Age Israel.52 Such women had passed from memory as a post-biblical rabbinical elite gradually reformulated Jewish life in exile (especially that of Ashkenazi Jewry) as one that would survive on the basis of its bibliocentric law, one that would become an increasingly restrictive object of masculine study, set apart from the ordinary domestic and mercantile life it so closely regulated. In 1982, Plaskow wrote an article in reply to Ozick’s 1979 article in which she argued that if halakhah is grounded in an androcentric theology that imagines God as male, and imagines men as normative Jews, it is pointless to confine feminist criticism to selective abolition or amelioration of certain mitzvot or commandments. To do so would leave intact the othering of women on which Jewish law’s most central formulations and expressions are founded.53 In her book, Standing Again at Sinai, published ten years

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later, Plaskow argued that ‘where a religious tradition makes the masculine body the normative bearer of the divine image of a God imagined in male language alone, and in ideas that cannot be “tampered” with, its anthropology should be considered idolatrous’.54 Plaskow had long been at a loss to understand why anyone would want to model their relationship with God in controlling terms that would not be ethically or emotionally acceptable in any of their other relationships. ‘Why’ she asked, ‘should the experience of God as a dominant hierarch be liberating or holy?’ God is no less morally accountable than humanity. Divine commandments have no ethical authority if they are already compromised by the patriarchal model of God that reveals them. There is no place in a feminist, relational Judaism for a God who is a dominant hierarch or divine husband to Israel who controls the world by means of the exclusive rights operative in property relations. Plaskow’s new Jewish feminist self would not be without authority, but it would be that of the natural authority of skills or character traits, not the essential, dynastic or caste authority selfmandated for a dominion accountable to no one but itself.55 Rachel Adler, who became an Orthodox Jew in her teens and reverted to Reform Judaism about 20 years later, similarly insisted that ‘if women are not part of the congregation, if we stand passively under the huppah (marriage canopy), if, even in the Reform movement, we have become rabbis only in the last ten years, this is because men – and not women with them – define Jewish humanity’. The authority of halakhah, Adler suggested, is located neither in its divine origin nor in any universal and timeless truth of its precepts, but rather in its capacity to imagine a better, more world-creating and less conservative world-maintaining, community.56 Adler advocated a theology that would begin not only with a systematic re-conceptualization of God, but even more, a re-telling of God through a feminist hermeneutic that would read the narrative tradition as it has never been read before, that is, with a hermeneutical privileging of the female subject, whatever her point of view. For Plaskow and Adler, then, an oppressive ideology of femininity could only be mediated and socialized by halakhah because the latter is already thoroughly embedded in aggadah or theology. Without theology’s conceptualization and narration of God’s relationship to the world, no one would have any idea why there is a halakhah, or why one might be obligated to it, in the first place.57 Cynthia Ozick’s contention that halakhah, not theology, is the engine of a feminist reformation was simply the wrong way around. It was not until 2004, with the publication of Tamar Ross’s milestone work, Expanding the Palace of Torah, that many more Jewish feminists would begin to see that the construction and operation of a full Jewish female subject might benefit from a reunion of theology and halakhah. Ross asserted that Jewish women are liberated when truth no longer ‘has the power simply to bang us over the head’ (and presumably leave us, religiously speaking, unconscious). The boundaries between the human and

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divine word are fluid and dynamic. God’s will is heard not only through the rabbinic interpretation of scripture, but also by warrant of the whole people’s consensual acceptance of that interpretation. Authority is not self-proclaimed; its dignity is not dynastic. It is by the warrant of a whole community that a rabbi is appointed. It is possible to read Maimonides’ ruling of the ‘three crowns’ as indicative of this potentially rich seam of Jewish inclusivity. In Mishneh Torah Maimonides wrote that the people Israel were crowned with three crowns: the crown of Torah, the crown of priesthood and the crown of kingship. The crown of everlasting priesthood was given to Moses’ brother Aaron; the crown of kingship, to David. But the crown of Torah is worn by all those who desire it, and because it is God’s, it is the greatest crown of all.58 Despite Ross’ denominational differences with Plaskow and Adler,59 she shares their view that neither the theological nor the halakhic process is hermetically sealed from change. Influenced by Maimonides and Rav Kook’s culminative theology of revelation, Ross’ notion of an open-ended progressive revelation suggests that feminism is also a God-given means for revealing God’s will and developing human sensibilities. In answer to Miriam’s question in the book of Numbers,60 God does not speak only through Moses; truth has more than one source: ‘These and these are the words of the Living God’, as God pronounced in settlement of an argument between Hillel and Shammai. Women must therefore be included in the process of halakhic deliberation. If they are not, there are theological consequences: the Jewish people will fail to hear God’s ongoing revelation, which might well include the divine ordination of the supercession of patriarchy.61 As contemporary liberal and Orthodox Judaisms have begun to own the term ‘theology’, and Jewish women have begun to identify as theologians in slowly increasing numbers, Plaskow’s early argument has become less controversial. Yet the passage of Plaskow’s thought over about 40 years is a fair illustration of how an idoloclastic theology, which must dismantle its own erroneous ideas of God before it starts dismantling other people’s, can eventually undercut its own grounds for counting as a substantive theology at all. In the third of her Sherman Lectures given in 2000 at the University of Manchester, and in work done thereafter, she rejected an androgynous model of God as a counter-idolatrous strategy of the kind proposed by Rita Gross in 1976. For Gross, God’s androgyny would blur the difference between genders, making it impossible to ordain and assign roles to each in the service of exclusively male interests. Male and female pronouns for God, Gross argued, should be at least alternated in theological discourse.62 But Plaskow felt that this kind of androgynous model of God would do little to disrupt existing polar ideas of the masculine and feminine by defining God as a combination of both. She also rejected a theology that feminized God as God-She and argued for a (not untraditional) expansion of inter-gendered and non-gendered images for God. It was the plurality within God that would underwrite valorization of human plurality as difference. No images

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of God or the human should be fixed; all should be disposable or recyclable: capable of giving way to the shifting, self-replenishing flow of others.63 By 2016, Plaskow had further minimized her idea of God in order to make God infinitely more than God’s idea. No longer persuaded that confession of a personal, benevolent (let alone loving), omnipotent deity was anything more than wishful thinking, she presented, in literary conversation with Carol Christ, her understanding of God or Goddess (it no longer really mattered which) as the ground of all being. Despite the long history of this term in western philosophical theology, in Plaskow’s use, neither the divine nor the human is ontologically privileged over any other natural entities. That which exists does so for no extrinsic moral or historical purpose other than life itself.64 That we can imagine a perfectly good and loving God does not entail that she exists. We need, she says, to ‘let go of anger and stand before the mysterious complexity of the world and the boundless creative energy that births its myriad forms and to accept the reality that all is a mixture of good and evil’.65 Plaskow’s struggle against the reification of God as a knowable thing – an idol – is as old as Judaism. But there are older forces than Judaism that can destroy images. Travelling with her partner Martha in the Amazon, just after publishing Standing Again at Sinai, Plaskow had an experience that lasted over several days in which she felt herself to be ‘gazing at the well-spring of life in all its terror and sublimity’. For some years afterwards, she stopped writing about God. She had arrived at the point where the Lord of History had been swept away in the thundering waters of the Iguazu Falls, on the border of Brazil and Argentina.66 There is a sense in which her theology, and it is still, just, theology, not atheism, at once ends and begins her own counter-idolatrous turn. From the perspective of a Jewish theist, the losses are considerable. The God addressed by most Jews for most of 3000 years has been personal. The Jewish sense of ethical accountability makes better sense as a product of divine intelligence and intentionality. The postulation of a non-personal God may not only be irreconcilable with Jewish thought and life, it also makes it difficult to sustain the conviction that girls and women are icons rather than idols, uniquely made in the image of God.67 But Plaskow had turned off the patriarchal theological projector and had awoken, not to darkness, but to the sun rising over the Amazon where the Rio Negra and the Ariau River meet and the spider monkeys chatter and the vultures peck at the carcass of a crocodile.68 She had witnessed a world brought back to life. Liberation at last.

Notes 1 ‘In Conversation: Helène Aylon with Ann McCoy’, The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture, May 1, 2017, https://brooklynrail. org/2017/05/art/Helene-Aylon, accessed 31.7.18. 2 ‘In Conversation: Helène Aylon with Ann McCoy’, https://brooklynrail. org/2017/05/art/Helene-Aylon. See also Helène Aylon, Whatever Is Contained

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Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist, New York, The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2012; Aylon’s own website, www.heleneaylon.com/, accessed 9.7.18; Debra Nussbaum Cohen, ‘The Liberation of Helène Aylon’, Forward, July 9, 2012, https://forward.com/ culture/158830/the-liberation-of-helene-aylon/, accessed 1.8.18. Judith Ochshorn, The Female Experience and the Nature of the Divine, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 1981. Hosea 2: 11–18. See e.g. Ellen Frankel, The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman’s Commentary on the Torah, New York, HarperSanFrancisco, 1996, p. 137. Versions of this story appear in Lamentations Rabbah; BT Gittin 57b and Pesiqta Rabbati 43. See e.g. The Female Face of God in Auschwitz; ‘Antidotes to Captivation and Spell-Bound Forgetting: The Counter-Idolatrous Figure of the Human in Modern Jewish Theology and Art’, in Claudia Welz, ed. Ethics of In-Visibility: Imago Dei, Memory, and Human Dignity in Jewish and Christian Thought, Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2015, pp. 101–117; ‘Idolatry and Fixation: Modern Jewish Thought and the Prophetic Criticism of the Cosmetically and Technologically Perfected Female Face in Contemporary Popular Culture’, The International Journal of Public Theology, 7 (2013), 135–156. The Star of Redemption, trans. from the Second edition of 1930 by William W. Hallo, Notre Dame, IN, Notre Dame Press, 1985, p. 423. Totality and Infinity, p. 78. See Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, pp. 127–128 and her whole chapter, ‘God: Reimagining the Unimaginable’, which is a classic formulation of the idoloclastic foundations of a Jewish feminist theology (pp. 121–169). The Prophetic Faith, p. 28. See Marcia Falk, ‘Toward a Feminist Jewish Reconstruction of Monotheism’, Tikkun Magazine: A Bi-monthly Critique of of Politics, Culture and Society, 4 (1989), 53–56. See also my ‘Feminist Theology and the Jewish Tradition’, in Mary McClintock Fulkerson and Sheila Briggs, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theology, New York, Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 51–72. Arthur Cohen, The Tremendum: A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust, New York, Continuum, 1981, p. 97. ‘Notes Toward Finding the Right Question’, p. 149. ‘Notes Toward Finding the Right Question’, p. 126. ‘Notes Toward Finding the Right Question’, p. 147. ‘Notes Toward Finding the Right Question’, pp. 144–150. See further, Halbertal and Margalit, Idolatry, p. 5. BT Sotah 3b; BT Meg. 15b. See further Menachem Kellner, ed., ‘Shekhinah and ˙ Eschatology’, in The Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings of Steven Schwarzschild, New York, New York University Press, 1990, p. 244. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Idolatry 1:2. ‘The Tragedy of Women’s Emancipation’, in Emma Goldman, ed., Anarchism and Other Essays, New York, Cosmino, 2005 [1910], pp. 219–232. Ez. 29: 3. Women’s haggadot include Esther M. Broner and Naomi Nimrod, The Women’s Haggadah, New York, HarperSanFrancisco, 1994 [1977]; The Wandering Is Over Haggadah: Including Women’s Voices, A Passover Seder Haggadah compiled by JewishBoston.com with the Jewish Women’s Archive (JWA) in 2011, https://archive.org/details/TheWanderingIsOverHaggadahIncludingWomensVoices, accessed 4.6.18. Arthur Waskow’s 1969 Freedom Seder, at which 800 African-Americans and Jews came together to commemorate the first anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death, was a precursor to the feminist liberationist Seder.

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24 See e.g. Ellen Frankel, The Five Books of Miriam and, more recently, Tamara Cohn Eskenazi and Andrea Weiss, eds., The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, New York, Union for Reform Judaism Press, 2007. 25 A ritual suggestion of Susannah Heschel’s, the orange on the Seder plate has become a symbol of the fruitfulness of including all those who do not ‘belong’; its seeds can be ritually spat out as a repudiation of homophobia and other prejudice. 26 ‘The Jew Who Wasn’t There: Halakah and the Jewish Woman’ (1971), in Susannah Heschel, ed., On Being a Jewish Feminist, p. 17. See also Judith R. Baskin, ‘Rabbinic Judaism and the Creation of Woman’, Shofar, 14 (1995), 66–71, which also reads the rabbinic literature, which is diverse in many respects, as sharing a common view of women as objects of male agency, rather than as subjects in their own right. 27 I and Thou, p. 154. 28 I and Thou, p. 78. 29 Leora Batnitzky, ‘Dependency and Vulnerability: Jewish and Feminist Existentialist Constructions of the Human’, in Tirosh-Samuelson, ed., Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy, p. 135. See also Claire Elise Katz, ‘From Eros to Maternity: Love, Death and “the Feminine” in the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas’, in Tirosh-Samuelson, ed., ibid., pp. 153–175. 30 In the Yemenite Midrash ha-Be’ur on Ex. 19: 2–3, for example, the reception of God’s prophecy, understood by medieval Jewish philosophy as a uni-directional transmission of divine will to its human reception, is modelled on the ‘innate’ receptivity or passivity of the feminine, making the feminine more eligible a receptor of divine prophecy than the masculine. (Yemenite Midrash: Philosophical Commentaries on the Torah, selected and translated by Yitzhak Tzvi Langermann, New York, HarperSanFrancisco, 1996, pp. 67, 80.) 31 ‘Dependency and Vulnerability’, p. 148. 32 Totality and Infinity, p. 112. 33 The Second Sex, p. 16. 34 E.g. Totality and Infinity, pp. 157–158. 35 ‘Judaism and the Feminine Element’, in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand, London, Athlone Press, 1990 [1965], pp. 30–37; Totality and Infinity, pp. 150, 156. 36 ‘Feminism and the Other’, in Robert Bernasconi and David Wood, eds., The Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, London and New York, Routledge, 1988, p. 36. 37 Sonia Sikka, ‘The Delightful Other: Portraits of the Feminine in Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Levinas’, in Tina Chanter, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001, pp. 103–104. 38 Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1981, pp. 74, 76, 117 and passim; Batnitzky, ‘Dependency and Vulnerability’, p. 135. 39 Claire Elise Katz, An Introduction to Modern Jewish Philosophy, London and New York, I. B. Taurus, 2014, p. 130. David Patterson notes that Levinas’ account of the feminine is drawn from or paralleled in rabbinic and mystical literature, where the key themes and categories that characterize Jewish thought: holiness, hiddenness, responsibility, exile, dwelling, gratitude, and the physicality of the Jewish spirit are central, not peripheral, to a sacralized history. (Genocide in Jewish Thought, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2012, esp. pp. 174–178.) 40 Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1987, p. 88.

204 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51

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53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

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‘Judaism and the Feminine Element’, pp. 31, 38. ‘Judaism and the Feminine Element’, pp. 33–34. ‘Judaism and the Feminine Element’, p. 34. See The Female Face of God in Auschwitz where I use the Levinasian ethic of presence, perhaps more than his idea of the feminine, to propose a Jewish feminist theological response to patriarchal dehumanization, pp. 102–105, 115 and passim. ‘Judaism and the Feminine Element’, p. 33. ‘Judaism and the Feminine Element’, p. 31. ‘Judaism and the Feminine Element’, p. 32. The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book By and for Women, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1973. ‘The Hebrew God and His Female Complements’, in Janet Martin Soskice and Diana Lipton, eds., Feminism and Theology, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 172, 155–174. Changing of the Gods, esp. pp. 29–30, 33, 36, 38. The liberal Jewish tradition locates the dignity of the individual in a progressive historical process governed by the exercise of natural rights, social contracts, and rational assent to revealed commandments. First theorized in nineteenth-century Germany, Reform Judaism would emancipate Jews not merely into eligibility for modern European citizenship but from the bonds of a pre-enlightened Judaic age. Frankel, The Five Books of Miriam, pp. 110–112; Sarit Paz, Drums, Women and Goddesses: Gender and Drumming in Iron Age Israel II, Fribourg, Academic Press Fribourg; Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007, pp. 102–104. The contemporary Israeli drummer Meytal Cohen might be regarded as having revived something of this female Jewish drumming tradition. ‘The Right Question is Theological’, in Susannah Heschel, ed., On Being a Jewish Feminist, pp. 223–233. Standing Again at Sinai, pp. 147–148. ‘What’s Wrong with Hierarchy?’, in The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972–2003, Boston, Beacon Press, 2005 [1992], pp. 128–142, p. 141. Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics, Philadelphia and Jerusalem, Jewish Publication Society, 1998, pp. 34–36. Neil Gilman, Traces of God: Seeing God in Torah, History and Everyday Life, Woodstock, Jewish Lights, 2006, p. 114. Mishneh Torah, 3: 1; see further Tamar Ross, Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism, Boston, Brandeis University Press, 2004, p. 289. See further Judith Plaskow and Tamar Ross, ‘The View From Here: Gender Theory and Gendered Realities: An Exchange Between Tamar Ross and Judith Plaskow’, Nashim, 13 (Spring, 2007), 207–251. Numbers 12: 2. Expanding the Palace of Torah, p. 218. See also Ellen Umansky’s contribution to Carol P. Christ, Ellen M. Umansky, and Anne E. Carr, ‘Roundtable Discussion: What Are the Sources of My Theology?’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 1 (1985), 119–131, 124. More recently, Susan Shapiro has revisited the notion that the right or primary question for Jewish women is theological in her article ‘A Matter of Discipline: Reading for Gender in Jewish Philosophy’, in Peskowitz and Levitt, Judaism Since Gender, pp. 158–173. ‘Female God Language in a Jewish Context’, reprinted in Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow, eds., Womanspirit Rising, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1979, pp. 168–171. Although Gross’ advocacy for divine androgyny anticipated elements of queer theology, it was about 20 years ahead of its time and made little impression when it was published.

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63 www.manchesterjewishstudies.org/sherman-lectures-2000/. See also ‘The Challenge of Transgender to Compulsory Heterosexuality’, in Marvin E. Ellinson and Judith Plaskow, eds., Heterosexuality in Contemporary World Religions: Problems and Prospects, Cleveland, Pilgrim Press, 2007, p. 34 and Hava TiroshSamuelson and Aaron W. Hughes, eds., Judith Plaskow: Feminism, Theology and Justice, Leiden, Brill, 2014, pp. 45–68. 64 Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, Goddess and God, pp. 174, 184–187 and passim. 65 Goddess and God, p. 237. 66 Goddess and God, p. 173. 67 I raised these critical questions in my review of Goddess and God in the World, ‘Reflections on Theology from an Anglo-Jewish Feminist Perspective’ in Tikkun, January 3, 2018. 68 Goddess and God, pp. 173–174.

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On a May morning in England, 1993, a group of women – a visitation from the Goddess – entered Bristol Cathedral during the Sunday service. The women were holding a large image of a woman painted by Monica Sjöö called God Giving Birth, depicting God as a woman with her child, the earth, emerging from between her open legs. And it was Sjöö, the artist, who was there, ritually lifting up and carrying what was in every sense her own image. The painting was of her, as it was of every woman in the building Like all such direct actions, it was a sign: the women’s liberation movement, under the banner of the Goddess, had come to the relief of a world where people are saved from death by the dead body and blood of a tortured man. As representatives of the Goddess, the group entered that (to them) benighted cosmos from a different one where life is generated from life. Sjöö remembered later that the moment was, ‘incredibly powerful and magical’. It felt ‘somehow significant and magnificent . . . as if we have opened a chink in the ether, allowed some freedom and power for all women to seep through from some other realm . . . we had broken some shackles in our own minds’. The women lined up in front of the altar and, facing the congregation, Sjöö confronted the Dean with the image, whose exhibition had been charged with obscenity and blasphemy several times during the 1970s. She remembers: ‘He attempted to take it from me and informed me that he was holding a service and that the cathedral is [sic] his at which I answered that the cathedrals are built on ancient sacred sites of the Goddess and that we were holding a service of our own’. The police were threatened but, in the event, they were not called. Sjöö died at the age of 66 in 2005. But, for the rest of her life, she not only remembered this classic piece of feminist idoloclastic theatre, she thealogically reimagined it:1 ‘the butterfly wings painted around Rachel’s eyes fluttering and taking off . . . especially when seeing her, as we were leaving the cathedral, leaning on the pulpit declaring the glad tidings of the End of Patriarchy to the congregation. We had indeed served notice to the Godfather and his henchmen that their time is nigh’.2 This was an idoloclastic stand-off: God and Goddess had confronted one another, face to face.3 As Sjöö said later: ‘If I hadn’t done God Giving Birth, this action would not have happened’.4 In and by the power of a female

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image, a masculine stone space usurping the power of female wombs of flesh had been liberated from patriarchy. A sign needs space but very little time. The women sang a song to the Goddess and left. They had flown into the building not as missiles but, like Rachel, as butterflies, their iridescent wings catching shafts of light. If the space had once been theirs, it was no longer. Now it was no more than a great tomb to a Goddess long-departed. If these butterflies remained long within its cold, dark walls, they would be trapped and die.

The reinstatement of female ‘idols’ Fifteen to twenty years before the action in Bristol, women inclined to radical and cultural feminisms had begun to turn their back on Abrahamic religion. For these women, whose turn to the Goddess is a relatively infrequently studied trajectory of the women’s liberation movement, neither secularism, nor Christian and Jewish reformism, could remedy a dispensation ideologically intolerant of feminine sacrality other than that in service to the institutions of the patriarchal family. Goddess feminism, a post-biblical feminism that recalls a pre-biblical earth, rejected transcendental abstractions of meaning and power as a radical devaluation of ‘female’ materiality. In the loving reconstruction of all those natural female forms that patriarchy had broken, women would once more touch their own power. Where patriarchal iconoclasm had preserved God’s honour by abstracting his presence from feminine forms lest they be worshipped in his place, post-Christian feminist iconophilia effectively answered a question that had been asked for centuries of a biblical story: why did the matriarch Rachel steal her father’s idols? In the haste of her and Jacob’s escape from an increasingly tense environment in her father Laban’s household, Rachel seizes her father’s teraphim, his household idol(s),5 and brings them on the journey to Canaan, without Jacob’s knowledge and hidden in the saddle cushion of her camel. When Laban later comes looking for his family and his teraphim she keeps them in her possession by again sitting on them like a bird might her eggs. This time she pretends she is menstruating so that the men will not move her and find them (Genesis 31: 35). While rabbinical commentators were well aware that biblical text does not disparage these images and there is no summary punishment for her taking them, they could not countenance the possibility that she might have not so much stolen as liberated the images; that she took them because it was unthinkable that she should leave them behind. In fact, the rabbis praise Rachel for taking the images from Laban so as to prevent him from continuing to worship idols. Genesis Rabbah 74: 5 reads, ‘Yet her purpose was indeed a noble one, for she said: “What, shall we go and leave this old man [Laban] in his error [idolatry]!”’ In another tradition, Rachel stole the figurines, to which were credited oracular powers,6 so that they would not tell Laban that Jacob had fled with his wives, his children

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and his flocks nor, indeed, disclose his whereabouts (Tanhuma, Vayeze 12). In short, the rabbis re-tell the story as Rachel having stolen the idols for the sake of Heaven. Rachel’s story is one way to approach Goddess feminism’s iconophilic negotiation with two types of idols: the false patriarchal idols of which women’s consciousness was to be rid, and the true icons of the divine feminine that patriarchy had broken as idols. These latter were the images that Goddess feminism reclaimed as their own. Acting shrewdly on her own initiative, Rachel appropriates divine power for herself, not Jacob.7 Jewish feminists on the progressive fringes of the tradition have suggested that she stole the images for the sake of women; for the sake of the divine matrilineal line. In and after Rachel’s rescue of the teraphim, treasured heirlooms passed down through the maternal line, images of the divine feminine are now being restored to the niches of women’s Goddess altars all over the world. They are ‘no longer just figurines, they are the figurative ways in which we can see, hear and sense ourselves to be’.8 A Goddess feminist, if asked, would celebrate Rachel precisely because she was an ‘idolater’: a Goddess worshipper, even a potential priestess of Asharah.9 Perhaps sitting on these female images gave her pleasure. Intimately present to her, they liberated an erotic energy that delivered her out of the symbolic and actual house of her father, a house to which she would never return. Rachel’s enigmatic story, and the diverse history of its interpretation, typified the arguments of Carol Christ’s landmark address, and later article, of 1978, ‘Why Women Need the Goddess’. Although Christ was drawn more to the Goddess in the Greek than the Hebrew tradition, her work’s underlying theorization was both respectful of indigenous difference in the Goddess traditions while regarding them as aspects of a universal matrifocal legacy and political possibility. The cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz had observed that social ‘moods and motivations’, are grounded in religious symbols embedded in a given culture. Together, these symbols yield webs of practical spiritual meaning, even in a secular age. Christ argued that ‘religions centred on the worship of a male God create “moods” and “motivations” that keep women in a state of psychological dependence on masculine authority as legitimated by its social institutions’.10 Christ urged women to use the moods and motivations generated by Goddess spirituality to resist the ideological depression of their energies into compliance with alienating norms. The Goddess was an exteriorization of liberated female consciousness in whose natural psycho-political powers women would generate new decentralized communities of women that, in celebrating her, would celebrate themselves.11 Post-Christian feminists believed that reformist feminist attempts to remain within the Jewish or Christian fold were politically and psychologically futile. Masculine institutions and concepts of God had subdued the earth. These concepts and institutions held women, nature, and the pre- or para-biblical female divine – all aspects of the same female process – captive

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to an ideology that enslaved and exhausted their reproductivity in his name. The name of God the father had vandalized the face of the earth: it had been carved into rocks and those rocks had been turned into books about men and for men. Patriarchal words were not written on water. They were used, metaphorically, and sometimes actually, to stone women. Not all women who celebrate the Goddess are radical feminists, so called. But their elective spiritual identity follows a radical feminist trajectory. Radical feminism rejected liberal feminism’s campaign for equal rights as forcing women to be women on men’s terms; to be imitation men (which was no better than being imitation women). A socio-religious order that merely improved on patriarchy would only partially liberate women. A compromise with patriarchy would be more damaging to women’s integrity than no liberation at all.12 Incorporating elements of cultural and radical feminism, Goddess feminism was not looking to squeeze itself into a place at the patriarchal table. Unequivocally, whether lesbian or heterosexual, Goddess women did not want to take on professional or ministerial roles that permitted them to operate as honorary men. To be reborn from themselves as women required no sacrificial or legal redemptive principle for, as Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone had averred, masculine control of the machinery of myth had lent men the greatest power of all: the power to create the feminine itself.13 When Goddess women took control of the mythographical machinery it was as a means to recreate and reproduce the feminine from its cosmogonic origin in and as the Goddess. The rebirth of the Goddess was to be the rebirth of women. Because the Godess is an ecology of pure becoming, women and the Goddess, in all senses, would become one another. The patriarchal othering of the feminine was turned on its head. Feminist philosophy had criticized the definition of the masculine subject as the definition of one who has overcome his own finitude. The man had become ‘man’ in becoming not-woman. ‘Woman’ is thereby his residue: everything that is different to or deviant from the masculine. In some ways Goddess feminists took patriarchy at its word. But instead of demoting women on account of their otherness to men, thealogy discourse on the Goddess sacralized women’s otherness on account of its being all that is other to patriarchy. For the Goddess to be a comprehensive figuration of the female other entailed a comprehensive repudiation of classical theism. In its own way, thealogy had to liberate women’s imagination from captivity to the same trinity of idols that confronted all other women: the patriarchal god called God whose being exhausts all other divinity but his son’s; the idol of the masculine that created the Father God in its own image, and the idol of the feminine: the subordinated complement of her masculine husband and divine father. By the end of the 1970s, post-Christian feminists had begun to reimagine themselves by notionally reassembling the fragments of Abrahamic religion’s smashed and discarded idols. Gathering dust in the glass cabinets of

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museums the world over, were images of female divinities. Only by smashing, as it were, the glass behind which these images sat could they steal the figures and begin to glue their bodies, divine and human, back together. In their fragments lay a set of recoverable truths about women’s history before history. The reunion of an image of the Goddess with an image of the self would return women to the integrity of their beginning. The being and becoming of the feminine as Goddess was that of a primal or spiritually indigenous female subject. This was a subject who was unimaginable by patriarchy if for no other reason than she so long predated it. Highly eclectic domestic shrines were set up in gardens and on shelves and small tables. On these, women arranged images of the Goddess and her priestesses, figurative and abstract, contemporary images and reproductions, among candles, incense, flowers, shells, and other natural found objects. Sometimes these shrines contained no particular sacra but were a bricolage of small things of little or no value, precious only as expressive of a private self; often there was no visible shrine at all, or just a picture of, say, a natural spring bubbling up from the rocks and ferns. Whatever form they took, feminist shrines were not so much sites of devotion or offerings to the Goddess as the places and moments of her (usually solitary) summoning. They were concentrations of energy that powered an encounter with the Goddess-self, or simply quiet spots in which a woman might feel better. Not all women made shrines to the Goddess but when they did, the images, or objects standing in for images, mediated a form of self-blessing in which the Goddess-self would be reinstated as brought back into consciousness. One of the earliest rituals designed by Z (Zsuzsanna) Budapest was her Self-Blessing Ritual.14 Other self-blessing rituals invited women to, for example, mentally replace an image of the self as The Christian Mary for one as Venus, an image that would idoloclastically ‘devour the void’ and become, instead, a door to the sacred.15

Excavations of the feminine Goddess-consciousness was raised by various means. Cognitive archaeology was one of them. Jean-Joseph Goux’s 1973 history of the symbolization of ‘woman’ laid some of the ground. Goux’s study began with Moses’ fury at the Israelites’ worship of a female deity – the golden calf born of a cow. After this primal idoloclasm, western thought went on to destroy all figurations of female power as idols, derogating motherhood and reducing the feminine to a pure materiality to which the masculine can alone give acceptable form.16 Feminist archaeology, which took place out in the field and, as or more importantly, in the subconscious, developed these and other such theorizations to excavate a female self. Marija Gimbutas was the best known of all feminist archaeologists to release female images of the divine and of women who were once free,

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knowledgeable, and authoritative from their shallow graves. From her work it seemed to follow that patriarchy may be about 3000 years old, but it is not a divinely created natural order. The condition of women was once globally otherwise and therefore could be again; patriarchy was ‘directly contradicted by archaeological findings and analysis of the most ancient human traditions’.17 The violent destruction of the ‘idolatrous’ pagan cult of the Great Mother was the necessary precondition of patriarchy. To become God, ‘man’ had to reverse the truth that man is born of woman, not woman of man. Patriarchy could not create its own world, eternal and historical, without a necrophilic assault on feminine generativity, not just once, but everywhere and forever. Gimbutas suggested there were two main cultural systems in prehistory, the peaceful, settled, art-loving, earth- and sea orientated matrifocal one and the mobile, bellicose, sky-orientated patrifocal one that did not beautify its environment.18 In Gimbutas’ reconstruction of the archaeological evidence, matrifocal Old Europe had been conquered by the patrifocal pastoralists who instituted a new gender hierarchy in the wake of systemic deacide and ecocide as the same political process.19 Far from being images of false divinities, ample figures of the feminine such as the ‘Venus’ (as archaeologists mockingly named her) of Dolní Vĕstonice, which predated patriarchal divinities by over 20,000 years, substantiated Goddess women’s claim that images of the female divine were humanity’s true originals. Later images of patriarchal gods and goddesses, divine and human, were copies, effectively fakes. Of course, these claims did not go uncontested. Lotte Motz, for example, though not unsympathetic to the idea of female divinity, found no evidence among the world’s female divinities for a sovereign, primordial Great Mother, birth-giver to the entire natural world. Rather, she found evidence of the importance of birth-helpers, and ambiguous, impenetrable goddesses who could not be lifted from their social and religious context to form a composite figure that feminists might recognize as the Goddess.20 It is not the task of this book to intervene in arguments about whether a prehistorical matrifocal culture existed and, if so, whether it would be a good foundation for twenty-first-century sexual and spiritual politics.21 In any case, the liberation of consciousness did not hinge on whether the pre-eminence of a divine Great Mother is a myth, a historical fact, or a combination of both. What should, however, be noted is that to read Goddess feminism as a set of historical propositions is to make a category or genre mistake. Discourse on the pre-patriarchal Goddess was not a thesis but a lament: a grieving song for a great Goddess revised and excised from western historical consciousness. At the same time, this was a lament for all the women whose minds and bodies had been silenced by their image; whose quest for the Goddess had begun from a spiritual and emotional experience of death-in-life or nothingness. This existential vacuity was expressed in the lines of a poem by Asphodel Long, a feminist scholar and (Jewish) ‘Grandmother’ of the British Goddess movement who died in 2005. Long’s poem

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asked: ‘Who are you, dear sister, image/Dressed and undressed, to play, to pay, to be made nothing of, to become no-one/To keep silence?’ A few lines later, women’s condition is also that of the Goddess: I was everything who went down to nothing, They wrenched my earth and my moon, drowned me into nothing, To be forgotten, to be annihilated from time, To be no one, nowhere, no person No voice. I do not exist. Except in the hard pain in your body . . . The bruise, the cut, the stumble, the bowed head, The silence.22 Whether fictive or historical, for many Goddess feminists, but not all, the idea of a once universal cult of the Great Mother played a central quasimagical role in dis-spelling the patriarchal ideology of femininity. Goddess feminists were, after all, less concerned to establish a new religion on the back of an old one, than to retrieve a self, not a divinity, so old that it was effectively a new one. They were not literalists. Mythopoesis and the divinatory power of dreaming were in the hands of all women as the priestesses of their own cult. Gimbutas’ work was celebrated but it was not depended on as if a vision required scientific empirical justification. The Goddess movement’s affirmation of the Goddess as a reclaimed image of the natural power of the self was ‘a synonym for a woman with newly regained self-worth’. The Goddess movement gave a political, not necessarily historical, reading of prehistory (and who reads history without some kind of agenda or interpretive lens?) that gave women access to a new/old biophilic power. This was not the projective power of the ‘eternal feminine’ but a power so inalienably women’s own that it would free them from dependence on the traditional masculine offices of the sacred. This was liberation: after the Goddess, no God, messiah, priest, theologian, father, or husband, could mediate or determine a woman’s idea of her own self.23 The ‘hammer’ Goddess feminists took to patriarchy’s false god called God was symbolized by the double-headed axe or labrys. The labrys was a recurrent motif found in ancient Minoan art, believed to have been ceremonially wielded by Minoan priestesses. As a symbol of post-Christian or neo-Pagan feminist idoloclasm, often made of silver and worn as a pendant, the labrys was a cognitive tool by which women could cut through the polluted fog of patriarchal false consciousness and repossess their own spiritual-political imagination. Despite their adoption of a symbolic weapon, Goddess feminists used neither material violence nor abstraction to break idols. Traditionally, God’s honour and integrity has been protected either by breaking natural (read female) forms of the divine or by giving ‘him’ an otherwise imageless image. Borrowing George Steiner’s phrase, the Judaic God has had to be

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left ‘blank as the desert air’, revealed only in sound and words, law and history as an impossible ‘summons to perfection’.24 Against this abstraction of finite material realities into an infinitely transcendent idea, post-Christian women invoked what they understood to be the memory of a gynocentric, earth-based, pre-Abrahamic religio-political dispensation. As revenants of ‘idolatrous’ ‘foreign’ (pagan) women – herbalists, midwives, witches, priestesses, and goddesses – they also reminded the Abrahamic religions of the countless women against whom its prophets and missionaries had declared a very long war. An idoloclasm entails an actual or notional element of force or violence. Here, that force was manifest in strength and courage. If the dormant power of the female self was reawakened through re-internalized mythical figures such as the Gorgon, the dreadful (Greek, gorgós) power of this image was only ‘death-dealing’ insofar as it was prepared to outface patriarchal idols. The power of such images was predominantly life-giving as a means by which to reintegrate women’s mind, will, and body. Becoming a Gorgon was a biophilic re-balancing process not an act of religious war. Goddess feminists are vitalists and they acted for, and within, a web of life. The Gorgons, Furies, Harpies, Amazons, and assorted hags and witches that repopulated the thealogical imagination were not there to arm women for psychological warfare against God or men. These excavated images of the feminine criticized ideology by their representation of its first, primordial, integrity. That is, these were images of women from which the weight of a history of cultural artifice had been lifted. Imaged as witches, women could ritually blast open any patriarchal structure to release its captive powers. Self-imaged as wolves, their moonlit howls of protest could now be heard from far across the empty, frozen, patriarchal steppe. Self-imaged as shape-shifting Tricksters, they could laugh in the face of patriarchy, taunting its authorities, inciting chaos, eluding punishment and leading women in a merry dance to the edge of culture and beyond.25 As uncreated by patriarchy, Daly’s ‘Outcast’ woman, for example, no longer belonged to the patriarchal caste of ‘woman’. She had cast herself upon the winds; she had cast her lot ‘with the trees . . . the sands and the tides, the mountains and the moors’.26 Only as an Outcast could she be, not being itself, but the selfsubsistent reality of being-herself. The exhilaration of feminist transgression was ontological before it was political. It crossed the line of acceptable femininity into an other state of freedom without limits or norms.27 As a spiritual praxis of the women’s liberation movement, Goddess feminism was more avowedly political than its imaginary might appear. And, as was the case in other parts of the women’s liberation movement, its liberation of female existential power from conservative ideologies of femininity was first ontological. Subverting traditional dehumanizing categorizations of women with property: slaves, minors, and other mammals, Goddess women of the 1980s to the present have been an oracular-prophetic assembly, recruiting its energies from a new and colourful cast of characters,

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warning patriarchy that contemporary women have forged new/old ontoecological alliances with all oppressed others, including animals. The restoration of broken images of the primordial female divine, whether as cognitive trace or in its actual material fragments, was enough to suggest that the power of a female self is primary and inalienable. Woman/Earth/ Goddess may be endangered by patriarchy to the point of extinction, but it is also older and stronger than patriarchy. As a triple figure of natality, it is as much the condition of futurity and life as it is the condition of history and death. For femaleness is categorically alive, unlike patriarchy, which is categorically dead and whose operational systems must therefore feed parasitically, bloated on life, to persist. Goddess spirituality was and is not, then, a heritage spirituality. The archaeological record is the source of a specific and significant type of thealogical imaginary, but it is not the only one. New images of the Goddess will proliferate indefinitely for she has as many names and faces as there are women, all of them different aspects, names or faces of the self as Goddess.28 Goddess spirituality is not, in the end, justified by historical evidence, if it must be justified at all, but by its capacity to generate images of Goddess/ women’s uncountable aspects and manifestations. Goddess feminist rituals present a radically diversified and decentralized account of the female self. As Goddess feminists trawled the history of religion, it became increasingly possible ‘to find such different goddesses as Aphrodite, Arianrhod, Artemis, Astarte, Bast, Brighid, Cerridwen, Demeter, Durga, Tiamat, Uma, Vesta, Yemanja, and Zoe’ – a veritable alphabet of Goddesses – all being invoked at a single ritual.29 This litany of primary prebiblical divine names (which was also chanted on the progressive fringes of Judaism and Christianity)30 spelled – in both senses of that word – the end of women’s alienation by recalling or calling to its own power. Taken up into the natural, political, and psychological female collective under the sign of the Goddess, women were ontologically reunited with their imperfect, everchanging, selves as they spiralled in circles, hand in hand with other women, without the determination of temporal linearity, out of their bounds and into a whole ecology of new possibilities. Asphodel Long used to say, ‘When we raise Her, we raise ourselves, when we raise ourselves, we raise Her’. She evoked this natural-existential process in one of her poems: Lying in your long barrow, we sample red flowers of ecstasy. Moon, you are whirling, contracting, tearing the birth film. Your belly’s waters break out to stain the sky. Moon, you have pushed an iridescent pearl on to the horizon. Where is the moon? Inside us. I swallowed you to make a new sun.31 In Carol Christ and Starhawk’s writing, above all, the spiritual, psychotherapeutic, and political dimensions of the Goddess movement ritually cohered

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into a single liberative moment. In their work, the historical and ethical dynamic of the women’s movement was compounded by and into a movement that naturalized both. For all of life, which includes the mineral and the vegetal as well as the animal, is not only sensible, it is its own intelligent condition of becoming.32 In the 2016 book she co-authored with Judith Plaskow, Christ proposed a relatively conventional theo/alogy in which the Goddess is intelligent, loving, and personal. This is a female divine who is at once as close to Christ as her own heartbeat and a divine subject who wills the flourishing of all that lives. (In this, Christ might now be more a theist than Plaskow, who has abjured all personalist theo/alogies while remaining a Jew.) As a thealogian, Christ dissolves any natural distinction between herself, the earth, the world, and the divine. Yet she cannot accept that the divine is, effectively, as much the rapist as the raped; that war is as much a manifestation of the divine as peace. She concludes: ‘if love is the highest value in the universe, then God[/ess] must be love’.33 Nonetheless, Christ’s theology is not a feminized classical theism. There is no ordination by an immutable, omnipotent God of an immutable gender order in which a woman must transcend her own mutability and be still, quiet, and forever young.

Thealogical non-realism and the realization of a female self The women’s liberation movement was the most significant of the factors that led to the Goddess’ ‘rising’ to consciousness at the end of the 1970s, but it was not the only one. The Goddess women who formed her first networks in the late 1970s were women’s liberationists who came of intellectual and political age in a leftist counter-culture expressing its horror at modernity’s industrial, agricultural, and genocidal death factories and the possibility of nuclear global destruction. It was not just radical feminism, but a whole counter-culture, that had rejected modern political ideology in no uncertain terms as necrophilic. In despair of modernity, Goddess feminism was part of a counter-ideological turn that sought to clear the mind of modern false consciousness through mind-expanding drugs. Yoga and meditation would clear the mind of the debris of modern conflict and guide the innereye from mere sight to vision. Post-Nietzschean proclamations of the death or redundancy of God had produced not only collective melancholia, but also a humanistic, communal, more self-sufficient way of life nourished by sustainably produced food, free love, and non-western spirituality. It was in this permissive critical context, in apposition to the women’s liberation movement, that the Goddess idea suggested itself as a means of raising and liberating women’s consciousness.34 In the Goddess, women could access all the sensuous, natural, pre-modern power of the divine, unencumbered by God’s vexatious commandments and judgements. It is probably not an overstatement to suggest that in the early years of Goddess feminism, it was immaterial whether or not the Goddess was a

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self-existent reality, the first human object of worship, or a mythopoetic political device.35 To believe this or that to be true of the Goddess would have been a category mistake. Not only were the traditional virtues of faith, hope, and the provision of empirical evidence considered a poor match for the dreaming magical will, but also the binary distinction between the divine and the human had been abolished. It made little difference whether women conceived of the Goddess as a real hypostasis of the female divine, as a symbol of the female existential possibility, or a combination of the two. The ontological fusion of the human and the divine entailed that thealogical claims were predicated on no authority other than, or higher than, each woman herself. In the early years of the Goddess movement particularly, it was widely felt that the existential liberation of a female self could be empowered only by divinity as a cosmic image or symbol of her own becoming. A real existent deity would, by her singular nature, alienate or stand over and against a woman’s becoming – and that of half the world’s human population. Carol Christ, Starhawk, and Monica Sjöö were at least half-inclined to thealogical realism. But Mary Daly, Nelle Morton, and Barbara Walker, among others, tended to regard the Goddess as a revisionary metaphor. Claims about the reality and truth of the Goddess as a liberative a/effect were not the same as those for her self-existence. In this sense, the figure of the Goddess was not quite disposable, but was not that of a preeminent divine entity with a will and purpose separable from that of a given human being.36 The point of the Goddess was not to oversee the world but to bring women, literally, to their senses as speaking, hearing, real subjects. The Goddess was an imaginal medium by which women would finally, in a phrase of Morton’s that became something of a slogan, ‘hear one another to speech’. The idea of the Goddess would underwrite the absolute value of a self of-woman-born to a finite bodily life. In the Goddess, women could no longer occupy a second or derivative order of value. Above all, a self-created idea of the Goddess entailed a female self that was always open to its own recreation. Over the course of the last three decades of the twentieth century, the Goddess was far more powerful as an idea of the protean divine-female subject than as a female divine object whose existence may or may not be the case. Only in the minimality of an idea of the divine, not in the delineation of a cosmic personality whose power would demote any other, would women’s liberation deliver the self-realization it promised. It was in pursuit of that free, and to that extent, real, female self that, in 1979, in her Changing of the Gods, Naomi Goldenberg proposed a psychotherapeutic feminist polytheism. Later describing herself as an atheist, Goldenberg rejected Judaism and Christianity on the Feuerbachian grounds that there is, in fact, no God behind his projection or idol. (To some extent this uneasy position permeated all religious feminism of the time, not just post-Christian. Other women than just Nelle Morton must have wondered,

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‘What if, when you take the sexism out of God language, there is nothing left? What then?’)37 Goldenberg applied Freud’s religious criticism to the condition of women and argued that religious authoritarianism, obscurantism, fear, and compensatory thinking arrest the intellectual development of the female subject. Also influenced by Jungian insights into the power of the human psyche to reveal and guide the self through dreams and fantasy, Goldenberg had no need to propose the existence of a real, transcendent Goddess as a cosmogonic mother or ecological matrix of life, or even as the female ground of being. She could argue that the collective psychological process of realizing the Goddess archetype would depose the illusion of the father-god in heaven and thereby politically liberate women from the rule of their fathers on earth.38 Because a thealogy and an anthropology are not discursively separable, characteristically non-prescriptive, non-realist accounts of the Goddess produced radically open, self-generating accounts of personhood. Although thealogy imagined the pliable materiality of the divine feminine (this, over and against the threat of total nuclear dematerialization), the Goddess was not herself a material thing but the opening of women’s consciousness towards the birth of a new kind of woman: one who required no transcendent hypostatic cause.

The Goddess as a counter-essentialist image of the feminine Thealogical non-realism never became dogma. In fact, it was important to retain a fluid, dynamic relationship between realist and non-, or less, realist ideas of the Goddess so as to prevent any hardening of the human and divine idea.39 Starhawk’s thealogy was perhaps the most explicit in its contention that the Goddess is both a real objective reality, and women create her. Women are both images of the Goddess, and the Goddess herself. In 1979, she famously observed that the objective self-transcending reality of the Goddess – as distinct from her idea – depended on her mood: ‘It all depends how I feel. When I feel weak, she is someone who can help and protect me. When I feel strong, she is the symbol of my own power’.40 In ways anticipating aspects of postmodernism, thealogy deliberately and necessarily disrupted the categories underpinning patriarchy’s modern Enlightenment modes of thought and operation. If modern patriarchy had used its scientific-military machinery to colonize every dimension of reality, women’s liberation would need to ensure the collapse of all extant notions of time, space, and form, including any it attributed to the divine. The entire structure of reality as a hierarchical order, not just a dominion of men over women, had to be dismantled, levelled, and re-naturalized if the world was once again to be the earth: an interdependent, egalitarian web or matrix of life. Thealogical non-realism’s biocentric ontology is open and undetermined because it is a web with neither a historical nor a heavenly praesidium. One of the primary names of the Goddess is ‘All Possibility’.41 Boundaries

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between people, between humanity and divinity and between nature and culture were now permeable membranes rather than borders to be patrolled. Not even old and bitter divisions between religious traditions always mattered very much. Living on a Greek island, Carol Christ, for example, could go into a Greek Orthodox shrine or church and approach the icon of Mary as Panagia, translatable as ‘She Who is All Holy’, and look into her ‘deep brown eyes’ and kiss her image. This was no defection from one type of feminism or one type of religion to another, but rather a witness to Panagia as the female principle that encompasses, predates and outlives thought itself.42 By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the distinction between Goddess feminism and neo-Paganism in general (especially its Wiccan forms) had become less clear. Both were beginning to institutionalize, if still relatively informally, into a set of new, interrelated traditions with training programmes for priestesses and teachers. As a new elective religious (Pagan) identity rather than a mood emblematic of women’s liberation, some Goddess feminists became less distrustful of realist thealogies, and some Pagan Goddess women no longer self-identified as feminists at all. However, whether the Goddess was figured as a real self-existent hypostasis of the divine, an image of the inexhaustible capacities of the liberated female self, or a combination of both, she remained counter-idolatrous because her power operated in the open space between fantasy and reality, subjectivity and objectivity. Purely private knowledge is not possible – all knowing is communally informed and informing. But Goddess feminism would remain feminist for as long as ideology – the patriarchal perception of a woman – was not permitted to determine epistemology – a woman’s perception of reality. Thus Susan Griffin prefaced her account of female existential awakening under the rubric of: Her Vision/Now She Sees/Through Her Own Eyes.43 Even so, the charge that Goddess feminism is an apolitical essentialism at odds with the rest of the feminist movement has been something of a commonplace of feminist theory, second as well as third wave. Goddess feminism has been accused of reinstating the patriarchal denial of women’s intellectual and political agency with a recycled image of women as ‘barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen’. It was ironical, critics claimed, that Goddess feminists were generalizing about what women ‘are’ and thereby re-naturalizing and reinforcing the male-female binary.44 Although many gay, bisexual, and heterosexual men sympathetic to feminism celebrate the Goddess in intentionally non-sexist, non-essentialist ways,45 as postmodernism began to define the higher educational curriculum, incredulity was expressed at Goddess feminism’s apparently gender-exclusive images and its apparent efforts to establish a religion for women alone. Moreover, the difference between participant but critical-analytical Goddess feminist texts such as those written by Starhawk between 1979 and 1990,46 and more recent books written by Pagan women who have weaker links to

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feminism and write in a style and format similar to popular self-help manuals, has been too often overlooked. Widespread, often patronizingly expressed, misapprehensions of Goddess feminism owe much to liberal feminism having worked long and hard to achieve parities with men for which cultural feminisms such as Goddess feminism seem ungrateful. While Goddess feminism is taught and researched on undergraduate and postgraduate university programmes throughout the world, its research is rarely well-funded and, with few academic appointments, it is the least theoretically engaged of the three religious identities considered in this book. Few if any of its popular texts are philosophically reflexive in their accounts of female embodiment and experience.47 Its alternative mood and post-institutional focus on self-transformation misleads people into thinking of Goddess feminism as a New Age spirituality. Not only is this inaccurate, it subtracts Goddess feminism from the women’s liberation movement where it better belongs.48 Carol Christ, Kathryn Rountree, and Paul Reid-Bowen are among a number of feminist scholars who have rebutted the charge that Goddess feminism is essentialist. I offer some of their and my own points here neither as a further intervention in a debate that should have run its course, nor to claim that no Goddess woman has ever thought about herself or the Goddess in an essentialist manner. Rather, I defend Goddess feminism against its dismissal as essentialist because, if its critics are right, thealogical idolclasm would be a contradiction in terms. It seems to me that the charge of essentialism is, if not entirely wrong, then far from entirely right. Second wave Goddess feminism played with old distinctions between false and truthful images of the feminine in complex and sophisticated ways. It mended the archaic female ‘idols’ broken by patriarchal religion and used them to break contemporary patriarchy’s own female idols. In the process of at once breaking and mending, Goddess feminism may have reimagined women in the most protean, self-deconstructing terms in the history of second wave feminism. From the very start, Naomi Goldenberg knew that there was a risk of Goddess feminism becoming a new and equally prescriptive, limiting, version of the old ideology of the Eternal Feminine. She therefore urged women to use the mental images that populate their dreams, fantasies, and visions – which, contra Jung, are not ideal, changeless forms but particular to unique persons in their different contexts – as the source of mobilization to action. For ‘what we do in our lives is related to what we think about our lives’.49 What ‘binds us together is not, in fact, the contents, of our religious and psychic imagery but rather the continual process of producing and reflecting on imagery’.50 Images fund action. This makes them politically and existentially dynamic. Goldenberg also knew that even an insistence on flux over essence can become something of a creed, but hoped that such creeds as would emerge from women’s liberation would be ‘written on water and open to life’.51 Second wave Goddess feminism’s valorization of plurality and hybridity made it vigilant against the reintroduction of a merely feminized monotheism.

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Goddess feminists regarded monotheism as the cause and effect of a conceptual monoculture that, starved of diversity, produces solitary, jealous, disconnected, models of the divine and essentialist ideas of women. It was precisely in the interests of human diversity that Goddess feminists preferred to let their metaphors, symbols, and archetypes of the divine-human proliferate. It was better by far to risk inconsistency and mere eclecticism than to adopt a single image of a female divinity to which all women’s being and praxis must conform. Daly was a formative influence in urging that images of the Goddess are only authentic images of the divine when they inspire – or breathe life into – the self. Realized in their new bonding with Other women (the capitalization is hers), being is an active verb, not a state: ‘In these instances, Goddess names active participation in Powers of Be-ing’.52 Even if, as it turned out, the thealogical scheme, such as it was, amounted to something closer to a relaxed monotheism than a genuine polytheism,53 images of the Goddess remained sources of counter-essentialist self-liberation. Because ‘the’ Goddess has an infinite number of faces, as so many functionally monotheist deities do, the thealogical anthropology remained dynamic and plural. Goddess women often image their divine selves as serpents who are known for their capacity to shed their old skins. As Amy Sophia Marashinsky notes, the Navajo and Apache lunar, seasonal, goddess Changing Woman or Estsanatlehi (self-renewing one), is, even as she grows old, as playfully self-inventive as a child; she ‘can change her age merely by walking into the horizon’.54 Or again, by the time Carol Christ published She Who Changes in 2003, inspired by Charles Hartshorne, she had begun to present thealogy as a Process philosophy. While patriarchal thought and its rituals stabilize natural existential discontinuities by fighting death (often through the arrest of change its codes as female), thealogy celebrates change as aliveness. Essenceless change is the creative condition of the existential possibility itself. In their continuous process, the intercreative Goddess/earth/women do not so much come to be or to ‘exist’ (which can connote a stepping outside the bustle of the immanent into the lull of the transcendent) as live and die. The cross-pollinations of the natural process obviate the totality of the essential or pure. Growth and decay constitute all living things’ free, uncertain process of becoming. In nature there are neither bounded subjects nor bounded objects. In the thealogical anthropology, female being belongs to the waves and eddies of change’s churning sea, to the great storms that sweep across the land. Like the Goddess, a woman’s being is a turbulence or flow that cannot be other than always becoming.55 As Kathryn Rountree, Carol Christ, myself, and others have argued, thealogy, drawing on the perpetual, uncontrollable transformativity of nature, has no place or meaning for a single, fixed essence of woman. For reasons such as these, Ruth Mantin, writing in 2001, was struck by the parallels between theaology and postmodern feminist philosophy, especially Rosa Braidotti’s ‘visionary epistemology’ which delighted in the capacity of new images not

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to harden identities but to yield new ones.56 The most eclectic and ecstatic of all the feminist ontologies, everything in Goddess feminism is subject to a dynamic spiral of change whose flourishing is ecologically dependent on diversity, including that of ‘race’, class, and gender.57 There was little in early second wave Goddess feminism that was inherently or necessarily essentialist (indeed, the apparently casual formulation of its truth claims sometimes undermined the authority of its ethicality)58 and it was probably more theoretically compatible with third wave feminist theory than most of its critics thought it was. Even today, when the Goddess movement seems rather more credal than it did in its early years, it does not propound a universal, unchanging essentialist view of the feminine self as a hypostasis of the ‘eternal feminine’. The Goddess remains a biocentric way of thinking about the individual and her relation to the social and natural collective. Thealogy, which is a feminist discourse, understands reproductivity as the fecundity of a cultural, political, and intellectual environment, as well as an embodied state.59 Goddess feminists are as culturally and politically engaged as any other type of feminist and take their responsibility to bring up children with a feminist consciousness particularly seriously.60 Although Goddess women perceive themselves as cultural and political agents whose historical activity is grounded in the generative activity of a cosmos whose energies are characterized as female,61 its biocentrism is not a code word for motherhood but refers to an organicist identity and its values. Biology is not, then, something to which the Goddess ‘reduces’ women. And even if it does, to regard an onto-cultural association between women, or indeed the human, and the natural as their derogation may be outdated and one of the symptoms and causes of the current ecological crisis. As Kathryn Rountree has observed, the idea that a feminist should weaken or sever women’s connection with nature, love, fertility, and mothering is not only destructive, but absurd. What Rountree has to say about the ‘accusations’ of essentialism (as if it were a crime) levelled against the Goddess movement is persuasive and merits quoting in full: It could be argued that it is not Goddess feminists who are locked into understanding women’s roles in patriarchal terms, but their accusers. The debate about essentialism has been structured within the dominant binary logic of Western societies, so that accepting a maternal role has to mean accepting a patriarchal construction of maternity with its inferior status and rejecting any number of other roles women might wish to have. Like Irigaray, Goddess feminists want to confound this binary logic and move beyond it, to reconceptualize women and feminism ‘otherwise than in phallogocentric terms’. Their solution to the low value attached to the maternal role is not to reject this role, but to assign it new value and affirm it as one of any number of roles a woman might choose for herself.62

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As in other parts of this book, I have had to be selective in the presentation and citation of sources. The work of Monica Sjöö is indicative of my argument that Goddess feminists do not ‘reduce’ the female self to the personification of a uterus. What is rather being protested is patriarchal modernity’s industrial reproduction of all natural bodies in ways that void them of the finitude of flesh. Sjöö presented her readers with an existential choice: ‘we either re-become children of the Great Mother, or we remain children of the machine. The opposite of life is not death, but to become a mechanism’. This, again, is an engagement with modernity, not a retreat into the primordial feminine: ‘Politics’, writes Sjöö, ‘is important, social and cultural activity is important, everything that can be done should be done to change our situation; but these activities cannot extricate us from the machinery if they are still conducted in the terms of the machinery. Ontological evolution and revolution must be conducted in the mode of biology-and-the-dream’.63 Sjöö’s writing and painting ‘broke’ patriarchy’s unrelenting metal bodies to restore finite, yielding unreliability to a female flesh that ‘has never been quite good enough for him; his babies are all quite metalloid’. Presciently, like Daly, she warned against the replacement of real intelligence for artificial intelligence: ‘We have only to look around us to see his [“flesh free”] vision for us: Robots; computer hearts’.64 Quite the opposite of essentializing, thealogical biocentrism is a criticism of colonizing politics and their missionary religions. The colonial imposition of standardizing norms is hostile to the ‘naturalness’ of women, the land and its first peoples. But ‘naturalness’, thealogy insists, is not the state of the sub-cultural but the flourishing state of that which is properly left to itself. Goddess feminism allies itself with all those who oppose the interference of ‘big’ science, agribusiness or the hyper-capitalist manipulation of markets in order to profit the few at the expense of the many. But it is its criticism of patriarchy as the controlled leaching and burning away of the stored energy of the earth to fuel its own project which suggests that it is a criticism of an essentializing ideological economy that evacuates all natural bodies of their diversity or difference, including intra-female difference, in order to rank, control, price, and consume them.65 Thealogical biocentrism is precisely an incitement to the confusion of any monocultural patriarchal idea that divides and rules. It protests the ideological factory-farming of people as well as animals into sameness, much as fruit and vegetables are chemically treated into blemishless, tasteless uniformity. Under patriarchy, a feminine appearance and character is ideologically continuous with that of any other of its produce: shiny, plumped, unwrinkled, without knobbles or bumps, unfermented, chemically preserved and poisoned so that nothing will live in or on its skin, each person, fruit, or other unit manageably identical to the next. Finally, one might say, with Irigaray, that ‘essentialism’ is not always a bad thing. As she pointed out not long after the birth of Goddess feminism, ‘in order to become, it is essential to have a gender or an essence (consequently

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a sexuate essence) as horizon. Otherwise becoming remains partial and subject to the subject. When we become parts or multiples without a future of our own this means that we are leaving it up to the other, or the Other of the other, to put us together’.66 Yet the sheer experientialism of the Goddess movement militated against essentialism as the elimination or reversion of difference. Every woman was her own thealogian – even if few outside the academy would have styled themselves as such. Joan Mallonee experienced the Goddess in dreams whose content she did not record, for even the act of writing would change her experience ‘into a dogma, a theology. I had a strong desire to speak about the images which were so strong and personal, but I had no desire to create the implication that She would be the same for others as She was for me’.67

Thealogical Iconophilia Ideology is ascetic: it values the idea of a body while it discards the actual body as uninterestingly prey to illness, age, and death. It is in the replacement of real bodies by their heartless idea that the latter becomes preeminent over the former. Patriarchy advertises itself in visual images, but its authority is ultimately invested in abstraction. Distrustful of patriarchal logocentrism – the ideological centrality and freighting of its words – thealogy has devoted less of its constructive energies to writing theoretical texts than to making new visual images – painted, sculpted, and imaginary – of the Goddess-aswoman-as earth. As Cynthia Eller demonstrated in 2000, Goddess art makes a serious attempt to produce non-objectifying images of women. She described Goddess feminist art as a feminist ‘auto-iconoclasm’ in reverence of all that is ‘too indeterminate, too full of potentialities’ about a woman’s appearance to be captured in an image’.68 Images of the Goddess-as-woman are inherently ‘auto-iconoclastic’ because she is a shape-shifting rush of wild, unbound life, manifest in those women who are not composed; who do not sit obediently still, but ‘run with wolves’.69 As a womb-cauldron stirred into a spiral vortex of change,70 or like sunlight flickering through the tree canopy into a rich mast of leaves and seeds on the floor of a wood, the feminine is not a single, flat, still, reflective mirror image of the Goddess, or the Goddess of woman. With a marked absence of sentimentality and moralism, the Triple Goddess as Maiden, Mother, and Crone visualizes women as open to all possible past and future selves.71 In her uncommitted Maiden moment, the Goddess is an incitement to sexual and intellectual curiosity; as Mother, she hypostasizes not only the tender amplitude of maternity, but also its fierce protectiveness, anger, and occasional weary indifference; as Crone, her patient wisdom is derived from her years. Twisted around the gnarled roots of her own self, she is not just unapologetically old, she tells the truth about loss; about the smell of putrefaction as new life forms surface from the end of others. As ‘Kathy’ told Giselle Vincett, the Goddess, as Crone, brought

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her ‘face to face with my own death through the possibility of dying from breast cancer. Before that, I’d always been terrified of dying and [Goddess] took me through it. So I’m not afraid of dying now. . . . She’s helped me deal a lot with my fear. You know, I have fear. I think anyone [does] who is trying to do anything different in this world, against the wind of patriarchy – so I have fears, but I trust her’.72 While reformist Christian and Jewish feminist demythologizers called for their traditions to reinstate the full humanity of women, post-Christian feminists did the opposite and remythologized women, reading their myth as popular culture’s back-handed compliment to their sacral power.73 Instead of protesting the idolization or alienation of women, they embraced images of the meta-, post- or extra-human as that of the revenant feminine and the alien feminine, the woman who has not yet landed. Jane Caputi, in particular, imaged the numinosity of the Goddess and the transgressive women who summon her in their own persons as monstrous re-visitations of the primordial sea monster goddesses that patriarchy slaughtered to create its own post-natural order. (Tiamat is a Babylonian example of a dragon goddess of the sea who was slaughtered by the god Marduk. He ‘subdued’ her chaos by cutting her body in two and establishing from her parts a sundered cosmic order that set heaven over earth and male over female.)74 Whereas other feminists had self-realized by demythologization, Goddess feminists self-realized by accessing the mythical power of figures the rest of the modern, rational, disenchanted world regarded as fictive. They gathered aliases, masks and the personae of witches, fairies, dragons, tricksters, and other monsters that modern western culture banishes into childhood and other pasts. Whereas children are educated to grow out of the magical, Goddess feminists sought to grow through and into it. In female images of the weird and the monstrous, women summoned a cast of characters whose graphic deviance liberated them from the sexual-political tedium of the patriarchal ideological order. Resistance and protest need not only to be manifest in speeches, marches, and agitation for legal reform – all methods borrowed from men. Goddess women participated in all of these, usually more as individual feminists than as self-identified representatives of the Goddess movement, but they preferred to categorize their activism as that of imaginal disturbances – as spells, dreams, memories, and hallucinations. Against the projectile linearity of patriarchal manufacture – from its historiography to its cold, over-lit, brutalist modern architecture –75 Goddess women came to life through dark, labyrinthine passages into their own candle and moonlit circular, lunar, vulval, tidal, uterine forms, times, and spaces. But theirs was not a retreat from the modern fray that it might appear. The monstrousness of the images they adopted was intended to be akin to a provocative political cartoon – a serious but pantomimic warning that it was sheer hubris for patriarchy to believe it could control women, for women in their magico-political element were forces of nature to be reckoned with.

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The chaotic ontology of the monstrous also reinforced ‘the philosophical futility of focussing upon a metaphysic of being rather than becoming’.76 The monster’s radical disruption of temporalities, forms, and boundaries, including those of the female self, represented a post-Christian redemption of women/nature/the Goddess from the patriarchal fixation of and with categories. Goddess women replaced images of women as dolls with images of women as monsters (sirens, harpies, amazons, and so forth) as a way of dislodging traditional, acquiescent images of the domesticated feminine from consciousness, both their own and that of the social collective. If patriarchal culture profaned, that is, excluded or disappeared images of the other,77 then the reappearance of alien, mutant, numinous images of the power of the feminine presented a timely challenge to its rule.78 As Mantin would put it, ‘scratch a mythical monster’ and you ‘find a Goddess’.79 Taking on the imaginal masks of monsters – figures of what was once, and was again, their own myth – women could re-enact the feminine. No longer prepared to engage in the traditional pleasantries of their sex, Goddess women conjured the feminine uncanny as a prophetic warning to masculinist dispensations that however much they exploited, excluded, and persecuted the other, its otherness would always come back to haunt them. It had fallen to the supremely undiplomatic Daly, who did not court popularity with other women, let alone men, to say that, in any case, the true female monsters were not those radical feminists who had the courage to be – that is, the power to flout all patriarchal norms – but the stupefied women who conformed to them. It was these ‘lobotomized’, ‘misbegotten’ ‘fembots’ whose roboticism she considered lethal to other women, not a few feminist monsters.80 One of the purposes of second wave feminism was to ensure that a woman’s becoming would no longer require her to choose between motherhood and freedom. Her maturation into womanhood would not require her to repudiate her mother and sisters, as boys’ rites of passage into manhood did. Nor, after feminism, would a woman’s ‘finishing’ or completion any longer depend on finding a man to marry her. As a utopian feminism, the Goddess movement went further and began to fiction a new kind of woman for a new kind of world.81 Yet as in much utopian fiction, the counter-images of women Goddess feminism’s visionary spirituality and its praxis summoned were also reclaimed and recycled versions of ancient ideas of the untamed feminine. The development of Goddess feminism from about 1975 as a utopian spiritual politics that imagined a new world even as it campaigned for it drew on a literary tradition that ran from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic Herland (1915) set in a women’s realm founded on matrifocal values, to the classic feminist utopian fiction of the 1970s. Of this latter period, perhaps the best known works are Ursula K. Le Guin’s from The Left Hand of Darkness (1969); Firestone’s non-fictional The Dialectic of Sex (1970), which dreamed of a classless, communitarian, biophilic society where sexual difference and motherhood have been respectively abolished and transcended;

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Marge Piercy’s story of an incarcerated but visionary Woman on the Edge of Time (1976); and Joanna Russ’s of Alice Jael Reasoner, a taloned killer of Manland invaders, in The Female Man, written in 1971 and published in 1975.82 Goddess feminist utopianism sometimes took literary form, as in Starhawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing (1993).83 But more generally, it read the women’s liberation movement’s theorization and praxis of reproduction, classlessness, biophilia, communitarian lesbianism and more as themselves constituting a proleptic experience of utopia – the good place that is not yet. The fictive dimension of Goddess feminism was its use of the imagination to conjure new images of the feminine from old ones. In these, activated in the actual social and psychological spaces of Goddess, the ontological possibilities of the utopian not-yet were already in process.84 To dismiss Goddess feminism as practically irrelevant because it is utopian would be to suggest that feminist utopianism should not be taken at its word, beyond the literary bindings of a book. Goddess feminism took feminist utopianism more literally than most and actually embodied the woman yet to come. Not just made in the image of the Goddess, a woman could become, as Goddess, the full assertive subject the women’s liberation movement had promised all along. Goddess women created themselves in the image of their own vision. Iconophilic to their core, Goddess women’s self-imagination repopulated the world parthenogenetically by inviting a new breed of disruptive agents from a space outside patriarchal history and time, from a forgotten past and a feminist not-yet, to enter the present political and cultural arena.85 Utopian literature had imagined a world in which women’s time had come. In each Goddess woman, it had actually come. The casings of her idol had become a shell or chrysalis in which she had been long gestating. The women’s revolution had now put enough pressure on women’s ideological containment to bring down its manifold walls. Utopian feminist literature (including Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing) had sometimes imagined women’s liberation in the context of an apocalypse brought about by the forces of destruction through which patriarchy would finally destroy itself and, with it, everything else. Goddess feminism was not, however, a feminist apocalypticism. Only patriarchy laid waste to its own history by atrocity. The Goddess’ process of change was ecological even while it was political. As the women’s liberation movement brought institutional change, new/archaic figures of the feminine could set seed in the cracks that were beginning to appear in their once mighty edifices. The powers hypostasized by post-patriarchal women were neither good nor evil. If images of the Goddess were not savagely beautiful, then they were never merely pretty. In fact, their metamorphosis into freakishly selfpossessed subjects was to be a permanent feminist revolution against the aestheticization of women. The female self that has become mutinous can look like anything it wants, and primarily like itself.86 If the being and becoming of the Goddess cannot be conceptually or imaginally fixed, then

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no more so can that of the women who had self-mutated into her image. Thealogically, women are not, after all, merely made in the image and likeness of the Goddess, but from the body of the Goddess-earth herself. Goddess feminism revealed new images of women in a variety of mirror and water-gazing self-blessing rituals and narratives. Any woman could look into any ordinary bathroom mirror and see a Goddess looking back at none other than her own reflection, herself.87 Goddess feminist art was another way of visualizing the world through women’s eyes. Monica Sjöö’s written and painted images of women were intended to overcome their ideological self-estrangement. She was one of the contributors to ‘Towards a Revolutionary Feminist Art’ (1971), one of the first of the feminist avant-garde art manifestos.88 The manifesto set out the argument that acceptance of women into the art world was conditional on their confirmation of ‘HIS vision’. Women artists would not begin to see the world through their own eyes until they had stopped making (non)images that were obsequiously mimetic of his. Sjöö knew that women artists would only be taken seriously by the art establishment and market of that period if they produced ever bigger and more contentless paintings. Saleable modern art was non-figurative and abstract: all concept and no body. From a radical spiritual feminist perspective, it had ‘reached a dead end’. Modern art was a new iteration of fine art’s traditional severance of the ethico-political from the aesthetic. Sjöö and the other authors of the manifesto argued that the art of the time was being produced with a cold, mercantile, objectivity that objectified its object. The patriarchal abstraction of heart from images should now, they urged, give way to expression of the real hopes and dreams of real oppressed bodies. (‘FUCK YOUR OBJECTIVITY’, as the manifesto put it, concisely, in uppercase type.)89 This manifesto was one of the paradigmatically idoloclastic feminist flyers of its day: ‘LIES AND LIES ARE WE BRED ON! We are slaves with the consciousness of slaves’. Women, the manifesto proclaimed: ‘LIVE A SHADOW LIFE’. But now they were coming out of the shadows and into the light for a purpose: ‘WE WANT TO ACHIEVE A WORLD VIEW’.90 Sjöö’s most iconic work, God Giving Birth (1968), was first exhibited at the St Ives Arts Council festival in 1970, where its removal was promptly ordered by local councillors.91 The painting, which imaged God as a nonwhite woman with a baby emerging from her open vulva, was based on the natural home-birth of Sjöö’s second son, Toivo, in 1961. His birth was an epiphany for Sjöö. She remembered it as: a first initiation to the Great Mother who is both imminent and transcendent, both dark and light. For the first time I experienced the enormous power of my woman’s body, both painful and cosmic and I “saw” in my mind’s eye great luminous masses of blackness and masses of radiant light coming and going. The Goddess of the Universe in her pure energy

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From broken idols, a Goddess feminist self body. This birth changed my life and set me questioning the patriarchal culture we live in and its religions that deny the life-creating powers of the mothers and of the Greater Mother.92

Or again, in Sjöö’s painting, Birth and Struggle for Liberation (1969), the depiction of a natural, home-birth in which the mother is surrounded by large images of women’s faces from all over the world, each with differently resilient, powerfully carved features, symbolizes women’s liberation as a local and a global labour for life’s emergence. As she points out of women, ‘Life does not emerge from us, we emerge from it ’.93 Sjöö’s paintings were points of material access into the process of women’s becoming as the birthing of a new self. Women were starting to feel their way down through the darkness. As Susan Griffin put it, ‘we see nothing. We are in the center of our ignorance. Nothing spreads around us. But in this nothing we find what we did not know existed. With our hands, we begin to trace faint images etched into the walls. And now, beneath these images we can see the gleam of older images. And these peel back to reveal the older still . . . shimmering now like an answer from these walls, bright and red’. Back, and back, from the womb-cave, women are reborn to themselves and into, ‘the one who first swam from the mouth of this cave. And now we know all she knew, see the newness of her vision. What we did not know existed but saw as children, our whole lives drawn here, image over image, past time, beyond space’.94 As so often in the history of religion, the way to the light was to be a passage through the darkness. Goddess art uncovered images of women concealed deep within lightless Cro-Magnon caves. Some of these images depict expulsed babies still connected to their mothers by an uncut umbilical cord. To Goddess women, these were icons of the female body drawn in the earthy pigments of ochre, sienna and umber, unalienated, made from its own earth and its own mother. In a style often recalling prehistorical cave art, Goddess art was never fine art for art’s own sake. Its icons were idoloclastic. They replaced classical art and pornography’s false images of women with truthful ones as objects of celebration rather than as objects of pornographic desire posing as worship. In the work of Sjöö, Carolyn Hillyer, and other spiritual feminist artists, each female body was the sole agent of her own creation.95 The imagination of the earth as Goddess and of the Goddess as the earth: mountainous, forested, gravid, old beyond age, could not have been a more effective counter-image to that of a woman either desexualized as the object of romantic love or hyper-sexualized as no more than the sum of her genitals. Goddess art sacralized female bodies of all shapes and sizes, ages, and ethnicities. Notably, it sacralized fat women as images of the unbudgeable, uncompromising, unassailable presence of the divine feminine as the boundless generosity of female flesh. Images of pregnant women as sacred mounds and hills, as the landscape of the divine, also returned dignity, weight, and substance to the spectral woman.

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Painted in the early 1980s, Meinrad Craighead’s Enclosed Garden, for example, iconizes femaleness as a pregnant womb-garden,96 its uterine symbols representing women not as the traditional passive vessel for male seed, but as garlanded agents of a bounteous sacred. The birthing gate of the garden is open, its low walls holding life safe, not imprisoning it. Goddess art’s symbology of the uterus and the egg reclaims and celebrates natality. Against theological, pornographic, and genocidal matricide, the gaping vulva, as in Kaali Cargil’s recent painting Heteira, gowns the female divine-human body in a vivid labial robe. Other such images recall the paleolithic descending triangle ‘signifying cosmic energy spiralling down into manifestation through matter’; the ancient egg-shaped stones engraved with the vulva, dating from around 6000 BCE, and the openings of caves that are painted in red.97 In all of these images, the folds and layers of the vulva are not (as in Hannah Wilke’s work, a wound) but a portal into the fullness of life. The open vulva, like that of the grinning stone Sheela na gig whose image was carved over the lintels of early medieval buildings all over Europe, is where history begins. Though here, history is not a linear chronology of competing masculine wills to power, it is subsumed into and healed by the larger, circular natural process. The whole material apparatus of Goddess feminism – not just its paintings – is a composite image of women whose bodies are a natural history of the earth itself. As observed by Adrienne Rich: ‘[t]he images of the pre-patriarchal goddess-cults did one thing: they told women that power, awesomeness, and centrality were theirs by nature, not by privilege or miracle; the female was primary’.98 Images of the Goddess were used ‘to reflect on how it feels to recognise female power as sacred’.99 A thealogy of image can use one ‘idol’ to break another: that of the patriarchal clone of the feminine. In the mid-1980s, Luisah Teish, the AfricanAmerican Yoruba priestess and Goddess feminist writer, dancer, and ritualist gave women detailed instructions for how to make a ‘soul doll’ (what in a patriarchal context would be called a ‘fetish’). The soul doll would have the power to break the power of a woman’s own idol over her. It would return her to herself as what Teish called ‘the me I hid from the world’100 (and, one might add, the woman the world had hidden from her). Created in a carefully selected private space, Teish’s ‘soul doll’ was to be made in the image of a woman’s own aspirations and achievements. She would look like her maker; would become her own maker. Lovingly sewn together by hand, stuffed with boneset tea, ornamented with coral and crystal, sponge, fragments of mirror, and her maker’s own hair, the doll was to be given a secret name and left covered (gestated) for nine days. After this, she was to be given a birth party at which she would be introduced to her maker’s women friends and placed on her maker’s personal altar or place of honour. This ritual of self-representation, wrote Teish, ‘is how you find yourself’. The doll, Teish warned, would be talking to her maker even as she made her. The relationship between image and self was one of intimacy

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and relearned trust. Women were urged to take great care not to lose their dolls through carelessness or theft.101 Few Goddess women would go to such elaborate lengths as to make a material soul doll of herself. Yet there is a non-literal sense in which all second wave feminists made soul dolls of themselves in so far as they were necessarily engaged in a cognitive and emotional process of self-reunion that would be achieved by taking ownership of the imaginal process of self-reproduction.

Postscript: a parting of the religious feminist ways For about 20 years, there had been enough common ground between reformist and radical religious feminists to hold these two sub-movements within the women’s liberation movement together. As Mary Ann Beavis has shown, the line between Christian feminism and post-Christian feminism can be blurred, to say the least.102 Not all religious feminists (myself included) can or should be categorized as being either reformist or radical in their approaches to a given tradition, as if the two are invariably opposed. Irigarary, for example, drew on those figures and mysteries of the Catholicism of her formative years that she considered ‘fruitful for a becoming divine of [her] feminine subjectivity’. She believed that the Christian tradition can be liberative when it is faithful to itself.103 She did not, at least in 1984, want to suggest that women self-deify or ‘regress to siren goddesses’ going into cosmic battle against male gods.104 Any yet she also left the Church as an adult and, as a way of entering ‘further into womanhood, and not [to] become more alien to ourselves than we were, more in exile than we were’,105 drew on a pre-Christian imaginary. She imagined how, before an omnipotent male God, women were guardians of the carnal and spiritual dimensions alike; she remembered when a woman was ‘goddess not servant’.106 Not only did Christian and post-Christian feminists alike perplex the secular majority in the women’s movement, both presented a powerful ecological critique of the ‘Judaeo-Christian’ tradition. Most biblical feminists resented the revisionist excision of scriptural and other evidence for syncretistic incorporation of the divine feminine in the belief and practice of the earliest Jewish and Christian communities. All religious feminists were committed to the principle of natality. The quest for authentic, useable images of the divine feminine was one shared by all religious feminists. All agreed that women’s liberation entailed liberation from false ideas of both the divine and the female, the one alienating the being and preventing the becoming of the other. For a few years at least, the re-awakening of the Goddess had been welcomed by reformist feminists. In the early 1990s, for example, conferences held for women in theological research included a significant minority constituency of Goddess feminist scholars. Goddess-orientated music and drama often featured in the evening entertainments. It was at one such international conference held in England by the European Society for Women in Theological Research at the University of Bristol in 1991 that that I was first

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introduced to the Goddess in Judaism by Alix Pirani, who was running a small workshop on the archetypes of Lilith and Shekhinah. Asphodel Long introduced me to Asherah at another international meeting of the same body. But in many ways, it was an argument over idols that weakened ties between Goddess feminists and Christian and Jewish feminists. Goddess feminism had re-divinized the self by the reinstatement of archaic images of the feminine that biblical and secular feminists regarded as representative of a retrogressive mystification of the feminine. Reconstructed idols worried reformists not because they were ‘pagan’ but because they jeopardized newly achieved sexual equalities predicated on women’s full humanity. The gradual institutionalization of feminism into Christianity and Judaism, as well as, of course, certain irreconcilable theological and political differences, also meant that some reformist religious feminists preferred to keep themselves at some institutional distance from Goddess feminism. The counter-cultural style of Goddess feminism (Sjöö identified as an anarchist) and what most regarded as the flimsy evidence for its prehistorical origins were at risk of damaging what, in some quarters of the academy, was feminism’s still unproven reputation for rigorous scholarship.107 An apparently polytheist radical feminist politics could tarnish the good monotheist name of religious feminism and the concessions that liberal religious feminists had been winning for women through the 1970s and 80s in their respective theological and liturgical communities. Reformists had made undeniable progress and much was at stake. Jewish and Christian movements for women’s ordination as rabbis and priests had garnered significant support among male clergy as well as other women and men. Feminist hermeneutics was just beginning to be introduced into mainstream academic biblical studies courses. Reformist innovations in liturgical language and ritual were making Judaism and Christianity more gender-inclusive environments for worship than they had perhaps ever been before. For these and other reasons it could be impolitic for women to express sympathies for Goddess feminism. Such associations could, moreover, damage a potential ministerial or academic career. Cracks in the relationship between Christian and Jewish feminists and Goddess feminists, who were sometimes known (confusingly) as ‘spiritual feminists’, began to appear in 1980, when Rosemary Ruether argued that ‘instead of creating a more holistic alternative’, Goddess feminists had ‘succumb[ed] to the suppressed animus of patriarchal religious culture’. By this she meant that the sheer bulk of patriarchy’s religious and cultural monopolization of public reality had cast a formidable shadow. It was in conquest of its own shadow – the other – that a dominant patriarchal identity had been defined and established. The demonized religious shadow-side of patriarchy consists of a set of threats to the power of its unity or purity: indigenous nature religions, magic, goddess worship, and for 2000 years, Judaism as well. But whereas Jews had managed to maintain a distinction between their own Jewishness and the anti-Jewish Christian animus, Ruether believed that an autonomous gynocentric religion had not survived

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as a living tradition and probably never existed in the first place. There is, she thought ‘no imaginary line of descent for a feminist religion’. Goddess spirituality could not be a genuinely holistic alternative if it had been taken over from a hostile patriarchal idea of what a women’s religion would look like.108 Ruether was not alone in regarding late twentieth-century Paganism as more of a countercultural romantic construction than a rediscovery of the world’s first religion. Feminist neo-Paganism, no less than any other kind of neo-Paganism, seemed to Ruether to have abdicated political and ethical responsibilities to the poor by its bourgeois retreat into nature as the source of an essentially aesthetic experience unsullied by modernity. Ruether, who, like Carol Christ, has considerable knowledge of the western Goddess tradition, later insisted that she was not rejecting Goddess feminism as a path for women. She was merely warning that ‘feminists have no perfect option from some past tradition’ and was reminding the movement to be cautious of sentimentalizing maternity.109 But by 1993, when Pam Lunn published her article ‘Do Women Need the Goddess?’ – a rebuttal of Carol Christ’s foundational manifesto for why women did need the Goddess –110 damage to the relationship between reformist and radical religious feminisms had already been done. The two liberative trajectories had been dividing for some time. Of course, long friendships between feminist theologians and thealogians could survive these differences of opinion. Plaskow and Christ’s life-long friendship has outlasted periods and aspects of intellectual and spiritual estrangement, as is movingly evident in their 2016 book, Goddess and God. But, at the end of the twentieth century, many women who remained in the Church felt that post-Christian criticism of the biblical traditions was exaggerated and insufficiently nuanced. A sense that the Goddess was a retrograde image – a gluing back together of idols into a composite that biblical religion may have had some legitimate theological reasons for breaking – was typified in early remarks made by the Jewish feminist critic Cynthia Ozick. She considered her more progressive Jewish feminist sisters’ (re)turn to the Goddess – even goddesses located in the ancient history of Israel or ‘buried’ in classic Jewish texts – to be a reversion to idol worship that Judaism existed precisely to break.111 Even in liberal Jewish circles, apparent feminist reversions to idolatry were not encouraged. When, in the late 1980s, it came to the attention of the popular Jewish press that Jane Litman, a student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, was making small images of the Hebrew goddesses and ostensibly worshipping them, there was an outcry and she received little support from the College. In a transcript of an interview conducted by Dana Densmore, the interviewee remembered that Jane Litman was known at the time as Jane Litwoman: And she at the time was very into the ancient near eastern goddesses. And was trying to show, and she was right, that … the women of ancient

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Israelite society [set up] little statuettes of Astarte and Ishtar, etc. And so in her apartment in Philadelphia she had a whole mantle filled with these little statuettes. When others got wind of it . . . Jane went through a real inquisition at the College: Are you engaging in witchcraft? Are you engaging in pagan practices, etc.? And so you need to know about that because it put a real shadow over a lot of the feminist stuff that was going on.112 Although the meta-gendered God of reformist feminism was sometimes styled as God/ess, the God of feminist theism was not the Goddess. The grammar, logic, and divine characterization of the biblical scheme did not permit such an elision. Jewish feminists such as Ellen Umansky and Athalya Brenner agreed with Christian feminists that men had created their own god in their own image,113 but regarded this as a historical contingency, not a theological necessity. It did not constitute grounds for rejecting the occluded God of what they regarded as an essentially liberative tradition. Jewish and Christian feminists agreed that the patriarchal ‘dominology’ was a systemic corruption of the original goodness of the world’s natural and social order, but it was one from which the God of biblical tradition had also mandated an Exodus. Of course, few, if any, Jewish and Christian feminists would have charged women who invoke the Goddess, whether instead of God or as well as God, with idolatry as a sin, even if they thought it an error. Naomi Graetz, for example, was probably not untypical in being persuaded that for a Jewish woman to worship God using Goddess imagery may be no more idolatrous than using certain other anthropomorphic Jewish means of imagining God.114 But, broadly speaking, Jewish feminists did not wish to break with ethical monotheism. It was this that funded their practical prophetic criticism. And in any case, the Jewish God, they insisted, is a complex figure whose ‘biography’ encompasses a good deal more than the moral and spiritual deficiencies of the Israelite Lord of Hosts. If Jewish women wanted to overcome their alienation from God they could do so through liturgical and ritual revision. Images of the divine feminine were already more than vestigial within the scriptural canon – principally Hochmah (the figure of Wisdom) and Shekhinah (the figure of God’s presence). On their part, Goddess feminists regarded reformist images of the divine and, indeed, of the women’s liberation movement, as irrevocably compromised. That Jewish and Christian communities were sexist beyond reform would surely damage women’s self-image and limit their powers of sacral self-expression. Thealogy rejected Jewish and Christian monotheism as irremediably intolerant of plurality and difference, whether human, cultural or natural. Thealogy saw itself as a milestone in the criticism of patriarchal religion as false consciousness. There was no God behind his idol: the projective Father-idol of masculinity is God and the Judaeo-Christian tradition that mediated him was regarded as a necessary, not contingent, abjection

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of female vitality to the ends of its own project.115 Above all, the heavenly Father and Lord of Hosts or Armies had ordered the murder of the Goddess in the breaking and erasure of her image. There was no way back to Abrahamic religion from that. It was not in transgressing against the Church or the rabbinate, but in the transgressiveness of female otherness itself, that spiritual feminists believed the work of the women’s liberation movement would get done. When the women’s liberation movement had liberated nature, divinity, and history from male domination, all these, under a natural rubric, would take care of themselves. With its absent or demoted figures of the female divine and its anaemic figures of feminine piety, the Abrahamic dispensation may have dignified obedient wives and mothers, but it demonized women who operated outside, or were not admitted to, the patriarchal family. Under this dispensation, all women, whether compliant or unruly, had been stripped of the cultic agency natural to, or cognate with, their embodied cultural and biological process.116 Any feminists who chose to remain under the authority of a masculinist tradition had shown a failure of nerve. The character of Shug, in Alice Walker’s 1982 novel The Color Purple, had provided some of the best-known lines of the religious feminist project when she exclaimed in a letter to Nettie that ‘Trying to chase that old white man out of my head . . . [is] hard work, let me tell you. He been there so long, he don’t want to budge’.117 In the opinion of most Goddess feminists, Jewish and Christian women may have ceased to be the dutiful daughters of that old white man but he still occupied their consciousness. Goddess feminists were not persuaded that Exodus communities had anywhere to go, or sufficient natural vitality to get them there. For them, the Christian patriarchal dominology would be most comprehensively overcome by reclaiming not the symbols of the tradition that oppressed them – Jesus nailed to a wooden cross and Mary pregnant by a holy ghost – but the figure those traditions oppressed, namely woman herself. These arguments were mostly academic. In practice, most Goddess feminists were not exercised by them. While the Church had once wielded decisive social and psychological control over women, by the beginning of the 1970s, it had become functionally irrelevant to all feminists other than Christian feminists. And by the 1990s, when it was becoming apparent that the backlash against feminism and the rise of socially ultra-conservative ‘fundamentalist’ religion were connected, Goddess feminists’ avoidance of Abrahamic religion was already customary. The concomitant rise of a (maledominated) ‘new atheism’ which regarded religion as irrational, socially retrogressive and dysfunctional, not to mention simply untrue, provided further confirmation for their by now routine distrust of traditional theistic creeds and culture. By the early 1990s, Goddess feminism had found a natural home in the predominantly American, but also European and Australasian, neo-Pagan movements.118 Some women also continued to situate themselves on the

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ultra-liberal margins of Jewish and Christian communities and are content to have a liminal religious identity to this day. Religious affiliations, especially in late modernity, are complex. The late or post-modern spiritual turn to the self, with its preference for a spirituality without doctrinal propositions, allowed many people to feel more at ease with hybrid identities than might once have been the case.119 After the third wave had dissolved every binary in gender’s path, the charge of idolatry, with its assumption of the absolute ontological and cultural integrity and discretion of categories and things, no longer made much sense. That a Goddess-self was an imaginal habitat rich in flora and fauna; a bricolage of half-dreamed, recycled divine parts, was more in tune with its time than might be supposed.

Notes 1 Naomi Goldenberg coined the word ‘thealogy’, as distinct from theology, to refer to discourse on the Goddess (thea) in the late 1970s. 2 ‘Breaking the Tabu: Doing the Unthinkable’, From the Flames, 10 (Summer, 1993). 3 Asphodel Long described her own activism as ‘Declaring My World Space, Declaring to the World I Was There’ (Poem on Old Age (1987), Athene Revisited, p. 24. 4 http://artcornwall.org/features/Monica_Sjoo_God_Giving_Birth.htm, accessed 25.6.18. Sjöö was living and working in St Ives in Cornwall when the painting was removed from view. It is notable that, according to Sjöö, none of the abstract artists working in St Ives at the time this feminist image was suppressed made any representations in support of the image. Sjöö was especially disappointed by the silence of the eminent sculptor Barbara Hepworth. 5 Quite what the teraphim referred to, either as a grammatically plural single object or a collection of objects, is uncertain. They seem to have been household, possibly lunar, divinities small enough for nomadic households to carry with them from settlement to settlement. They were also probably present in elite and royal households, as indicated in the story of Michal who uses the teraphim to help David escape from her father Saul in 1 Samuel 19. 6 Ezekiel 21: 21. 7 Wendy Zierler, And Rachel Stole the Idols: The Emergence of Modern Hebrew Women’s Writing, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 2004, pp. 1–4. 8 See Shoni Labowitz, God, Sex and Women of the Bible, Discovering Our Sensual, Spiritual Selves, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1998, pp. 58–60, 64–65, 71. 9 Savina Teubal, a Jewish scholar closely associated with the Goddess movement, speculated that Rachel, who died and was buried on the road to Canaan, may have intended to use the teraphim to establish a new shrine there (Sarah the Priestess: The First Matriarch of Genesis, Athens, Swallow Press, 1984, p. 99). 10 ‘Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological and Political Reflections’, in Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow, eds., Womanspirit Rising, pp. 284. 273–287. 11 See further Marilyn Gottschall, ‘The Mutable Goddess: Particularity and Eclecticism Within the Goddess Public’, in Wendy Griffin, ed., Daughters of the Goddess: Studies of Healing, Identity and Empowerment, Walnut Creek, Altamira Press, 2000, pp. 59–71. 12 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, p. 137. 13 Beauvoir, The Second Sex, pp. 171–292; Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, esp. pp. 121–147.

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14 ‘Self-Blessing Ritual’, reprinted in Christ and Plaskow, eds., Womanspirit Rising, pp. 269–272. Budapest is a founder of the feminist Dianic tradition, which to this day excludes men from specific rituals such as the uterine Blood Mysteries, which are for female-born women. 15 Karen LaPuma, Awakening Female Power: The Way of the Goddess Warrior, Fairfax, SoulSource Publishing, 1991, pp. 177–178. 16 See Economie et symbolique (1973) and Les iconoclastes (1978), translated by Jennifer Curtiss Gage, published in English as Symbolic Economies After Marx and Freud, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990, esp. pp. 134–150; 205. 17 Jean Markale, The Great Goddess: Reverence of the Divine Feminine From the Paleolithic to the Present, Rochester, Inner Traditions, 1999, p. 48. 18 See e.g. ‘Women and Culture in Goddess-Oriented Old Europe’, in Charlene Spretnak, ed., The Politics of Women’s Spirituality Essays on the Rise of Spiritual Power Within the Feminist Movement, New York, Anchor/Doubleday, 1982, pp. 22–31; The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe, 7000–3500 B.C.: Myths, Legends and Cult Images, London, Thames and Hudson, 1974. 19 See further Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, New York, HarperCollins, 1991 [1987]; Ramona Wanlass, ‘The Goddess, Syncretism and Patriarchy: Evolution and Extinction of the Goddess During the Creation of Patriarchy in Ancient Israel’, Women in Judaism: A Multidisciplinary Journal, 8 (2011), 1–16 and Carole Light, ‘The Effects of Patriarchal Systems on Beliefs Surrounding the Goddess in Pre-History and Early Christianity’, Feminists Issues, 12 (1992), 73–82. 20 The Faces of the Goddess, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997. 21 See Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future, Boston, Beacon Press, 2000; Paul Reid-Bowen, The Goddess as Nature: Toward a Philosophical Thealogy, Aldershot and Burlington, Ashgate, 2007, pp. 18–19. 22 ‘If Women Could Speak, What Language Would They Choose?’ (1977), in Athene Revisited: Collected Poems, Calcutta, Writers Workshop Books, 1999, p. 32. 23 Asphodel Long, ‘The Goddess Movement in Britain Today’, Feminist Theology, 5 (1994), 11–39, p. 15. 24 In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture, London, Faber & Faber, 1971, p. 38. See further Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, Athens, Georgia University Press, 1982 p. 58. Shepard offers an eco-philosophical critique of monotheism that closely parallels post-Christian feminist critiques of monotheism published just a little later than his. His book is also predicated on the possibility of recovering a ‘secret’ undamaged self from the fear-ridden, alienated political and psychological structures in which it languishes. 25 Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon, Boston, Beacon Press, 1986, p. 191. See also Griffin, Woman and Nature, pp. 169–227, and passim; Raphael, ‘Thealogy, Redemption and the Call of the Wild’, pp. 56–58, 60–61. 26 Daly, Pure Lust, p. 3. 27 See further Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment, pp. 256–259. 28 Caputi, Gossips, Gorgons and Crones, p. 290. 29 Reid-Bowen, The Goddess as Nature, p. 60. See further ibid., pp. 57–62. 30 See Melissa Raphael, ‘Truth in Flux: Goddess Feminism as a Late Modern Religion’, Religion, 26 (1996), 199–213; ‘Goddess Religion, Postmodern Jewish Feminism and the Complexity of Alternative Religious Identities’, Nova Religio, 1 (1998), 198–214. 31 Asphodel Long, ‘New Moon in December’ (Part of the ‘Moon Cycle, 1978’), p. 60. 32 She Who Changes: Reimagining the Divine in the World, New York, Routledge, 2004, pp. 45–47, 52. 33 Goddess and God, pp. 158, 207.

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34 Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods, pp. 42–43; Christ, ‘Why Women Need the Goddess’, passim; Morton, ‘The Goddess as Metaphoric Image’, in Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ, eds., Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, New York, HarperSanFrancisco, 1989, pp. 111, 115; Emily Culpepper, ‘The Spiritual Political Journey of a Feminist Freethinker’, in Paula M. Cooey, ed., After Patriarchy: Feminist Transformations of the World Religions, Maryknoll, Orbis Books, 1991, pp. 146–165; Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. xix. 35 See Reid-Bowen, The Goddess as Nature, p. 18; Sally Binford, a feminist archaeologist and proponent of technological approaches to archaeology, was dismissive of spiritual feminist speculation in this area. See her, ‘Are Goddesses and Matriarchies Merely Figments of Feminist Imagination?’, in Charlene Spretnak, ed., The Politics of Women’s Spirituality, pp. 541–549. Other positions were more nuanced. I summarize some of this debate over the priority of matriarchy in my Introducing Thealogy: Discourse on the Goddess, Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1999/ Cleveland, Pilgrim Press, 2000, pp. 75–96. 36 Reid-Bowen, Goddess as Nature, p. 36. 37 The Journey Is Home, p. 203. 38 Changing of the Gods, pp. 29–30, 33, 36, 38 and passim. See further Richard Grigg, God After God: An Introduction to Contemporary Radical Theologies, New York, State University of New York Press, 2006, pp. 111–126. 39 For a fuller presentation of thealogical writing on the nature of the Goddess, see Raphael, Introducing Thealogy, pp. 52–74. 40 The Spiral Dance A Rebirth of the Religion of the Great Goddess, New York, Harper & Row, 1979, p. 81; Christ, ‘Why Women Need the Goddess’, p. 278; Beverley Clack, ‘Denial of Dualism: Thealogical Reflections on the Sexual and Spiritual’, Feminist Theology, 10 (1995), 104. 41 Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing, New York, Bantam, 1994, p. 207. 42 She Who Changes, pp. 237–238. The permeable boundaries between Christian and Goddess feminism are also exemplified in Lucy Reid, She Changes Everything: Seeking the Divine on a Feminist Path, London and New York, Bloomsbury, 2005. 43 Griffin, Woman and Nature, p. 163. 44 Kathryn Rountree, ‘The Politics of the Goddess: Feminist Spirituality and the Essentialism Debate’, Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 43 (1999), 138–139. 45 David Green’s article ‘What Men Want? Initial Thoughts on the Male Goddess Movement’, Religion and Gender, 2 (2012), 305–327, argues that the men’s Goddess movement celebrates the Goddess as an anti-typical image of the feminine that liberates them from an oppressive ideology of masculinity as the (here, unwilling) head and complement of femininity. 46 E.g., The Spiral Dance; Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics, London, Mandala, 1990. 47 See Ruth Mantin, ‘Can Women Travel with Nomads and Cyborgs? Feminist Thealogies in a Postmodern Context’, Feminist Theology, 9 (2001), 29. Carol Christ’s Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality, London and New York, Routledge, 1997, is one of several of her books that are unusual in being participant thealogical texts that are also ‘systematic’ in their presentation of, and advocacy for, Goddess feminism. 48 In New Age and Armageddon: The Goddess or the Gurus? Towards a Feminist Vision of the Future, London, The Women’s Press, 1992, Monica Sjöö distanced Goddess feminism in no uncertain terms from what she considered to be the dangerously apolitical ‘positive’ thinking of the New Age Movement. See also Reid-Bowen, Goddess as Nature, pp. 19–20. 49 Changing of the Gods, p. 62.

238 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

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Changing of the Gods, p. 64. Changing of the Gods, p. 71. Beyond God the Father, pp. xviii–xix. Cynthia Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America, New York, Crossroad, 1993, pp. 131, 141; Beverley Clack, ‘The Many-Named Queen of All: Thealogy and the Concept of Goddess’, in Deborah Sawyer and Dianne Collier, eds., Is There a Future for Feminist Theology? Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1999, pp. 150–159, 155; Melissa Raphael, ‘Monotheism in Contemporary Feminist Goddess Religion: A Betrayal of Early Thealogical Non-Realism?’, in Deborah Sawyer and Dianne Colliers, eds., Is There a Future for Feminist Theology?, pp. 139–149. Patty Kenelly, http://mydailygoddess.blogspot.com/2008/07/changing-womancycles.html, July 28, 2008, ‘Changing Woman: Cycles’, presenting an excerpt from Amy Sophia Marashinsky’sThe Goddess Oracle, 1997. Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment, p, 259; Reid-Bowen, Goddess as Nature, pp. 137–139. Mantin, ‘Can Women Travel with Nomads and Cyborgs?’, pp. 31–32, 36–37. Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment, pp. 255, 257. See Raphael, ‘Truth in Flux’, pp. 203–207. Helen Hye-Sook Hwang, Trista Hendren, Wenifer Lin, and Kaalii Cargil, ‘Introduction’, in Helen Hye-Sook Hwang and Kaalii Cargill, eds., She Rises: Why Goddess Feminism, Activism and Spirituality? vol. 1, Chicago, Mago Books, 2015, pp. 4–5, 6. See further Reid-Bowen, Goddess as Nature, pp. 160–163. Kathryn Rountree, Embracing the Witch and the Goddess: Feminist Ritual Makers in New Zealand, London and New York, Routledge, 2004, p. 63 and passim; Raphael, Introducing Thealogy, pp. 116–133. See Raphael, Introducing Thealogy, p. 93. Embracing the Witch and the Goddess, pp. 63–64. The Great Cosmic Mother, p. 390. The Great Cosmic Mother, p. 42. The two classic radical feminist expositions of this process are Griffin’s 1978 Woman and Nature and Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, published in the same year. ‘Divine Women’, p. 61. Quoted in Carol Christ, ‘Heretics and Outsiders: The Struggle Over Female Power in Western Religion’, Soundings, 61 (1978), 260–280, p. 277. Cynthia Eller, ‘Divine Objectification: The Representation of Goddesses and Women in Feminist Spirituality’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 16 (2000), 24–26, 27, 31, 41–43. Clara Pinkola Éstes, Women Who Run with Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild, London, Rider, 1992. On the operations of the cosmogonic womb in thealogy, see Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment, pp. 262–297. See e.g. D.J. (Deanna J.) Conway, Maiden, Mother, Crone: The Myth and Reality of the Goddess, St Paul, Llewellyn, 1994. More recent celebrations include Claire Hamilton’s Maiden, Mother, Crone: Voices of the Goddess, O Books, Ropley, Hants., 2005. Popular studies such as these may have been influenced by Goddess feminism but do not offer a spiritual feminist politics in the manner of Starhawk, Zsuzsanna (Z) Budapest, or Monica Sjöö. They are written for a wider neo-Pagan readership that includes men and women who do not necessarily identify as feminists. ‘Goddess Feminists and the Body’, in Matrifocus: Cross-Quarterly for the Goddess Woman, Beltane, 2009, www.matrifocus.com/BEL09/goddess-feminism. htm, accessed 4.8.18.

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73 Cf., Genesis 1: 2–7. Goddesses and Monsters: Women, Myth, Power, and Popular Culture, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2004, p. 19. See also her earlier study, Gossips, Gorgons and Crones. 74 Caputi, Goddesses and Monsters, pp. 23–24. 75 This protest against the modern disenchantment of nature and the evacuation of fun from the modernist built environment is also evident in the work of organicist counter-cultural architects like Jan-Erik Andersson who similarly refuse the nature/culture binary. I was privileged to spend an evening during the international conference Art Approaching Science and Religion at the Åbo Akademi University in his leaf-shaped, non-linear house in Turku, Finland, which exemplifies this reunion of nature and culture. See Jan-Erik Andersson, Life on a Life: My House as Total Artwork, Ghent, Belgium, AraMER, 2014, esp. 27–33. 76 Reid-Bowen, Goddess as Nature, p. 148. 77 Irene Diamond and Gloria Feman Orenstein, Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism, San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990, p. xi. 78 See further Melissa Raphael, ‘Gender, Idolatry and Numinous Experience: A Feminist Theological Approach to Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy’, in Jörg Lauster, Peter Schüz, Roderich Barth, and Christian Danz, eds., Rudolf Otto: Theologie – Religionsphilosophie – Religionsgeschichte, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2013, pp. 251–262. 79 ‘Can Women Travel with Nomads and Cyborgs?’, p. 39. 80 Daly’s dismissal of women she considered to be the abject creatures of patriarchy was sometimes regarded as elitist. Moreover, it was easier to be indomitable if, like Daly, one had an assured income, white skin, and access to international presses. (See further Lynne Segal, Is the Future Feminist? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism, London, Virago, 1987, pp. 20–21.) 81 Saxton, ‘Introduction’, The Girl, p. xx. See also Tatiana Teslenko, Feminist Utopian Novels of the 1970s: Joanna Russ and Dorothy Bryant, New York and London, Routledge, 2003, pp. 163–165. 82 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex; Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, New York, Ace, 2003 [1969]; Joanna Russ, The Female Man, New York, Bantam Books, 1975; Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time, London, The Women’s Press, 1976. 83 New York, Bantam Books, 1993. 84 Teslenko, Feminist Utopian Novels, pp. xii, pp. 163–165. 85 See Melissa Raphael, ‘Thealogy and the Parthenogenetic Reproduction of Femaleness’, in Michael A. Hays, Wendy Porter, and David Tombs, eds., Religion and Sexuality, Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press, 1998, pp. 213–225; Mantin, ‘Can Women Travel with Nomads and Cyborgs?’. 86 See further Melissa Raphael, ‘Call of the Wild’, and Thealogy and Embodiment, pp. 203–212. 87 See e.g. Luisah Teish, Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals, New York, HarperCollins, 1985, pp. 38–39, 49. 88 Katy Deepwell, ed., Feminist Art Manifestos: An Anthology, London, KT Press, 2014, ebook, no page numbers. 89 The masked feminist artist-activist group Guerrilla Girls was formed in 1985 for just such reasons as these. The group remains highly active to this day, though is now more characteristically fourth wave or intersectional in its campaigns for the representation of all culturally overlooked people in art and the art world. In 2015, they performed a ‘stealth projection’ on the façade of the Whitney Museum in protest against the monetization and appropriation of art by a superrich elite that has the buying power to define aesthetic merit in accordance with its market value.

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90 A Manifesto, reprinted in Katy Deepwell, Feminist Art Manifestos. 91 God Giving Birth was later bought by the Anna Nordlander Women’s Art Museum at Skelleftea in Sweden, and was similarly condemned as offensive by Swedish conservatives. 92 ‘God Giving Birth’, www.artcornwall.org/features/Monica_Sjoo_God_Giving_ Birth.htm. 93 The Great Cosmic Mother, p. 386. 94 Griffin, Woman and Nature, pp. 159–160. 95 Eller, ‘Divine Objectification’, pp. 23–44. 96 See Eller, ‘Divine Objectification’, pp. 28–29. 97 Sjöö, The Great Cosmic Mother, pp. 60, 76. 98 Adrienne Rich, ‘Pre-Patriarchal Female/Goddess Images’, in Charlene Spretnak, ed., The Politics of Women’s Spirituality, p. 33. 99 Eller, ‘Divine Objectification’, p. 25. 100 Jamalaya, p. 39. 101 Jambalaya, pp. 192–195. 102 Christian Goddess Spirituality: Enchanting Christianity, New York and Abingdon, Oxon, Routledge, 2016, pp. 1–3 and passim. 103 Key Writings, p. 145. 104 ‘Divine Women’, p. 60. 105 ‘Divine Women’, p. 60. 106 I Love to You, p. 135. See further idem, In the Beginning, She Was, London and New York, Bloomsbury, 2013, passim. 107 I am, of course, generalizing. In British theology departments, for example, Ursula King and Lisa Isherwood, both Christian feminists, hosted numerous seminars and conferences that gave a platform for thealogy. 108 ‘Goddesses and Witches: Liberation and Countercultural Feminism’, Christian Century, September 10–17, 1980, pp. 842–847. 109 Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History, Berkeley and London, University of California Press, 2005, pp. 3–5. 110 ‘Do Women Need the GODDESS?: Some Phenomenological and Social Reflections’, Feminist Theology, 4 (1993), 17–38. 111 ‘Notes Towards Finding the Right Question’, pp. 121–122, 120–151. 112 Densmore, ‘Feminism and the Transformation of Judaism’, pp. 153–154. 113 See Ellen Umansky’s contribution to Christ, Umansky, and Carr, ‘Roundtable Discussion’, p. 124. Brenner, ‘The Hebrew God and His Female Complements’, p. 156. 114 Unlocking the Garden: A Feminist Jewish Look at the Bible, Midrash and God, Piscataway, Gorgias Press, 2005, p. 163. 115 Changing of the Gods, esp. pp. 29–30, 33, 36, 38. 116 See Merlin Stone, ‘The Three Faces of Goddess Spirituality’, in Charlene Spretnak, ed., The Politics of Women’s Spirituality, p. 65. For a study of Goddess feminism’s theorization of the transformativity of female embodiment see Melissa Raphael, Thealogy and Embodiment, passim. 117 New York, Washington Square Press, 1983, p. 179. 118 Cynthia Eller, ‘The Roots of Feminist Spirituality’, in Wendy Griffin, ed., Daughters of the Goddess, p. 25. 119 See Raphael, ‘Goddess Religion, Postmodern Jewish Feminism and the Complexity of Alternative Religious Identities’, pp. 198–214.

9

After idoloclasm

What next? Naomi Goldenberg opened her book The Changing of the Gods with the words, ‘“What will happen to God?” I first asked myself this question in 1971’.1 By 1979, when she published it, feminist idoloclasm had not only begun to alter the course of western women’s history, it had made a significant contribution to the modern disorientation of human power. Idoloclasm is a means to liberate the future from the past. It is the breaking of a hole in an airless construction through which aperture life might find its way. But the destructive, theatrical act of idoloclasm cannot be, itself, a program for the future. It is not itself a positive theology. There is much in this book that betrays my own sympathies, but because it is about idolbreaking it offered few opportunities for the more constructive theo/alogical professions I have made elsewhere. The idoloclastic moment, necessarily, stops short of describing any determinate, accomplished concrete reality. Its drama is the moment of deciding to decide: of making the blow for freedom, not its aftermath, freedom itself. There is, in a sense, nothing to say about an idol. An idol is a formal termination of possibility. Its opacity or ‘stupidity’ (as Levinas would call it) occludes becoming by objectification or stoppage to the point of its object’s ‘death’, this, when it has finally substituted its own empty form for its object’s real one. An idol’s vacation of the subjectivity of the divine or human person it replaces is a kind of murder – what has been called the most serious kind of murder.2 But once the idoloclast or her object has been redeemed from the death of idolization and has arisen, got to her feet, anything (or nothing that is immediately discernible) can happen. This is why redemptive narratives are apt to finish abruptly. The joy is not long and drawn out. The gospels end with and after Jesus’ resurrection appearances; a romantic novel ends with a long-awaited declaration of love or a marriage, and the chronicles of war end with the declaration of peace. The tension of the story breaks with the resumption of profane or ordinary time after the heightened sacred time of crisis. A continuum may have been irrevocably broken with the breaking of an idol, but its dust settles in ways that are not always predictable or even particularly interesting.

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An idol empties forms of life. That it is the very form of nothingness presents the risk that the consequence of its breakage or release will be the anti-climax of nothing changing at all. And yet there is plenty of evidence to suggest that not all the women’s liberationists who broke idols experienced the nothingness after nothingness described in chapter three of the present study. On the contrary, there was a good chance that women’s liberation from their idols would make them happier. ‘Ultimately’, wrote Germaine Greer, ‘the greatest service a woman can do her community is to be happy; the degree of revolt and irresponsibility which she must manifest to acquire happiness is the only sure indication of the way things must change if there is to be any point in continuing to be a woman at all’.3 And whatever its consequences, there was joy to be had in the act itself as ‘the purposive employment of energy’ towards emancipation from ‘helplessness and need’; in the process of ‘learning to walk freely upon the earth’.4 For most women there would still be a very long way to go before the world could be enjoyed without the politics of the possessors and the possessed. But, in the meantime, there was transgressive delight in the idoloclastic moment, especially in its laughter. Simone de Beauvoir observed young girls’ self-liberation when bursting out laughing at their own absurd poses and at the men who, as well as denigrating young women, made themselves ridiculous in adoring them.5 Because, to become a ‘normal’ woman, a woman ‘must enter into the masquerade of femininity’ – because she can ‘appear’ and ‘circulate only when enveloped in the need/desires/fantasies of others, namely men’ – Irigaray likewise encouraged women to ironize patriarchy by laughing among themselves. She advocated women’s adopting comedically absurd postures that mimicked ideologically assigned roles.6 Fearless laughter in the face of power is, after all, a demonstration that the one who laughs has seen through its pretensions. Nothing punctures and deflates vanity more effectively than its parody. Helpless laughter, better than the barbs of satire, recaptures some of the resistant joy that gets dissipated by the resentments and manipulations of the routinely demeaned.7

After captivity, the open air Irigaray, at the beginning of the 1990s, hoped that, after idolclasm, after ‘breaking out of our formal prisons, our shackles, we may discover what flesh we have left. I think color is what’s left of life beyond forms’. By this she meant that women’s liberation was the release of an exuberant sexuate female energy. A woman will bloom or flower, again and again, when she ‘stays close to herself and the living world’.8 There were good grounds for her hope. From around 1968, feminist idoloclastic theory and practice pursued an emancipation caricatured in the popular press as ritual ‘bra-burning’. Although mythical (it almost certainly never happened) bra-burning was not a bad metaphor for idoloclasm: for women’s dismantling and discarding

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the apparatus of their containment and experiencing the liberation of their minds and bodies in the kinesthesis of free movement. There is a strain of literary romanticism traceable from say, Dorothy Wordsworth to Simone de Beauvoir and on to Susan Griffin, in which young women experience the metaphorical and material conditions of liberation in nature – a far-flung free space beyond the traditional religious reclusion of women and beyond liberal feminism’s opened professional doors. Here, roaming free, on paths of their own choosing, the social and cultural horizons of the feminine opened onto new vistas.9 Insofar as nature has been apprehended as a symbol of the first and last unmediated power and beauty, to find oneself in nature by getting lost in it could be something akin to what religionists describe as being in the presence of God. But even without any mystical freighting, whether living in solitude in nature,10 in the non-personal companionship of other living, growing, wild forms, or simply going for a walk in the countryside, nature could be a trope and occasion of the active recovery of women’s existential integrity. For feminist vitalists – and only vitalists are idolclasts – women’s insurrection, whether secular or spiritual, was also a resurrection. The women’s liberation movement was a revolution that returned life to women, before it returned to them an equitable distribution of power and goods. Hence Faith Rogow’s three-part round, ‘Praise be, woman, ARISE’,11 had something of the turn of the seasons about it; a celebration of the end of winter. Women’s happiness in nature, experienced as a site of existential liberation and return to self, was not, however, a re-assimilation of the feminine into the undifferentiated sphere of nature or the cosmos, as if it had no place in the urban, terrestrial centres of creative and political power. It was rather to experience the open country, which even in Beauvoir’s period was becoming agri-industrialized and had been ravaged by two world wars, as, at least notionally, unconditioned by the human idea. As that which is ‘unconquered, inhuman, nature subsumes most clearly the totality of what exists’.12 In a cultivated environment, woman is another cultivation, ‘whereas among plants and animals’, wrote Beauvoir, she is a human being; she is freed at once from her family and from the males – a subject, a free being. She finds in the secret places of the forest a reflection of the solitude of her soul and in the wide horizons of the planes a tangible image of her transcendence; she is herself this limitless territory, this summit flung up towards heaven; she can follow these roads that lead towards the unknown future, she will follow them; seated on the hilltop, she is mistress of all the world’s riches, spread out at her feet, offered for the taking.13 Later in the twentieth century, Greer said much the same thing: girls need a wide literary and natural world in which to roam. As she notes in her preface to the 2003 edition of The Female Eunuch, ‘most of the women in the

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world are still afraid, still hungry, still mute and loaded by religion with all kinds of fetters, masked, muzzled, mutilated and beaten’. It is in resistance to patriarchal ideology’s prescription or permission to contain and control women’s bodies, that women must seek the ‘freedom to run, shout, talk loudly and sit with [their] knees apart. Freedom to know and love the earth and all that swims, lies, and crawls upon it’.14 Big landscapes – open skies, moors, and expanses of water – at once signify and offer the experience of existential freedom. For a woman to roam in what has been left untouched to grow into its own undomesticated, unhusbanded form, that has no interest in or idea of who she was, is, or might be, is to experience a liberation from her image. For radical feminists – Firestone, Daly, Dworkin, and others – the women’s liberation movement was movement into a breathing space whose fresh air would wash or blow through consciousness. They had described women as ‘caked and encrusted’ in the rot or ‘mould of man-made femininity’. A combination of theological aspersions of sin and impurity and pornographic violation had left women feeling in need of purification rituals of their own making.15 Idoloclasm, as a washing of ideology from consciousness (not to be confused with ideological brainwashing) could be a revival or expansion of being after its diminution and confinement. Outside, in gardens, parks, woods, and fields, women could inhabit a flesh that is ‘no longer a defilement: it means joy and beauty. At one with earth and sky, the young girl is that vague breath which animates and kindles the universe . . . her being is imperious and triumphant like that of the earth itself’.16 The feminization of the breath was pivotal. In Irigaray’s lexicon the ‘diabolic’ amounts to the ‘idol’ for, like the idol, ‘it delights in enclosure, it avoids the draught. . . . Miming the living, the diabolic does not breathe, or does not breathe any longer. It takes away the air from others, from the world. It suffocates with its sterile repetitions’.17 Feminist idoloclasm, however, is a mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Coming out into the fresh air, after the musty gloom of a social order that hushes and stills the feminine, the women’s liberation movement let women hear themselves speak; unselfconscious, untidied, unbounded, a breeze blowing through them back into the light. Carol Christ’s early literary study of women’s spirituality, illustrated by reference to the work of Kate Chopin and Margaret Atwood, found that instead of evoking a (re)turn to life through a traditional masculinist crisis of a conversion, women’s spirituality is a redemptive surfacing from a state of patriarchal nothingness. It is evoked as an awakening of being. The recovery of a fragmented self is the recovery of its sheer vitality in and through the aliveness of the natural world. It is here that Christ locates the possibility of what, using a widely used term of the time, she called women’s ‘wholeness’.18 A brief example of such might be provided by Elizabeth Goudge in her early book The Middle Window. Goudge, a twentieth-century British

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author of novels, children’s stories and Anglican devotional meditations, remembered her own walking holidays in Scotland when she described the fictional Judy, hill climbing alone, after rain, on the Isle of Skye: The sun was gloriously warm on her face. There was no breath of wind, no sound at all. . . . But the silence was charged with life. She felt it all around her, running through the visible world like an invisible flame and . . . out of the silence and loneliness there came to her a vivid sense of her own individuality. . . . She did not feel dusty now, she felt washed, with her true colours showing; and she could have shouted for joy. . . . She was becoming herself.19 These neo-romantic articulations of liberation share a sense that movement oxygenated not only a woman’s body but her languishing female self. What Daly’s idoloclasm set out to do ‘was to Blast a hole in the wall between the foreground and the Background – a hole so large that everyone who is really Alive can get through. . . . I decided that the way to do that was just to be my Natural Self, who is Extreme’.20 Only out in nature’s open air, she urged, could a woman access an elemental Self removed ‘with a leap and a bound’ from the ‘foreground’ – the surface, alienated consciousness – into ‘the Background’: the Homeland of the female self.21 The out-of-caste, outcast self comes, in all senses, to her senses in the Background. This is not an elaborate apology for the autonomy of the bourgeois individual. Daly’s self-decolonization affords a state of at-oneness with herself in the embrace of a whole uncolonized, animate cosmos.

‘Only (re)connect’ The ultimate purpose of second wave idoloclasm was relational. To free women from the congestion of their definition was a redemption of the self that would open them to the subjective reality of other selves. The authenticity of the self was not an end in itself but a condition of authentic relation with other full selves; with other non- or awakened objects. The women who sought a liberation of consciousness were also activists closely involved in producing the tangible effects of political direct action with, and on behalf of, the female collective. (How even the briefest exposure to collective feminist praxis could permanently shift perception of the boundaries of the self and the exercise of its will became apparent to me, in my early twenties, over the course of one entirely unheroic but unforgettable day spent with two friends at the Yellow Gate of the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common.) No second wave theorist thought that breaking open the idol of ‘woman’ would reveal an authentic female self, who had been there all along, curled up alone inside its rigid casings, waiting to be born. Daly’s early feminist anthropology imagined the female self as a living, growing seed, dormant

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within its ideological husk, but was referring to a feminist entelechy of the self, not to a ready-made self.22 The aim was the achievement of a difficult freedom that decided for, rather than found, a self. After idoloclasm, self-estrangement would be gradually overcome, but not in abstraction from others. Feminist idoloclasm was politics, not psychotherapy. An individual may make their own idoloclastic gesture or think idoloclastically. But idoloclasm is an act of liberation whose realization of the self is not on behalf of the self alone. The feminist criticism of idols is a criticism of the (e)strange-ment – the othering – of women from their humanity through a process of divide and rule in which the self is separated from and subordinated to the appearance of its patriarchal idea. Idoloclasm is therefore the beginning of a solidarity with (and of) the self in social and political solidarities with other selves. The purpose of feminist idoloclasm was the end of a whole idolatrous dispensation not personal liberty. The self was set free for permeability to subjectivity itself, not for the creation of a private universe. All feminisms, from liberal to radical, sought a new existential paradigm in which female self-fulfilment and relationality would no longer be mutually exclusive.23 Encouraging neither antinomian licence nor the imposition of new feminist codes of behaviour, what feminists wanted to know was what it would be like to want to do this or that of their own accord. In this, women’s liberation was to be that of a self-owned, named human subject, her self-arrival a general amelioration in the condition of the human, not of women alone. As Mary Wollstonecraft had already pointed out at the end of the eighteenth century, ‘Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers – in a word, better citizens. We should then love them with true affection, because we should learn to respect ourselves’.24 Ursula King described feminist spirituality as in search of a state of consciousness that would give women a ‘wholeness, a sense of meaning and a purpose’ by which thought and action might be unified and directed. E.M. Forster’s ‘Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest. Live in fragments no longer’,25 abbreviated to the imperatival ‘only connect!’, was by now feminist spirituality’s slogan for an uncontained self. By the late twentieth century, spirituality was no longer an ascetic discipline but a liberation of the modern, alienated self into psychological, ecological, and political connectivity. In this, feminist spirituality and other spiritualities of the period were in close accord.26 King shared with other late twentieth-century commentators ‘an emerging understanding of spirituality as the inner core made up of all the experiences and encounters one had in one’s life and out of which come the motivations, inspiration and commitment that make one live and decide in a particular way’.27 King’s account of ‘the inner core’ of feminist spirituality was far from socially, politically, and environmentally a-contextual. She, Mary Grey,

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and numerous other religious feminist scholars of the period were closely involved with practical, communal, initiatives for improving the lives of women both locally and globally. King and others were describing a political self that had been liberated for, and within, global socio-ecological relationships with other selves whose becoming could only be a condition and a reflection of their own. Feminism, in turning its back on the Enlightenment’s elitist individualism, was not looking to an achievement of the female self as another hostile thing that divides the world into a few subjects and their many objects. The self, as assumed in the work of Carter Heyward and others,28 is not, after all, a thing but an active, erotic, connective process and event occasioned in and by movements for social justice. Liberation from false consciousness was not, then, a lonely, possibly interminable, process of self-purgation that would contribute little or nothing to the transformation of human relationships and their material conditions. Granted, it is a good deal easier for a woman to come into her own when she enjoys some degree of financial independence and is not too much encumbered by familial duties of care. But not even those liberal feminists least invested in systemic political, philosophical, and spiritual criticism regarded the acquisition and exercise of female agency as a private achievement. Jean Baker Miller, in 1976, urged women to ‘find’ themselves not by severing relational connections but redefining them with ‘a strong conviction of their own worth and of their own right to self-development and authenticity’.29 Or again, the post-Christian feminist ethicist Eleanor Haney wrote of ‘self-centring’ as ‘precisely that movement of one’s personal existence that brings women into an at-homeness in the universe. It is one pole of a graceful relationship with all that is, it is one extremely important step in a process of coming into congruence with others, of becoming whole’.30 For others such as Charlotte Bunch, the repossession of a female self was most comprehensively achieved in lesbian relationships as expressions of a political affiliation before they were those of a private sexual preference. Radical feminist lesbianism protested the sexualization of women, including the sexualization of lesbianism, which is not reducible to a sexual act. Patriarchy, Bunch argued, defines a ‘real woman’ as ‘one who gets fucked by men. We say that a Lesbian is a woman whose sense of self and energies, including sexual energies, center around women – she is woman-identified’. While heterosexual women would need to forge relationships with men who know that they too, ‘will have to build new selves that do not depend on oppressing women . . . the Lesbian, woman-identified woman, commits herself to women not only as an alternative to oppressive male/female relationships but primarily because she loves women. Whether consciously or not, by her actions, the Lesbian has recognized that giving support and love to men over women perpetuates the system that oppresses her’.31 Adrienne Rich was also notable among those for whom a liberated female self was a lesbian self. In 1974, she said that she ‘absolutely [could not] imagine what it would be like to be a woman in a non-patriarchal society’ but

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could catch a ‘rare glimmer’ of what that might look and feel like in women’s love for women. In the mirror of a woman facing her face in mutual love, she would at last see who she was; her own self-referring image. Resistance to the debasement of women’s erotic and biological relationships by alienating social constructs was conducive to a new self, ‘radically unintimidated by custom’ and ‘radically willing to reject societal constructs and “historical” precedent’.32 Another way to see a new self in relation was by its articulation in a circle of other women. Ritualized talking in women-only consciousness-raising groups provided women with moments of self-revelation through learning how to speak and listen to other women in their own voice, unmediated and uninterrupted by men.33 In these free conversational spaces, women had begun, in all senses, to hear themselves speak. With the intention of divesting herself of determinate roles and imaginal substitutes, a woman’s emergent self had, at least in theory, entered the group’s circle by the telling of a story that was at once inalienably particular and her own, and common to all those around her. Together and singly, the stories women told would begin to tell them. In advance of activism, a woman’s struggle to find words for and about herself was a way to find a thematic and a language by which to understand her relationship with herself and thereby with other women. In breaking out and stepping forth from her image she would realize that she was not alone; her condition of estrangement had a political name and a cause, and in that circle it was already being overcome.34 With conventions for respectful listening, personal stories were heard because those lives mattered in and of themselves and because to organize personal experience into a feminist narrative was also to offer a political analysis of its formation and its resolution. The monthly meetings of the New York feminist scholars in religion in the early 1970s, for example, took on ‘a sacred character’ as women began to find a language (indeed a God-language) of their own. Judith Plaskow, citing Nelle Morton’s words of 1979, remembers: ‘We literally heard one another down to a word that was our word and that word was ourselves’.35 Some radical feminists were convinced that the only way women could be and become themselves was in isolation, periodic or permanent, from men. In women-only separatist households and communities, men were not, or should not have been, so much reviled as redundant. Goods and services were supplied by other women, many of whom had developed professional skills previously almost exclusively associated with men: those of electricians, taxi-drivers, tree-surgeons, plumbers, and so forth. Separatism achieved a clarity and integrity of image that, wholly withdrawn from the ambit of the male gaze, would no longer function as a mirror to an otherwise all-pervasive masculinity. Separatism may have broken its ties with a full half of the world’s population, but it also created a whole new world from the other half, one in which the possibility of self-estrangement was obviated from the outset.

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New directions for new selves A wide range of practical and intellectual activities materialized the female self as it came out from the shadows of its idol. One of the principal ways by which women culturally and historically substantiated and relearned themselves after absence and silence was through further and higher education. It was only in the last decades of the twentieth century that (broadly middleclass) women entered higher education in significant numbers. A feminist education was not to be a traditional education. Its purpose was not so much to train women (educare) as to educe them. That is, from the Latin educere, women’s return to education would, as the etymology of the word suggests, lead them out from a potential state into an actual one; allow them to branch out and bring an object, formerly themselves, into closer view, no longer dependent on the masculine episteme. In Britain, Women’s Studies programmes were first hosted by women’s liberationist groups in local centres for adult education, but from the early 1980s Women’s Studies courses were introduced in parts of the university sector and modules in other degree programmes also began to use gender as a category of analysis. These gave access to curricula that critiqued stereotypical images of women and privileged women’s voices and perspectives. These curricula were not merely corrective of tendentious arguments or there to fill a gap in knowledge. They offered a paradigm-shift that would reshape the terms, values, and content of knowledge and understanding itself. Until the state stopped paying their fees, many British women enrolled as mature students at their local colleges, polytechnics, and universities, often combining motherhood with their studies. Many of these mature students paid a significant price for their intellectual and creative becoming. Giving up their jobs could result in financial hardship. Joining new learning communities could incur the resentment of husbands and children who felt threatened by the alterations in attitude and identity that critical academic engagements, especially in the humanities and social sciences, almost inevitably occasioned. Perhaps because so much was at stake – not only the stability of marriages but their own self-idea – these women, often preparing essays and revising for exams after finishing the washing up and when everyone else was asleep, were among the most intellectually committed and creative students I have encountered over the course of my teaching career. Other women enrolled in self-defence classes that were designed to build confidence in a woman’s psychological as well as physical resistance to assault. Yoga classes were also counter-ideological in their cultivation of women’s awareness of the self as a supple, elastic, unity of mind, will, and body. Just as their first wave foremothers had advocated, women also got into their existential stride by adopting more comfortable and expressive, less elaborate and hampering, clothes and shoes. Refusing to shave and pluck their skin of hair, women chose to use less, or different types of, makeup. Their faces began to take on the character of what Irigaray described as a

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face ‘open to the light’; ‘the new dawn’ of a face unmasked and un-sculpted. This was a face whose bloom came not from a tube or bottle (the ‘fresh’ and ‘natural’ look is surely the hardest of all light make-ups to achieve). It had been spirit- and wind-blown back to its ‘perpetual beginning’, drawn again and again from ‘the depths’ that nourish it.36 The history of patriarchy is a history of men speaking on behalf of women. After idoloclasm, women had to come to life by learning how to represent themselves to culture and to themselves. Representation of women’s new self-image was not only the task of feminist visual artists. Women had to learn to speak and write their own truth in their own language. Under the death-sentence, as it were, of a ‘phallogocentric’ dispensation, a woman cannot speak herself, cannot break the silence of her image, when she has no language of her own.37 Luce Irigaray had warned: ‘If we continue to speak this sameness, if we speak to each other as men have spoken for centuries, as they have taught us to speak, we will fail each other’. Patriarchal words will ‘pass through our bodies, above our heads, disappear, make us disappear. Far. Above. Absent from ourselves, we become machines that are spoken, machines that speak’.38 Inspired by Irigaray, Elisabeth Lenk discovered that she need not be the blank page upon which masculinity writes itself. She began to re-write herself as a ‘new woman’: a woman who has become ‘many’, occasionally melting into ‘pure movement’; someone fluid, threatening, yet to come. She was not alone: ‘Before they have even considered whether there can be such a monster, such a cross-breed, such a deviant creature, [women] have started to film, paint, write and dream her’.39 At the same time, feminist commentators of the period were all too aware that even feminist narratives were compromised by their linguistic constitution and mediation. Mary Daly therefore set about inventing a new (English) language order to write women into existence.40 She needed an uncontaminated language in which women could listen and ‘speak forth’ their existential ‘stepping forth’.41 Arrogation of the power of naming from God and men enabled women to reinvent, redefine, and repossess themselves. Daly’s texts articulated women from a set of disjointed, disassembled puppet limbs. Her ransacking of patriarchal genre and culture provided her with vast piles of trash from which to assemble and build a cast of inimitable types and characters. From the scrap metal of patriarchy she coined striking neologisms and metaphors that gave her a post-apocalyptic feminist vocabulary of her own. She used metaphor as it is etymologically intended, namely to carry an object beyond its idea. Her metaphors ferried women out of captivity and into the new existential dimensions of their inner and outer re-spatialization. Daly’s prose has had an indelible effect on the consciousness of numberless feminists (including my own), whose lives may bear little resemblance to that of a separatist like herself. But not even Daly could smash the ‘mind-binding’ grammar of patriarchy: the rules and terms by which the world has been ordered into a particular comprehensibility and for which, even after modernism, no readable,

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communicable alternative exists. (Daly’s work endures precisely because it is not written in a private language but a redeployed one.) While, contra Daly, I remain convinced that patriarchy has always been countermanded in the sublime creations men and women have produced under, or in spite of, its watch, as Adrienne Rich wrote in her Twenty-One Love Poems, no one (other than perhaps Daly) can or ‘has yet imagined’ the woman-identified woman under the prevailing conditions of patriarchy.42 Nonetheless, in her middle age, Adrienne Rich wrote (of) her transformation from daughter-in-law to radical lesbian feminist in and through poetry. Once liberated from the rigid casings of social expectation, Rich became the breath or vibration of her own words: ‘an instrument in the shape of a woman trying to translate pulsations into images for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind’.43 Not for her, the silent lunar wastes that lay at the end of Daly’s transcendental feminist trajectory. Not for her, the primordial speech of Jewish and Christian cosmology, in which God summons the world into existence by his word alone. Rich wanted speech to touch the bedrock of the ordinary, of the immanent, laid down over generations upon generations of women’s lives. In her poem The Dream of a Common Language, women were offered, perhaps not a language, but language that is spare and free of literary conceit. In her ‘dreams of tenderness’, women would come to know and love what they have also known and loved all along: the familiar mysteries of life among the women all around them.44 Watching actors gesticulating in silent-movies is like watching people turned into flickering images or ghosts even when they were still alive. After the breaking of the deathly silence of idols, feminist artists began to write and sing their own songs in their own voice. Traditionally ideologically commended as hushed or silent absent-presences, women began to experiment during the 1970s with the audible expression of what Frankie Green, citing Barbara Ehrenreich, after Durkeim, described as ‘collective effervescence’. Feminist musicians staged women-only events, at once secular and spiritual, in which women danced and sang with one another in ecstatic ritual celebration of their new identities. Political solidarity was built in festivity. As in any revolutionary movement, the transgressive carnival pulse of loud music released the power of the oppressed and drummed out the ideological powers of its repression.45 Frankie Green remembers: ‘We placed a notice in the London WL [women’s liberation] workshop weekly newsletter and lots of women responded who wanted to play, discuss, and develop feminist music; they got together at Hazel’s council flat in Peckham and from that grew the London Women’s Rock Band’. After acquiring some instruments and a primitive PA system, Green and her band played their first gig at the national women’s liberation conference at Acton Town Hall in October 1972, handing out song-sheets and inviting other women to join in with them. The band practised in squats, pub rooms, and friends’ flats all over London: ‘It was certainly exhausting,

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that intense period at the beginning of the 1970s. I remember it as full of great fun as well as stormy relationships, arguments, and fallings-out. We were angry about all injustice and exploitation. It was a watershed time of extraordinary energy, an upsurge of political activism that encompassed and changed many women and vast swathes of life, and I feel lucky to have been in the right place at the right time to be involved in that’.46 The feminist academy played a central role in reassembling the fragments of post-idolized women. The reconstructive work of Jewish, Christian, and post-Christian feminist theorists towards the revelation of a divine-human feminine has been discussed in the previous five chapters of this book and needs no further rehearsal here. Feminist historiography had different methods and concerns to those of feminist theology and feminist studies in religion. But even if their methods bracketed out the dimension of revelation, after idolclasm, feminist historians were nonetheless engaged in the resurrection and revelation of three-dimensional female speaking subjects by writing their subversion and resistance back into history. Some of the first feminist historians retrieved women’s agency from the obscurity of myth and forgetting by reminding the world of their underacknowledged contributions to its public institutions. While early second wave ‘contribution history’ supplied surprising and not insignificant evidence of precedent and achievement, feminist historians went on to realize a far larger number of ordinary women’s lives, reconstructing their thoughts, desires, prayers, and dreams from their devotional diaries, artefacts, novels, poems, drawings, paintings, embroideries, and rebellions large and small. Feminist history, like that of feminist literary studies, now covers a vast and diverse historical, ethnic, and geographic terrain. The ground was laid in the 1980s by scholars such as Joan Kelly, Joan Wallach Scott, and Gerda Lerner.47 With the publication of Gerda Lerner’s The Creation of Patriarchy in 1986 (its thesis was conceived in the early 1960s) it became apparent to ever more people that patriarchy itself had a history. It did not originate in the natural, indeed cosmic, order. Its figures and institutions were relative not absolute or necessary. The second volume of Lerner’s Women and History series tracked feminist consciousness back to the medieval period, suggesting that women were not and had never been the duped objects of ideological control that sometimes even feminism itself implied.48 Feminism has a history, and historiography is political. In short, once fully historicized, no woman could any longer be generalized and reified into a hypostasis of the natural, perennial, ‘eternal’ feminine. The idea or idol of the feminine is constructed in accordance with specific socio-historical needs, aspirations, and fears. Recording previously unrecorded histories of women’s leadership, learning, and activism not only changed the shape of canonical traditions, it also changed the shape or figure of the feminine, not least by lending it interiority. Feminist historiography played an existential role in bringing women back to life as neither the ornaments nor the auxiliaries of culture. Women could no longer be classed as

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those to whom things merely happened. Above all, when women knew their past they could be confident of their future, not trapped in the bodies and domestic institutions of an a-temporal, indefinitely extended present.

Becoming (divine) Earlier chapters of this book have examined how theistic feminists self-realized by abjuring their traditional idea and re-creating themselves in their own divine image, whether as the equal of men in the Church, or as a Jew, a full member of the people Israel, assembled alongside the men at Sinai, past, present, and future.49 The Christian and Jewish feminist project was to enable each woman to become the non-reproducible, divinely created, original of herself. I end this book with the suggestion that in recovering their humanity – in becoming fully human – not only Jewish, Christian, and in different ways, post-Christian women, but also secular women, instantiated the process of what Luce Irigaray called ‘becoming divine’. It was in the nature of feminist theology as a type of apophatic theology that its notion of a divine person would exceed not only the images and claims of any particular patriarchally mediated religious tradition, but religion itself.50 For that reason becoming divine was also a process or outworking of women’s liberation cognate with all types of feminism, not just religious feminism, insofar as divinity is not exhausted by its theistic conception and feminism is variant of modern existentialism. It is not difficult to jump to the wrong conclusions about the phrase ‘becoming divine’, as I did when I first heard Grace Jantzen use it at a seminar in Manchester in the 1990s, around the time she published her book of the same name. To my Jewish ears, ‘becoming divine’ sounded too like a theosis. To become God, or as the gods, would be idolatry and hubris, again. But in Jantzen, Daly, and Irigaray’s interrelated thinking, ‘becoming divine’ is not that. To become ‘God for ourselves’ is a recovery of life lived in patriarchally unmediated connection with its deepest roots and elements. That this is possible is not predicated on belief that this or that is the case, but on openness to a kind of joyous truth ‘which gives flesh to speech: air, breath, song’.51 Becoming divine is the process through which a woman takes possession of her existence in and of herself. Daphne Hampson’s view that God is a dimension of all that is ‘and which allows us to be all that we have it in us to become’;52 that God is that which allows us to be ourselves, comes close to what it might mean for women’s liberation to liberate a woman into a self that is divinely itself. That ‘becoming divine’ is not only a theistic turn, but one that is existentially available to an atheist or secular humanist feminist, refers to the process of realizing a becoming self (this is not being divine) that is uncreated and un-conferred by any ideological cause. Becoming divine, even for feminists justifiably wary of theological terminology, is, I think, cognate with a Thomistic notion of aseity. Of course,

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in classical theism after Aristotle, God’s aseity is that of a cold, self-moved (emotionally) ‘unmoved mover’, detached, without dependencies or affect, from human suffering, accessible only to a (traditionally celibate) masculine elite’s rational contemplation.53 But aseity as a post-idolocastic feminist existential reorientation would be quite different. Here, the word might be used to refer to a femaleness with no other secondary function or instrumental reason for its existence than its own being and becoming. Such becoming would be divine insofar as femaleness liberated from its idol is, like God liberated from God’s idol, uncaused, non-contingent and, above all, not the creature or effect of any other power or agency but its own. This letting God be God and letting a woman be who she might be is not to say that women are self-born or self-caused. Nor is it to deny that they are created in the image of the divine. On the contrary, for those whose feminism is theologically predicated, their aseity could be said to be in the likeness of God’s. But becoming divine is not necessarily a theology. A post-idolatrous ontology is one in which a woman’s existence is or should be identical with her own possibility; that of whom nothing other or better can be conceived; that which cannot be anything other than its own becoming. My rehearsal of what I understand to be a counter-idolatrous feminist ontology is exemplified by Mary Daly and Luce Irigaray’s account of female becoming (divine). Daly’s early work applied Paul Tillich’s modern Protestant critique of idols as ideas that have elevated a preliminary or conditioned concern to the standing of an ultimate one to her own criticism of patriarchy. Tillich’s early thinking about ‘the unconditioned’, which he later identified as the power of being, helped Daly to envision the power of female being as that which would propel women towards freedom: a state that is unconditioned by patriarchy’s ultimate concern, namely its own power. Tillich had famously argued that God does not exist as another object in the universe but rather is existence. As part of the existentialist reversal of the old philosophical order, initiated by Nietzsche, in which essence preceded existence, the women’s liberation movement could, finally, abolish any idea or essence of female being behind its own activity. Where femaleness, like divinity, does not exist but is existence, an active, dynamic process, it will no longer languish in the stagnant pool of its own idea.54 Daly’s female ontophany – the appearance or revelation of female being as becoming – was the philosophical corollary of living courageously and clear-sightedly. Courage, indeed, was a sufficient good in itself: ‘The ethic emerging in the women’s movement is not an ethic of prudence but one whose dominant theme is existential courage. This is the courage to see and to be in the face of the nameless anxieties that surface when a woman begins to see through the masks of sexist society and to confront the horrifying fact of her own alienation from her authentic self’.55 It took courage to overcome the alienation of consciousness and the fixated self it produced. Daly verbalized the freedom of becoming precisely as a verb – Be-ing – that would power women’s resistance to the patriarchal

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power of non-being which expands its field of operation by attacking the power of being, not just in women, but in everything that seeks to exist in and of its own self. As a verb, Be-ing could never reproduce women into a new feminist version of the same. It is as the one who stands the ground of her own Be-ing that woman is divine. And as no feminist account of the divine allows it to subsist as the proper name of any power that could stand over and against, that is, estrange, a woman’s possibility, the divine is nothing more or less than the permanent revolution, the dynamic possibility, of a woman’s own idea. To that extent there was not, and never could be, an ‘after’ idoloclasm. Idoloclasm was the removal of cognitive obstructions to becoming. After idoloclasm, feminism could be a hierophanic marking of the crisis of an encounter between an old and a new order of reality. The new (feminist) order was a summons to choose life over death, or in language with less biblical resonances, to a biophilic existence, that had, in the idoloclastic moment, actually been answered.56 Biophilia was no platitudinous abstraction. Modern patriarchy, ‘radical’ feminism argued, is not merely inequitable or otherwise ethically deficient. By their very nature, modern patriarchy’s grinding, unpausing processes of production commodify, monetize, junk, or otherwise lay waste to the natural, namely all that is alive and striving for its integrity; for light, water and air. It was only after women’s ontophanic confrontation with patriarchy as subjects who were, so to speak, alive and kicking, not as more of its dead or dying things, that they would begin to create ‘a counter-world to the counterfeit “this world” presented to consciousness by the societal structures that oppress [them]’.57 The recovery of a woman’s integrity as manifest in her pure lust for life (Pure Lust being the title of Daly’s 1984 book) is the recovery of a power that will revive her, and with her, all living things.58 Women’s liberation is the liberation of life itself from the ‘dis-spirited’ political and existential conditions under which all living things labour to survive. In ‘coming to’, that is, waking from a state of unconsciousness into consciousness, women’s liberationists could begin to experience the power of their own becoming. As integral subjects, and as part of an active female ‘Cosmic Commonality’ or web of socially, ecologically, and spiritually connected filaments or threads,59 they would fulfil their promise, coming into their own divinity as creators or dreamers of a new world. Luce Irigaray’s theorization of female becoming as an expression of pure, uncontainable desire as an impetus for revolutionary change over fixity was not wholly dissimilar to Daly’s,60 even if expressed in a less elaborate idiom. Irigarary did not identify herself as an idoloclast – the term would have been too certain of its rightness, too destructive. She felt it important to take a responsible approach to the tradition, ‘neither to remain children nor to become iconoclasts’.61 But her account of the female subject was, in its way, as idoloclastic as Daly’s. Irigarary, too, understood women’s liberation as the power of women’s irreducible difference to dissolve, inundate, pluralize,

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confuse, and otherwise confound a patriarchy whose monocultures were authorized by a monotheism of its own invention. Although many have found Irigaray’s thinking heterosexist in tone and content,62 she wrote in the conviction that only patriarchy’s binarization of gender is essentialist and heteronormative because it is only masculinity that marks proximity to the divine.63 As Feuerbach observed, ‘God is the mirror of man’. But ‘woman has no mirror wherewith to become woman’.64 ‘Man’ defines himself in relation to a male God and is outraged at the very notion that men could be defined in relation to women, or that God could be defined by reference to a female divinity. In which case, women need not be abolished by feminists, they need to become women, divine women, if they are to counteract millennia of belief in which a masculinist God made in the image of men has alienated women’s experience as subjects. In her 1986 essay ‘Divine Women’, she remarked that to become divine is all that God asks of humanity; not to become gods but to become men and women who ‘become perfectly’; who refuse to allow parts of themselves ‘to shrivel and die that have the potential for growth and fulfilment’.65 It has been one of the premises of this book that the women’s liberation movement, made up of constituencies that self-identify as both secular and religious, should not be annexed by theo/alogy. But neither can its prophetic nature be fully understood without reference to theo/alogy. It was for such reasons that Irigaray believed it necessary for all women to ‘think anew a religious dimension when many believe we have put an end to it’.66 For it is religion that, ‘in some obscure way . . . holds together the totality of the self, of the community and culture’.67 The divine joyousness of ‘a concentrated communication with the world’, which is ‘in a manner of praying’, is not and should not be the sole property of a given religious community.68 ‘If we are to escape slavery’, wrote Irigaray, ‘it is not enough to destroy the master. Only the divine offers us freedom – enjoins it upon us’.69 There has never been a society that has been established without the guarantee or under-writing of the divine. ‘There comes a time for destruction. But, before destruction is possible, God or the gods must exist’.70 Without a God of their own, women are cut off from the horizon of the infinite. If a woman is to accomplish her own subjectivity she will need ‘a god who is a figure for the perfection of her subjectivity’, and without that infinity she has no access to self-love, to her own skin, knowledge, and power but is ‘forced to comply with models that do not match them, that exile, double, mask them, cut them off from themselves and one another’.71 The god called God is no more than a mask worn by men who have taken sole possession of his attributes. In this absolute, singularly masculine God, ‘the world is closed upon itself and the way is prepared for the hell at work today’.72 A woman’s divine humanity cannot, then, be won by regression into a tradition, even a feminist one. Clearing a passage or airway by which a woman might begin to breathe herself back into being cannot be done for her.73 That self-resuscitation is not, for Irigaray, one of the offices of

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religion. Irigaray’s theo/alogy of the feminine may bear more than a trace of Catholicism, but it is also sharply critical of the Church. Neither does she intend a new Paganism, despite her insistence that western thought is founded on the reduction of ‘woman’ into a receptacle for male becoming that epistemically, practically, and politically suppresses its maternal origin. Neither religious nor secular, her thinking is philosophically and politically ecumenical in character. God, here, is the infinity into which a woman is released from her idol. Liberation into the infinite is not a destination synonymous with the reward of eternal life in a world to come. It is the open horizon of female becoming in its own real, living, flesh; where it is no longer possible to tell sea from sky.74 No longer defined by the inert opacity of its idol, the feminine is infinitized not merely into permeability to the divine, but into the divine itself. The divine is not a delineation of the feminine. The divine feminine is a feminine sensible-transcendental dimension that exists within the female collective as no more than an indefinite figure of emerging female subjectivity, as a perspective from and in which femaleness is transfigured. As her own horizon – an open threshold that she must cross – ‘woman is neither open nor closed. She is indefinite, in-finite, form is never complete in her’.75 Here, idoloclasm is not the inauguration or overture to becoming divine (after which, what then?) but the process itself. Irigaray takes from Feuerbach the notion that the aim of the self is to become divine, that is, to reclaim certain attributes of the divine from their projection onto God and make them one’s own. But this is not an appropriation of God that leaves God empty (atheism) and humanity full (humanism).76 It is a kind of ‘godding’. As divine, a woman is proofed against regression into the state of a prisoner to a fetish or idol called God; she will not yield the freedom of her desires.77 In ‘Divine Women’, Irigaray re-read Feuerbach in ways that allowed her to conceive of God not as ‘a rigid objective of One immutable postulate’ but as the ‘idealized, projected other of women’s emerging subjectivity’. God is a particular kind of mirror. If a woman is divine, it is not the kind of mirror she might use to check that her appearance is in order and pleasing to others. This is a mirror on which a woman is now on the right side. It is a means of self-knowledge. The divine becomes a way of seeing and fully incarnating who one is without becoming trapped in a distorted concave or two-dimensional image.78 This is a mirror that produces not a two-dimensional appearance as mere facade, but a transfigurative refraction of light that brings a woman face to face with the depth and shadows of her mystery.79 In this, Irigaray proposed a theology in which the female and the divine are an inseparable, sovereign, moment of becoming – an open, uncertain, and un-preempted ‘field of production’ or process of completion without completion. In this notion of becoming divine, Irigaray refuses not only the sameness of a mass-produced patriarchal woman, but also liberal feminism’s assimilation of the feminine into the universal rational disembodied subject

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who is effectively male by default. As Jenny Daggers put it in her exposition of Irigaray, the Christian ‘(male) God offers women only the human and divine perspective of becoming man: to accomplish her female subjectivity she needs a female god who opens up the perspective of a transfiguration of female flesh’.80 Irigarary may have insisted on female difference, but Toril Moi was surely wrong to read Irigaray as an essentialist.81 That sexual difference unfolds in the divine obviates, a priori, the idolatrous fixation of female being. The difference of the feminine can be neither ideologically enforced nor erased by equality: ‘Thus the matter for a woman is not of becoming a man and joining a becoming divine in the masculine’.82 ‘Woman’ is not one thing. With a non-phallic, diffuse erotic sensibility, she is divinely free because she is not one but many. Irigaray’s is a vision that transgresses the patriarchally created order, where in Genesis 1, God divided land, sea, and sky into a taxonomy of whatever is not this, is that. In Irigary’s thought, women have divine freedom because they are, as it were, released into the elemental multidimensionality of air and water, ‘half-fish and half-bird’, neither definitely this nor that.83 Woman is ‘not a unity or figure or ideality, but is indefinite, in-finite, form is never complete in her . . . this incompleteness in her form, her morphology, allows her continually to become something else’.84 The end of this book returns to its prologue. It is a reminder that in the beginning, before gender, when great winds blew still cloudy forms through the darkness and across the heaving face of the waters towards the light, was the end of patriarchal ends.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Goldenberg, Changing of the Gods, p. 1. Irigaray, ‘Towards a Divine in the Feminine’, pp. 13–26, p. 15. The Female Eunuch, pp. 316–317. Greer, The Female Eunuch, p. 370. The Second Sex, pp. 375–376. This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 134. Cf., Greer, The Female Eunuch, p. 92. Je, Tu, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference, pp. 109–110. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 379, discusses the related phenomenon of girls running away from home, liberated by the sheer choice to leave, even if only to return a few days later. Sara Maitland, How to Be Alone, London, Macmillan, 2014. Christ and Plaskow, Goddess and God, p. 122. Je, Tu, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference, pp. 109–110. Je, Tu, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference, pp. 109–110. The Female Eunuch, p. 11. Gyn/Ecology, p. 305. The Second Sex, p. 387. Key Writings, p. 166. Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest, Boston, Beacon Press, 1980, pp. 13ff.

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19 Cited in Christine Rawlins, Beyond the Snow: The Life and Faith of Elizabeth Goudge, Bloomington, Westbow Press, 2015, loc 3536. Kindle edition. 20 Outercourse, p. 341. 21 Gyn/Ecology, p. 26. See also, e.g., Outercourse, pp. 182, 221 and passim; Pure Lust, pp. 248–249. 22 Beyond God the Father, p. 339. 23 Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and Self, Boston, Beacon Press, 1986, pp. 114–115, 259. 24 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 224. 25 Howards End, New York, Bantam Books, 1985 [1910], p. 147. 26 Ursula King, Women and Spirituality: Voices of Protest & Promise, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993 [1989], p. 35. 27 Aruna Gnanadason, ‘Women and Spirituality in Asia’, in Ursula King, ed., Feminist Theology from the Third World: A Reader, Eugene, Wipf and Stock, 2015, [1994], p. 354. 28 Isabel Carter Heyward, Touching Our Strength; The Erotic as Power and the Love of God, New York, HarperSanFrancisco, 1989. Hayward, a Christian lesbian feminist theologian, argued, for example, that ‘a historical rather than an essentialist perspective on sexuality involves framing our sexual ethics around issues of what we do rather than of what we are’ (p. 41). 29 Toward a New Psychology of Women, Boston, Beacon Press, 2nd edition, 1986, pp. 111–115. 30 Cited in Hampson, After Feminism, p. 111. 31 ‘Lesbians in Revolt’ (1972), www.feminist-reprise.org/docs/lwmbunch.htm, accessed 4.5.18. 32 Jane Roberta Cooper, ed., Reading Adrienne Rich: Reviews and Re-Visions, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1984, p. 153. See further Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, eds., Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose, Reviews, and Criticism, New York, Norton and Co., 1993; Liz Yorke, ed., Adrienne Rich: Passion, Politics and the Body, London, Sage, 1997. 33 See further Dori Grinenko Baker, ‘Where the Holy Lives: Life Story as Source for Personal and Communal Transformation’, in Emily Silverman, Dirk von der Horst, and Whitney Bauman, eds., Voices of Feminist Liberation: Writings in Celebration of Rosemary Ruther, Sheffield and Bristol, Equinox, 2012, pp. 27–43; Jennifer Coates’ Women, Men and Language: A Socio-linguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language, Harlow, Pearson Education, Thirdedition, 2004 [1986] was both indicative of and influential in feminist thought of the period. Coates’ research suggested that the presence of men in conversational circles can inhibit women’s contribution, which is usually more affective and less dominant and objective in its style, tone, and content than men’s. The book ran into three editions, the last of which was published in 2015. By then, Coates had reintroduced her work, modifying what some in the 1990s regarded as its essentialist and stereotypical interpretive lens. 34 Preface to the Second Edition of Diving Deep and Surfacing, 1986. 35 Goddess and God, p. 88. 36 An Ethics of Sexual Difference, pp. 154, 157. 37 This Sex Which Is Not One, p. 265. 38 Luce Irigaray and Carolyn Burke, ‘When Our Lips Speak Together’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 6 (1980), 69. 39 Lenk, ‘The Self-Reflecting Woman’, p. 53. 40 See her and Jane Caputi’s First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language. 41 Gyn/Ecology, pp. 368–369 and passim.

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42 In The Dream of a Common Language, New York and London, W. W. Norton & Company. 1978, p. 25. 43 Cited in Cooper, Reading Adrienne Rich, p. 56. 44 Dream of a Common Language, p. 77 and passim. 45 Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, New York, Metropolitan Books, 2006. 46 Frankie Green, ‘The London Women’s Liberation Rock Band: 1972–1974’, 2010, https://womensliberationmusicarchive.co.uk/, accessed 4.6.17. 47 See e.g. Joan Kelly, Women, History and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984, in which Kelly’s writings from the 1970s were posthumously compiled. 48 The Creation of Patriarchy, New York, Oxford University Press, 1986; The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy, New York, Oxford University Press, 1993. 49 In Exodus 19: 15, Moses instructs men to stay apart from the pollution of women in readiness for God’s self-revelation on Sinai, prompting Jewish feminists to wonder if Jewish women, whose bodies are also not physically sealed into the covenant as men’s are by circumcision, are fully Jewish at all. 50 See further Ann-Marie Priest, ‘Woman as God, God as Woman: Mysticism, Negative Theology, and Luce Irigaray’, Journal of Religion, 83 (2003), 1–23. 51 ‘Divine Women’, pp. 71–72; ‘Belief Itself’, p. 52 in Sexes and Genealogies; Morny Joy, Divine Love: Luce Irigaray, Women, Gender and Religion, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 2006, p. 25. 52 After Christianity, p. 284. 53 Daly’s thought is profoundly indebted to Aristotle and Aquinas, not least their capacity to hold mind and matter, body and soul together in ways that Enlightenment philosophy could not, even if it is also critical of their non-dynamic masculinism. See Pure Lust, p. 338; Joy, Divine Love, p. 105. 54 Daly, Beyond God the Father, pp. 26, 34–40 and passim. 55 Beyond God the Father, p. 4. 56 Beyond God the Father, p. 32. 57 Beyond God the Father, pp. 34–35. 58 Beyond God the Father, p. 35. 59 Pure Lust, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, pp. 26–27. 60 Joy, Divine Love, pp. 105–106. 61 Key Writings, p. 145. 62 See Joy, Divine Love, p. 97. 63 Key Writings, p. 174. 64 ‘Divine Women’, p. 67. 65 Sexes and Genealogies, p. 69. 66 Key Writings, p. 147. 67 Key Writings, pp. 171, 145. 68 Key Writings, p. 187. 69 ‘Divine Women’, p. 68. 70 ‘Divine Women’, p. 62. 71 ‘Divine Women’, p. 64. 72 Irigaray, In the Beginning, She Was, p. 5. 73 Key Writings, p. 165. 74 Key Writings, p. 169. 75 Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1985 [1974], p. 229. 76 Grace Jantzen, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998, p. 91; Sam McBride,

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77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

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‘Reconceiving God: Luce Irigaray’s “Divine Women”’, in John Charles Hawley, ed., Divine Aporia: Postmodern Conversations About the Other, Cranbury, NJ and London, Associated University Presses, 2000, p. 213. An Ethics of Sexual Difference, p. 118. Divine Women, p. 65; see also McBride, ‘Reconceiving God’, pp. 213–215. Irigaray, In the Beginning, She Was, p. 72. Daggers, ‘Luce Irigaray and “Divine Women”’, p. 43, with reference to Irigaray, ‘Divine Women’, p. 6. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London, Methuen, 1985, pp. 139, 148. See also Joy, Divine Love, p. 18. ‘Towards a Divine in the Feminine’, pp. 13–14. ‘Divine Women’, p. 66 and elsewhere. Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 229.

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Index

Abravanel, Isaac ben Judah 3–4 Achtenberg, Deborah 6–7 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 45, 46 Adler, Rachel 191, 193, 199 aestheticization, of the feminine 49–54, 60, 61, 226–227 Alderman, Naomi 181 Allen, Woody 166 Althaus-Reid, Marcella 130–132, 136, 109, 152; see also queer theory Anderson, Pamela Sue 153 Andersson, Jan-Erik 239 aniconism 11 anti-Judaism 177; feminist 165, 180 Antler, Joyce 159, 163 Aquinas 3, 125, 260 Arendt, Hannah 161 Aristotle 15, 254, 260 Armstrong, John 42 art: feminist counter-idolatrous 11, 171–175, 184–185, 206–207, 227–229, 235; feminist destruction of 9 Asaad, Khaled al- 12 aseity 253–254 Asherah 186, 231 atheism 41, 101–102, 126, 234, 257 Atwood, Margaret 147 Augustine, Saint 124, 128, 147 autonomy 27, 31, 59, 104, 107, 245 avodah zarah (idolatry) 131, 156, 169, 189; see also idolatry Aylon, Helène 184–185 Baker, Dori Grinenko 259 Barbie dolls 174, 175; see also dolls Bardot, Brigitte 73 Barth, Karl 124–125, 129 Baskin, Judith R. 203

Bates, Laura 46 Batnitsky, Leora 193 Battersby, Christine 107 Beattie, Tina 149, 151–152 beauty, female: contests 10, 48, 56; sexual politics of 48–63, 72, 75–77, 89, 174; see also aestheticization, of the feminine Beauvoir, Simone de 19–25 passim, 28–29, 39–40, 48, 51–52, 55, 71, 75–78, 90–91, 99–100, 104–106, 147, 177, 193–194, 209, 242–243 Beavis, Mary Ann 230 becoming divine see Daly, Mary; Irigaray, Luce; women Bell, Rudolph M. 65 Benhabib, Seyla 113 Benson, Bruce Ellis 42 Berger, Arthur Asa 65 Besant, Annie 47 Biberman, Matthew 183 Binford, Sally 237 Bingemer, Maria Clara 149 biophilia, feminist 120, 212–213, 225, 226, 255 Black, Paula 62 Bloomquist, Karen 134 body image 13 and passim; dysmorphic 58–59, 66, 67, 85 Bordo, Susan 57 Braiterman, Zachary 64 Brenner, Athalya 197, 233 Brice, Fanny 169, 180 Brittan, Arthur and Mary Maynard 45 Brock, Rita Nakashima 116, 127, 143–144 Broner, Esther 166, 190 Brown, Helen Gurley 60 Brownmiller, Susan 158–159

Index Brumberg, Joan Jacobs 46, 64 Buber, Martin 52, 82, 188, 192, 193 Budapest, Zsuzsanna (Z) 210, 238 Bunch, Charlotte 247 Butler, Judith 24, 61, 107, 157, 176–177 Bynum, Caroline Walker 152 Cahan, Jean Axelrad 181 Caputi, Jane 112, 224 Cargill, Kaalii 229 Carmody, Denise Lardner 123 Caro, Joseph 173, 182 Carr, Anne 122 Chernin, Kim 56, 57 Cheruvallil-Contractor, Sariya 135 Chodorow, Nancy 100–101 Christ, Carol 108, 143, 180, 201, 208, 214–216, 218–220 passim, 232, 244 Christian feminism 5, 114–152, 165, 166, 180, 233–234; see also postChristian feminism Christolatry 137–138, 142–143 Christology: feminist 137–145, 152; patristic 139; see also Christian feminism; Jesus Clack, Beverley 237, 238 cleaners 170–171; see also domestic labour Clifford, Jo 136 Coates, Jennifer 259 Cochrane, Kira 46 Cohen, Leonard 63, 168–169 Cohen, Meytal 204 comedians, Jewish female 169, 181 consciousness-raising groups, feminist 33, 248 Conway, Deanna J. 238 Cornwall, Susannah 136 cosmetic procedures, surgical and nonsurgical 33, 60, 63, 71–72, 74, 79, 84, 180 cosmetics 48, 54, 60, 62, 250 Cox, Harvey 56, 65 Craighead, Meinrad 229 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 47 Culpepper, Emily 119, 237 Daly, Mary 24–25, 29, 61, 70, 78–79, 95–97, 116, 130, 239, 244–245, 260; on becoming divine 253–255; on the Christian God 120; Christology of 138; on the Church 143, 119; on fembots 78, 225; on the Goddess

289

216, 220; on idol-breaking 117–121; on language 250–251; on Mary, mother of Jesus 146–149, 151; on necrophilia 83; on Outcast women 101–102, 213; on robots 222 Dawidowicz, Lucy 164 Dayan, Daniel 87 death see idolization Declaration of Sentiments of the First Women’s Rights Convention 18–19 Delaney, Carol 83, 110 Densmore, Dana 232 Derrida, Jacques 28, 129 Diamant, Anita 181 Diana, Princess of Wales 73 diet and beauty industry 35, 56–58, 62–63, 66, 135, 141; see also beauty, female dolls 4, 24, 28, 35, 48, 55, 63, 65, 66, 68, 79, 80–83, 88, 97, 132, 173–175 domesticity 57, 76, 105, 194, 196 domestic labour 17, 19, 22–23, 49, 79, 171, 194; see also cleaners Dworkin, Andrea 32, 56, 61, 244 education, feminist approaches to 249; see also women’s studies Ehrenreich, Barbara 251 Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard 37, 178 Eliot, T.S. 93 Eller, Cynthia 47, 223, 236 Elliott, John 134 Engels, Frederick 22 Enlightenment, theology and politics of 27, 40–41, 104, 116, 217, 247; see also autonomy Equal Rights Amendment 91 Erdozain, Dominic 133, 135 eshet chayil (Woman of Valour) 164, 167 essentialism, feminist 37, 39, 112, 217–223, 256, 258, 259 Éstes, Clara Pinkola 238 Etcoff, Nancy 58 Eve (biblical figure of) 4–7, 146 evil, women and 41, 89, 112, 124, 151, 201, 226 Exodus, as feminist trope 20, 118–119, 142, 153, 188–191, 196, 233–234 Falk, Marcia 181, 202 Fall, the 123, 148, 151; see also patriarchy

290

Index

false consciousness, feminist critique of 3, 16, 24, 27, 96, 99, 118, 132, 148, 168, 169, 212, 215, 233, 247 Faludi, Susan 66, 103 Farians, Elizabeth 121 feminine, the: as a contested term 43; reproduction of 33, 57, 71, 100, 105–106, 173, 222; see also Buber, Martin; Levinas, Emmanuel and passim feminism: intersectional 35, 42, 47, 61, 62, 239; intrication of waves and types 38–42; separatist 98, 248, 250; see also Christian feminism; Goddess feminism; Jewish feminism; postChristian feminism and passim Ferguson, Anthony 82 Ferris, Kerry O. 87 Feuerbach, Ludwig 20, 25–29 passim, 146, 189, 216, 256–257 Fiddes, Paul 134 Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler 123, 134, 142, 180 Firestone, Shulamith 21, 24–25, 30, 51, 55–56, 71, 75–78, 84, 91, 98, 103, 105–106, 209, 225 Fishwick, Carmen 87 Foreman, Anne 44 Foucault, Michel 57, 61 Frankel, Ellen 202, 203 Frankenberry, Nancy 43 Frederickson, Barbara and Tomi-Ann Roberts 68 Freud, Sigmund 28, 77, 82, 107, 116, 217 Friedan, Betty 92, 159–160, 161–163, 173 Friedman, Marilyn 87, 112 Furman, Frida Kerner 67–68 Fuss, Diana 112 Garbo, Greta 73 Gatens, Moira 13, 53 Gebara, Ivone 149 Gelbin, Cathy S. 89 Gildea, Florence 88 Gilligan, Carol 105 Gilman, Neil 204 Gimbutas, Marija 210–211, 212 Ginsberg, Allen 103 Gnanadason, Aruna 259 God, feminist liberation of 24–25; and passim

Goddess, the: archaeology of 210–212, 214, 237; domestic shrines to 210; many names of 218; patriarchal destruction of 211, 214; Triple 214, 223–224; see also Goddess feminism Goddess feminism 206–235; counteressentialism in 217–223; iconophilia in 223–230; relation to Christian and Jewish feminisms 230–235; as a utopianism 226 Goldenberg, Naomi 11, 16, 197–198, 216, 217, 219, 235, 241 Goldman, Emma 190 golems 89, 191, 197 Gornick, Vivian 156, 160 Gottlieb, Lynn 167, 181 Gottschall, Marilyn 235 Goudge, Elizabeth 244–245 Graetz, Naomi 233 Grant, Linda 62 Green, David 237 Green, Frankie 251–252 Greenberg, Blu 198 Greer, Germaine 23, 24, 32, 35, 37, 48, 51, 59–60, 70–71, 99, 242, 243–244 Grey, Mary 246 Griffin, Susan 9–10, 218, 228, 238, 243 Grigg, Richard 237 Grimké, Angelina and Sarah 19 Gross, Rita 200, 204 Grosz, Elizabeth 51, 67, 111 Grudem, Wayne 154 Guerrilla Girls 239 Halbertal, Moshe and Avishai Margolit 43, 46, 202 Hamilton, Claire 238 Hampson, Daphne 137–138, 147, 253 Handler, Ruth Mosko 175 Haney, Eleanor 247 happiness, women’s 21, 27, 81, 105, 242–243 Haraway, Donna 82 Harris, Eve 181 Harris, Scott R. 268 Hartshorne, Charles 116, 220 Hazleton, Lesley 165 headship, of husband 124–125, 148, 154 Hebblethwaite, Margaret 126 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 19–21 passim Hemmings, Clare 39 Herzfeld, Noreen 82

Index Heschel, Abraham Joshua 14 Heschel, Susannah 114, 180, 203 Heyward, Carter 247 Hillesum, Etty 90–91, 101 Hillyer, Carolyn 228 Hippel, Theodor Gottlieb von 133 historiography, feminist 22, 39, 167, 252–253 Hite, Shere 69–70 Hobson, Janell 87 Hochmah (figure of Wisdom) 233 Holmstrom, Amanda J. 67 Holocaust, the 159–164 passim, 192, 195–196 Hopkins, J. Ellice 117, 133 The Hours (novel) 92–93 housework see domestic labour Hughes, Gertrude Reif 111 Hunt, Mary 142, 153 Husserl, Edmund 48, 100 ideology of femininity 14, 16, 18, 27, 32, 36, 38, 51–52, 57, 72, 79, 96, 115, 123, 158, 191–196, 199, 212 idolatry: in biblical literature 12, 14, 85–86, 125, 150, 165, 185–186, 213; and gynolatry 24, 48, 51, 61, 71, 75–78, 174; in rabbinic literature 169, 186–187, 189, 195, 207; and the totalitarian 8, 14, 194–196, 220; see also avodah zarah (idolatry); idolization and passim idolization: and celebrity 71–75, 87, 171; and death 52, 83–86, 189, 241; of women and of the feminine 24, 32, 51–52, 55, 70, 91, 94, 170, 174 and passim idoloclasm: as distinct from iconoclasm 11–12; as a Jewish moment 169; and laughter 169–170, 242; and mockery 132, 169; and renewed relationality 246–247; risks of 70, 99–103 passim, 112, 179, 219, 242; and sacral shattering 32, 106, 128, 144, 168– 169, 179, 196; and violence 11–15, 43–45, 93, 118, 132, 175, 212–213; and passim Ignatius of Antioch, Saint 139 Illouz, Eva 87 image: cultural visibility of 32, 51, 64, 72–74; ekphratic 16–17; false (see idols); of God 2–4, 31, 119, 121, 124, 137, 145, 173, 186–189, 201

291

Ingham, Arleen 133 Irigaray, Luce 25, 27, 45, 91, 94, 99, 101, 105, 107, 112, 120, 124, 194, 221–223; on becoming divine 253–258; on female beauty 51; on liberation 242, 244, 249–250; on patriarchal sexuality 69–70 Isherwood, Lisa 6, 51, 64, 141, 240 Israel: ancient 12, 20, 115, 186, 190, 198, 233, 236; as the Jewish people 85, 160, 185–186, 188–189, 199– 200, 253; State of 160, 165–166 Jagger, Alison 32, 44 Jantzen, Grace 83, 89, 253 Jardine, Alice 108 Jay, Nancy 147–148, 154; see also sacrifice Jeffreys, Sheila 35, 63, 183 Jesus 150–152, 234, 241, 130–138 passim, 145 Jewish feminism, types of 157–160 Jewish feminist theology 184–201 and passim Jewish Princess, stereotype of 164, 169 Johnson, Elizabeth 121–122, 125, 128, 135, 149–150 Jones, Allen 8–9 Jones, Serene 133 Jones, Teresa 153–154 Joy, Morny 195, 260 Julius, Anthony 44 Kamitsuka, Margaret 133 Kass, Deborah 182–183 Katz, Claire Elise 194, 203 Keller, Catherine 128–129 Kelly, Joan 252, 260 King, Ursula 107, 246 Kochan, Lional 181 Kollontai, Alexandra 22 Kopania, Kamil 182 Korsmeyer, Carolyn 67 Korte, Anne-Marie 47 Kukla, Elliot 183 Labowitz, Shoni (Shoshana) 235 labrys, symbol of 212 Laing, R.D. 97, 111 Langford, Wendy 87 language: feminist reclamation of 250–251

292

Index

Le Doeuff, Michèle 67 Lenk, Elisabeth 99–101, 174, 250 Lerner, Gerda 252 lesbianism 70, 76, 91, 98, 104, 177, 191, 209, 226, 247–248, 251 Levin, Ira see The Stepford Wives (novel) Levinas, Emmanuel 43, 52–53, 187, 241; and the feminine 6–7, 106–107, 192–197, 203–204 Levy, Ariel 68 Levy, David 80 Lewis, C.S. 128 liberation theology, Marxist 126, 132, 143; see also Christian feminism; Exodus, as feminist trope; Jewish feminism Lilith 167, 231 Lipstadt, Deborah 180 Litman, Jane 232–233 Llewellyn, Dawn 47 Lloyd, Genevieve 99 London Women’s Rock Band see Green, Frankie loneliness 4, 98, 102 Long, Asphodel 211–212, 214, 231, 235 Lorde, Audre 15, 70 love 2, 3, 6, 12, 15, 24–25, 30, 51, 60, 62, 69, 71, 82, 93, 105, 126, 221, 244, 246–247, 251, 256; Christian gospel of 78, 136, 139, 142, 144; erotic 192, 194, 196; free love 96, 215; God’s 127–129, 135, 186–187, 215; romantic 49, 75–78, 228 Lunn, Pam 232 Luther, Martin 123 madness 96–97 Maimonides 7, 181, 189–190, 200 Maitland, Sara 258 Mantin, Ruth 220–221, 225, 239 Marashinsky, Amy Sophia 220 Mariology see Mary, mother of Jesus Marion, Jean-Luc 42 marriage 1–7 passim, 18, 23, 33, 47, 60, 67, 75–76, 81, 91, 96, 100, 151, 164, 178 Marx, Eleanor 22 Marxism 22, 27, 55, 168, 183; see also liberation theology, Marxist Mary, mother of Jesus: in feminist liberation theology 149–150; as icon 149–152; as idol 145–149; see also Beattie, Tina; Bynum, Caroline Walker

masculinity 16, 26, 38, 93–94, 96 and passim; and divinity 118, 121–124, 137, 188, 197, 233; Jewish 165–166, 177–179, 256 Mason, Jackie 166 maternalism 105, 193, 126 maternity see motherhood Matthews, Jill Julius 113 Maynard, Patrick 87 McDougal, Joy Ann 153 McFague, Sallie 121, 126–129 McMullen, Matt 81 menstruation 36, 177, 207 men’s studies 46–47 messianic, the 21, 93, 131, 173, 188, 194–196 Meyer-Wilmes, Hedwig 111 Mészáros, István 43 Michaelson, Jay 178–179 Miles, Margaret 64 Miles, Rebekah 133 Miller, Jean Baker 247 Millett, Kate 40, 104 mirrors 29, 30, 55, 69, 94, 101, 109, 172–173 modernity 13, 24, 26–28, 49–50, 51–53, 56, 74, 79, 93, 101–102, 105, 158, 160, 168, 171 Mohamed, Lena 42 Mohl, Raymond 180 monsters, feminist 224–225, 250 Moran, Caitlin 73–74 Morton, Nelle 127, 216, 248 Morgan, Sue 133 Moss, Kate 9 motherhood 24, 32, 82, 96, 100, 106, 126–127, 148, 150, 210, 221, 225, 249; Mary’s 151 mothers 22, 24, 69, 80, 101, 126, 147, 148, 154; Jewish mothers 160, 163–166 Motz, Lotte 211 Muers, Rachel 46, 151 Mulvey, Laura 60–61 Murphy, Peter Francis 133 nature 121–122, 190, 208–209, 220; patriarchal dominion over 52, 54, 65, 83, 239; as a space of liberation 234, 243–245; women and 38, 221, 224– 225, 232; see also biophilia, feminist; women’s liberation movement necrophilia, patriarchal 79, 83, 88, 148, 211, 215; see also Daly, Mary

Index Neuer, Werner 153 Nietzsche, Friedrich 11, 28, 33, 93, 156, 215, 254 Noddings, Nel 105 Novick, Leah 167 Oakley, Anne 44, 171 objectification, of women 51–54, 56, 59, 68, 82, 115, 161, 172, 176, 188, 223, 227, 241 Ochshorn, Judith 202 Orbach, Susie 56, 66 ordination of women: as priests 137; as rabbis 164 Orsi, Robert 154 Our Bodies, Ourselves (book) 197 Ozick, Cynthia 71, 162, 198–199, 232; proposal of Eleventh Commandment 188–189 Papadaki, Evangelia 45 Parker, Dorothy 180 Parsons, Susan 37, 153 patriarchy: as colonization 14–17, 24, 45, 61, 102, 95, 122, 196, 217, 222, 245; as original sin 121–122; see also necrophilia, patriarchal; and passim Patterson, David 203 Pattison, Stephen 6, 53, 64, 84 Paul, Saint 204 Paz, Sarit 204 Pearlman, Ellen 89 Pellegrini, Ann 179 Pérez-Esclarín, Antonio 135 Peskowitz, Miriam 183 Pirani, Alex 231 Plaskow, Judith 93, 114, 115, 117, 180, 193, 198–201, 202, 215, 232 Plato 59; and allegory of the cave 17–18 Polinska, Wioleta 64 Pope, Barbara Corrado 154 pornography 4, 11, 32, 35, 52, 57–58, 63–64, 68, 70, 80, 172, 185, 196, 228–229, 244; and gynophobia 83 post-Christian feminism 39, 137–138, 145, 147, 165, 207, 208–209, 224, 230, 236, 247; see also Goddess feminism Priest, Anne-Marie 260 queer theory 106, 108, 161; and Jewish studies 175–179; and theology 129, 135–136, 204; see also Althaus-Reid, Marcella

293

Rachel (biblical matriarch) see teraphim Rand, Erica 175 Raphael, Melissa 6, 42, 47, 63, 87, 89, 181, 182, 236, 238–241 passim Reed, Esther D. 113 Reid, Lucy 237 Reid-Bowen, Paul 219, 236–239 passim Reik, Theodor 76 relationality, renewed see idoloclasm religion, criticism of 8, 20–21, 25–26, 28–29, 126 Rhode, Deborah L. 64 Rich, Adrienne 98, 167, 229, 247–248, 251 Richardson, Kathleen 88 Richardson, Mary 9 Rivera, Maya Rivera 43, 136 Rosenzweig, Franz 187, 192–194 passim Rosler, Martha 163 Ross, Tamar 199–200 Rountree, Kathryn 219–221 Rowbotham, Sheila 17, 29–30, 32, 40, 95, 97–98, 112 Ruddick, Sara 105 Ruether, Rosemary 116, 121–122, 124, 126, 137, 149, 152, 180; Christology of 142–144; on Goddess feminism 231–232 Ruskin, John 36 Rye, Gill 135 sacrifice 2, 83, 94, 147–148, 154, 168, 209 saints, female 13, 39–40 Saiving, Valerie 117, 133 Salkin, Jeffrey 181 Sartre, Jean-Paul 52, 97, 100, 107 Sass, Louis 112 Saxton, Ruth O. 66, 239 Sayers, Dorothy L. 117 Schachter-Shalomi, Zalman 157 Schwartz, Hillel 65 Schwartz, Laura 47 Scott, Joan Wallach 252 Scruton, Roger 53, 64, 88 Second Commandment (proscription of idolatrous images) 85, 169–170, 174, 187, 189 secularization 26, 40–41, 43, 91 Seder, Jewish feminist 115, 190–191, 202; see also Exodus, as feminist trope Seeskin, Kenneth 181

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Index

Segal, Lynne 239 self, female: (de)realization of 32, 95–105, 193; digital 71–72, 85, 109; divided 96–97; feminist quest for 176, 103 and passim; realization of 34, 90, 193, 215–217, 246; thirdwave evacuation of 105–110; see also subjectivity, women’s self-blessing rituals 210, 227, 236 self-defence classes 249 Semmel, Joan 172–173 Sex Discrimination Act 91 sex robots see dolls sexualization, of women 74–75, 80, 153, 172, 247 sexual pleasure, female 69–70, 197, 208 Shabbat (Jewish sabbath) 164, 187–188 Shalvi, Alice 165–166 Shapiro, Susan 204 Shekhinah, the 167, 189, 195, 231, 233 Shepard, Paul 236 Showalter, Elaine 97 Silverman, Emily 161, 179 Simmons, Laurie 173–175 Sjöö, Monica 206, 216, 222, 227–228, 231, 235–238 Slagter, Janet Trapp 44 slavery, feminist conception of 12, 18–20, 23–24, 28, 35, 40, 41, 86, 99, 115, 143, 190, 246; see also Exodus, as feminist trope; Seder, Jewish feminist Smart, Carol 87 solitude 4, 243, 93 Soloveitchik, Joseph B. 6 Spare Rib (magazine) 40 Spencer, Stanley 141 Stannard, Una 56–57 Starhawk 214–215, 216–218, 226, 238 Stenger, Mary Ann 128 The Stepford Wives (novel) 163 Stone, Merlin 240 Storkey, Elaine 121 Streisand, Barbra 180, 182 Stuart, Elizabeth 135 subjectivity, women’s 10, 13, 19, 25–26, 31–32, 35, 37, 50, 84, 91, 94–95, 107, 117, 156, 166, 169, 190, 195, 230, 241, 246, 256–258 Tanner, Kathryn 129, 144–145 Tax, Meredith 97

Taylor, Barbara 47, 116–117 Teish, Luisah 229–230, 239 teraphim, the 207–208, 235 Teslenko, Tatiana 239 Teubal, Savina 235 thealogy see Goddess feminism Thelma and Louise (film) 102 theology, apophatic 122, 125–129, 253; see also Christian feminism, Jewish feminism Tillich, Paul 254 Townes, Emily 136 Trible, Phyllis 7 Tricksters, feminist 213, 224 Trinity, Christian doctrine of the 120, 131, 145 Turner, Denys 129 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman 170–171 Umansky, Ellen 204, 233, 240 uncanny, the 9, 35, 82, 107, 131, 171, 225 utopianism see Goddess feminism Wagner, Peter 43 Walker, Alice 234 Walker, Barbara 216 Walter, Natasha 46, 67 Walters, Harriet 67 Wannenwetsch, Bernd 65 Ward, Graham 65 Weisstein, Naomi 111 Welz, Claudia 6, 53, 64 Wilke, Hannah 171–172, 229 Wolf, Naomi 57–58 Wolfson, Elliot 110 Wollstonecraft, Mary 4, 5, 18, 24, 27, 33, 51, 71, 76, 77, 101, 103, 116– 117; theology of 29–30, 41, 172, 246 women: becoming divine 253–258 (see also aseity); dehumanization of 53, 80, 101, 158, 161–162, 178, 188, 213 and passim; as enslaved by their idea 18, 147, 209; as monsters 89, 224–225, 250; as ‘non-existent’ 5, 71, 90, 92–95; re-humanization of 22, 35, 170, 253 and passim; and sisterhood 108–109, 119, 134, 143; see also dolls; objectification, of women; slavery, feminist conception of women’s liberation movement 8, 15–16, 26–27, 30–31, 33, 39–41,

Index 57–59, 70, 91, 95, 99, 103–104, 108, 116; cosmic dimension of 119–120, 126, 243, 256; as emergence into the open air 244; and Goddess movement 206–207, 213, 215, 219, 226, 233–234; and Jewish feminism 157–158, 161, 164, 170, 174, 191; as women’s Second Coming 143; see also Exodus, as feminist trope women’s studies 249

women-church 142–143 Woodward, Grace 9 Woolf, Virginia 29, 93, 103 Yentl, images of 182–183 yoga 249 Young, Pamela Dickey 134 Zierler, Wendy 235 Žižek, Slovoj 16, 46

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