The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theology 9780199273881, 019927388X

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t h e ox f o r d h a n d b o o k o f

FEMINIST T H E OL O G Y

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the oxford handbook of

FEMINIST THEOLOGY Edited by

MARY McCLINTOCK FULKERSON and

SHEILA BRIGGS

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Oxford University Press 2012 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–927388–1 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Contents List of Contributors

Introduction

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Mary McClintock Fulkerson and Sheila Briggs

SEC T ION I FE M I N IST T H EOLOGY AT T H E CROS SROA DS 1. Feminist Theology and the Global Imagination

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Serene Jones

2. Feminist Theology and the Jewish Tradition

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Melissa Raphael

3. What is Feminist Theology?

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Sheila Briggs

SE C T ION I I CH A NGI NG CON T E X TS 4. Transethnic Feminist Theology of Asia: Globalization, Identities, and Solidarities

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Namsoon Kang

5. Gynocentric Thealogy of Tantric Hinduism: A Meditation upon the Devi

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Neela Bhattacharya Saxena

6. Globalization and Gender Inequality: A Contribution from a Latino Afro-Feminist Perspective

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Maricel Mena López

7. ‘The World Palpitates’: Globalization and the Religious Faith and Practices of Latin American Women

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Nancy E. Bedford

8. Globalization, Women, and Religion in the Middle East Azza M. Karam

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9. Interrupting ‘Global-Speak’: A Feminist Theological Response from Southern Africa to Globalization

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Denise M. Ackermann

10. Theological Perspective on Mutual Solidarity in the Context of Globalization: The Circle’s Experience

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Elizabeth Amoah

11. Woman Lost in the Global Maze: Women and Religion in East Africa under Globalization

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Philomena Njeri Mwaura

12. Feminist Theologies and the European Context

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Lisa Isherwood

13. Globalization the Second Wave of Colonization: Impacts on wahine Māori

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Tui Cadigan

14. First Nation, Empire, and Globalization

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Andrea Smith

15. Feminism, Inc.: Globalization and North American Feminist Theologies

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Thandeka

SEC T ION I I I CH A NGI NG CON T E N TS 16. Beyond Theology of Religions: The Epistemological and Ethical Challenges of Inter-religious Engagement

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Sharon D. Welch

17. Beyond the God/Man Duo: Globalization, Feminist Theology, and Religious Subjectivity

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Ellen T. Armour

18. Feminist Theologies of a World Scripture(s) in the Globalization Era

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Musa W. Dube

19. The Challenges of Globalization for Muslim Women

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Zayn Kassam

20. Theology and Identity in the Context of Globalization Mar´ia Pilar Aquino

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21. Doing a Theology from Disappeared Bodies: Theology, Sexuality, and the Excluded Bodies of the Discourses of Latin American Liberation Theology

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Marcella Althaus-Reid

22. Globalization and Women’s Bodies in Latin America

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María Cristina Ventura (Tirsa)

23. Globalization and Narrative

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Cheryl Kirk-Duggan

24. La Morenita on Skis: Women’s Popular Marian Piety and Feminist Research on Religion

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Elina Vuola

25. Feminist Ritual Practice

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Teresa Berger

26. Globalization, Women’s Transnational Migration, and Religious De-traditioning

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Kathryn Tanner

Index

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List of Contributors

Denise M. Ackermann is Emeritus Professor of the Department of Religion and Theology, University of the Western Cape in Belleville, South Africa, and has been a visiting professor of practical theology at the University of Stellenbosch. She has written on racism and apartheid, women’s issues, and the AIDS crisis in Africa. Her books include After the Locusts: Letters from a Landscape of Faith (2003), Tamar’s Cry: Re-reading an Ancient Text in the Midst of an HIV/AIDS Pandemic (2002), and Women Hold Up Half the Sky: Women in the Church in South Africa (co-authored 1991). Marcella Althaus-Reid (1952–2009) was the Chair of Contextual Theology at New College, University of Edinburgh, and the first woman professor of theology at the college in its 160-year history. Born in Argentina, she studied at ISEDET, Buenos Aires, and St. Andrew’s University Scotland. Her work focused on Liberation and feminist theologies, as well as theology and sexuality. Her books include Controversies in Body Theology and Controversies in Feminist Theology (both co-edited with Lisa Isherwood, 2007), From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology (2004), The Queer God (2003), and Indecent Theology (2000). Elizabeth Amoah is a professor in the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Ghana, where she has been teaching since 1979. She is a founding member of The Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians (Circle). María Pilar Aquino is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of San Diego. She has served as the first woman president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States, of which she is also a co-founder. Both nationally and internationally, she serves on the editorial board of prominent theological journals. Her scholarly endeavors evolve in the area of Liberation theologies and ethics, with a special focus on critical feminist theological method and hermeneutics, and with a research interest in the emerging fields of intercultural and peace-building studies. In addition to her many journal essays, book chapters, and three authored books, she has more recently co-edited The Return of the Just War (2001), A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice (2002), Reconciliation in a World of Conflicts (2003), and Feminist Intercultural Theology: Latina Explorations for a Just World (2007). Ellen T. Armour is E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair in Feminist Theology and Director of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality at the Divinity

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School and Graduate Department of Religion of Vanderbilt University. Her research interests are in feminist theology, theories of sexuality, race, gender, disability and embodiment, and contemporary continental philosophy. She is the author of Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference: Subverting the Race/ Gender Divide (1999) and co-editor of Bodily Citations: Judith Butler and Religion (2006), as well as author of a number of articles and book chapters. Nancy E. Bedford completed her doctorate of theology at Tübingen, and is now the Georgia Harkness Professor of Applied Theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, and Profesora Extraordinaria No Residente, Instituto Universitario ISEDET in Buenos Aires. She is the author or editor of five books, most recently La porfía de la resurrección: Ensayos desde el feminismo teológico latinoamericano (2008). Among her research interests are global feminist theory and theologies, Latino/Latina and Latin American theologies, theology in migration, food and theology, and rearticulating classical doctrinal loci from the perspective of critical and poetic reason. She is a member of a Mennonite church. Teresa Berger is Professor of Liturgical Studies at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale Divinity School. She holds doctorates in both systematic theology and liturgical studies, and her scholarly interests lie at the intersection of those fields with gender theory and with cultural studies. She has written extensively on liturgy and women’s lives and produced, in 2007, a video documentary called Worship in Women’s Hands. Her publications include Women’s Ways of Worship: Gender Analysis and Liturgical History (1999), Dissident Daughters: Feminist Liturgies in Global Context (2001), Fragments of Real Presence: Liturgical Traditions in the Hands of Women (2005), and, most recently, Gender Differences and the making of Liturgical History: Lifting a Veil Liturgy’s Pas (2011). Sheila Briggs is Associate Professor, School of Religion, University of Southern California. Tui Cadigan is a member of the Sisters of Mercy, Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand, and is one of only two members of the order who are of Māori descent. She is the delegate for Māori Religious on Te Runanga o Te Hahi Katorika ki Aotearoa (National Catholic Maori Council), and a member of the Taumata group of Catholic Māori developing a contextual Māori theology. Sister Cadigan studied at the University of Auckland, where she focused on the experiences of Māori women religious and the need for change from a Māori perspective. She has contributed to Land and Place: He Whenua, He Wahi: Spiritualities from Aotearoa New Zealand (2004) and Overcoming Violence in Aotearoa, New Zealand: A Contribution of the World Council of Churches Decade to Overcome Violence 2001–2010 (2002). Musa W. Dube is Professor of the New Testament at the University of Botswana. She is the author and editor of a number of journal articles, book chapters, and books. Her

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books include Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible (2000) and The HIV/ AIDS Bible: Selected Essays (2008). An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), Mary McClintock Fulkerson is Professor of Theology at Duke University Divinity School. She also teaches in the Duke Women’s Studies Program. Her first book, Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and Feminist Theology, examined the liberating practices of non-feminist church women and feminist academics through the lens of poststructuralism and Marxist/feminist literary criticism. Her recent book, Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church, explores the practices of an inter-racial church (United Methodist) that includes people with disabilities. In contrast with theology’s typical focus on beliefs, this project offers a theory of practices and place that foregrounds the affective reactions and communications that shape all groups, particularly around perceptions of ‘otherness’. Lisa Isherwood is a liberation theologian who believes theology to be a communal project fuelled by notions of radical equality and empowered by divine companionship. Her work explores the nature of incarnation within a contemporary context and includes such areas as the body, gender, sexuality, and eco-theology. She has written, co-authored, or edited seventeen books, including Liberating Christ (1999), Introducing Feminist Christologies (2001), The Power of Erotic Celibacy (2006), Transgressions (2007), Patriarchs, Prophets and Other Villains (ed., 2007), and The Fat Jesus: Feminist Explorations in Boundaries (2007). She has been series editor of five international series: Introductions in Feminist Theology, Theology, Gender and Spirituality, Religion and Violence, and (with Marcella Althaus-Reid), Controversies in Contextual Theology and Queer Theology. Professor Isherwood is an executive editor and founding editor of the international journal Feminist Theology. From 2007 to 2009 she was Vice President of the European Society of Women in Theological Research Serene Jones became the first woman president of Union Theological Seminary, New York, in 2008, where she is also the Roosevelt Professor of Systematic Theology. She studied at Yale University and is an ordained minister in both the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ. Prior to her current appointment, she was Titus Street Professor of Theology and Chair of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale Divinity School. Her books include Feminist Theory and Theology: Cartographies of Grace (2000) and Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety (1995), and she has co-edited Feminist and Womanist Essays in Reformed Dogmatics (2006), Constructive Theology: A Contemporary Engagement with Classical Themes (2005), Liberating Eschatology: Essays in Honor of Letty Russell (1999), and Setting the Table: Women in Theological Conversation (1995). Namsoon Kang is Associate Professor of World Christianity and Religions at Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University, USA. Her expertise is in Constructive Theology, postcolonialism, postmodernism, feminism, and world religions. She has been actively involved in global ecumenical and peace movement and was one of the plenary speakers at the 9th Assembly of WCC at Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2006. She is the author of ‘Who/What is

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Asian? A Postcolonial Theological Reading of Orientalism and Neo-Orientalism’, in Catherine Keller et al. (eds), Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire (2004), as well as numerous articles and books in both English and Korean. She is currently the acting president of WOCATI (World Conference of Associations of Theological Institutions). Additional information about her is available at http://www.brite.tcu.edu/about/nkang.asp Azza M. Karam serves at the United Nations Development Program where she has been Senior Policy Research Advisor in the Regional Bureau for Arab States, and Special Advisor on Middle East and Islamic Affairs to the Secretary General of and the Director of Women’s Programs at the World Conference of Religions for Peace International. She has also worked at International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, and the Centre for the Study of Ethnic Conflict at the Queens University of Belfast. Her experience spans the fields of multi-religious collaboration, international gender issues, democratization, human rights, conflict, and political Islam. Her books include Transnational Political Islam: Religion, Ideology, and Power (2004), A Woman’s Place: Religious Women as Public Actors (2001), and Women, Islamisms and the State: Contemporary Feminisms in Egypt (1998). Zayn Kassam’s interest in globalization arose out of an engagement with environmental issues. She is an associate professor of religious studies at Pomona College and associate faculty at the School of Religion at Claremont Graduate University. A specialist in Islam, she teaches courses on gender, mysticism, philosophy, and literature within the Islamic context, as well as a course on religion and the environment. A two-time winner of the Wig Award for Distinguished Teaching at Pomona College, she has also won the American Academy of Religion’s National Award for Teaching Excellence. She is the author of the volume on Islam in the series titled Introduction to the World’s Major Religions, as well as articles on gender, pedagogical issues in teaching Islam, and philosophical and ethical issues. Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, PhD, is Professor of Theology and Women’s Studies, and Director of Women’s Studies, Shaw University Divinity School, and an ordained minister in the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. She has written and edited over twenty books, has published numerous articles, is series editor for Women and Religion Series, Greenwood/Praeger Press, and is co-editor for The Africana Bible. Featured in Malka Drucker’s White Fire: A Portrait of Women Spiritual Leaders in America (2003), KirkDuggan is known for her 6 P’s: professor, preacher, priest, prophet, poet, and performer. An athlete, she resides in Raleigh, North Carolina, with her beloved husband, Mike. Maricel Mena López, Doctor in Biblical Literature, is Visiting Professor at the Universidad Pontificia Javeriana, Cali, Colombia. Philomena Njeri Mwaura, PhD, is a senior lecturer at Kenyatta University, Nairobi, Kenya, where she teaches in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. She is a former president of the International Association for Mission Studies.

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Melissa Raphael is Professor of Jewish Theology at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. Her research interests have focused on post-Christian feminism, Jewish feminist theology, and Jewish religious aesthetics. She is the author of a number of studies, including Theology and Embodiment: The Post-Patriarchal Reconstruction of Female Sacrality (1996), Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness (1997), The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (2003), and Judaism and the Visual Image: A Jewish Theology of Art (2009). Neela Bhattacharya Saxena is an associate professor of English at Nassau Community College, New York. She teaches English, American, and South Asian Literature, as well as courses in Women’s Studies and multidisciplinary history of ideas. Her publications include In the Beginning Is Desire: Tracing Kali’s Footprints in Indian Literature (2004); ‘Gaia Mandala: An Eco-Thealogical Vision of the Indic Shakti Tradition in InterCulture’; ‘The Fun House Mirror of Tantric Studies: A Rejoinder to David White’s Kiss of the Yogini in Evam’; and ‘Color of God: Resplendent Clay of Hinduism as the Glow of the Ineffable’, in Living Our Religions (2008). Andrea Smith is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. She studied at Union Theological Seminary and University of California—Santa Cruz. She currently serves as the US Coordinator for the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians and is a cofounder of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence. She recently completed a report for the United Nations on Indigenous Peoples and Boarding Schools. Professor Smith’s primary area of expertise covers issues of violence against women of color, especially Native American women. Her publications include Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances (2008) and Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (2005). She is also the editor of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex (2009) and co-editor of The Color of Violence, The Incite! Anthology (2006). Kathryn Tanner is the Frederick Marquard Professor of Systematic Theology at Yale Divinity School. She obtained her doctorate from the Religious Studies Department of Yale University, where she taught for ten years before joining the University of Chicago faculty in 1994. Her work employs interdisciplinary methods for rethinking the character of Christian belief and practice. She is the author of six books, including The Politics of God (1992), Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (1997), and Economy of Grace (2005). Thandeka is the founder of Affect Theology, the study of human emotions that guide, direct, and prioritize religious beliefs, creedal claims, and liturgical practices. Author of The Embodied Self: Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Solution to Kant’s Problem of the Empirical Self (1995) and Learning to be White: Money, Race and God in America (1999), Thandeka’s current book project is a formal introduction to Affect Theology. She has

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taught at Meadville Lombard Theological School, Williams College, Harvard Divinity School, and Brandeis University, and has been a visiting scholar at Union Theological Seminary and the Center for Process Studies, as well as a fellow at Stanford University’s Humanities Center. An ordained Unitarian Universalist minister and theologian, she was given the !Xhosa name Thandeka, which means ‘beloved’, by Archbishop Desmond Tutu in 1984. María Cristina Ventura (Tirsa) is a feminist theologian and biblical scholar who currently teaches in the Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones at the Universidad De La Salle, San José, Costa Rica. After completing her doctoral studies at the Universidad Metodista en Sao Paulo, she became Professor of New Testament in the Instituto Teológico de Santo Andrés, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and then a professor of the Old Testament at the Universidad Bíblica Latinoamericana. She is the member of Red Bíblica Latinoamericana y de Ribla and Asociación de Teólogas Latinoamericanas y Latinas en Estados Unidos. In addition to several articles, she is author of ‘Cuerpos Peregrinos: un estudio de género, clase y etnia de los Salmos 120–134’ (Pilgrim Bodies: A Study of Gender, Class, and Ethnicity in Psalms 120–134). Elina Vuola, Doctor of Theology, is the Professor of Latin American studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She did her dissertation in 1997 on the methodological premises of Latin American liberation theology and feminist theory, with a specific focus on issues of sexual ethics in the context of widespread poverty in predominantly Catholic Latin America. In 2002–3 she worked as a visiting scholar and research associate at the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. Her current research is on Costa Rican Catholic women’s interpretations of the Virgin Mary in relation to Latin American feminist theorizing about religion in general and Catholicism in particular. Some of her publications in English are Limits of Liberation: Feminist Theology and the Ethics of Poverty and Reproduction (2002) and ‘Seriously Harmful for Your Health? Religion, Feminism and Sexuality in Latin America’, in Marcella Althaus-Reid (ed.), Liberation Theology and Sexuality (2006), both of which are also translated into Spanish. Her latest research has been published as ‘Patriarchal Ecumenism, Feminism, and Women´s Religious Experiences in Costa Rica’, in Hanna Herzog and Ann Braude (Eds), Gendering Religion and Politics: Untangling Modernities (2009). Sharon D. Welch is Provost and Professor of Religion and Society at MeadevilleLombard Unitarian Universalist Seminary in Chicago. Her work has focused on ethics, peace initiatives, and multicultural education. She is the author of four books: After Empire: The Art and Ethos of Enduring Peace (2004), A Feminist Ethic of Risk (1990), Sweet Dreams in America: Making Ethics and Spirituality Work (1998), and Communities of Resistance and Solidarity: A Feminist Theology of Liberation (1985). She is currently a member of the International Steering Committee of Global Action to Prevent War.

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i n troduction mary m c clintock fulkerson and sheila briggs

A movement called ‘Feminist Theology’ emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in the context of Second Wave feminism in the United States. Drawing largely upon the activism of white women, this feminist theology shared concerns with the secular North American movement, for example, women’s rights, antidiscrimination legislation, protection from sexual and domestic violence, and the politics of representation. As theology it took on gender issues particular to the Christian religious community, promoting women’s access to official church leadership, leveling critiques at the patriarchal character of Christian tradition and its institutional structures, and seeking to retrieve women’s agency and histories. As a critically important reaction to dominant, unmarked white male accounts of normative Christianity, this feminist theology has been ground-breaking. Feminist theology was one of several new theologies that began in the 1960s through participation in social movements seeking radical change. Among these were Black Theology in the United States and Liberation Theology in Latin America. So, although the contributions of Second Wave-feminist theology were acknowledged, a number of critiques came from these other radical theological movements. Amid complaints about the racial and class homogeneity of feminist theology, women of color in the United States founded the Womanist and mujerista theological movements, while women from Latin American, Africa, and Asia also began to organize in the 1970s, first through EATWOT (the Ecumenical Association of Third-World Theologians) and then later through their own autonomous forums, such as the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians. The awareness that feminists were working in other religious traditions challenged the monopoly of Christianity in feminist thinking and led to Christian feminist theology’s embrace of inter-religious dialogue and recognition of women of other faiths and post-traditional forms of feminist spirituality. Second-generation feminist theologies from the mid-eighties onward also invoked poststructuralist challenges to the notion of experiencing subjects and challenged the heteronormative character of feminist theology. In the past half century, while an originally predominantly white and Christian feminist theology gave way to more diverse movements of women engaged in

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religious reflection, the surrounding social context was being transformed by the processes of globalization. Indeed, many of the changes to feminist theology itself occurred through responses to the intersecting economic, cultural, and political impacts of globalization. Among these effects was the disruption of the narrative of feminist theology as a Western discourse. Globalization allowed not only connection between feminists engaging religion in widely different cultural and geographical locations but also reshaped the socio-economic and political frameworks in which they worked. Also, the inequities and exploitation that characterized the emerging ‘global village’ began to trouble feminist theology’s efforts to include the ‘other’, for including the ‘other’, whether the religious, racial, ethnic, queer, or class ‘other’, could easily be subverted into the most hegemonic stratagems of globalization. This Handbook tries to present an inclusive account of feminist theology in the early twenty-first century that acknowledges the reflection of women on religion beyond the global North and its forms of Christianity. It has, therefore, chosen globalization as its central theme, as the foremost characteristic of the context in which we do feminist theology today. Although we cannot claim to have avoided the hegemonic traps that face any inclusionary discourse under globalization, we hope that we have provided an internal critique that will help the reader uncover our silences and our evasions and begin to imagine what feminist theology might become beyond the historical moment of this Handbook.

Defining globalization Five hundred years of Western colonial expansion has led, ironically, to a global Christianity that is now calling into question the adequacy of a project centered in the problems and issues of the West, whether they be traditional topics of Western Christian theologies or feminist topics defined solely by Western women. However, our social and cultural reality cannot be adequately addressed by feminism’s ‘inclusive’ intentions and approaches unless the material and symbolic transformative effects of globalization— the successor to the world system of Western colonization—are also acknowledged. For feminist theology to take seriously the enormously complex topic of globalization requires that it move beyond its basic narrative as a movement defined by the USA. This is not to abandon the context of the USA, where we, the Oxford Handbook editors, are situated as feminist theologians. It is, rather, to confess the partiality of our perspective and to reassess our understanding of situatedness in light of the implications of globalization for defining ‘contexts’. Several features of globalization help in beginning to take on this challenge. First and foremost, globalization takes the economic form of global capitalism. With the end of socialisms in the 1980s, capitalism became the sole economic system for the globe, and it has clearly had positive effects. Even a postcolonialist critic observes global capitalism’s ‘trebling world per capita income since 1945, halving the proportion of the world living in abject poverty . . . while various subordinated groups have grasped

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opportunities for global organization’ (Ashcroft 2001: 214). US entrepreneur-philanthropist Bill Gates is using what he calls ‘creative capitalism’ to address global poverty and HIV/ AIDS. However, the free market has not been an unadulterated ‘engine of human progress’. The gap between rich and poor still continues to widen, and women— especially women in the global South and women of color in the West—are almost always at the bottom. When economies are restructured to reduce government spending and services, to produce commodities for export rather than local consumption, and to decrease production costs through lowering wages, poor families and especially the women within them are expected to absorb enormous economic burdens (Benería 2003). Driven by the profit motive, some would say that wealth creation has become the ‘sine qua non’ of global capitalism (Ellwood 2001: 10–11). Even though the recent global economic crisis of 2008–9 has interrupted the soaring success of dominant centers of profit such as the USA, the impact of globalized capitalism is not going away. Harms done to the wealthiest centers of capital have even more severe reverberations in every dependent global location. Since, worldwide, women constitute the most marginalized groups disadvantaged by both the growth and the crises of the global economy, global capitalism clearly matters for feminist theology. A second feature of this new period in world history has to do with globalization’s implications for the political, which began with the alteration of the role and power of the nation state. While globalization theories differ on how they understand the ways national power has been altered, all would agree that there has clearly been a shift from the center-periphery model of colonialism to a multipolar situation. The very meaning of ‘global’, as James Beckford points out, is the ‘sense of not being controlled from any single geographical location and of being guided by “new logics” ’ (2003: 145). One of the unfortunate effects of such logics, however, is that the emergence of transnational centers of power diminishes the possible ‘creative’ function of the nation-state to control global markets for the common good. As women’s low wage and unpaid labor demonstrate, loss of labor laws and government protections can have serious costs. This shift to multipolar centers of power, of course, has not meant the end of significant differences in power. Since the precursor of contemporary globalization was the European overseas empires that formed between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the inequities in the flow of resources that marked the centerperiphery model of the earlier colonialism have not been abolished. As Stephen Moore puts it, capitalist colonialist nations enmeshed such peoples ‘in a symbiotic relationship with their own [economies] . . . thereby ensuring a constant two-way flow of human and natural resources (slaves, settlers, raw materials, etc.)—and a one-way flow of profits into their coffers’ (2000: 185). With the formal political independence of colonized nations after World War II, the international economy, based on the integration of colonies into the markets of their colonial masters, eventually needed to be replaced. The multipolar model of global markets was not conceived to redress the injustices and imbalances of colonialism’s economic legacies. Instead, development in this model has always meant leaving the wealth accrued by the West during the colonial period intact, while stimulating global economic growth by the

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successful implementation of capitalist models outside the West. These development policies have led to the emergence first of Japan, then China and India as major economic powers on equal footing with Western nations. Internally, however, these new economic powerhouses have retained and renewed the exploitative practices of the colonial period. In particular a large pool of underpaid labor with few legal protections, drawn from the local or migrant populations, and producing goods and services for foreign export is an extension of earlier colonial patterns into the new global economy. Perhaps the biggest change between colonialism and globalization is the vastly increased direct participation of women in the exploited labor force, including transnational migrants (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003). We do well to remember that the ‘post’ in ‘postcolonialist’ criticism is never intended to name a period free of colonial legacies. A postcolonialist take on matters is, thus, crucial to remind feminist analysis of globalization that residuals of unjust power relations continue to impact the new and ‘enlightened’ age. However, such a view cannot be allowed to blot out the agency and creativity that has always characterized colonized groups, a creativity characteristic of women all over the globe. In short, the ever-growing complexity of these shifting global politics and power dynamics cannot be portrayed simply in terms of First World versus Third World. Global cities now include Hong Kong, Cairo, Istanbul, Moscow, and Tokyo, not simply Western power centers such as New York and London. As Asian feminist theologian Namsoon Kang points out, Asia is no longer adequately treated as simply a ‘victim’ of the West. Nor do we rightly speak of opposition as simply between oppressors and oppressed. As will be illustrated throughout the book, an appropriate feminist theological approach will recognize both the dispersal and complexity of marginalizing power. A third key feature of globalization is its impact on culture and communication, mediums central to feminist analysis. The loss of centers of power defined specifically on the basis of geographical location has had its parallel in the deterritorialization of cultural boundaries. While ‘cultures’ have always been transported around the globe—a feature characteristic of imperialist Christian missions, as well as the spreading of non-religious cultures—what is distinctive about globalization is its compression of time and space and the effect of that compression on culture. To get at this new cultural mode we might best speak of cultural ‘flows’. Communication technologies allow for unprecedented rapid spread of information, images, and cultural narratives all over the globe in ways that constantly alter, indeed, co-constitute the ‘present’. This spread has been symbolized by the notion of the ‘McDonaldization’ of global culture. Suggesting the dominance of Western culture in what is both promotion and global distribution of images and products, the term also signifies a homogenization that does not adequately account for the resistant and creative production of non-Western cultures. (In fact, some argue that globalization’s cultural flows can have heterogenizing effects (see Appadurai 1996).) However, it does help illustrate the non-geographically defined character of most cultures. Scenes with members of African bush tribes drinking Coca-Colas, for instance, are paralleled by images of US Midwesterners eating sushi

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one night and choosing between Mexican and Indian restaurants the next. Indeed, given the possibilities for virtual social networks, the very definition of community is in the process of significant alteration. In sum, globalization occurs as (a) decentralized capitalism that operates through (b) decentralized power centers, in relation to (c) time and space-compressed cultural flows. While one of the ways local cultures can respond to globalization is through ‘denial’, such a reaction shows they are being shaped by globalization’s forces. Transnational feminism has sought to develop a different practice in antiglobalization politics. It accepts that globalization has revealed the increasing redundancy of such simple dichotomies as Western/non-Western, First World/Third World. It sees the antiglobalization struggle as fighting not against the compression of space and time in the cultural flows of our contemporary world but against the boundless commodification of culture and indeed of every area of human life. It seeks to use the communications infrastructure of globalization to undo it as a political economy by creating transnational networks of feminist activists who repeatedly cross the borders of the places, identities, and beliefs that divide us (Mohanty 2003). A transnational feminist practice of solidarity is especially relevant to feminist theology in its multiple and interconnected contexts as we struggle with the effects of globalization on women’s lives. Therefore, it is crucial for us as feminist theologians to think through the implications of such radical world forces for the discourse that has long stood for the liberation of women and the transformation of the complex social structures that continue to prevent women’s flourishing and render invisible the significance of gender.

The project To work toward furthering awareness of this absolutely vital world reality, two of us, both professors of feminism and theology in the USA, hosted a conference in 2003 at Duke University Divinity School for feminist theologians from around the globe. We brought scholars from several continents together to share our very different experiences of globalization and its impact on women. Such conversations are, truly, only a small beginning, but they initiated for many of us a confrontation with radically different convergences of bounty and desperation, marginalizing and creative agency, that simply cannot be pushed off the academic screen. Such conversations were themselves a result of globalization. The initial face-to-face sharing of stories and deliberations between women from places as far away as Australia and Ghana, Korea and California, was made possible by global airlines flights. That we shared some cultural knowledges—of American fast foods, of Muslim women’s abayahs, and of Indian meditative practices of yoga—is a result of globalized ‘cultural flows’, the rapid spread of certain images and symbols that circulate throughout the world. Also, our subsequent book project is inconceivable without transglobal

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communication technologies like email. Although access to such rapid communications systems is not equal among us all, the fact that many of the seminaries and universities where we teach do have some form of these advanced technologies shows how feminist or any academic projects in the twenty-first century are already embedded in global structures. There is simply no easy way to characterize or order the insights that emerge with feminist attention to globalization. However, we begin with one of the most demanding of its effects, the wound of poverty, and then turn to some of the implications of globalization for the ‘feminist’ and ‘theological’ character of feminist theology.

Global poverty and women One of the most pressing issues of globalization is the failure of global capitalism to support the flourishing of all people. The effects of free trade and profit-seeking can even further impoverish groups. There are people struggling with poverty in Durham, North Carolina, as well as in Haiti or South Africa. Given that women are everywhere, they are always affected by this impoverishing, and women are the ones who experience poverty in the most extreme measures. Nor can globalization even be discussed ‘without centerstaging women of color’ (Aguilar and Lacsamana 2004: 16), illustrated powerfully in essays such as Maricel Mena Lopez’ account of Afro-Columbian women. Indeed, the effects of such forces on women are issues addressed by not only feminists within the academy. Years of work on the oppression of women across the globe has led journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wu Dunn to argue that the issue of the twenty-first century is the emancipation of women. So feminist thinking must attend to this reality of poverty and its huge impact on women, and regardless of focus, most essays in the Handbook address poverty in some form. For example, the impact of poverty on health care is radically evident in African countries, whose native authors testify to the horrific spread and impact of HIV/AIDS on women—what Denise Ackermann calls an AIDS pandemic. Stories from Latin America tell again and again of the incredible disparities in income and work possibilities. As Maria Ventura so poignantly puts it, most Latin American women have ‘tired bodies’, ‘violated bodies’, and ‘bodies in motion’ as they are forced to migrate to find work to support their families. They are migrant workers, washerwomen, and domestics, with ‘hands hardened by manual work’ and bodies that will never measure up to the models promoted by the capitalist market culture. In addition, the continued violence and poverty associated with global sex-trafficking is a well-known issue that affects too many women’s lives. The fact that women’s paid employment is consistently lower than men of the same class, wherever they are located geographically, has other gender-related associations besides the sex trade and its dehumanizing commodification of (primarily) female) bodies. Women’s (unpaid) domestic labor continues to complicate realities for poor and

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wealthy women alike. Kathryn Tanner tells of the surge of two-thirds world women who migrate primarily to northern countries because they can make more money being nannies than they can in their native countries. They continue to keep close connections with their families at home, including the provision of much-needed financial support. Thandeka tells of white Western women in the USA who hire these nannies. Ironically— and an example of one of the paradoxes of globalization—while the former advance in status, they still continue to make lower salaries than their male counterparts (due in part to their continued responsibility for childcare), while the nannies from overseas out-earn their menfolk at home. One can, of course, feel little sympathy for the elite Western women; they clearly make more than the nannies they hire, and they are generally freer to make such choices. However, whatever the specifics of female economic status, the highly problematic association of ‘the domestic’ with women continues to be a global phenomenon. And ‘domestic’ has yet to be an honored form of human labor.

New challenges for feminist theology This huge spectrum of women’s suffering demands a response—not, however, one akin to the check-in-the-mail reaction to a tear-jerker ad of starving African women and children. A crucial question, ‘Whose Globalization?’ as Namsoon Kang puts it, is another way to put the reminder that feminist theology must recognize the very different social locations that generate and define its issues and dilemmas. Like other Liberationists, feminist theologians virtually define their work as contextual theologies, in contrast to theologies that portend to be ‘universal’, as in, written from nowhere and true for all Christians. The point of such theologies is that, to matter, theology must be written out of situations of social marginalization and oppression. When we add ‘globalized’ to ‘context’, feminist theologians face much more complexity. What has defined ‘context’ for feminism has long been structures of gender, race, sexual orientation, and the constraints of ethnicity and class. More recently, the crucial work of postcolonial criticism is beginning to help us see the Western paternalizing assumptions that fund our check-in-themail mentality (see Donaldson 1992; Donaldson and Pui-lan 2002; Pui-lan 2005). Recognition of the intersection of these varied global forces brings to light potentially relevant new ways of thinking about the longstanding markers attended to by (white) feminism. While clearly gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and ethnicity have continued relevance for feminism’s notion of context, three additional factors help us imagine the impact of globalization in defining context. First, contexts for producers and purviews of feminist theology are deterritorialized by globalization. As mentioned earlier, social location can no longer be defined by geographical boundaries. ‘Boundaries of difference’, says Robert Schreiter, are increasing in significance in the place of ‘boundaries of territory’ (1997: 26–7). This is not to say that territorial geography ceases to exist; indeed, one section of the Handbook will review feminist theological issues by way of geographical regions. It is to say, however, that the

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physical and the local are always already constituted by the virtual communities made possible by global technologies and the compression of space, as well as the residuals of the past. This is not exactly news to feminist thinking, but its complex formulation in terms of the frequently unacknowledged global technologies of communication opens new avenues for defining our contexts as ‘social location’. Women’s context in southern Africa, for example, is not just a physical location in the larger continent of Africa. Minimally, Denise Ackermann argues, it consists of the convergence of globalization, residuals of apartheid, neo-colonialism, and ethnic and cultural differences. Women in Ghanaian marketplaces are now selling not only fresh locally grown food carried in trays on their heads, but also individual snacks in plastic wrap in roadside shacks plastered with cell phone advertisements and pictures of Barack Obama. Yet we must raise a note of caution against simply celebrating the deterritorializing effects of globalization. The experience of indigenous peoples, addressed in the essays of Andrea Smith and Tui Cadigan, reminds us that this deterritorializing is predicated on the territorialization of native land under colonialism. Andrea Smith explains how native land was claimed as the territory of the settler colonial state and that this declaration of control over land as its territory defines the modern nation-state. This control is fundamentally at odds with the understanding of indigenous peoples, which is built on respect for the land and not on its control. Tui Cadigan shows how the fundamental connection between spiritual power, women, and the land—mana wahine— was violated in the settlement of Aotearoa New Zealand by the British Empire. Globalization may erase many of the boundaries of nation-states but it sets up new ways to exercise control of the land and its resources, much to the detriment of indigenous peoples and the environment. Second, context is ‘hyperdifferentiated’, which is to say that people participate not simply in one culture, but in multiple realities, including virtual communities. While the global collage of products and advertising just mentioned appears to suggest the same thing, hyperdifferentiation is a reminder that such cultural realities are always intersecting to form our identities and most basic ‘communities’. As such, they are always multiple. Our attention to hyperdifferentiation prevents us from falling into two conceptual traps. First, feminist strategies that assume gender is the basic reality for women everywhere, altered slightly for some by secondary markers such as race or ethnicity, are left far behind by the notion of hyperdifferentiation. This does not permit blindness to the reality that some differences matter more than others, as Denise Ackermann insists. We have, after all, written a book on globalizations’ effect on ‘women’, invoking a difference that continues to matter in profoundly serious ways. It just means that gender cannot be treated apart from other identity markers. Second, we can avoid the mistake of identity politics that recognizes multiple identities but then essentializes them. This fragments women into tightly bounded microcommunities where social networks and political alliances are fragile unless women share a substantial number of identity markers. It also impedes activism not only on gender issues, but also on those of race/ethnicity, social class, sexual orientation, disability, age, and any other significant marker of identity. An important implication of such hyperdifferentiation

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is that the call for ‘authentic’ identities, such as the need to be considered ‘authentically Asian’ as Namsoon Kang points out, signifies false and problematic notions of social location. Even the identity of ‘Western’, deeply identified with highly problematic colonializing impulses, gets complexified with hyperdifferentiation. Some of our authors—Elizabeth Amoah, for example—participate in and identify with Western academics, as well as in the very different realities of the Circle of Concerned African Women of West Africa. Also, US Womanist theologians such as Katie Cannon (1992: vii–viii) can consider themselves members of the African Diaspora engaged in the Circle, and thus be both a ‘privileged’ Westerner and a women marked by ‘race’ and gender. Everyone, even a US Anglo-Saxon male, has ‘multiple identities’. Identity, for everyone, will need to be reconfigured. Globalization constructs our identities as consumers in capitalist-controlled markets but at the same time destabilizes older essentialist conceptions of identity. It thus opens up interstices within itself where we can resist its own impositions of identity through negotiating new ones that span local and transnational contexts. Thirdly, it is becoming more and more obvious that, wherever they are, cultures are hybrid. While this has probably always been the case, the lens of globalization makes it virtually impossible to deny the hybrid or eclectic character of any social reality. In other words, hyperdifferentiation sticks. There is simply no one form of Christianity, no ‘normative’ essence that can be considered ‘pure’ and unadulterated by surrounding culture. Ghanaian Elizabeth Amoah claims a hybrid identity in the intersection of Akan wisdom with Christianity in Africa. Elina Vuola traces Marian devotions of Russian Orthodox Karelian (Finnish) women that syncretized indigenous pre-Christian traditions of female sexual power with their imaging of the Virgin Mary. Now those co-constituting signifiers can come from anywhere. We find examples of hybridized religious practices by women across the globe (Christianity and voodoo in Haiti, candomble in Brazil, and Cuban Santeria (see Lopez)). While such practices connote ‘syncretism’ and the compromising of religious faith for some, globalization helps us recognize that syncretism is unavoidable. Identities are inevitably formed by ‘cultural elements that are at hand’, as Schreiter puts it, elements that are ‘usually from more than one culture’ (1997: 63). Lopez points out the significant value of Afro-Catholic religious syncretism, for example, which contested the ideological hegemony of Europeanized Catholicism during times of slavery. Any social reality, Christian culture included, is always co-constituted by other signifiers and bodily practices from its surrounding culture. Globalization has moved us beyond the holism that characterized modern cultural anthropology, and the notion of ‘trait’ geographies that came with area studies. With recognition of globalized context as deterritorialized, hyperdifferentiated, and hybrid, other themes long associated with feminist theology are revisited in the Handbook. A few examples bear mention. First, the multivalence and density of any context produced by globalization makes it imperative, as suggested earlier, to move beyond or at least limit the use of identity politics. What we discover in our chapters are a host of alternatives to this essentializing practice long associated with (white) feminist theology. Further, the alternatives typically resist what Maria Pilar Aquino calls the unhelpful destabilizings of the ‘post-neoisms’, the obsession of the 1990s with ‘difference’.

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Pilar Aquino’s focus is on the connections between groups that enable the alteration of unjust ‘kyriarchal powers’. Offering another alternative to identity politics, Namsoon Kang introduces the notion of ‘posture’. As a way to think about Asianness as ethnicity, ‘posture’ invokes an image of openness and relationality. It can help create an imagination whereby identities are always real, but need to be seen as part of processes. Analogously, concern in many of the essays with relational practices of engagement, as Sharon Welch puts it, rather than activism around fixed marginalizing markers, has a similar effect. Relational models of identity enable us to judge how injustices are configured in particular contexts and do not generalize a fixed nature of identity and injustice as essentialist/inclusivist models do. Both the ‘posture’ and ‘engagement’ models call feminist theology to attend to the variances produced by globalization as it intersects with the local—the multi-layered ‘glocal’, so to speak—yet allow for potential connections and similarities. Again, some differences matter more than others, and the feminist challenge is to read contexts locally and globally in making such judgments. A second issue for reconsideration in light of globalization is periodization. The narrative of feminist theology that arose in the second half of the twentieth century was deeply embedded in the grand metanarrative of the Modern West. In this Western story it is the emancipatory agenda of modernity that enables women to struggle for their rights. According to this account, feminism has its origins in the period of the French Revolution in the work of such women as Mary Wollstonecraft and becomes a movement in the United States after the Seneca Falls convention of 1848. The women’s suffrage movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries define the ‘First Wave’ of feminism. Then in the middle of the twentieth century feminist activism dwindles because everyone is attending to more important matters of fascism, communism, and war. However, in the 1960s social movements erupt demanding that modernity honor its emancipatory promises and slowly, but inexorably the vestiges of racism, sexism, and homophobia are removed. Globalization then fortuitously arises and spreads these achievements of democracy to the rest of the world. Yet globalization also uncovers other narratives that radically decenter that of Western modernity. This story can no longer present itself as the account of universal feminist discourse (which simply adds more adjectives, such as Western, white, Christian, etc., to deal with ‘diversity’), but must be reread in light of the communities of women it rendered invisible. Its periodization erases women’s struggles outside the West as well as in the premodern West. Womanist theologies, for example, have long been challenging this feminist narrative. In her riveting argument for taking Native American women seriously, Andrea Smith offers a different account of ‘First Wave’ feminism. The activism and very existence of Native American women have long been ‘a “present absence” in the U.S. colonial imagination’, as she reminds us. North American feminism, then, actually began in 1492, when Native women collectively resisted colonization. In another example, Azza Karam argues that an adequate history of feminist movements in the Middle East is much more complicated than the typical judgment that feminism emerges with (Western) modernity.

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A third area for feminist attention involves the already-mentioned complex character of power relations revealed by globalization and the necessary move out of the binary logic of oppressor–oppressed. Serene Jones’ overview of the imaginings of both feminist theology and globalization gives expression to this when she outlines the ways feminist themes and commitments can be co-opted by the power mechanisms of globalization. Feminist imaginative ‘plays of mind’, as she puts it, that have been judged to enhance women’s flourishing cannot be judged as simply liberating or constructive, for globalizing dynamics can reorient any good to undermine women’s well-being. Take, for example, the valorizing of difference, democracy, fluid identity, and the aesthetic, which can appear to correct rigidities and power imbalances of patriarchal Christianity. Global capitalism can appropriate difference for endless commodification, misdirect democracy toward deceptive equalizing of human needs, and romanticize fluid identity in settings where for immigrant women, to take one example, clear boundaries and traditions are much more sustaining. Already problematized by hyperdifferentiation, appeals to ‘native’ or authentic cultural identity in simple terms illustrate the complex character of power due to globalizing forces. The call for ‘authentic’ identities, such as the need to be considered ‘authentically Asian’ as Namsoon Kang points out, not only signifies false and problematic notions of social location. These appeals can also display or mask anxieties that may have complicated effects. Indeed, ‘authentic’ patriarchal Muslim culture, argues Azza Karam, has sometimes been invented by Middle Eastern men in an attempt to resist colonialism’s emasculating effects. Reaction to the feared homogenizing Western culture created intensified male control. Zayn Kassam also explores the complexities of Muslim reaction to the perceived onslaught of Western colonialism over the centuries. Tracing the history of the veil itself has sometimes functioned as a ‘symbol of resistance’. While there are no simple configurations of appeals to the ‘native’, it is clear that power moves to assert agency have secondary effects, which may well involve lateral damages to other subordinated populations. In short, power moves to assert agency have secondary effects, which may well involve lateral damage to other subordinated populations. This, of course, does not mean that any such response to globalization is simply defensive. The heightened valuing of indigenous culture can also be a sign of creative agency. We will read many accounts like Nancy Bedford’s story of Pentecostal Latina women, where women’s creativity is operative in contexts that may first appear to be simply patriarchal. Islamic practices toward women suggest intriguing examples of the non-binary character of oppression. Karam argues powerfully for more nuanced approaches by the West and against the Western stereotyping of Islam as pure patriarchy. In a subtle updating of Mary Daly’s exposure of the patriarchal God–man duo, Ellen Armour connects the more nuanced feminist respectful reading of women’s practices of ‘submission’ to the non-reductive acknowledgement of the transcendent. (These are not simply the practices of ‘fembots’.) On the other hand, Lisa Isherwood, building on the work of the Dutch feminist theologian Maaike de Haardt, points to monotheism and its one-way monologue of the divine to the human as doing injury to women. Transcendence becomes this colonization by an external divine that cements unequal

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and asymmetrical relationships that are then reduplicated in globalization. Despite their differences, Armour and Isherwood would agree that feminist theology’s assumptions about what counts as good agency must be conceived with serious attention to women’s desires and pleasures and how those are mobilized within their religious traditions. In short, our essays show that attention to such settings in light of globalization should surface liberative and oppressive effects, but also what might best be termed the ambiguity and sometimes tragic consequences of the multivalent character of power. Power, in short, is never simple. Patriarchy has never been simple; and as globalized, it can only be more of a challenge. Given the increasing complexity of context, and these examples of emerging changes in feminist ways of thinking, the question of shared ends and commonalities is also rendered more pressing for feminist theology. Already long fractured by complaints about the false universalizing of (white) feminist theology of the 1960s and 1970s, will feminist theology’s recognition of deterritorialized, hyperdifferentiated, hybridized contexts simply split us even more? To consider this challenge, we turn to some of the implications of globalization for being ‘theological’ and the insights generated by the group of thinker/activists represented in this volume.

Implications for feminism as theology As they increase our awareness of difference, the dynamics of globalization may well threaten our sense of common agendas. However, they also heighten the dangers associated with historical forms of universalizing Christianity. So deeply embedded are connections of world mission with the logic of empire-building—even before the rise of global capitalism—that adequately sensitive concepts of feminist theology as theology may seem impossible to some audiences. The conference that produced this volume was itself the product of US feminists, and the outcome, The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theology, a product of a British press. Despite our efforts, the authors are, still, predominantly Western scholars, or shaped by the West, and predominantly Christian. Given the nature of globalization, there would not appear to be a way to escape fully the impact of these forces. What we can do, however, is identify proposals for moving forward and recognize their always-partial and imperfect impact, even as we also acknowledge that there will not be a pure feminist alternative. One ongoing question has to do with approaches to the term ‘theology’. The status of feminist theology as theology has often been questioned because its focus does not have to be on ideas, not even religious ones. Sheila Briggs wants feminist theology to address the materiality of human existence and the material conditions in which our imaginations are shaped and operate in two areas of critical importance in the processes of globalization: science and technology and popular culture. She sees alternatives to purely technocratic solutions and corporate-owned media. The coordination of expert and indigenous (often local women’s) knowledges is needed to protect the environment and

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provide food, water, and energy security for all of the world’s populations. The secularized Christianity of Western science must give way to broader insights drawn from the religions and spiritualities of other cultures. Christian systematics is not adequate. Another approach to the challenge of feminist theology as theology includes a new take on an old but still relevant issue. Jewish feminist Melissa Raphael reminds us of the long-standing virtual identification of the term ‘theology’ with ‘Christian’. Helpfully, she finds constructive expansions of the term by some of her Jewish colleagues, who employ it to refer to faith practices outside of doctrine. While the ‘theology’ dilemma is not fully resolved in this Handbook, Raphael has identified a deep theme that resonates throughout the volume. This wider definition of theology overlaps in a significant way with Christian feminist attention to lived practices outside of doctrine, a continually repeated focus in this book. An analogous concern is to advance the work of Talal Asad (1993) and others on the problematic use of the term ‘religion’. Asad’s well-known critique of religion’s long-standing virtual reduction to ‘belief ’ and cognitive accounts of faith is now pushed in a feminist direction. Sharon Welch helpfully considers the problematic way in which comparative religion has been approached when these reductions are assumed. Her constructive alternative to the ‘dialogue’ and ‘debates’ that have dominated this model of inter-religious encounters is religious ‘engagements’. With engagements, Welch exposes how the Western focus on the cognitive ignores a rich continuum of spiritual practices characteristic of other faiths. Several other authors take up the ways in which non-Christian ‘religions’ and spiritualities are not adequately portrayed as belief systems, yet are fundamental to women all over the world and need to be honored. Neela Saxena, for example, discusses the subjectivity of bhakti, a devotional mode of surrender and ego-effacing desire in Tantric Hinduism that is quite different from what Western feminists think of as female submission in a patriarchal system. Whole new dimensions of reality come to light with such respect, dimensions that can surely lead to alterations of Christianity in the future. As for the way in which Christian theology is portrayed and invoked overall in the Handbook, our approach diverges not only from typical volumes in ‘generic’ systematic theology, but also from some of the classic forms of feminist theology. Mary Daly (1973) and Rosemary Radford Ruether (1983), for example, offered ground-breaking feminist ‘systematic’ thealogies, or what Mary McClintock Fulkerson (1994) has called parodic systematic theologies, as they took up classic Christian doctrines and exposed their oppressive patriarchal function along with proposals of constructive alternatives. The Handbook’s approach does not drop the Christian tradition or some of its long-standing themes, but neither does it pursue the concern of feminist theologians who worry that the Christian tradition is being left behind or inadequately reappropriated (see Parsons 2000). Instead, we focus on the seriousness of these globalized processes for formerly abstracted Christian convictions. Musa Dube puts it rather pointedly as she calls for the need to ‘villagize the globe’. Feminist (or any) theology, she argues, must challenge the ‘one-way traffic’ of Western accounts of theology with counter-narratives from the two-thirds world. However, the explicitly theological themes basic to taking seriously the activist/practice approach of most of our authors are here addressed. And the activist/practice approach has implications

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even for the most basic topics of theological authority. Dube’s counter-narratives, for example, yield ‘world scriptures’ birthed of compelling communal experiences. A theological account of ‘tradition’, which has always been central to Christian theologizing, is fascinatingly reconfigured by Kathryn Tanner. She insists that feminist theology take seriously the new form ‘tradition’ takes for marginalized women due to globalization. Looking at the huge number of impoverished women forced into transnational migration to survive, Tanner shows how these displacements do not cut women off from their ‘traditions’, cause assimilation, or allow for unaltered forms of their continued connections to ‘community’ and ‘tradition’ with their countries and faiths of origin. For a feminist theology that takes counter-narratives seriously, the deterritorializing, hyperdifferentiating, and hybrid character of context mandates new ways to define ‘faithfulness to tradition’. What is implicit in most essays and illustrated powerfully by such authors as Elina Vuola, Melissa Raphael, and Teresa Berger is that theology must turn to the faith activities of practitioners, what in religious studies has been called the shift to ‘lived religion’ (see Hall 1997). Thus Vuola’s comparison of the practices of Marian devotion in Orthodox Karelia with those around the Latin American Virgin of Guadalupe not only show incredible creativity, but warn against too easy judgments of the sexist function of a doctrine. Additionally, Berger shows how feminist liturgies highlight dilemmas peculiar to women—ritualizing healing for losses, celebration of female life stages, and denunciation of violence against women—and Womanist Cheryl Kirk-Duggan points us to the compelling lived narratives of African American women. Women in east Africa, even under patriarchal cultural arrangements, could be religious authorities, herbalists, and prophetesses, Philomena Mwaura tells us, and some ‘such women became leaders of the anti-colonial rebellions, for example, Bonairiri among the Abagusii and Mekatilili wa Meza among the Giriama’. Even Ellen Armour’s chapter on ‘God’ is connected in a critical Feuerbachian way to anthropological realities, that is, women’s faith’s practices. Significantly, this connection is not in the form of the reductionism typically associated with Feuerbach. If Christian feminists or any other religiously traditioned feminists are to take on the tragedies and injustices of the current global realities, she argues, they must take seriously the transcendent commitments of women along with the anthropological implications of any ‘God-referent’. Neither can be ignored. As has been suggested repeatedly in identifying these emerging issues, the overwhelming alternative to the defense of theological doctrine or religious belief for feminist theology is a shared turn not just to practice, but to multiple forms of activism as well. Serene Jones puts it bluntly: in order to connect to women around the globe and their issues, the heart of globalized feminist theology, it is better to ‘do practices’, so to speak, than doctrine. Other authors are eloquent as they make similar claims. Jewish feminism, as Raphael points out, has always intersected with Christian feminism in virtue of its focus on ethics and practice rather than belief-centered theology. Maria Pilar Aquino insists that the litmus test for feminist theology is its addressing of human suffering. Andrea Smith makes a powerful case for structural attention to this issue, arguing for the realignment of academics’ accountability to grassroots change movements instead of academic tenure committees. We must have strategic alliances

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and do public theology, Ackermann argues, in a way that honors the wisdom of the oppressed. And key to such alliances is an engagement that resists stereotypes of ‘third world women’—a dehumanizing ‘sympathy’ that has been particularly characteristic of Western images of African women. Further, practically every author gives examples of women’s activist groups that indeed perform the kind of engagement Welch is promoting. For example, the Circle of Concerned African American Women theologians brings together Muslim, Christian, and Hindu women to work on issues such as HIV/AIDS. Philomena Mwaura tells of the grassroots women’s work for environmental goods in Eastern Africa initiated by Kenyan Professor Wangare Maathai, a 2004 Nobel Peace Laureate. Women in Buenos Aires created their own knitting cooperative to work in the international fair trade market. Andrea Smith tells of involvement in Incite! Women of Color Against Violence—a grassroots organization that has even learned from the Evangelical US group, PromiseKeepers. Analyzing the world of elite Western white women who have left executive positions out of their concern for family, Thandeka argues not only that the ‘ethic of care’ emerging from these elite women’s experiences can be reconnected to the global economy, but also that ministers and religious institutions can take on consciousness-raising for what she sees as present opportunity to reforge the linking of the personal with the political in a potential new liberation movement. These feminist theological engagements with the structures of globalization are testimonies both to the essential connection that feminist theology has to activist practices and to the defining of theology as a practice of ‘interruption’ of the injustices of globalization, as Ackermann puts it, an interruption that is only possible if we are engaged in these realities. Theology is a ‘work of friction’, Bedford says, that works out the implications of faith’s involvement in the ‘sticky materiality of practical encounters’. The shared ends, then, are not about reproduction of Christianity (or Western feminism), but refer to critical performance of Christian traditions, or whatever spiritual traditions are relevant, in ways that enhance human flourishing. As one of the harshest critics of Christianity, Marcella Althaus-Reid illustrates that the very heteronormativity of Liberation theologies must be challenged. And her hybridized ‘indecenting’ of Christianity is itself a sign that new versions of such performances are very much in play. Ackerman’s claim that some differences matter more than others is again quite relevant here. In the contemporary global context, feminist theology may well have a take on a difference that matters enormously, globally speaking, despite the variations of its impact. The sheer number of human beings designated as ‘women’ and the consistent diminishing of well-being associated with that marker are enough to suggest that feminist theological concerns have a certain sense of universality, as long as ‘universal’ has more meanings than simply the enforcement of a class, race, and culturally specific point of view. Emerging here is a way of thinking about universalizing that is not about hegemonic or totalizing moves—something akin to what postcolonialist theologians call a theopolitics of ‘planetary love’ (Keller et al. 2004: 224). We return to what Namsoon Kang calls a ‘transethnic perspective’—not a ‘blind universalism but a relational and dialectical universalism that promotes “shared sensibilities” ’.

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Feminist theology must create transethnic perspectives that can generate shared space to recognize and act out of common commitments. That is not to say that there will be agreement on which differences matter all the time, or that there is a cure for all problematic feminist moves; there is no such thing, and one of the illusions of secular theory is just this assumption that more complex theorizations can ‘save’ us. Despite our embarrassment over the oppressive use of theological resources, Christian and otherwise, these traditions also have profoundly liberative resources—resources that compel regular self-criticism and honoring of the finite goodness of all of creation. Iconoclasm inherent in the refusal of idolatry and commitment to justice in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, Native American notions of sacred sovereignty as alternative to the absolute power of colonialism or the nation state, and Hindu shakti, the affirmation of women’s power are all examples of these potentially liberative resources. And such capacities to be consistently self-critical, show concern for the other, and exercise a relentless willingness to try again are no small thing. Our look at global situations for women confirms that just as there is no simple thing called ‘sexism’, there is no simple thing called ‘woman’. It also decries the inadequacy of identity politics. However, these past mistakes do not invalidate or undermine the compelling call for feminist theologies. It is, on the one hand, imperative that the multiple global disparities in access to well-being be named and addressed. On the other, we recognize that such discourse always risks collapsing ‘[t]he everyday, fluid, fundamentally historical and dynamic nature of the lives of third world women’ into what Chandra Talpade Mohanty calls ‘a few frozen “indicators” of their well-being’—poverty, short life expectancy, malnutrition, low wages, and so on (1991: 6). The point to be stressed is not that the inadequacy of identity politics is news, but that these recognitions give us all the more reason for the continued expansion of humanizing contacts and explorations. This is why, in other words, feminist theologians’ obsession with practices/engagements is so essential. In conclusion, we would like to appropriate and resituate the category of ‘imagined community’ that Benedict Anderson deployed to describe how the nation-state and national identity emerged with the modern capitalist, colonial economy and its dissemination of print. Such dissemination was actually revolutionary insofar as it facilitated a sharing of identities—a shared imagination—that transcended geographical place, faceto-face relationships, and communication (Anderson 1991: 6). What is more, shared and disseminated narratives sometimes produced identities in the sense of a ‘deep, horizontal comradeship’, as Anderson puts it (7). Shirin Rai has argued that today the ‘global village’ qualifies equally with the nation-state as an ‘imagined community’ and both are formed by gendered power relations (Rai 2002: 85). We believe that such communities do not have to be tied to hegemonic strategies and, therefore, propose that feminist theologies articulate their shared, overlapping concerns as non-imperialist, non-essentialist ‘imagined communities’. Admittedly, women do not possess a single shared history as the ‘nation’, which defined Benedict Anderson’s concept of an imagined community. Furthermore, unlike certain populations such as African Americans or Jews, women have no single collective historical trauma that might give them a shared memory and identity. We also recognize the risk to transnational practices of feminist theology from

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smuggling into its identity as ‘imagined communities’ the earlier Western universalizing of feminist sisterhood. Yet we believe that we can avoid this danger through a generous, self-critical feminist theological posture. Although generating passions around which ‘a people’ (whether nation-state or ethnic minority) might form from a shared history may not be an option for women, there may well be convergences of shared concerns surfaced by globalization and articulated in this volume. Accompanied by a generosity or empathy with those in very different global situations, such a confluence of interests, commitments, passions, and desires merits acknowledgement. The category of imagined community expresses the strength of connections that have and can be forged in the doing of feminist theology across religious traditions and geographical regions. With the advent of globalization the overlapping and expanding circles of feminist theological engagement do not have to take the form of face-to-face communities—although they can. In a globalized world communication technologies have immeasurably more influence on our ‘imagination’, shaping it with countless images, convictions, and messages from around the globe. Such cultural flows have produced far more complex and powerful shared identities, or ‘imagined communities’. In respect to the deterritorializing, dedifferentiating, and hybridizing effects of globalization, this way of defining and envisioning feminist theology as community acknowledges its non-localized, fluid, and hybrid character as well as its generation of passions around converging justice concerns. The proliferation of ‘imagined communities’ is simply an effect of the virtual spaces that contemporary communications technology has created and where physical distance and different material conditions no longer separate our many locations from one another. Such communities are not inherently feminist or liberative. Feminism and feminist theology endow an imagined community with clear and compelling passions and commitments and as transnational movements for radical social change they take up a global posture or plural number of overlapping engagements. We see these passions and commitments throughout the Handbook as our authors argue for activist/ praxis-defined ‘communities’ as an alternative to identity and representative politics. As these circles of concern continue to emerge, they continue to generate activism, and they continue to invite new modes of shared analysis and widening arenas of passion for change. Feminist theologies and their connective practices, in short, may helpfully be described as vibrant and growing ‘imagined communities’ of justice for women, communities that will always reach out, will always receive from the other, and will always need to repent and start anew. *

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The Handbook is organized as follows. An introductory section, Part I, ‘Feminist Theology at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century’, explores how the ‘state of the question’ has developed in the doing of Jewish and Christian feminist theology during the past half-century in its Western ‘home.’ Part II, ‘Changing Contexts’, examines the implications of globalization for feminist theology by way of geographical regions. Given the

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globalized culture, of course, those regions are taken up with regard to how they are affected by the globalized (or colonial) contexts. Thirdly we consider the implications of this complex reality on the genre of feminist thinking as a theological enterprise, indicated in the final section of the Handbook, Part III, Changing Contents, where specific theological themes define the chapters.

Notes 1. This is not to ignore the activism of women of faith in the USA in the previous centuries. However, the use of ‘feminist’ was a product of the early twentieth century, when the term came to the USA from France by way of Great Britain (see Cott 1987: 13–50). There were also women’s rights activists in other religious traditions before the term was coined in mid-twentieth-century America. There have been, for example, since the early twentieth century Islamic feminists (see Ahmed 1992: 169–207). 2. Heteronormative refers to the cultural view that makes normative the construction of gender as binary, i.e. complementary male and female, and sexual orientation as heterosexual. 3. Immanuel Wallerstein has been a key figure defining globalization in terms of an economic logic, i.e. global capitalism. For a discussion of four significant theories, see Beyer (1994). 4. For a helpful overview of different accounts, see Beyer (1994). More recently, see Waters (2001). 5. Organizations such as the WTO (World Trade Organization) and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), although charged with monitoring international human rights, are inadequate in terms of their enforcement powers. There is much theorizing about these issues, but for a concrete example, see Ho et al. (2000: 379–91). 6. This term from Paul Gilroy is helpfully developed by Schreiter (1997: 55). 7. Robert J. Schreiter proposes that a ‘local’ site or community will typically respond to globalization’s homogenizing effects with one of three different logics: antiglobalism, ethnicization, or primitivism (1997: 21–5). 8. The authors’ focus is not simply poverty, but women in ‘the developing world’ in light of three kinds of abuse: ‘Sex trafficking and forced prostitution; gender-based violence, including honor killings and mass rape; and maternal mortality, which still needlessly claims one woman a minute’. The intent is not to simply display victims, but to offer ‘a drama . . . of empowerment’ as well (Kristof and Wu Dunn 2009: xxi–xxii, 243ff.). 9. These three features of ‘context’ are borrowed from Schreiter (1997: 26–7). 10. For good discussions of the effect of colonialism and globalization on cultural and ethnic Asian ‘identity’, see Brock et al. (2007). 11. Adrien Wing tells of shopping in South Africa where her ‘multiple’ racial, gender, and national identities evoke discrimination and privilege: her brown face gets her the suspicious look of shop owners, until they hear her American accent, which elicits friendly and helpful responses (2000: 7 ff.). 12. For an early critique of holism in cultural anthropology, see Clifford and Marcus (1986), and Clifford (1988). We thank Kwok Pui-lan for pointing out the notion of ‘trait’ geographies as proposed by Arjun Appadurai (Brock et al. 2007: 15). 13. For two very different feminist interpretations of the practice of genital cutting/mutilation, see Lesley Amide Obiora’s ‘Bridges and Barricades: Rethinking Polemics and Intransigence in the Campaign against Female Circumcision’, and Isabelle R. Gunning, ‘Uneasy Alliances and Solid Sisterhood: A Response to Professor Obiora’s Bridges and Barricades’ (Wing 2000: 260-74, 275–84).

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14. McClintock Fulkerson argues that these are not simply systematic theologies that are critical of patriarchy. They affect criticism much more creatively by effectively functioning as parodies. Other feminist works take up a particular doctrine, such as Christology, salvation, God, rather than attempting to cover the system. 15. The heterogenizing and deterritorializing impacts of globalization can, in fact, intensify problematic impulses to valorize particular identities. While this is not reducible to what feminists have called ‘identity politics’, it would include them (see Miller 2008: 412–32). 16. The new conception of nations as ‘imagined communities’, which emerged with print capitalism, enabled masses of people ‘to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways’ (Anderson 1991: 36). It is accurately used to refer to ‘all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact’ (6). 17. However, more complex reasons contribute to the dilemmas of rallying a community to these causes. A significant difference in the USA between the African American community and something called ‘feminism’, for example, has to do with the dispersal of those designated as ‘women’ throughout every kind of community. Appeals to gender do not tap into any shared collective memory. There is, as Ron Eyerman puts it, no cultural trauma for women such as the history of slavery in the USA that constructs a collective memory and, thus, a shared identity.

Works Cited Aguilar, Delia D., and Lacsamana, Anne E. (Eds) (2004). Women and Globalization. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Ahmed, Leila (1992). Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press. Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Asad, Talal (1993). Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ashcroft, Bill (2001). Post-Colonial Transformation. London/New York: Routledge. Beckford, James A. (2003). Social Theory and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Benería, Lourdes (2003). Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics as if All People Mattered. New York: Routledge. Beyer, Peter (1994). Religion and Globalization. London: Sage. Brock, Rita Nakashima, et al. (Eds) (2007). Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Cannon, Katie G. (1992). ‘Foreword’, in Mercy Amba Oduyoye and Musimbi R. A. Kanyoro (Eds), The Will to Arise: Women, Tradition, and the Church in Africa. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Clifford, James (1988). The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. and Marcus, George E. (Eds) (1986). Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cott, Nancy F. (1987). The Grounding of Modern Feminism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 13–50. Daly, Mary (1973; repr. 1985). Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press.

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Donaldson, Laura E. (1992). Decolonizing Feminisms: Race, Gender, and Empire-Building. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. and Kwok, Pui-lan (Eds) (2002). Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse. New York: Routledge. Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Hochschild, Arlie Russell (Eds) (2003). Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Metropolitan Books (Macmillan). Ellwood, Wayne (2001). The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization. London: Verso. Eyerman, Ron (2001). Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fulkerson, Mary McClintock (1994). Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and Feminist Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Hall, David D. (1997). Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ho, Laura, Powell, Catherine, and Volpp, Leti (2000). ‘(Dis)Assembling Rights of Women Workers Along the Global Assembly Line: Human Rights and the Garment Industry’, in Adrien Katherine Wing (Ed.), Global Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader. New York: New York University Press, 379–91. Keller, Catherine, Nausner, Michael, and Rivera, Mayra (Eds) (2004). Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire. St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press. Kristof, Nicholas D., and Wu Dunn, Sheryl (2009). Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Kwok, Pui-lan (2005). Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. (2007). ‘Fishing the Asia Pacific: Transnationalism and Feminist Theology’, in Rita Nakashima Brock et al. (Eds), Off the Menu: Asian and Asian North American Women’s Religion and Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Miller, Vincent J. (2008). ‘Where is the Church? Globalization and Catholicity’, Theological Studies, 69/2: 412–21. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (1991). ‘Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism’, in Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Eds), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2003). Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moore, Stephen D. (2000). ‘Postcolonialism’, in A. K. M. Adam (Ed.), The Handbook of Postmodern Biblical Interpretation. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 182–8. Parsons, Susan Frank (Ed.) (2000). Challenging Women’s Orthodoxies in the Context of Faith. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press. Rai, Shirin M. (2002). Gender and the Political Economy of Development: From Nationalism to Globalization. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ruether, Rosemary Radford (1983; repr. 2002). Sexism and God-talk: Towards a Feminist Theology. London: SCM. Schreiter, Robert J. (1997). The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Waters, Malcolm (2001). Globalization, 2nd. edn. New York: Routledge. Wing, Adrien Katherine (ed.) (2000). Global Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader. New York: New York University Press.

section i

FE M I N IST T H EOLOGY AT T H E CROS SROA DS

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When the editors began pulling together this volume, they asked a number of feminist theologians to travel to Durham, North Carolina, to discuss our work. It was an exciting gathering. Sitting at the table were women from around the world. We all had strong academic backgrounds but hailed from different religious communities, regions, races, and ages, a very global group. In light of these differences, some of them obvious, some more surprising and harder to see, I am certain that if someone had asked us to come up with definitions of our topics—feminism, theology, globalization—we would have failed to reach any kind of consensus. With respect to ‘feminism’, we would no doubt have had lively debates spurred on by generational differences about what it means to be feminists and whether it’s an outdated term. In terms of ‘theology’, we would have argued about whether the word applies to anything other than ‘Christian theology’—highlighting its character as a historically Western endeavor. And when it came to ‘globalization’, the historians would have said one thing, the social scientists another, and the humanities-trained critics yet another. Our failure would, of course, have said a great deal about our shared project—feminism, theology, and globalization are not singular entities; they are multifaceted, multidefined realities. It would have been a mistake, however, to assume that our lack of consensus meant we held nothing in common. From the moment our conversation began, it was clear that we agreed on a lot. We all studied ‘theology’, we did so as ‘feminist activists’, and we saw our work unfolding on an increasingly ‘global’ stage. Moreover, we all showed up in Durham because we felt this confluence of interests mattered—in fact, it matters enormously. Why? Because it’s impossible to address critical global issues of our day—global warming, economic justice, communal conflict, immigration equity, sexual commodification, technological imperialism, international health crises, transnational violence, and massive global militarization—without considering the place that religion holds in

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the lives of so many people and without taking into account the roles that women play on the stage of world politics. Our shared hope was that our scholarly work, standing as it does at the intersection of these realities, might contribute to such understanding. As to exactly what our scholarly work might have to offer, that’s where our most interesting conversations happened—each of us giving different accounts of how these three realities interact in various places and at multiple levels. Running through all our accounts, however, were a number of shared convictions that again and again revealed our orientation as globally aware feminist theologians and scholars of religion. In this essay, I explore those shared commitments and use them as the basis for my own account of what feminist theology is and how it might help us understand and engage our globalizing world. In the first section, I offer a non-faith-specific definition of feminist theology as an intracultural activist enterprise aimed at exploring the landscape of religious imagination from a feminist perspective. I also lay out a few of feminist theology’s most distinctive ‘plays of imagination’. In the second section, I turn to faith-informed, Christian feminist theology, my area of work, and describe it as a more narrowly focused activist enterprise that explores the landscape of the distinctly Christian theological imagination from a feminist perspective. Its distinctive ‘plays of mind’ are delineated as well. In the third section, I turn to the topic of globalization and map out what I consider to be central features of ‘the global imagination’—describing the ways in which globalization has impacted and shifted our thinking processes in recent decades, particularly in the global North. Th en, in the last section, I return to Christian feminist theology (and to pluralistic feminist theology, as well) and suggest ways its faith imagination—its theological plays of mind—might productively engage the global imagination with the aim of improving, in new and creative ways, the lives of women everywhere.

Defining feminist theology An activist, imaginative endeavor What is feminist theology? The most obvious answer to this question is also the most important. Feminist theology is first and foremost an endeavor undertaken by women who understand themselves to be part of a broad social movement devoted to improving the lives of women everywhere. In this regard, feminist theology has, since its inception, been an activist endeavor with very practical goals and strategies. At its heart stands a shared commitment to creating a world where women (and all people) flourish. This is its driving aim. This is what makes it ‘feminist’. This is why it exists. As to what women’s flourishing consists of, feminist descriptions vary from one religious tradition and cultural context to another, but running through them are several

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almost universally held beliefs. The type of world in which women flourish is one where women have political, social, and religious power to participate fully in decision-making processes; where women’s bodies are valued, respected, and protected from demeaning forms of exploitation, abuse, and violence; where women’s labor, particularly the care they provide to children, the elderly, and the sick, is shared by all and honored as economically and socially valuable work; where the natural environment is engaged with respect; where education is open to all; and where the basic material resources that it takes for communities to be healthy and thrive are ensured. This view of flourishing also includes celebrating forms of beauty that women cherish and spiritual practices that women treasure, both of which point to the fact that flourishing involves not just the absence of oppression and injustice but also the positive presence of things that make women happy and fulfilled. It is also a vision where women are understood not just as victims of harms but as social agents, as capable of harming others as they are of working toward the betterment of all. Tied to this vision of women’s flourishing is feminist theology’s strong sense that creating this kind of community requires not just an abstract or merely principled commitment to building it; it demands that we invest our lives in ongoing, concrete actions designed to actually make it happen. In other words, pursuing the flourishing of women requires hard, pragmatically taxing, communal work. It includes not only obvious forms of activism such as lobbying Congress, marching in the streets, or fighting in the courts and in church councils to change laws and policies (things that feminists in liberal democracies associate with activism but that feminists in other political economies might view very differently); it also includes working for social change in local, everyday ways—how we cook, what we wear, who we are friends with, how we raise children, what we expect our homes to look like and our jobs, if we have them, to include, and, of course, how we worship and practice our faith. In this regard, feminist theology thinks of its activist practices as being as intimately personal as they are widely political, a belief that may now be commonplace but which nonetheless holds within it a philosophical claim about the nature of human social engagement and transformation. Closely tied to this view of practical transformation is feminist theology’s contention that changing society requires both changing laws and practices and challenging the categories and processes we use to think about life and to make sense of our world. I find it useful to think of this dimension of transformative practice as the recrafting of ‘imagination’, using the term not just to refer to our fantasies or dream lives—things imagined but not real—but also and more broadly to that vast interior landscape of thought within which our experiences are crafted and receive order and significance. This definition of imagination is closer to what is sometimes called ‘ideology’ or ‘culture’ or even ‘discursive worlds’—it includes the rich collection of beliefs, attitudes, images, stories, and memories that compose our collective and individual mental universes and hence frame our ongoing activities of meaning-making. Central components of our present-day mental landscapes are, of course, our individual or communal sensibilities about the three intersecting topics of this volume— religion/spirituality, gender/women, globalization/sociality—each of which profoundly

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shapes how we understand and engage the world. Recrafting each of these, as both distinct and interrelated realities, forms the unique work of global feminist theology. Insofar as it is a feminist enterprise, it explores how gender is constructed and deployed in the cultural imagination. Insofar as it is theology, it explores the complex ways communities of faith understand (and hence ‘imagine’) the Divine and its relation to the human experience and worldly existence. Insofar as it is global, it takes seriously the global stage upon which each unfolds. Helping to reshape our religious, global imagination, to recontour its landscape, making it more just and nourishing for women: this, then, is the job of feminist theology. As a multifaceted endeavor, it includes the critical task of uncovering deeply misogynistic impulses embedded in the world’s various religious traditions and in the form and processes of globalization. It includes as well the creative, innovative work of fashioning new forms of spiritual belief and practice in contexts where old forms have failed and harmful beliefs no longer hold power. Running through it all is feminist theologians’ profound sense that for faith to be truly life-giving, no matter its specific form, it must encourage the well-being of women in serious and substantive ways—a task of no small proportions, to say the least.

Feminist theology’s imaginative landscape: Eight plays of mind Over the years, feminist theologians from many walks of life and different religions have taken up this task of exploring, critiquing, and creatively remaking our religious imaginative landscapes. Out of this work has emerged a collection of ‘habits of thought’ or ‘intellectual dispositions’ that the writers of this book (we discovered) and feminist theologians in general share. When we look at the landscape of a given religion’s worldview and its gender assumptions, there are similar directions in which our thinking tends to move, things we have grown accustomed to focusing on, plays of mind that structure the questions we ask and the answers we seek. These shared habits constitute what I think of as feminist theology’s imagination. The first of these plays of mind is our tendency, when exploring a religious tradition or reflecting on global life, to privilege the experiences and lives of women as a source of our reflection—our preferential option for women. This does not mean that we think women all share the same experience or have all the answers or even decidedly unique ones. It means, more simply, that when our eyes travel across the terrain we are exploring, we tend to slow down and pay careful attention to what women are saying and doing or, sadly, what they are not saying and doing in cases where they have been rendered invisible or trivialized. Granting this kind of epistemological privilege to women means attending not only to what actual women may or may not be doing but also to what a given culture is saying about women—its view of proper (or improper) womanhood and ideal (or failed) femininity. A second play of mind is the constant, indeed relentless, acknowledgement that how we see things—including women—is profoundly affected by where we stand as we look.

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We know that ‘knowing’ is a deeply embedded and contextually freighted endeavor and that it never happens in a pure, unmediated manner. Our background, language, history, geography, education, personal experiences, and even our unconscious but powerfully present assumptions about the world form the lens through which we engage it. In practice, these concepts translate into a strong tendency for feminist theologians to locate their claims (to indicate ‘whence’ they speak) and state up front that their work is always situated work (Jaggar and Bordo 1989; Sedgewick 1992; Alcoff and Potter 1993). This insight about the contextual character of knowledge is connected to a third habit of thought—an ever-increasing awareness on the part of feminist theologians that not all women see things the same way and that this includes our often vastly different understandings of what a ‘woman’ is. The sheer diversity of women’s religious, social lives makes this apparent: the definition of womanhood assumed in a Moroccan market may be quite different from that assumed in a meeting of the Japanese Parliament or on a soccer field in Atlanta, Georgia. Our awareness of this reality is evident in feminist theologians’ frequent use of the term ‘gender’ instead of ‘sex’ to refer to localized constructions of ‘woman’. Invoking ‘gender’ points to the fact that what we often think of as natural, given, or universal features—what’s usually referred to as the ‘sexed basis’—of women’s experience are, in reality, socially constructed ‘gender’ stories about masculinity and femininity that have been mapped onto human bodies as if they were self-evident descriptions of universal, biologically stable phenomena. Fourth, in addition to recognizing the constructed character of our views of ‘women’, feminist theologians appreciate the degree to which the category ‘religion’ is also such a construct, one shot through with the contradictions and conflicts of the communal discourse that engenders it, and not, as has been previously assumed, a universal dimension of a stable phenomenon called ‘religious experience’. What this means in very concrete terms is that feminist theologians are disinclined to look, for example, at a Christian and a Buddhist account of divinity and to assume that underneath both is a shared set of convictions about God, just as they would not assume a shared view of womanhood. Instead of making such assumptions, their inclination is to listen carefully to these accounts and be open to the possibility that they are significantly different and perhaps even incommensurable. The same holds true when listening to different accounts of belief within the same religion: incommensurability may exist not only between a particular Buddhist practice and Christian belief statement, for example, but also between different Christian beliefs as well as between various Buddhists on the same issue of practice. Overall, this appreciation for the contextual and constructed character of knowledge—and in particular religious and gender knowledge—makes feminist theologians unusually adept at the tasks of critiquing and deconstructing constructions that have proved problematic for women—a fifth ‘habit of thought’. Not surprisingly, this encourages feminist theology to be a restless and suspicious enterprise, one that constantly interrogates not only others’ but also its own assumptions about gender and faith. This deconstructive disposition, I might add, makes conversations such as the one we had in North Carolina about this book lively, rigorously critical, and, at times, disorientingly

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chaotic. In such conversations, the challenge, of course, is to value the disorientation while also remaining committed to (and articulate about) those beliefs that warrant serious discussion and even substantive disagreement. This requires a willingness to interrogate one’s own beliefs, to let them go or change them if it seems appropriate while also being willing to defend and strengthen them when it doesn’t. This is particularly true when it comes to our deepest convictions about what it means to be a human being—our theological anthropology. Running through feminist theology’s discussions of the self are a number of such convictions—our sixth play of mind. I listed a few of these in my account of basic conditions necessary for the flourishing of women— the belief that human beings inherently deserve respect, safety, just compensation, access to education and health care, shelter, food, participation in decision-making, and the opportunity to pursue and enjoy desired forms of beauty and happiness. In addition to these, feminist theologians make a series of other deep claims about the structure or form of humanity in general, claims that undergird this account of flourishing. First, we tend to see human beings as radically relational creatures, a term that highlights not only our interpersonal but also our interspecies and planetary interconnectedness. I am who I am only in and through the relationships that constitute me. Second, we are reflective, rational beings, capable of thinking about our world but also our thoughts about our world. Third, we are meaning-making, linguistic beings who experience the world in and through language. Fourth, we are also responsible agents capable of intentionally engaging our environment and hence affecting the character of our relationships and experience. Fifth, we are beings whose feelings, emotions, desires, and memories play a significant role in shaping our everyday experiences of meaning and the character of our actions. Sixth, we also insist that our thoughts and actions are affected by unconscious as well as conscious desires, emotions, and so on—that we may indeed not always know who we are or what we do and why. Seventh, we are embodied creatures—our bodies are not just lumps of matter that we inhabit and upon which we impose our stories, but complex, biological entities that determine, to a larger extent than we often imagine, who we are and what we become (Fausto-Sterling 2000). Eighth, feminist theologians are highly conscious of the role power plays in determining the character of our relationships, the shape of our embodiment, and the form of our emotions and desires. This means that when we think about a particular social construal of something such as gender, religion, or women and the relationships and embodied realities that compose it, we always ask the question, what are the ‘forces’ at work in their construction? The notion of force here refers not just to obvious forms of political power and interest but also to the more subtle pressures exerted on us through culture, language, and habituated bodily practices. Relationality, agency, linguistic facility, embodiment, desire, the unconscious, power—all these dimensions of our humanity, feminist theologians insist, never exist in the abstract but are located in particular lives, events, and situations. This highlights a seventh ‘play of mind’, our commitment to particularizing and localizing our accounts of things such as gender, religion, and globalization. For the feminist theologians who gathered to talk about the book, this was most evident in the careful attention that scholar after scholar paid to the stories (narratives) women tell about their lives—and

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the stories, particularly the religious ones, that our cultures tell about women. It happened, for example, in our gathering when someone described initiation rituals for young girls in Navaho communities, or when another told the story of how Māori women are considered to be more powerful and beautiful as they age rather than the reverse, as is assumed in much of mainstream North American culture. It happened as well when we listened to an account of early American missionary women’s stories, and when we heard tales about the relationships between North American professional women and the immigrant women from the global South who clean their houses and care for their children. When each of these ‘tellings’ unfolded, the room grew silent and everyone’s attention was focused intensely on the tale at hand. At the end, of course, excited conversation broke out among us as we asked questions about the tale and began to analyze it in terms of our shared commitments and our lively differences. Given the wide range of topics that feminist theologians take up, we tend not to limit this narrative focus to things that we would normally think of as ‘stories’ but include an array of cultural, linguistic productions that carry within them strong assumptions about gender and women, particularly when they have to do with spirituality or religion—things such as songs, myths, works of art, everyday practices, forms of speech, rituals, novels and poetry, historical documents, movies, and the list could go on. When we analyze such cultural products, we also tend to treat their ‘gender story’ and their ‘religious features’ not as if they were straightforward entities that have single meanings. Rather, we explore the performative character of the stories, an eighth feature of feminist theology. We ask, what is this story trying to do or to perform in our social worlds? What kind of social roles is it attempting to script for us? What are the relations of power it is trying to promote? What kind of imaginative landscape is it attempting (and often succeeding) to render?

A core feminist story about gender, religion, and globalization Keeping track of all these questions and angles of analysis is, of course, a complex enterprise, and many different interpretations of feminist theology follow from them. That’s why conversations such as the one represented in this book are so engaging. Running through these interpretations of gender, religion, and globalization, however, is something like a ‘core globalization story’ about women in today’s world that loosely frames, at least at this moment in history, our collective work. I end this section with that story not to neatly sum up our disparate projects into one totalizing structure, but rather to surface the often unacknowledged but ever-present political, social narrative that undergirds much of what we do. That story, roughly told, goes something like this: We currently live in a world where, at a massive global level, women’s lives are increasingly at risk, threatened by violence, and burdened by the weight of growing poverty and powerlessness. In most of the world’s cultures, the dominant view of what women should be and do (their view of proper ‘womanhood’) is determined by elite

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men in power and by religious/cultural traditions that have within them strongly misogynist strands. In many cases, women are defined in a manner that promotes their status as a source of cheap, unorganized (and often unrecognized) labor, be it in the domestic sphere, the sexual market, or in underpaid service and productive industries. Women’s bodies are therefore regulated—politically, economically, sexually, and culturally—in ways that are harmful to them and over which they have little say. This is as true in the workings of the nation-state as it is in the movement of global capital. It is also the case in the sphere of religion. Here, men continue to be, at a broad global level, the most important religious leaders and thinkers; and as such, they have more control over religious stories and meanings than women, and the stories they promote often configure women in destructive ways. As far as change is concerned, we are aware that, as globalization itself shows us, not all women share the same vision of flourishing or the same understanding of what it means to be ‘woman’. This does not mean, however, that we have no common concerns or that collective and coalitional work is impossible. In fact, we remain hopeful that women can be locally and globally organized to better represent their interests and express their religious convictions, and we feel that this is true not only at an institutional level, but at a cultural level where, in the nitty-gritty play of the religious imagination, there are vast resources available for constructing visions of a world where the well-being of all is held up as a worthy goal. And that is where our work as feminist theologians begins.

Christian feminist theology Diverse perspectives, common convictions Having just defined ‘feminist theology’ as an intracultural, multifaith, activist endeavor, let me now narrow the discussion and explore my own particular subfield within this movement—feminist theology done from a self-confessed Christian perspective. Like feminist theology in general, Christian feminist theology is marked as much by internal diversity as it is by consensus. In terms of differences, our theologies vary significantly from one Christian faith-community to another. For example, Roman Catholic feminism has a different flavor to it from Reformed feminism or Anglican feminism. Similarly, our theologies vary depending on the social location of the writer: womanist theologians focus on different topics than do mujerista theologians who, in turn, touch on different themes from women working on Korean spirituality or lesbian ethics. Our theologies also differ depending on the methods we use. Among us, there are liberal feminist theologians, postmodern feminist theologians, process feminist thinkers, liberation feminist theologians, psychoanalytic feminists, and so forth. The shape of our work also differs depending on the social issues we address, issues that include sexual violence, mothering, care, health issues, the environment,

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economic justice, postcolonialism, empire, and racial conflict, to name only a few. Our theologies look quite different, as well, depending on the institutional status of the feminist theologian doing it. For example, theology written by a Protestant woman teaching at Yale Divinity School sounds quite different from theology written by a feminist working in a Dalit neighborhood outside of Madurai, South India. In the midst of all these differences, there are also issues around which there is loose but pervasive consensus among us. Like feminist theologians in general, Christian feminists see our work as integrally connected to concrete social movements committed to the flourishing of women—and all people. We see ourselves as activists devoted to changing society, not just explaining it, and understand our principal contribution to that process to be an innovative work of reshaping religious imaginations and the practices they engender. In the context of that reshaping, Christian feminists also share the feminist ‘plays of mind’ just listed: we focus on women’s experiences, think about gender, recognize knowledge as constructed, attend to power relations, have a relational, embodied, performative understanding of persons, and find the insights of a variety of cultural productions useful for our work. In this regard, our work is from beginning to end a feminist religious enterprise. There are several things that distinguish our work from the broader feminist movement, however. The first and most obvious is the fact that we speak out of the Christian tradition and usually do so as practicing Christians. This means, at a very concrete level, that the principal (although not exclusive) audiences we address are ecclesial; we do our work in churches and in conversation with church-related bodies that are both local and global in their reach and history. Second, when it comes to our work on the ‘religious imagination’—the work that, as theologians, we specialize in—we are primarily interested in recrafting the Christian theological imaginative landscapes that have grown out of these communities and their many traditions. While feminist theologians acknowledge that these theological traditions are vast and complex in character—too complex and diverse to be easily defined or summarized—running through them all is a core story that, when broadly conceived, constitutes the central features of the landscape of faith we share. This ‘Christian Story’, in rough form, goes something like this: We believe in a Triune God who creates the world, sustains it, and, in an ongoing way, seeks to be in relation with it to encourage its well-being. In seeking relationship, this God offers to humanity the opportunity to know and respond to God in faith and in practice. Although fundamentally good, the world is also plagued by sin, a reality that works against its flourishing and hence leaves it in need of redemption. This redemption is offered, in a distinctive manner, through the history of Israel and in the gospel of Jesus Christ, the savior who reveals the grace of God, in both the present and the future. In response to this promise, Christians are called to participate in church communities that embody and witness to God’s creative and re-creative grace, and this call requires churches to be places where creation is celebrated, hope abounds, God is worshipped, and, in faith, the flourishing of all humanity is held up as a shared desire. Although this brief version of the story is admittedly simplistic (and can be interpreted to support wildly different understandings of Christian beliefs and practices), it highlights

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the major themes or ‘doctrines’ that feminist theologians analyze within tradition’s imaginative landscape—the doctrines of God, creation, humanity, redemption, Christology, sin, faith, eschatology (the future), and ecclesiology (the church). When we look at these themes, we ask questions designed to surface their ‘imaginative’, life-shaping quality, particularly with respect to the lives of women and in terms of gender, power, performativity, and so forth. What does it mean, we ask, for Christians to live in the space of these doctrines? How does this landscape shape women’s interior worlds as well as the external conditions of their lives? How do they configure our views of gender? Are they life-giving, and if so, how have these doctrines shaped our conception of what ‘life-giving’ means? And if they are not, how might we reconfigure the terrain to make them so? In asking such questions, we show that when women become the subjects of doctrines’ imaginative construction, the world can look different from when men are its central figures. Consider, for example, what happens when activities such as cooking dinner, cleaning toilets, and the relentless work of childcare, as well as bodily events such as pregnancy, rape, menopause, sex between women, sex-trafficking, and breast cancer become theologically important. New possibilities for imagining God and ourselves immediately appear and, with them, a wealth of new questions. What might divine action and power look like if modeled after patterns of domestic labor instead of imperialistic or militaristic models of power? How might we pray differently if we imagined God as a large, aging woman with diabetes and wearing a head scarf? What if sin were defined not primarily in terms of sex but as a social reality such as the commodity form or the devastating consequences of global warming? What if, when we thought of ‘church’, our imagination drifted toward social spaces such as kitchens or brush chapels or even sand dunes instead of grand cathedrals or white steeples on village greens? When it comes to preaching, what if we thought of it flowing through Internet blogs or over a backyard fence instead of across the bow of a high pulpit? And when it comes to salvation, what if we imagined Jesus on the cross looking down upon the body of a battered woman? A Cherokee woman celebrating her sixteenth birthday? A transgendered, immigrant domestic worker riding the subway in New York? How does his death save her?

Major themes in Christian feminist theology: Reconceiving doctrines Over the course of the past three decades, questions such as these have led feminist theologians to explore and re-imagine almost every doctrine in the Christian tradition. Although it is impossible to summarize all their work here—its scope and depth are too vast and diverse to do so—there are several themes that stand out. Taking a brief look at them in their doctrinal context provides a good overview of general plays of mind that mark our work. Christian feminist theologians are concerned about the nature of our basic Trinitarian views of God (Biezeveld and Mulder 2001). While some argue that the doctrine of the Trinity is irretrievably sexist and arcane, others attempt to re-interpret it in feminist terms.

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These attempts focus primarily on the ‘relational’ view of God implied in the claim that God is three interrelated yet distinct persons. For some, God’s relational identity is used as the basis for claims about the inherently relational quality of all reality (LaCugna 1991). For others, divine relationality is best understood as a model of ‘community in God’, moving us toward a better understanding of human sociality marked by reciprocity and mutuality. For still others, this theme promises to rejuvenate our appreciation for the Holy Spirit, the most traditionally ‘relational’ of the Trinitarian persons (in fact, sometimes understood as ‘pure relation’; Pritchard 1999). In addition, this theme has pushed us to reconsider the place of ‘Sophia’, a figure from the wisdom traditions, in our theology, as well as the possibilities related to seeing God in process-oriented terms (Johnson 1992). Feminists have also given considerable attention to the doctrine of revelation, bringing to bear upon it the insights of feminist epistemology. Among some of the issues raised is the question of the form of our knowledge of God. In many of our traditions’ most prominent texts, there has been an insistence that knowledge of God comes to humanity as an external reality that overwhelms and often ruptures our normal perceptions of things. Feminists have asked whether this image makes sense when we consider, for example, persons who have undergone traumatic experiences such as rape or torture and for whom ‘overwhelming’ and ‘rupturing’ describe how they felt being violated and threatened (Jones 2000). In such a context, ‘rupture’ or ‘in-breaking’ becomes a problematic model for conceiving of God’s mode of relating to us. Christian feminist theologians seek new images of revelation, perhaps as a safe form of touch or an immanent knowing. They have also asked questions such as, what might it mean to think of our knowledge of God in aesthetic terms rather than in a strictly propositional or reductively cognitive manner (Chopp 1989)? As conversations such as these move into the area of biblical interpretation, the resulting feminist positions have been equally intriguing and diverse with respect to issues of textual meaning and the elasticity of exegesis (see Russell 1985; and Schüssler Fiorenza 2001). Exploring the doctrine of creation has prompted feminists to explore the ways we imagine the character of God’s originating and providential relationship to humanity and the environment. They ask us to imagine the world not only as a distant Other to God, but as God’s body, as intimately connected to the Divine (see especially McFague 1993). Similarly, feminists question the long-held assumption that in creating the world, God imposed order on chaos, making it appear that order is the divine mandate and, conversely, that chaos is a problematic mess that needs to be contained. They ask, what if chaos—all that is fluid, open, indeterminate, and unfinished—were given positive value in our accounts of divine creation (cf. Baker-Fletcher 1998; Keller 2003; and Ross 2006)? If this were to happen, they argue, we could better appreciate dimensions of life classically associated with the feminine (see Schneider 2004; Baker-Fletcher, 2006). As an example, feminist theologians have asked us to imagine creation as an activity more like giving birth or delighting in beauty than giving rules or struggling against death (Jantzen 1999). As feminists grapple with the doctrine of humanity, they suggest that we think of persons not as isolated actors but as relationally complex creatures whose borders are as

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fluid as they are open (cf. Brock 1988; Grey 1989; Graff 1995; and LaCugna 1995). With respect to sin, they have suggested that instead of defining it only as bad or harmful things that we do, we should also think of it as something that happens to us, as the harms that befall us (cf. Plaskow 1990; Rigby 1997). Relatedly, there is an ongoing insistence on women’s agency with respect to sin—women are not just victims of sin but its enactors as well (see Armour 1999; and Coakley 2002). Feminists push us to see, additionally, that sin resides as much in social structures and in cultural patterns as it does in individual intentions and actions. With respect to the individual, they have also urged us to consider a more positive role for sexual desire and the erotic than traditionally assumed (Althaus-Reid 2000). Christology is also an important topic for feminist reflection, giving rise to a number of new insights into the meaning of Christ’s life and work. One of the most interesting conversations centers on the relationship between incarnational and cross-centered Christology. Some feminists argue that the historical focus on the self-sacrificing work of Christ on the cross can lead to theologies that encourage women, disproportionately, to accept destructive social roles as those who sacrifice themselves to the broader social good (cf. Williams 1991; and Cullinan 2004). Instead, feminist theologians suggest, we should look to Christ—his birth and subsequent life—as the mediator of a grace that celebrates embodiment and lauds the resilience of human life, not its diminishment (cf. Johnson 1990; Baker-Fletcher and Baker-Fletcher 1997; Ruether 1998; and Tanner 2001). For feminist theologians who continue to focus on the cross, there has been an ongoing attempt to see Christ’s violent death not as an act of divine retribution, but as a devastating result of human violence and sin (see Brock 1988; Solberg 1997; and Thompson 2004). They argue that on the cross we meet a God who understands the plight of victims and who embraces them while also demanding that the violent structures of our world be challenged and dismantled (see Terrell 1998; and Keshgegian 2000). On the topics of redemption and salvation, feminists have also made a number of interesting proposals (cf. Grau 2004). They have asked, what if we were to imagine grace as a form of adornment, drawing on women’s experiences and using the language of clothing and beauty to describe it (cf. Chopp 1989; and Grau 2004)? Perhaps, then, aesthetic, spatialized terms like glory, splendor, embrace, and envelopment would serve as the frame for conceiving of atonement. For some feminist theologians, rather than juridically announcing divine forgiveness, God’s gracious mercy is envisioned as enveloping and womb-like. Employing this new imagery helps us, they argue, expand our understanding of who God is and how she relates to us, perhaps as mother, lover, and friend. Feminist theologians have also explored the character of the closely related doctrines of justification and sanctification—two terms used to describe the shape of the redeemed life— asking us to imagine God’s grace falling upon us not only as a divine verdict that, at a distance, forgives our sin but also as a gift that provides for women a bounded identity with agency and a strong sense of self (cf. Solberg 1997; and Jones 2000). The doctrine of the church has also undergone considerable revision in the hands of feminist theologians. In answer to the question, What is a church?, feminists have suggested that we imagine it as an open, round banquet table set with a feast that all are

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invited to share (cf. Russell 1993). They have also imagined it not just as a building or an institution but as a cultural space that includes activities typically associated with women—gossip, care, food preparation, and so on (cf. Isasi-Díaz 1996). Similarly, feminists have paid attention to the bodily gestures and ritual practices that constitute the church, highlighting the ways in which actions such as passing the peace, preparing a potluck meal, and taking care of the sick are central to its identity (cf. Fulkerson 2001). Feminist theologians have also explored what church might look like if it were conceived of as a community of equals rather than a hierarchical institution (Schüssler Fiorenza 1995; and with Douglass and Kay 1997; and Häring 1999). Running like a common thread through all these accounts of church is an attempt to rethink the borders we put around ecclesial communities and their models of Christian leadership, making them more porous, gender-inclusive, and less prone to repressive modes of authority and unconscious exclusionary practices. Finally, as Christian feminist theologians, we also reflect on the topics of Christian hope and eschatology. In these discussions, there is a strong critique of the classical Christian views of ‘heaven’ and the ‘end of time’ that weaken our commitment to seeking fullness of life in the here-and-now, and instead support patriarchal visions of a divine kingdom yet-to-come (cf. Russell 1974; Keller 1996; and Amy Plantinga Pauw, ‘Some Last Words about Eschatology’, in Pauw and Jones 2006). Feminists ask us to reconsider the character of the ‘hoping self ’ in light of women’s experiences of embodiment and agency, drawing attention to circumstances that present theological challenges such as infertility, miscarriage, and rape (cf. Sands 1994; Adams and Fortune 1995; Frantz and Stimming 2005). At the center of many of these discussions is also an insistence that the ecological world in which we live—our environment—not be treated as a mere stopping place on our way to another, more glorious kingdom beyond this world, but rather as the blessed, graced site of our unfolding lives before the God who lives with us, in the present, and calls us to an ecologically responsible future (cf. Warren 1994; Ruether 1996, 1992; and Gebara 1999).

Globalization Against the backdrop of these descriptions of feminist theology, let me turn now to ‘globalization’, another diversely defined topic, and explore the challenges it raises for feminist theological reflection. When discussed in feminist contexts such as the Durham meeting, the term ‘globalization’ refers to at least five different features of contemporary social life (cf. Jameson and Miyoshi 1998; Sen 1999; Appadurai 2001; Stiglitz 2003; and Young 2003). Its first and most common use is economic; it refers to the network of processes that fuel and fund the ever-expanding capitalist marketplace. The word ‘globalization’ was coined in an advertisement by American Express, in which the world is characterized as a place where, for the adventuresome shopper, a single credit card can buy whatever one

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desires—a car, a trip, a can of soda—and can do so wherever in the world one might be—Nepal, South Africa, Canada. What the advertisement so well depicts is the worldwide reach of these interconnected processes (cf. Harvey 2000). At the level of production and consumption, they can be seen, for example, in the making and selling of a pair of athletic shoes. It’s likely that the cotton used in their production is grown in China and the rubber soles processed at a plant in Brazil, which in turn relies on oil from Argentina; the factory where workers assemble them is in the Philippines; the ships that transport them to market are Dutch or German; the marketing strategy used to sell them is formulated in Seattle but implemented through a complex online process housed in India; the stores where they are sold range from a boutique in Los Angeles to a mall in Santiago or a street vendor in Delhi; and the financial body funding and profiting from the process has corporate headquarters in Tokyo and London. An important feature of this process is the absence of unified regulations governing these activities, which are themselves widely dispersed and shift quickly to follow market demand, the fluctuating cost of labor, the ups and downs of the financial markets, and the varying cost and availability of natural resources. Almost needless to say, the distribution of the profits produced through this network of exchange is also dramatically uneven, with most of the profits flowing to the financial and marketing sectors of global capital. Parallel to this economic description is a second account of globalization that focuses on patterns of population migration and immigration. Never before have such vast numbers of persons moved as quickly and as often as they do today. It’s not hard to imagine that standing in the security line in a Miami airport, one might find a young Indonesian woman who is moving to Canada to join her family, a Brazilian businessman who manages a jewelry business and has an apartment in Tampa, and a Congolese teenager who hopes to find his brother in Boston and is saving money to buy an online teaching degree. On ships, in buses, on small boats, in trucks, and by foot, people are moving across national borders to new homes and communities. For some, these migrations are chosen and happen with relative ease; for others, moving is difficult and often exploitative and dangerous. Some move for economic or familial reasons; others are displaced by political conflict or violence. Whatever the case, the people no less than the goods of our world are in motion; the borders that divide us are being constantly crossed and transgressed. And again, the relations of power that either provoke or hinder this movement are dramatically uneven. The issue of borders brings us to a third dimension of globalization: the shifting character of ‘nation-states’, those national entities that determine the shape of the geographical and political maps of the world. It is now commonplace to refer to the increasingly ‘transnational’ character of our global interactions—a term that highlights the degree to which the flow of capital, the movement of people, and the mechanisms of communication that span the globe are less and less confined by the regulatory interests of discretely defined national bodies. There is considerable debate over whether the importance of national governmental institutions is declining or simply being redefined to serve better the interests of global capital. Some theorists have speculated that in place of national sovereignty, a vast empire based on global capital pervades all global interac-

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tions wherein nations are themselves servants to the larger, less wieldy forces of the global market (see especially Hardt and Negri 2000). Regardless of where one comes down on this debate, the profoundly interconnected and interdependent character of the world’s nations is beyond dispute. Yet again, an important feature of these interconnections is the obviously unequal power these national bodies wield, a fact evidenced in their disparate economic conditions and, perhaps even more importantly, in the uneven size and strength of their military. A fourth popular definition of globalization centers on the issue of culture. A quick glance at the variety of foods stocked on the shelves of any grocery store in North America attests that we live in a world marked by a diversity of tongues and tastes. Aided by technology that now makes it possible to interact with people around the globe only a few seconds after we’ve opened an Internet connection, we no longer experience the networks of our knowledge and our relationships as being locally constrained. One way of viewing this proliferation of cross-cultural interactions is to see it as a harbinger of an increasingly multicultural world, one where no single culture can claim dominance but where a variety of voices and traditions constantly interact. Another way of assessing this interplay, however, is to see it as moving toward a more unified, less pluralized worldwide culture, one where everyone who can afford a TV can choose who to cheer for as they watch the World Cup competition while drinking a Coke and munching on McDonald’s fries. From this perspective, globalization is not multiplying our worldviews but narrowing them. Here again, economic and political relations of power determine in large part which forms of cultural production dominate and who has access to them. Let me add finally to this list of features of globalization a comment about globalization and religion. Like so many other aspects of contemporary life, our world cannot be mapped according to stable religious geographies. Whether it be at a meeting of the UN or on a street corner in Cairo, adherents of different faith traditions constantly interact with one another as they are drawn into the web of interrelations I have just described. In this regard, the ‘religious Other’ is an ever present feature of our global lives. Sometimes these encounters are by choice; sometimes they are not. Sometimes they take place in peaceful settings; at other times, however, they are occasioned by social conflict and violence. These encounters sometimes lead people to harden the borders of their religious identity; sometimes, however, they lead to radical conversions from one faith tradition to another or to a more general openness toward religious difference. These encounters can also create hybrid religious experiences, as in the case of the Methodist minister who practices Yoga, uses Buddhist chants when she prays, and sometimes admits her attraction to the idea of reincarnation. It is also the case that ‘religion’ can, at times, easily accommodate its beliefs and practices to match the interests of global markets or of nation-states. At other times, however, its resistance to the dominant, unifying forces of globalization is clear. In all these ways, religion—however one might define it—is not only a reality shaped by the dynamics of globalization; it is also a complex social phenomenon with which globalization must reckon.

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Feminist theology and the globalization of imagination Nowhere can we see this mutually informing interaction between globalization and religion more clearly than in the changing face of feminist theology. For example, our gathering in North Carolina would have been almost unimaginable fifty years ago, both with respect to the modes of transportation, systems of communication, and economic resources that brought us there and with respect to the types of conversations we had. In that regard, globalization is the space within which this book itself is located. Our task as feminist theologians, however, is not just to describe these dynamics but to generate an evaluative response to them. This requires analyzing the particular role that women and gender play in these complex global processes and exploring whether it contributes to women’s flourishing. Given that we are specifically interested in the imaginative landscapes of faith, our task also includes exploring how our religious landscapes comport with those of globalization, and in cases where they don’t, formulating resistant responses to it. At one level, carrying out this evaluative task is not exceedingly difficult. For example, when globalization is considered from an economic perspective, it quickly becomes apparent that the vast majority of women around the world work in low-wage service sector jobs designed to enable the production and consumption of market goods, be it in the kitchens they staff, the houses and hotels they clean, or in the labor they devote quite literally to reproducing the market’s future workers and consumers. From a feminist theological perspective, it is not hard to identify the basic injustices of this system and to envision political and economic programs that might address them. We can carry out a similar analysis of the disparate impact of migration and immigration on the lives of women, or on the place of gender in the ever-changing face of nation-states, global militarism, neocolonial domination, and so on. It is also the case, however, that the impact of globalization on the lives of women has not been only negative. Today more than ever, women have constantly expanding choices about where they will live, what their jobs will be, how they will practice their religion, and how their families will be arranged. At another level, however, the task is more complicated. When analyzing and evaluating our imaginative landscapes, it’s difficult to determine exactly how globalization affects our thought processes and thus how it interacts with the theological worldviews that nurture our religious beliefs and actions, particularly with respect to women and gender. This level of analysis is difficult because globalization isn’t something that can easily be identified and pinned down, and its effects on our imaginations are not only diverse but indeterminate and often hidden from us. For the purpose of comparison with theological imaginations, however, it is useful to map out some of the habits of thought these global systems seem to encourage. In keeping with my earlier discussions, I think of these features as the lines of flight that our thoughts are trained to follow or, better, imaginative landscapes that the dynamics of globalization entice us to enter, be it through a seductive

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advertising campaign or new forms of technology (see Deleuze and Guattari 1977; Kintz 1977; Jameson 1991; Deleuze 1994; Miller 2005; and Sassen 2006). Let me briefly list several of these plays of mind. First, the global imagination is trained to appreciate difference and multiplicity and to feel uneasy with assertions of sameness or unitary oneness; in this regard, it enjoys the pleasures of proliferation. The market consumer is taught to always desire more choices, more colors, more sounds, more things. Second, this predisposition for the proliferative is tied to a tendency to distrust order and conclusive definition and to be drawn, instead, toward notions of indeterminacy and indecipherability, a tendency grounded in the constant interaction of different cultural systems, moral economies, and linguistic frameworks. In this regard, it is a deeply democratic mindset, populist in orientation and often relativistic in terms of normative judgment. Third, if there is an ontology that fits globalization—a theory of what it means to ‘be’—it is an ontology of radical relationality. Applied to everything from patterns of food production to the nature of the human self, the global imagination sees the interconnections and the varied modes of exchange that shape all existence. Fourth, an imagination shaped by globalization considers boundaries—those borders that give definitional edge to everything from nation-states to individual identities—to be more fluid than solid, and it subsequently celebrates things transgressive, nomadic, or hybrid. Nothing is singular or monolithic in shape and form, be it hip hop rock from India or the Zen-informed communion service in a New England congregation. Fifth, with respect to explanatory frames, it is more interested in tracking the synchronic play of forces that converge in a given event or entity than it is in tracking the temporal sequences of cause and effect that produce it. In other words, it explains a thing by drawing spatialized, horizontal maps of the elements that form it rather than drawing temporal, vertical maps that trace its origins and delineate the causal processes of its production, much like the map of interconnected sites one imagines springing to life when something like ‘US Civil War’ or ‘the history of burritos’ is Googled on the Internet. Sixth, it is fascinated by aesthetic form and remains highly conscious of the role played by compulsion and attraction in the production of desires. It measures something by how appealing or repellant it is, a tendency nurtured in part by the predominance of the commodity form. In other words, it’s an ‘I want it, so there’ play of mind. Seventh, such an imagination tends also to use pragmatic standards of evaluation that focus on utility and function. So, for instance, it tells stories that highlight the use-value of things as they are deployed in its networks of exchange. That one might evaluate the quality of something based on a standard of inherent value, in such a context, becomes not only illogical but unimaginable. How might feminist theologians evaluate the modes of thought that inform the globalized imagination, particularly with respect to the flourishing of women and logic of gender? The answer is complex and, at heart, deeply ambiguous. On the one hand, many of these features are displayed vividly in the feminist imaginative landscape I previously

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outlined. We espouse an appreciation for difference and for the proliferation of voices. We are suspicious of unitary accounts of meaning, and we chafe against rigid or hierarchical instances of order. We espouse an ontology of radical relationality, be it in reference to persons, the environment, or God, and when it comes to definitional boundaries, we like things fluid, transgressive, and hybrid, as seen in our accounts of human nature, creation, and divine identity. Although we value historical explanations of women’s oppressions, much of our recent work has focused on lateral accounts of gender constructions that highlight the place of desire and the aesthetic, particularly in our accounts of sin, church, and eschatology. With respect to our commitments to social change, we also tend to value the pragmatic over the metaphysical, the functional over the transcendent, a trend displayed well in our deeply functionalist accounts of the church as justice-seeking communities. While these ‘globalized’ dimensions of feminist theology’s imaginative landscape are not inherently problematic, when viewed from the perspective of the potentially harmful aspects of globalization—especially the inherent imbalances of power discussed above—it appears more ambiguous, particularly with respect to its capacity to promote the flourishing of women. In this regard, globalization confronts feminist theologians with challenges that complicate and potentially threaten some of their most treasured plays of mind. Consider ‘difference’. While it is surely a good thing that feminist theologians appreciate the plurality of women’s religious experiences, the dynamics of globalization are creating a world culture in which we often share more than we might expect, particularly when it comes to the common forms of exploitation we experience and the similar struggles with bodies, aging, and so forth that we share. As we seek to understand the way we are connected in a globalized economy, we need to pay attention to these new forms of ‘similarity’. When it comes to our celebration of ‘difference’, we would also do well to consider that the marketing strategies of global capital often include an exuberant celebration of difference as something exotic that entices and excites consumers to buy new products, a dynamic that we should most certainly view with suspicion. Similarly, nation-states often exploit a rhetoric of difference—shoring up an identity of ‘us’ against ‘them’—to secure geographic boundaries and to justify economic domination and military domination, and not to encourage democratic conversation and open up hardened political interests. In all these ways, feminist theologians must navigate these choppy waters of layered meanings as we consider how to positively value difference without succumbing to the pitfalls of easy commodification or domination offered by aspects of globalization. Consider also the themes of indeterminacy and order. For many women who suffer from the disorienting effects of migratory displacement or the disorders of mind that follow events of overwhelming violence, a feminist theological promotion of the chaotic nature of creation can often feel more damaging than liberating. What they need is a sense of greater security and stability, not constant dislocation and fragmentation. The same holds true for a relational ontology, be it in our view of the self or of the Trinity. While no one wants to dispute that our lives are profoundly interconnected,

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this connectivity can be experienced as a threat rather than a hope-filled promise when it is used to justify the exploitation of labor and the extraction of resources. In such situations, autonomy and self-regulation might be the greater prize. Similarly, transgression might be attractive when applied to established boundaries surrounding women’s gendered identities, giving us permission to occupy social roles and perform public identities previously unimaginable, be it as a Japanese corporate executive or a cross-dressed cab driver in Mexico City. When ‘transgression’ is enacted by an invading military force, however, its appeal for women is less apparent, particularly when we consider the violation of borders that happens in rape or torture or when a community literally disintegrates under the pressures of an external, occupying force. As another example, consider the possibility that while hybridity may effectively describe the character of postcolonial identity and hence encourage us to appreciate the fluidity of cultural boundaries, allowing women to be new creations, when the logic of hybridity is used to mask the deleterious effects of the loss of language and culture of indigenous communities around the world (and their distinctive accounts of gender performativity), its creative possibilities are harder to see. With respect to feminist theology’s recent penchant for synchronic description, as seen in our views of God, church, and eschatology, the sense of timelessness that it invokes can pacify our capacity for resistance when it encourages us to avoid the hard work of historical analysis and social critique. In terms of our privileging of the aesthetic, as in our adornment accounts of grace and salvation, it may well be that our accounts of desire concede too much to be trivialized, market-driven construals of the erotic and that our construals of sexual desire owe more to the structure of the commodity form (and hence, the commodification of women’s bodies) than to sustaining accounts of passion and compassion. And finally, our continued insistence on the strategically pragmatic grounding of theological claims holds a continued risk that our work might too easily play into the aggressively utilitarian logic of the marketplace, a site where value is determined by profitability and not by any sense of intrinsic worth. I raise these possibilities not because I think the imaginative proclivities of feminist theology are always (or even necessarily) implicated in the more devastating dramas of our ever globalizing world. That would be too strong a claim. I offer them, instead, as a cautionary note—we must not let our earnest desire to find evermore interesting and provocative modes of analysis lead us to uncritically adopt potentially damaging forms of discourse. Remaining cognizant of the pragmatic, eschatological goal of our reflection—the future flourishing of women—will help to anchor our varied plays of mind in the real situations women experience. In so doing, we can keep our discursive strategies grounded in concrete assessments of how these strategies impact the lives of women. In the case of Christian feminist theology, our awareness of how the global imagination functions as well as the particular plight of women in the present-day global economy may well lead us to shift the kind of doctrinal work we do. For example, in the doctrine of God, it seems to me that more work needs to be done on the nature of divine desire and the character of the erotic as it resides in the Trinitarian life of God, particularly because an engagement with the logic of global imagination may well occur in terms of aesthetics

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and desire, two dimensions of human experience that the market understands so well and manipulates so effectively. In terms of theological anthropology, it may be time to offer accounts of the human person that emphasize not only the unstable, overdetermined character of our identity constructs but also those features of the self that are stable, perduring, and perhaps even universal. With respect to sin, we may need to explore, in careful and nuanced ways, the sins of our overzealous celebrations of difference, indeterminacy, relationality, and hybridity, and the ways such celebrations can make us complicit with unjust economic practices. On the topic of church, we need to reconsider our grounding assumptions about community to take into account emergent modes of social relating made possible by the Internet and other new forms of global connectivity. In addition to rethinking our formulation of doctrines, there are other directions that the reality of globalization may well push Christian feminist theologians to take in the years ahead. For interfaith dialogue, it may be useful to take practices rather than doctrines as a starting point for our conversations, asking women to discuss their theology by identifying the religious significance of things such as their cooking practices, their childcare habits, or their clothing choices. We must also continue to deepen our appreciation for the effects of violence on women’s sense of self and then steer clear of theological claims that uncritically reproduce traumatic disintegration. It is also crucial that we continue to value the place of ‘stories’ in our understanding of women’s diverse lives; as a procedural strategy, narrative seems to travel well across cultural divides. Telling stories allows us to hold together an appreciation for difference and indeterminacy (effective storytelling requires an element of the unexpected) with a desire for coherence and temporal order (narratives, after all, seem to require at least a modicum of both). Perhaps most importantly, we will have to reformulate our understanding of what a political action is and what a social movement looks like if we want to keep up with evershifting social forms presented by the global economy and its technologies. While the days of street marches might not be completely behind us, the future demands new eyes to see new forms of social resistance and emancipatory engagement. Let me also conclude by saying that feminist theologians, in all their variety, may well be better situated for these tasks than most intellectuals and activists. Our organic ties to religious communities around the world ground us in the ‘real life’ experiences of women from all walks of life. Our access to ecclesial institutions with worldwide reach can, if understood and used critically and constructively, allow us to have a great impact on how those institutions promote the flourishing of women and all people. Because our work is so clearly focused on the shape of the ‘imagination’, we are practiced in modes of analysis that can engage directly and creatively the cultural dimensions of globalization. The interdisciplinary character of feminist theology helps enormously in this regard—at our best, we are trained to be as comfortable interpreting novels and CDs as we are digging through archives, reading quantitative studies, and sorting the central claims of a dense philosophical treatise. And finally, because we speak about things divine—about the deepest commitments that shape us and the most significant truths that claim us—we have our hands in a realm of discourse and practice that, when mobilized for emancipatory ends, truly has the power to remake the world.

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Notes 1. For broad definitions of ‘feminism’ as an activist endeavor, see Grewal and Kaplan (1994); Donaldson and Pui-lan (2002); and Farley (2006). Also see Weedon (1987); O’Grady et al. (1998); Mitchem (2002); and McCann and Kim (2003). 2. Thanks to the Durham gathering, I had the opportunity to share these reflections with many of this book’s authors and was surprised by their relative lack of disagreement with respect to the ‘habits’ I list. This does not imply, however, that all feminists everywhere would agree with me. (How boring would that be!) 3. See Butler (1992). Although this book has now become a classic in feminist theory, its strongly constructivist position has been the subject of much critique, particularly with respect to her underappreciation for the constitutive force ‘the body’ plays. See Armour and St. Ville (2006). 4. This does not imply, necessarily, a biologically reductionistic position. The social constructivism most widely embraced by feminists today is of the ‘weak constructivist’ variety. See Benhabib (1992, 1995) containing essays by Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, and Drucilla Cornell. For a theological discussion of these and related issues, see Isherwood (2000). 5. There remains much to be done on the question of the category of ‘religion’ in general and in its more particular use in feminist thought. On the construction of ‘religion’, see Masuzawa (1993, 2005). On the relation between ‘religion’ and ‘woman’, see Jones (2008). 6. To describe how narrative and performative modes of analysis interact, let me use the example of a popular song—it could be almost any song on the radio that deals with men and women and the relationship between them. With respect to a narrative analysis, I first ask, What does the world of the song look like, what sorts of pictures does it evoke, who are the major actors, and what kinds of interactions are being described? In short, what story is the song telling, not only with respect to its obvious tale-like quality (after all, many songs don’t tell a straightforward, narrative story) but more importantly with respect to the dramatic actions it implies? As a feminist, I am, of course, particularly interested in how it constructs a picture of what a ‘woman’ is and how she is positioned with respect to her male counterparts. What kinds of power relations exist between them? How are bodies depicted? What sort of ‘desires’ does the song assume exist between men and women? Having asked these questions, I then ask about the effects the song is trying to produce in its listeners. This means analyzing its performative quality, not simply with respect to how the song is actually being performed in a music studio or on the radio, but more importantly, with respect to the kind of gender relations the song itself is trying to get its listeners to adopt (and hence, to perform). To determine this, I ask questions such as, when I enter the world of the song, who do I identify with, how does it make me feel, what sort of social scripts do I take on as I listen, and what am I likely to do as a result? For example, is the song trying to get me to buy beer, or to be a better wife and have a cleaner house and look sexier, or is it, perhaps, designed to strengthen a sense of my power to resist mainstream conceptions of femininity? As with any performance, the performative aims of a song are going to vary depending on its audience. It may sound different to (and hence have a different performative effect on) a twenty-year-old man driving to his job at the cable company than it would to a forty-six-year-old woman sitting in her university office writing an article on feminist theology.

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As a theologian, I also listen to the song with an ear to its theological character. I analyze the relationship between the narrative, performative world of the song and a given theological world—with its own narratives and its varied performative agendas— and compare the imaginative landscapes of each, asking do they comport, or are they at odds, or perhaps somewhere in between? To complicate matters even more, I evaluate the song normatively. I think about not just my experience of it but about its broader social significance and the politics of its performative force, and I step back and consider whether it contributes to the flourishing of women and whether its view of the world is theologically tenable. 7. Christian feminist theology has a long history, it has been explicitly named as such only since the early seventies when works like Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father (1973) first appeared on bookshelves around the world. Since that time, numerous articles and books have continued to appear, some of them to great acclaim, others to more considered, localized applause (and at times, harsh critique). 8. For Roman Catholic feminist perspectives, see LaCugna (1993) and Schussler Fiorenza (1996). Within the Reformed tradition, see Pauw and Jones (2006). For an Anglican perspective, see Hampson (1996). 9. Some of the women writing theology out of these social locations are the womanist theologians Williams (1993); Cannon (1995); Cummings (1995); McDowell (1996); Mitchem (1996); Gilkes (2001); Thomas (2004); Douglas (2005); and Townes (2006). Mujerista theologians include Aquino (1993); Rodrigues (1994); Garcia (2001); Machado (2003); and Isasi-Díaz (2004). Asian women theologians include Park (1989); Chung (1990); Kinukawa (1994); and Pui-lan (2005). African women theologians include Dube (2000) and (2006) and Oduyoye (2003). Native American woman theologians include Kidwell (2001). 10. Keller (2005) represents a process theological perspective, as does Suchocki (2003). For a postmodernist perspective, see Armour (1999); Fulkerson (2001); and Townes (2006). For a liberal approach, see Davaney (2006). For liberationist models, see Russell (1993); and Tamez (1993). For theology influenced by psychoanalysis, see Jantzen (1999). 11. On the topic of sexual violence, see Boonprasat-Lewis and Fortune (1999). On mothering, see Bunge (1994). On care, see DeMarinis (1993). On health related themes, see Townes (1998). On postcolonialism, see Pui-lan (2005); and on empire, see Keller et al. (2004). 12. In this regard, our theologies (like all theologies) carry with them long histories of inequalities and profound social harms. This is most acutely evident in North America where feminist theology done from a white, mainstream Protestant perspective still receives the broadest hearing. While one would be hard-pressed to find feminists in this group who openly sanction such privilege, white Protestant women continue to hold most of the high-status positions teaching feminist theology, and the work they do continues to garner the most academic attention and acclaim, often to the exclusion of other voices. 13. In the following overview of each doctrine, I make no claim to have represented all the issues feminist theologians have wrestled with or even the most creative or the most convincing of our proposals. I am only trying to signal for people who are not familiar with the inner workings of feminist discussion some of the most notable themes surfaced by our work. 14. Here I am primarily interested in Protestant views of God-knowledge found in works ranging from John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards to Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr. 15. See Russell (1985); and Schüssler Fiorenza (2001). For the intersection between the doctrine of creation, anthropology, and Scripture, see Kvam et al. (1999).

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16. For voices in this debate, see Kathryn Tanner’s Pitt lecture, ‘Incarnation, Cross, and Sacrifice: A Feminist-Inspired Re-appraisal’, delivered at Yale Divinity School on 15 October 2003 (Tanner 2004); and Tanner (2001); as well as Grant (1989); and Njoroge and Askola (1998). 17. Also see Fulkerson’s book, Places of Redemption. Tracy Swan Tuite also works on the theme of ‘passing the peace’ and ‘touch’ in her 2007 dissertation, Yale University. 18. Although I refer frequently to the ‘new’ character of global networks, many of these processes have been in play for not only decades but centuries and thus are hardly ‘new’ phenomena. 19. For an excellent discussion of the rise of ‘global cities’ as centers of global capital, see Sassen (2001). 20. For different accounts of these patterns and their implications for identity, see Brettell and Hollifield (2000); Arnold (2004); and Long and Oxfeld (2004). 21. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to, half tongue-in-cheek, as the ‘Cocacolonization’ or ‘McDonaldizing’ of the world. Cf. Watson (1997). 22. A longer discussion of religion and globalization would no doubt focus on the processes by which the globalizing dynamics I have just outlined historically participated in the construction of the category of ‘religion’ in early modern Europe.

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Boonprasat-Lewis, Nantawan, and Fortune, Marie M. (Eds) (1999). Remembering Conquest: FeministWomanist Perspectives on Religion, Colonization, and Sexual Violence. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Pastoral. Brettell, Caroline, and Hollifield, James Frank (Eds) (2000). Migration Theory: Talking across the Disciplines. New York: Routledge. Brock, Rita Nakashima (1988). Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power. New York: Crossroad. Bunge, Marcia J. (2001). The Child in Christian Thought. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Butler, Judy (1992). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Taylor and Francis. Cannon, Katie Geneva (1995). Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community. New York: Continuum. Chopp, Rebecca (1989). The Power to Speak: Feminism, Language, God. New York: Crossroad. Chung, Hyung Kyung (1990). Struggle to Be the Sun Again: Introducing Asian Women’s Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Coakley, Sarah. Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender. London: Blackwell. Cullinan, Colleen Carpenter (2004). Redeeming the Story: Women, Suffering, and Christ. New York: Continuum. Cummings, Lorine L. (1995). ‘A Womanist Response to the Afrocentric Idea: Jarena Lee, Womanist Preacher’, in C. J. Sanders (Ed.), Living the Intersection: Womanism and Afrocentrism in Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress. Daly, Mary (1973). Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation. Boston: Beacon. Davaney, Sheila Greeve (2006). Historicism: The Once and Future Challenge for Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress. Deleuze, Gilles (1994). Difference and Repetition. New York: Columbia University Press. and Guattari, Félix (1977). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York: Viking. DeMarinis, Valerie M. (1993). Critical Caring: A Feminist Model for Pastoral Psychology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. Donaldson, Laura, and Kwok, Pui-lan (Eds) (2002). Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse. New York: Routledge. Douglas, Kelly Brown (2005). What’s Faith Got to Do with It? Black Bodies/Christian Souls. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Douglass, Jane Dempsey, and Kay, James F. (Eds) (1997). Women, Gender, and Christian Community. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. Dube, Musa W. (2000). Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. Atlanta: Christian Board of Publication. (2006). The HIV and AIDS Bible: Selected Essays. Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press. Farley, Margaret (2006). Just Love: Sexual Ethics and Social Change. New York: Continuum. Fausto-Sterling, Anne (2000). Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic. Frantz, Nadine Pence, and Stimming, Mary T. (Eds) (2005). Hope Deferred: Heart-Healing Reflections on Reproductive Loss. Cleveland: Pilgrim. Fulkerson, Mary McClintock (2001). Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and Feminist Theology. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock.

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(2007). Places of Redemption: Theology for a Worldly Church. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garcia, Magdalena (2001). Hacia una fe liberadora: introducción a la teología mujerista. Louisville, KY: Presbyterian Church USA. Gebara, Ivone. (1999). Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation. Minneapolis: Fortress. Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend (2001). If It Wasn’t for the Women . . . Black Women’s Experience and Womanist Culture in Church and Community. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Graff, Ann O’Hara (Ed.) (1995). In the Embrace of God: Feminist Approaches to Theological Anthropology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Graham, Elaine (1995). Making the Difference: Gender, Personhood and Theology. London: Cassell. Grant, Jacquelyn (1989). White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Grau, Marion (2004). Of Divine Economy: Refinancing Redemption. New York: T&T Clark. Grewal, Inderpal, and Kaplan, Caren (1994). Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Grey, Mary (1989). Redeeming the Dream: Feminism, Redemption, and Christian Tradition. London: SPCK. Hampson, Daphne (Ed.) (1996). Swallowing a Fishbone? Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity. London: SPCK. Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, David (2000). Spaces of Hope. Berkeley: University of California Press. Isasi-Díaz, Ada María (1996). Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. (2004). La Lucha Continues: Mujerista Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Isherwood, Lisa (Ed.) (2000). Good News of the Body: Sexual Theology and Feminism. New York: New York University Press. Jaggar, Alison , and Bordo, Susan (Eds) (1989). Gender, Body, Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Jameson, Fredric (1991). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. and Miyoshi, Masao (Eds) (1998). The Cultures of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jantzen, Grace (1999). Becoming Divine: Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Johnson, Elizabeth A. (1990). Consider Jesus: Waves of Renewal in Christology. New York: Crossroad. (1992). She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. New York: Crossroad. Jones, Serene (2000). Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace. Minneapolis: Fortress. (2008). ‘Transnational Feminism and the Rhetoric of Religion’, in Maura A. Ryan and Brian F. Linnane (Eds), A Just and True Love: Feminism at the Frontiers of Theological Ethics. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

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Keller, Catherine (1996). Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World. Boston: Beacon. (2003). The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. New York: Routledge. (2005). God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys. Minneapolis: Fortress. and Nausner, Michael, and Rivera, Mayra (Eds) (2004). Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire. Atlanta: Chalice. Keshgegian, Flora (2000). Redeeming Memories: A Theology of Healing and Transformation. Nashville, TN: Abingdon. Kidwell, Clara Sue, Noley, H., Tinker, G., and Weaver, J. (2001). A Native American Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Kintz, Linda (1977). Between Jesus and the Market: The Emotions that Matter in Right-Wing America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kinukawa, Hisako (1994). Women and Jesus in Mark: A Japanese Feminist Perspective. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Kvam, Kristen E., Shearing, Linda S., and Ziegler, Valarie H. (1999). Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kwok, Pui-lan (2005). Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. LaCugna, Catherine Mowry (1991). God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. (1993). Freeing Theology: The Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Long, Lynellyn D., and Oxfeld, Ellen (Eds) (2004). Coming Home: Refugees, Migrants, and Those Who Stayed Behind. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. McCann, Carole R., and Kim, Seung-Kyung (Eds) (2003). Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives. New York: Routledge. McDowell, Deborah E. (1996). Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin. New York: Norton. McFague, Sallie (1993). The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress. Machado, Daisy L. (2003). Of Borders and Margins: Hispanic Disciples in Texas, 1888–1945, American Academy of Religion Academy Series. New York: Oxford University Press. Masuzawa, Tomoko (1993). In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (2005). The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, Vincent J. (2005). Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture. New York: Continuum. Miller-McLemore, Bonnie (1994). Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma. Nashville, TN: Abingdon. Mitchem, Stephanie Y. (2002). Introducing Womanist Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Njoroge, Nyambura J., and Askola, Irja (Eds) (1998). There Were Also Women Looking on From Afar. Geneva: World Alliance of Reformed Churches. Oduyoye, Mercy A. (Ed.), with Vroom, Hendrik M. (2003). One Gospel—Many Cultures: Case Studies and Reflections on Cross-Cultural Theology. Amsterdam: Rodopi. O’Grady, Kathleen, Gilroy, Ann L., and Gray, Janette (Eds) (1998). Bodies, Lives, Voices: Gender in Theology. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic.

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Park, Sun Ai Lee (Ed.), with Fabella, Virginia (1989). We Dare to Dream: Doing Theology as Asian Women. Hong Kong: Asian Women’s Resource Centre for Culture and Theology. Manila: EATWOT Women’s Commission in Asia. Pauw, Amy Plantinga, and Jones, Serene (Eds) (2006). Feminist and Womanist Essays in Reformed Dogmatics. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. Plaskow, Judith (1990). Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. New York: HarperSanFrancisco. Prichard, Rebecca Button (1999). Sensing the Spirit: The Holy Spirit in Feminist Perspective. St. Louis, MO: Chalice. Rigby, Cynthia L. (1997). Power, Powerlessness, and the Divine: New Inquiries in Bible and Theology. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Rodriguez, Jeanette (1994). Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-American Women. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ross, Susan A. (2006). For the Beauty of the Earth: Women, Sacramentality, and Justice. New York: Paulist. Ruether, Rosemary R. (1992). Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. (1996). Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. (1998). Introducing Redemption in Christian Feminism. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic. Russell, Letty (1974). Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective: A Theology. Philadelphia: Westminster. (Ed.) (1985). Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. Philadelphia: Westminster. (1993). Church in the Round: Feminist Interpretation of the Church. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox. Sanders, Cheryl J. (1996). Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Sands, Kathleen (1994). Escape from Paradise: Evil and Tragedy in Feminist Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress. Sassen, Saskia (2001). The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (2006). Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schneider, Laurel (2004). Revelations: Divine Multiplicity in a World of Difference. New York: Taylor and Francis. Schussler Fiorenza, Elisabeth (1995). In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, 2nd edn. London: SCM. (Ed.) (1996). Power of Naming: A Concilium Reader in Feminist Liberation Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. (2001). Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. and Häring, Hermann (1999). The Non-Ordination of Women and the Politics of Power. London: SCM. Sedgewick, Eve (1992). Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Sen, Amartya (1999). Development as Freedom. New York: Knopf. Solberg, Mary M. (1997). Compelling Knowledge: A Feminist Proposal for an Epistemology of the Cross. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

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Stiglitz, Joseph E. (2003). Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton. Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt (2003). Divinity and Diversity: A Christian Affirmation of Religious Pluralism. Nashville, TN: Abingdon. Tamez, Elsa (1993). The Amnesty of Grace: Justification by Faith from a Latin American Perspective, trans. Sharon H. Ringe. Nashville, TN: Abingdon. Tanner, Kathryn (2001). Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress. (2004). ‘Incarnation, Cross, and Sacrifice: A Feminist-Inspired Re-appraisal’, Anglican Theological Review, 86/1: 35–56. Terrell, JoAnne Marie (1998). Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African American Experience. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Thomas, Linda E. (2004). Living Stones in the Household of God: The Legacy and Future of Black Theology. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress. Thompson, Deanna (2004). Crossing the Divide: Luther, Feminism, and the Cross. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress. Townes, Emilie M. (1998). Breaking the Fine Rain of Death. New York: Continuum. (2006). Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Warren, Karen (Ed.) (1994). Ecological Feminism. New York: Routledge. Watson, James L. (Ed.) (1997). Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Weedon, Chris (1987). Feminist Practice and Post Structuralist Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Williams, Dolores S. (1991). ‘Black Women’s Surrogacy Experience and the Christian Notion of Redemption’, in P. Cooey, W. Eakin, and J. McDaniel (Eds), After Patriarchy. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1–13. (1993). Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-talk. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Young, Robert (2003). Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

chapter 2

fem i n ist t h eol o gy a n d the jew ish tr a dition melissa raphael

Building on the foundations of First Wave Jewish and Christian women’s activism, Jewish feminist theology has made a decisive contribution to the post-Holocaust renewal of Jewish thought. Jewish feminist theology’s vision of Israel as an assembly of gendered persons whose ethical relationships with the world and with one another witness to the love and justice of God has introduced inclusive language into the liturgy and expanded the linguistic and imaginal range of Jewish evocations of God. In doing so, Jewish feminist theology has established the theological terms on which to affirm the full humanity of Jewish women as subjects and agents of their own Jewish experience. This essay begins by outlining the denominational and postdenominational contexts of Jewish feminist theology and assessing its standing in the primarily Anglophone Jewish community in which it has established itself since the second half of the 1970s. The essay will then move on to examine the ideas and approaches of a number of Jewish feminist theology’s key practitioners and some of the challenges it is likely to face over the coming years.

The denominational context of Jewish feminist theology Throughout its history, Jewry has benefited from the outstanding piety, scholarship, and philanthropy of women who have adapted Jewish law and custom to their genderspecific status and circumstances. However, by the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, First Wave Jewish feminists in Europe and North America recognized that women have a right and a moral and spiritual duty to express their Jewish values and aptitudes outside the domestic sphere. Second Wave Jewish feminists of the last four

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decades of the twentieth century went on to adopt a range of critical and disciplinary perspectives in a negotiation with the tradition that would yield equality of access as women, not honorary men, to positions of religious leadership, religious education, and full participation in communal worship. The present impact of feminism throughout the Western Jewish community, even in those circles that disapprove of it, should not be underestimated. Contemporary Judaism offers women unprecedented educational and devotional opportunities, though among the Orthodox this is only to a degree and of a kind permitted by an essentially male dispensation. For despite the considerable advances made by feminism, we should not forget that men have generated and dominated what is effectively the entire canon of Jewish religious and intellectual tradition. The male Jew has been the normative Jew: he has been God’s allocutor and the tradition’s interlocutor and decisor in matters of Jewish law (Raphael 2005). In the classic sources, ‘women are silent, absent from the Jewish construction of the universe and of God’, categorically separate to men and classified with minors, slaves, handicapped people, and non-Jews (Wright 1994: 152–3). This remains the case in Orthodox communities and to a lesser extent in the more conservative nonOrthodox congregations as well, where more subtle forms of gender discrimination can persist despite a rhetorical commitment to equality. Religious feminist challenges to Jewish patriarchy have been of three overlapping types (Heschel 1986; Zaidman 1996). Each of these has made a distinctive methodological and substantive contribution to Jewish feminist theology. Within modern Orthodoxy, women use the frame and terms of halakhah (customarily, if somewhat inadequately, translated as ‘Jewish law’) to negotiate between contemporary women’s interests and those of the tradition. Orthodox feminists use a conservative legal hermeneutic that limits its will for change to interpretations allowable by the male rabbinic establishment within the existing spirit and letter of Torah. Orthodox feminist approaches to Judaism are predicated on a view of the normativity of classical Judaism that differs sharply from that of more liberal Jewish feminists. While those on the left of the Jewish feminist movement would be inclined to support Daniel Boyarin’s view that rabbinic Judaism was ‘a takeover and disenfranchisement of all sources of traditional religious authority among Jews, including, but not only the authority of women’s traditions’ (2000: 179), those taking a more Orthodox approach would sympathize with the view that, after the failure of Jewish military strength and the destruction of the Second Temple, the rabbis created a form of Judaism that would be precisely hospitable to feminist values. According to this sympathetic account of postbiblical Judaism, the community was structured to survive without military or political power and had espoused an image of God whose power was deferred and whose present imitation was located in prayer and the ‘service of the heart’ (Lubarsky 2004: 310). In short, Orthodox feminism focuses on halakhah as a necessary and sufficient locus of revelation that has made it far less concerned with theology as an engine of reform than feminists from the less traditionalist denominations. Since the nineteenth century, liberal Jewish feminism has drawn on the ethical impetus of modern reformism to gradually achieve an at least nominal equality of religio-social opportunity with Jewish men. Less bound by halakhic judgments and

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obligations than Orthodox feminists, and, indeed, sometimes indifferent to halakhic precedent, feminist scholars of the broadly liberal traditions—most notably Judith Plaskow, Rachel Adler, and Ellen Umansky—have conjoined the tradition’s inherent prophetic self-criticism and self-revision with the humanistic values of modern Judaism to address (and sometimes move beyond) the classic theological framework of Judaism: God, Torah, and the people Israel. This essay will therefore devote most of its attention to Jewish feminist theology written and used by women from Reform and Reconstructionist backgrounds, since it is within these non-Orthodox groupings that interest in theology is at its most lively. However, before turning to the liberal or reformist feminist contribution, it is important to examine the third type of Jewish feminism—‘postmodern’ Jewish feminism—since its influence on liberal Jewish feminisms has been considerable and the boundaries between the two types are highly permeable, on the reformist side at least. The more eclectic, selfdefining mood of ultraliberal or ‘postmodern’ Jewish feminism is, naturally, the least bound by law and tradition. Lori Lefkovitz, for example, finds the great pillars of Jewish thought— God, Torah, and Israel—unhelpful to women. Preferring the gynocentric categories of French philosophy, she subverts the rabbinic distrust of female Otherness and celebrates its numinous power and mystery (1995). Other postmodern Jewish feminists have more clearly thealogical (Goddess-orientated) affiliations. Some women on the alternative Jewish left have chosen to pursue a woman-centered approach to reflection on the divine that includes the thealogical texts and rituals of the contemporary Goddess feminist movement (see Pirani 1991; Gottlieb 1995; Raphael 1998). In doing so, Jewish feminists both on the edges of and within the Goddess movement feel that thealogy—discourse on the Goddess—need not abandon or compromise their Jewishness. As Ryiah Lilith notes, ‘As a Goddess-worshipping lesbian feminist, I found that no mainstream Jewish denomination fulfilled my spiritual needs but just because I am not a Reform Jew or a Conservative Jew, it doesn’t mean that I am not a Jew. I rejected the denominations, not the religion. I may not be able to explain exactly how I manage to be both Jewish and a Pagan, but I know with certainty that I am both’ (2001: 110). Thealogy is especially congenial to women on the left of the Jewish feminist movement when it honors the ancient near eastern Goddesses associated with ancient Israelite women’s syncretistic practice such as the Canaanite goddess Asherah, whom the Israelites would sometimes style as a divine consort of their God (see Long 1992: 128–9; Brenner 1997), as well as those female divine hypostases that derive from biblical, rabbinic, and mystical traditions, such as Shekhinah, the immanence of God, and Hochmah, the figure of Wisdom. Consequently, it is not always possible to ascertain precisely the difference between a Jewish feminist theology and a Jewish feminist thealogy. Many Jewish women who, like the academic and Reconstructionist rabbi Rebecca Alpert, would not consider themselves ‘post-Jewish’ or neo-pagan would nonetheless share her commitment to incorporating a thealogical element within Jewish feminist theology. With Alpert, they would declare, ‘I want room in my Judaism for a variety of theological perspectives. I want room to explore the meaning of ancient Goddess worship; to let its existence seep into my contemporary struggle with a masculine God’ (1999: 497). When Jewish feminist

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theology postulates a maternal model of God, its discursive boundaries become especially porous to a thealogical celebration of the Goddess as an idea of the divine that is as accessible to Jewish women as any other women (see Christ 2005: 579). This does not, however, make thealogians such as Starhawk or Asphodel Long (the late ‘mother’ of the British Goddess movement), who have never repudiated their Jewishness, Jewish feminist theologians. Cynthia Ozick’s famously derisive remarks about Jewish feminist thealogy as a crude ‘resurrection of every ancient idolatry the Jewish idea came into the world to drive out’ (1983: 121) may be overstated, but it is difficult to deny that most models of the Goddess function in very different ways to the Jewish God, even the Jewish ‘God-She’. Although their debate remained amicable, Judith Plaskow’s feminist spirituality parted company with that of the Goddess feminist Carol Christ’s on the question of monotheism, whose basic terms Plaskow was not willing to concede. The Goddess of feminist thealogy imposes no quasi-contractual obligations upon humanity, does not primarily reveal herself through the historical or any posthistorical juridical process, and, in the Wiccan model of the modalities of the Goddess as Maiden, Mother, and Crone, has a cyclic nature largely alien to that of the Jewish God. Nonetheless, it is arguable that in a postmodern feminist religious environment where women are encouraged to avail themselves of the freedoms and possibilities of compound, multiple, or fluid cross-traditional identities across a spectrum of sexual-political alternatives, a rigid or hostile distinction between Jewish feminist theology and Jewish feminist thealogy need not be drawn.

Definitions of Jewish feminist theology The extent to which Jewish feminist theology—as a discourse or discipline—has been an engine of sociopolitical change in the Jewish community is debatable, not least because a consensus about the nature, content, method, and purpose of theology has itself proved elusive in the Jewish community as a whole. While Jewish theology can reasonably be claimed to be implicit in any Jewish text from the Bible onward that represents the being, will, or self-revelation of God, the received view is that Judaism is legal, ritual, and social in character, rather than doctrinal or creedal. If that is the case, then Jewish feminist theology will have been less apparent as a primary agent of change within the Jewish community than the feminist struggle for halakhic reform and access to study and leadership as a means to spiritual-political justice for women. This latter view would be found in the more Orthodox, halakhically orientated feminist circles, but also, and in different ways, in liberal Jewish feminist circles as well, where Judaism may be more a social, cultural, spiritual, and historical identity than a confession of faith. Very few Jewish women would describe themselves as professional feminist theologians (though as time goes on, and the books and doctoral theses now in preparation are completed, the numbers will grow). It also seems clear that those accustomed to a conventional Christian definition of theology as an ordered, thematic discussion of the Church’s presiding doctrines would detect little Jewish feminist theology in circulation.

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Yet if, with Alexandra Wright, one defines feminist theology not as an academic profession, but as ‘women speaking about God and about themselves in relation to their religious tradition’ (1994: 152), it is more than possible to claim that there is, in fact, a great deal of Jewish feminist theology in circulation, but it is diffused and implicit in articles, lectures, and liturgical and ritual innovations. The more inclusively Jewish feminist theology is defined, the more prevalent and influential it appears to be. Women rabbis and others use and produce theology through their hermeneutical, pastoral, and liturgical and linguistic practices. In Britain, Jewish feminist theology has been both shaped and derived from the pastoral and liturgical innovations of women rabbis such as Sybil Rothschild, Sybil Sheridan, Marcia Plumb, Alex Wright, and Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah, who has been an important advocate for the lesbian feminist perspective (Rothschild and Sheridan 2000). Similarly, feminist scholars of the Hebrew Bible such as Athalya Brenner offer readings of the text that assume, even if they do not always state, feminist theological positions. Or again, Marcia Falk has developed a constructive feminist theology through the creation of new blessings, poems, midrashim, translations, and rituals (1996, 2004). Here Jewish feminist theology becomes a discourse on the nature of God and the relation between God and the world that proceeds by drawing together Jewish tradition and feminist spiritual politics, poesis, art, philosophy, literature, historiography, liturgy, language, and ethical values: the whole expressive range of Jewish feminism regardless of its declaring a religious intention, each element being construed through the lens of the other. As Rachel Adler recently recalled, the first anthologies of Jewish feminist thought ‘puzzled Christian feminists, crammed as they were with a hodgepodge of articles, most of which had nothing to do with matters of faith and doctrine. Instead, history, sociology, and psychology rubbed shoulders with halakhic (legal) analyses, personal narratives, new rituals, and a very few articles recognizable as theology’ (2002: 1). Although there are only a very few women who would describe themselves as Jewish feminist theologians, Jewish feminist theology might be defined most inclusively not as a body of self-identified theological texts or a separate academic discipline, but simply as the elucidation of what a Jewish feminist can believe. Such an inclusive definition may precisely fail to be a definition in so far as it could render Jewish feminist theology both everything and nothing in particular, but it does nonetheless signal what has been one of Jewish feminist theology’s main achievements, which has been to challenge received ideas of what theology should be and do.

Jewish feminist theology’s standing in the Jewish academy and congregation With more than a hint of regret, David Ellenson has observed that ‘no great systematic theology . . . will be forthcoming in our day. Furthermore, even if it were, many of us would doubt its claims for absolute certitude and veracity’ (1999: 501). Instead, Ellenson

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finds that Judith Plaskow and Rachel Adler’s feminist theology, like that of Arthur Green, ‘captures the theological temperament of our time. . . . The orientations that define their writings are illustrative of the emotive, yet tentative and personal tenor that informs so much theological work today’. As the product of an intellectually and communally fractured modernity, theirs is an experiential theology that thereby lacks certitude and comprehensiveness (1999: 500). Jewish feminist theology’s experientialism, relationalism, and immanentism have also been characteristic elements of the most influential twentieth-century Jewish theology: that of Martin Buber, Emmanuel Lévinas, Abraham J. Heschel, Arthur Green, and others, the crucial difference being Jewish feminist theology’s sustained attention to women’s experience and the rectification of gendered religious discrimination. Insofar as Jewish feminist theology is indicative of the mood and direction of contemporary Jewish theology as a whole, it follows that Jewish feminist theologians have not been invariably patronized or marginalized by other Jewish theologians. Significant numbers of male rabbis and academics whose broadly left-wing spiritual-political interests are in Jewish men’s studies—Daniel Boyarin, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, and Arthur Waskow notable among them—acknowledge their debt to Jewish feminist theology (see Umansky 1999: 146). Yet even if Jewish feminist theology encapsulates some of the mood and trajectory of current Jewish theology, Jewish theology that is non-gender-reflexive has not accepted feminist construals of God or the divine attributes without question. To take but one example: most Jewish scholars would be of the view that even if the Shekhinah (the divine presence) is a traditionally feminine attribute of God, she is still properly subordinate to the male attributes of God. The neo-Kantian Jewish theologian Steven Schwarzschild rejects the neomystical and feminist construal of the Shekhinah as a female hypostasis of divine immanence. The theological anthropomorphization or metaphorical sexualization of divine immanence, no less than literal conceptions of divine masculinity, limits God’s transcendence, weakens monotheism, and turns God ‘from a spiritual and ethical being into a sort of hermaphrodite’. According to Schwarzschild, the Shekhinah is not the name of a divine hypostasis but a metaphor for the fundamentally ethical relationship between God and Israel, and thereby, between God and humanity (1990: 237). It should also be noted that some Jewish feminist theologians have similarly objected to any promotion of Shekhinah into a deity as this would undermine the unity of God (Frymer-Kensky 1994: 50). There are, in fact, indications that the impact of Jewish feminist theology upon mainstream Jewish thought has been limited or at least poorly acknowledged. In the recent Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies (2002), whose editors style it as a ‘snapshot of the current state of research in Jewish Studies’ and which allocates space for its articles on the basis of ‘the extent and interest of current scholarly debate in that area’, Paul MendesFlohr’s article on Jewish theology makes no methodological or substantive reference to Jewish feminist theology (Mendes-Flohr 2002). More surprisingly, it is also barely referred to in Tal Ilan’s overview of Jewish women’s studies in the same volume (2002). In more popular Jewish feminist literature, feminist theology rarely features as a

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disciplinary contribution. In Danya Ruttenberg’s 2001 Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism, an edited collection of essays on the sexual, political, and cultural identities of the present generation of Jewish feminists (effectively the daughters of Second Wave Jewish feminists), explicitly theological approaches do not feature at all. It may be that Jewish feminist theology has not had the academic impact it might have because, as the Jewish liberation theologian Marc Ellis has pointed out, the current conservative climate of theological appointments impedes the development of new critical Jewish thought. Whereas theologians of Plaskow, Adler, and Ellis’s age entered academia supported by radical academics who valued, shared, and informed their younger colleagues’ political engagement, today ‘the education industry that increasingly dominates higher education’ is not hospitable to theologies of protest (Ellis 2004: 174–5). For Jewish theologians the political backlash is compounded by ‘dissent-stifling hiring practices for Jewish academics’ in Jewish seminaries and in secular academic institutions. Both seminaries and universities tend to solicit the opinion of local Jewish leaders during an appointment’s selection process and further delimit the political scope of the post by setting it in ‘safe’ areas such as ‘Old Testament’ or Hebrew studies (2004: 178–9). As Ellis remarks: ‘Do you think it would be possible—did it ever cross the mind of the [Harvard] Divinity Faculty—to hire a Jewish faculty member with the same piercing critical skills as [Elisabeth] Schussler Fiorenza?’ (2004: 177). It is impossible to understand the relative paucity and marginality of Jewish feminist theology, as well as its ambivalent reception in the academic and congregational community, without recognizing that the tradition does not wholeheartedly encourage and is often bemused by the theological project itself. Of course, Jewish religious thought and observance is patently and inherently theological insofar as it is expressive of beliefs that ultimately derive from revelation. It is, in fact, possible to cull a theology or at least a cluster of theological concepts such as those concerning divine providence or eschatological hope from the aggadhic or literary elements of the classical rabbinic literature, even though the rabbis (with the exception, perhaps, of Maimonides in the twelfth century) had little concern for the imposition of a dogmatic scheme. Jewish philosophical theology has a long and distinguished history. Medieval Jewish thought in particular used Greek philosophy to elucidate the divine object of its faith. Yet premodern Jewish theology all too often served an apologetic purpose, whether in response to medieval Christian theological polemic against Judaism and coercive attempts to convert the Jews, or as a means of scoring points in sectarian quarrels within the Jewish community itself (Mendes-Flohr 2002: 763–4). According to Orthodox commentators at least, in the modern period the Reform movement used theology pragmatically to present Judaism’s ethical credentials to a Western Christian society that was becoming more tolerant of its Jewish population and to prevent emancipated Jews from abandoning the traditions of their ‘forefathers’. By then, theology seemed to have become an essentially Reform intellectual and ethical project, separable from halakhic study and observance: a modern apology for belief that has been detached from practice. For the Orthodox, theological discussion might reinforce the halakhic obligation but does not itself impose the commandment.

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While contemporary Jewish theology enjoys the support of some illustrious contemporary practitioners (Jacob Neusner and Steven Katz among them), its disciplinary positioning within the American and British academy is relatively marginal. It is common to find that, as a discipline, Jewish theology is subsumed under the category of Jewish philosophy or it is not taught at all. In the nonconfessional intellectual culture of departments of Jewish Studies and Religious Studies, Jewish feminist theology can seem doubly committed: a religious and a political confession (Plaskow 1994: 62–3). Leaving confessional studies to the seminary, Jewish Studies has produced an extensive feminist literature that rarely includes theology qua discourse upon the nature and will of God and its self-revelation in history. Yet for the reasons outlined above, Jewish theology, especially feminist theology which is a critical theology, is also methodologically foreign to the Orthodox Jewish seminary, leaving Jewish feminist theology too often suspended in an intellectual vacuum somewhere between the activity of the rabbinical seminary and the secular university. In Britain, theology can be studied as a degree within the universities but theology departments tend to be Christian and theology is assumed to be Christian unless stated otherwise. The energies of British Jewish Studies departments are usually focused on history, halakhah, philosophy, and culture, with interest in theology as a discipline remaining almost as marginal as it is in the wider Jewish community. It is also notable that well-known, self-identified Jewish feminist theologians have not, to date, been trained in Jewish theology. For want of a place to study Jewish theology in the late 1960s, Judith Plaskow trained in a Protestant school of divinity in the United States (Plaskow 2005: 9) (as did I in England in the first years of the 1980s for similar reasons); Marcia Falk and Rachel Adler studied English literature and Ellen Umansky trained as a historian (Adler 1998: xxiv). Political, intellectual, and spiritual boundaries and margins have long been recognized as sites of freedom, subversion, and regeneration. The uneasy location of Jewish feminist theology might therefore be welcomed as much as it is regretted since the multi- and cross-disciplinarity of Jewish feminist theology has been a source of methodological and substantive creativity. Nonetheless, its lack of a single academic identity can also militate against the development of Jewish feminist theology as a focused discipline and literary corpus that can engage in fruitful dialogue with feminist theologians from other religious traditions.

Some key Jewish feminist theological contributions Arguably, there are only three full-length books to date that have styled themselves works of Jewish feminist theology: Judith Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai (1990), Rachel Adler’s Engendering Judaism (1998), and my own The Female Face of God in Auschwitz (2003). Of these, Judith Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai remains the presiding and foundational Jewish feminist theological text. It is the closest Jewish feminist

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theology has yet come to paralleling a Christian systematic theology, or at least a modern Protestant systematic where, in the manner of Schleiermacher, doctrine is reinterpreted in terms of a particular principle or idea. I have already alluded to the reasons for this relatively small corpus: namely, an Orthodox cultural preference for legal discourse, with Torah being the sufficient locus of divine self-revelation, compounded by a distribution of labor within the Jewish academy that leaves Jewish theology marginal to both the rabbinical and the secular Jewish Studies departments in the universities. It has also been noted that the Judaism of many Jewish feminists is, like that of many other Jews, not so much religious or faith-based as culturally and politically focused. The question of Jewish feminist theology’s contribution to Jewish feminism was first raised for a wide readership in an article Cynthia Ozick published in 1979 in which she insisted that Jewish women’s secondary role and status is not a failure of revelation in Torah but a halakhic injury that is consequently a matter for halakhic, or what she calls ‘sociological’, not theological, reform (1983: 142). Judith Plaskow then countered with the argument that Jewish women’s status as Other to the male norm is not halakhic in origin but precedes halakhah, originating in a masculinist conception of God and revelation of which halakhic inequalities are but a symptom. Jewish feminism needs, therefore, to be grounded in an engagement with ‘the profound injustice of Torah itself ’, in a systemic revision of the theology that underpins the structure, content, and interpretation of Jewish law (1983: 223–33; see, also, 1994: 62–84). It is not that Plaskow has ever wanted Jewish feminist theology to dispense with Torah. Despite its androcentrism and its reinforcement of patriarchy, Torah does attempt to testify to the workings of a guiding and calling God; to moments of illumination and mystery ‘when the curtain was pulled back from the endless chain of historical circumstance and some underlying meaning and presence were traced and read from the events of Jewish history’ (1994: 78). It is rather that Plaskow finds Torah to be incomplete and foreshortened in its range. Plaskow urges that the Torah’s canon can be extended far beyond the traditional boundaries of Torah, into the lives and writings of women and other nonrabbinic groups who are also witnesses to divine presence and creators of Jewish theological meaning (1994: 79). Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai made a significant contribution to the revisioning of Torah, a contribution grounded not only in her scholarship, but in her practical experience of B’not Esh, the Jewish feminist spirituality collective she helped to establish in the early 1980s, and the havurot—the informal liberal communities that are more open to alternative and experimental ideas and practice than established congregations (1990: vii–ix). In Standing Again at Sinai Plaskow knows her work is limited by the range of Jewish feminist religious studies itself, noting that because women speak more about their lives than about theological issues per se there was not, at the time of her writing, a range of voices with which she could dialogue (1990: xxi). Nevertheless, convinced that a constructive feminist theology, if not the narrow criticism of patriarchal Jewish theology, would make a practical difference to women’s lives (1994: 68), she began with women’s experience and moved to explore Jewish images of God from a feminist perspective in an attempt to reorient and transform the Jewish conception of God (1990: 121–3). In other words, her exercise in God-talk, which comes as the fourth of six chapters, is

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subsequent to and dependent on the recovery of women’s memory, embodiment, and the reconstruction of community. Aware that there is no nonsexist essence of Judaism that can be retrieved by the operations of feminist thought, Plaskow intends her book to help ‘create a Jewish community in which women are present and equal as women’ and in which ‘difference is nurtured and respected’ (1990: 119). She wants to see the transformation of Judaism into a religion that men and women shape together (1990: xv–xvi). In customary Reform tradition, Plaskow justifies women’s continued adherence to Judaism on ethical, historical, and relational grounds, rather than on the authority of revelation. As a woman and a feminist she has mixed feelings about halakhah. Halakhah forms the greater part of the oral Torah and is regarded by Orthodoxy as a divine revelation through which the revealed written Torah—the Hebrew Bible—should be read. Plaskow grants that halakhah is a responsive communal process that can protect rights and establish responsibilities. However, its rigidities and precedents can also inhibit social spontaneity, innovation, and the acceptance, let alone celebration, of difference (1990: 60–73). Instead of testing the elasticity of halakhah, Plaskow’s work has been more immediately concerned with the transformation of the theological imaginary and the use of feminist historiographical and hermeneutical methods to expand the Judaic canon. Her most recent research marks the shift of her interests toward Jewish sexual ethics, and her latest book, published in 2005, The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics 1972–2003, collects her previous essays. The explicitly theological dimension of her work forms the earlier part of her corpus. Plaskow’s struggle with halakhah, or more precisely, her refusal to struggle with it, signals perhaps the most significant difference between Jewish feminist theology and Christian feminist theology. Whether or not a feminist Judaism should be centered around law and whether law can rectify the injustices of gender discrimination sanctioned by its own structures, norms, and sources are both issues peculiar to Jewish feminist theology (though parallels could be drawn with Islamic feminists’ negotiation with Sharia law). Rachel Adler has a greater commitment to the accommodation of halakhah within a feminist Reform Judaism than Judith Plaskow and Ellen Umansky. Perhaps because Adler identified as an Orthodox Jew for a significant period of her life before returning to the Reform community of her upbringing, she holds fast to her halakhic commitment by offering a liberal construal of halakhah as the act of making one’s way or as pathmaking (from the Hebrew root HLKh, to walk or go). Halakhah then becomes not so much law as a way of translating Judaism’s stories and values into action (Adler 1998: 21). To a greater extent than other Jewish feminist theologians, Adler’s approach is grounded in the traditional Jewish belief that revelation is produced hermeneutically through a dialogical reading of the classical halakhic texts and the stories they tell. Rereading the classic texts is, for Adler, a central task of Jewish feminist theology. On both halakhic and hermeneutical counts, Adler’s theology is perhaps the most characteristically Jewish of all Jewish feminist theology written to date. Rather than offering a systematic feminist elaboration of the positive beliefs that underpin and direct the community’s hopes and practices, Adler’s most important theological work, Engendering Judaism (1998), is preoccupied with the means by which law, liturgy, and

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Jewish sexual and marital ethics can be transformed by religious feminist values and practices. As Randi Rashkover observes, Adler’s own theological position is ‘conspicuously absent’ from the book. Indeed, for Rashkover, her ‘theological silence’ makes it more difficult for Jewish feminists to bring religious and philosophical sophistication to the reading of classical Jewish texts (2004: 330–1). Yet it may be that Engendering Judaism is a little more theologically declarative than Rashkover finds it to be; Adler clearly regards the feminist rereading of Torah as a way of mending Judaism itself. Adler’s theological approach also illustrates a very Jewish concern that God is also subject to the moral requirements of justice, and her inferential theological style suggests that Jews should refrain from depicting God in positive theological discussions that may degenerate into discursive idols. Reflecting recent developments in feminist studies of religion, Adler’s reading of the rabbis is complex, nuanced, and nonideological. As Rashkover puts it, Adler ‘avoids reading the rabbis as heroes or oppressors’ and reads them instead, through a ‘hermeneutic of laughter’, as human beings whose stories portray them as suffering ordinary insecurities, desires, and misadventures (327). Adler’s reading of Berakhot 51b, for example, illustrates how her hermeneutic of laughter can be a witty and deflating interjection into the patriarchal conversation. In Berakhot 51b, a rabbi and his learned guest debate whether a woman should receive a glass of wine that has been blessed during the ritual of grace after a meal. Their discussion so irritates Yalta, a woman of high status who is both the rabbi’s wife and the daughter of a wealthy and erudite family, that she goes to the wine cellar and smashes four hundred jars of wine. Her action leaves the men looking foolish indeed as there is now no wine to bless. Yalta then disdains the unblessed cup of wine her husband’s guest has offered her as a placatory gesture with a sharply cutting remark. By focusing on Yalta’s words and actions, not on the substantive halakhic debate between the two men, Adler’s feminist reading does not merely challenge the religious and social prestige of Yalta’s male guest but theologically destabilizes the very standing, locus, and possibility of the holy and its blessings within the patriarchal order (see Adler 1998: 55–6). Ellen Umansky has also made an invaluable contribution to the teaching and publication of Jewish feminist theology. She notes that her approach is close to that of Adler, though she cannot, to the same degree as Adler, relinquish the autonomy that Reform Judaism has traditionally conferred upon Jews by its modern selective approach to the observance of Jewish law (1999: 144). In common with feminist theologians from other traditions, Umansky’s approach to Jewish feminist theology reflects a widespread lack of confidence that women’s values and experience can be successfully reconciled with those valorized by the patriarchal tradition. Her negotiation with the halakhic mode has made a significant methodological contribution to Jewish feminist theology. Umansky’s theology, influenced primarily by Reform theology but also by Reconstructionist theology (with its emphasis on the greater importance of community life than belief), is a product of Jewish modernity’s critique of halakhah’s archaic heteronomy. However, Umansky’s theology is also a product of postmodernity where voluntary religious observance entitles a woman to control

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and define the meanings of a Jewish life for herself by disprivileging androcentric canonical traditions and focusing primarily on her own experience as a means of authoritative engagement with the tradition. Umansky grants that it is questionable whether any woman can claim any personal experience to be Jewish simply because she is a Jew; the tradition might impose its own cultural and religious prerequisites. Umansky’s Reform perspective is not, then, oblivious to the basic requirements of Jewish law, especially those pertaining to idolatry. Nonetheless, Umansky rejects Jacob Neusner’s normative view of Jewish theology as an exposition of received, authoritative sources on the grounds that these norms are masculinist and androcentric. Jewish feminist theology should, by its nature, celebrate its autonomy and subjectivity: its own voice, perspective, and stories (1989: 193–4). Feminist theology, for her, differs from traditional theology in its willingness to acknowledge the autobiographical nature of its project and in its abjuration of claims to universal truth or a single form of authentic Judaism. Rather, the feminist theologian’s task is to articulate her own understanding of ‘the self, God, and the world and, within a Jewish context, to view these realities through the lens of Jewish feminist experience’ (1999: 142). Umansky’s feminist theological method is firmly contextual; citing Rabbi Laura Geller’s conviction that to be a Jew entails telling one’s own story within the Jewish story, Umansky insists that Jewish feminist theology negotiates the categories of God, Torah, and Israel through ‘a theology self-consciously rooted in the context of the theologian’s own life’ (1999: 143). Like other Jewish feminist theologians, Umansky’s theological method is often rooted in liturgical revision and it is also midrashic, that is, she uses the classical rabbinic hermeneutical method where new stories or midrashim are told by retelling old stories in such a way as to reintroduce women into the text as agents of the narrative and whose experiences of God are not entirely mediated through those of men (1999: 145). By focusing on theology’s narrative dimension, Umansky has made an important contribution to feminist historical theology. Her studies of Lily Montagu (the founder of British liberal Judaism) and other well-known and unknown Jewish women demonstrate how Jewish women’s piety and activism have enacted a personal, affective theology predicated on relational intimacies, both between human persons and between persons and God (Umansky 1983; Umansky and Ashton 1992). Predated by an article by Susan Nowak in which she offered a humanistic reading of women’s Holocaust memoirs (1999), my book The Female Face of God: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust (2003) offers a different approach to historical theology. This is the first full-length Jewish feminist theological engagement with the Holocaust, parts of which have been reprinted not only in mainstream Jewish theological collections, but also in a number of Christian theological publications, suggesting spiritual continuities and permeabilities between Jewish and Christian feminist theology, particularly in the area of theodical reflection. In this book I use women survivors’ memoirs of Auschwitz to argue that it was a patriarchal model of God, not God-in-God-self, that failed Israel during the Holocaust. This was a model of God that was reliant upon an idea of masculine power that simply could not withstand the actual masculine patriarchal power of Nazism that confronted it.

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A central purpose of the book is to challenge the masculinist free-will defense of God’s inaction or absence during the Holocaust as the justifiable price of (male) autonomy and moral freedom that most post-Holocaust theologies are in various ways predicated upon. The deployment of the free-will defense in post-Holocaust theology suffers from a number of intrinsic philosophical flaws (Katz 2005), but also does not correlate with women’s experience as evidenced in so many of their memoirs and by so much of the feminist historiography of the Holocaust (see further, Raphael 2003, 2004). Judith Tydor Baumel’s research on Jewish women’s structures of mutual support in pre-war Nazi Germany and during the Holocaust suggests that, historically at least, Holocaust theology need not turn on the axis of freedom (1995, 1999). Baumel has shown that women developed cooperative strategies for survival out of previous domestic, philanthropic, and feminist experience that had fostered sisterhood and solidarity. She concludes that crisis situations can strengthen women’s communal identities and power while negating the masculine ideal of the autonomous individual (1999: 333–4, 343, 344). Historical evidence has theological implications. My book argues that in the ghettos and death and concentration camps women seem to have invested their human dignity less in freedom as such than in the degree to which they were needed by vulnerable others and bound to them by quasi-covenantal ties of love and obligation. So too, the women’s memoir literature gives little evidence either for a female equation of dignity and freedom per se or for women calling upon God’s interventionary power to save them, but far more for their calling upon one another to be present to each other’s need. What seems to have mattered to women was to maintain a capacity to respond to the need of the Other, just as they had done in family and communal life before the onslaught. Although Judaism is a practical religion that regulates and ritualizes the ordinary needs that sustain life, women’s experience in meeting the emotional and physical needs of the suffering Other has been largely ignored by post-Holocaust theology: it is not considered an authoritative religious witness to the self-revelation of God in history. And yet my feminist reading of the narratives of resistant presence to the suffering Other found in women’s memoirs of the Holocaust period counters these theologies of absence. In these texts, women often remember how they held, covered, warmed, and fed other women, and how other women did those motherly things for them. From a post-Holocaust feminist perspective, such acts can be construed as figures or tableaux of God’s maternal presence to suffering within Auschwitz. Women’s efforts to restore humanity to the degraded Other can be interpreted as acts of tikkun, or restoration—the Jewish task of sanctification that makes the world fit for God’s presence. If that was the case, then the redemptive, covenantal process was not suspended by Auschwitz but went on in spite of it. While, in Judaism, memory (zakhor) is a commandment, a sanctification of history that has a necessarily collective dimension, The Female Face of God in Auschwitz does not seek to speak on behalf of women victims of the Nazi genocide or to appropriate and rewrite what they wrote. Rather, it suggests that these stories of resistant presence to the Other, in a place defined by its will to erase presence through the processes of mass degradation and murder, can, for the post-Holocaust feminist reader, constitute a

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‘discernment situation’ where the meanings of these women’s stories can continue to unfold in other women’s lives also shaped by covenantal love. Theologically too, the traditional Jewish image of the Shekhinah as a female figure of divine presence accompanying Israel into exile correlates well with these narratives of female shelter and again counters the dominant theologies of absence. Instead, the stories of women’s relationships in Auschwitz–Birkenau and other camps can become media of divine presence, read and told as ‘narrative bodies for God’ (to use a phrase Rachel Adler uses in a different context (1998: 96)). Here, women’s holding, pulling, and pushing the Other from death back into the slender possibility of life—so often the very substance of their memoir—were means of carrying God into Auschwitz under a torn shelter: an improvised Tent of Meeting in which women could meet God in the face-to-face relation.

Jewish feminist theology and the subversion of theological essentialism Some think that religious feminism, with its roots in religious traditions that divinely and eternally ordain heterosexist gender roles, will be more susceptible to the charge of essentialism than other feminisms. While I am yet to be persuaded that ‘essentialist’ attribution of different roles, values, and characteristics to men and women should, in fact, be avoided in all and every instance, it seems clear that Jewish feminist theology has done much to subvert and complicate the apparent essentialism of feminist theologies that ignore the masculine attributes of God or simply replace them with feminine attributes. Jewish feminist theology has, for example, avoided undue reliance on potentially essentialist ‘feminine’ names for God which, while properly valorizing traditionally female ethical postures and practices, are in danger of reinforcing the nurturing attributes ascribed to women by religious patriarchies that refuse them any others. Gynocentric names for God, such as harachmamima, a female form of ‘The Merciful One’, with strongly uterine overtones, and Shaddai, a biblical name for God usually translated as ‘Almighty’ but deriving etymologically from ‘breasts’ (see Gen. 49: 25; Ruth 1: 20), are often used by Jewish feminist theologians and liturgists alongside less biologically inflected names such as ‘The Holy One’. Of course, Jewish feminist theology can be solidly personalistic. Rachel Adler’s own work is a significant instance of feminist personalism. She insists on God as a real, personal, sustaining Other: the creator and covenantal partner with whom the people of Israel have had a long and complex historical relationship (1998: 91–6). My own work is also predicated on a personalistic model of a God revealed in history. However, Jewish feminist theologians are also inclined to express their sense of God as an immanent dynamic energy that can be evoked by a litany or stream of metaphors that resist the predication of a patriarchal super-personality to God such as that of the monarchical God whose exclusively masculine character is idolatrous and which renders the female

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ontologically Other to the divine. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, for example, has explored the multiple facets within the unity of God by noting biblical instances of ‘morphing’, such as Deuteronomy 32 where God is imaged in a succession of images from a rock and father to a mother eagle, birth-giver, and warrior. When one image for God can dissolve into another, motion and change are introduced into a theological repertoire that can no longer be limited to one set of static and hierarchical metaphors for God (1994). Marcia Falk similarly expresses her sense of the permeable boundaries of the human, natural, and the divine through the composition of new prayers and new translations of traditional texts. By emphasizing the immanence of God in nature, the community, and the individual and finding elemental images such as ‘well-spring of life’ or ‘spark of the inner self ’ that are conceptually, if not in Hebrew grammar, gender neutral, Falk destabilizes received ‘masculine’ anthropocentric theologies in which the transcendence of God separates the divine from the female and the natural (1989: 53–6). Judith Plaskow’s recent notion of a transgendered God also signals a tendency in Jewish feminist theology to correct its own tendency toward theo(a)logical essentialism. In a lecture given at the University of Manchester in 2000, she explored the theological instabilities and contradictions generated by the Jewish anthropomorphic concept of God as father and husband of Israel that suggest a model of God who is neither male nor female, nor androgynous, but transgendered. Plaskow notes that the Jewish God is gendered but not sexed: the Bible consistently veils or averts its gaze from that part of God that would reveal God’s sex (as on Mount Sinai when Moses and three priests and seventy elders ‘see’ God but the text refers only to what lies beneath God’s feet (Ex. 24: 9–11). Likewise, although the Hebrew Bible refers to God as a woman in labor and as a woman nursing her baby, God is also Israel’s husband. However, the literature is reticent about their sexual relationship, not least because, as Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (1994) and Daniel Boyarin (1997) have pointed out, God’s being effectively married to Jewish men has homoerotic implications that have long troubled its patriarchal interpreters. The indeterminacy of God’s sex ‘feminizes’ Jewish men as lovers and wives of God and can erase women’s sexuality as a reflection of God’s image, making it redundant or superfluous to the male communion with God. Yet the very indeterminacy and ambiguity of the bond between God and Israel can also leave it open to reconceptualizations that reflect the performativity and playfulness of sexuality (evident, for example, in the mutualities, subversion of gender stereotypes, and slippages in the subject and object voices of the biblical Song of Songs). As Plaskow notes, ‘If gender is something we perform, the possibilities for divine performance are infinite’ (2000: 9). Plaskow does not present her model of a destabilized, transgendered God as a cure-all for hierarchy, violence, and coercion in the tradition, but argues that it does allow Jews to question compulsory heterosexuality and, through ‘fluid and shifting subject positions’ of multiple selves, to experience a more fluid relational possibility between persons and between persons and God (11). Not only Jewish men’s studies, but also process theology has informed Jewish feminist theology. In Sandra Lubarsky’s post-Holocaust critique of the traditional attribute of divine omnipotence, God’s power is affirmed as maximal but not coercive because that would contradict God’s perfect goodness. Instead, ‘God must work in tandem with other

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causal influences and with the element of self-determination that defines each occasion’. God is experienced as an immanent power, ‘responding to creaturely freedom with an influx of possibilities and thus actively working to shape the world’ (2004: 308). God’s power is quiet, hidden, and persuasive; it is a love that encourages rather than commands. Lubarsky’s feminist qualification of the attribute of divine omnipotence is not to be mistaken for tacit acceptance of the powerlessness and passivity that has so often led to the degradation and abuse of women. Rather, divine power is construed as an active, vital, organic power that is a good model for the human exercise of power (310–11).

Challenges for Jewish feminist theology in the twenty-first century It is inevitable that Jewish feminist theology will continue to evolve over the coming years, especially as the academic pioneers of Second Wave Jewish feminism begin to contemplate retirement and younger scholars inherit a globalized world with changing opportunities, issues, and patterns of inequality. The next generation of feminist theologians will face different challenges than the previous generation of feminists whose radical outlook was formed during the 1960s through to the 1980s when the ‘Death of God’ movement, liberation theology, and (after Bultmann) systemic demythologization set the theo-political agenda. For Jewish women, radical theologies were further complicated in two different ways: first, by awareness of feminist anti-Judaism (Jewish and Christian feminist dialogue under the leadership of Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Rosemary Ruether, and Judith Plaskow has greatly improved understanding and produced a considerable literature in its own right), and second, by a theological reluctance born of the trauma of God’s apparent silence and absence from his covenantal people during the Holocaust. This was a divine silence prefigured in and compounded by the biblical and rabbinic notions of God as a hiding God: an elusive God who mysteriously hides his face; who is himself resistant to human speculation on his nature. Perspectival shifts are already evident, even among Second Wave feminists themselves. In 2002, prompted in part by her mother’s decline into dementia and more generally by the plea of human suffering that cannot be healed or justified, Rachel Adler expressed doubts about the benign maternal ‘God-She’ upon which so much Second Wave feminist spirituality has been predicated. Adler regards the relational ethic as a legacy of an Enlightenment progressivism that cannot be sustained indefinitely in the face of so much historical evidence to the contrary. She concludes: Perhaps the universe is darker and messier than we have been willing to concede. . . . Indeed, perhaps this tender, intimate divine presence which is our generation’s master liturgical image, implicit in all its prayers and sacred music is not the only face God turns towards us. Sometimes She cannot be imaged as Mother or Lover. Sometimes she is the attacking bear bereft of her cubs, the lioness in our path, the

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terrifying, the arbitrary, the inexplicable. I am asking how we will speak to and of Her. I am asking why. (Adler 2002: 3; see, also, 1998: 99)

Although Adler’s recent comments may not have done full justice to either the fluidity of Jewish feminist models of God or to the sexual ambiguities of the traditional love between God and Israel, Adler’s sense that the Enlightenment legacy has shaped and now circumscribes the Jewish feminist theological agenda seems well founded. Similarly, Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt have questioned what the consequences might be when ‘the majority of work in Jewish feminist studies has been tied either implicitly or explicitly to the Enlightenment’s project of emancipation’ (Peskowitz and Levitt 1997: 14). The legacy of ethical rationalism left by Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment movement that developed about a century after that of Christian Europe) permitted Second Wave Jewish feminist theology to criticize the irrationality and injustice of premodern gynophobia and to interrogate the authority and mentality of the classical sources. Modern Judaism created the possibility for Jewish feminist theology, yet modernity may also, in the future, limit its scope. Peskowitz and Levitt’s question might be directed toward Jewish feminist theology whose historicist, ethical Reform terms and assumptions have permeated its thought but have not yet been critically interrogated. Jewish feminist theology is the product of its time; most immediately it has been a post-Holocaust theology in which Judaism can no longer be justified either by classical faith in the God of revelation on Sinai or by the modern Reform assertion that Judaism underpins the ethical structures of Western civilization. Consequently, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Jewish feminist theology is still best able to justify Judaism to other Jewish women on the grounds of its history of prophetic concern for social justice, of its existence as a source of spiritual and practical connection between foremothers, mothers, and daughters, and as a ritual and imaginal focus for women’s communal experience and identity. To varying degrees, all types of Jewish feminism have put their shoulder to the liberal Jewish feminist cause and have focused on women’s religious liberation, their equality of religious opportunity, and their capacity to reorient the tradition toward the practical needs and conditions of their own lives. And they are not the only ones to have done so. Even Orthodox feminist scholars have deployed the same historical methods of modern liberal theology. The work of Blu Greenberg and Judith Hauptman, for example, has been to rationally justify women’s continuing participation in Jewish life by defending the Talmudic rabbis as more sensitive to women’s needs than other non-Jewish religious authorities of the time. If there is any deference to the supernatural authority of these texts it is very muted. Greenberg, Hauptman, and others develop an essentially modern liberal defense of Judaism, arguing that the discriminatory husk of the tradition can be discarded to reveal its unchanging core: its principles of justice and equality (Heschel 1986: 27). Jewish feminist theology to date has tended to justify the practice of Judaism to women on the grounds of its ethical provision, not its revelation or eschatological promise. For example, the covenantal motif predominates in Jewish feminist religious writing and practice not only because it is inherently relational but because its consensual reciprocities

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are so amenable to the liberal values of individualism, autonomy, and immanence. And yet the rational, egalitarian impetus of Jewish Enlightenment thought may be leaving Jewish feminist theology reluctant to engage some of the great themes of classical Judaism. As I have argued elsewhere (Raphael 2006), in the coming decades Jewish feminist theology may want to revisit some of Judaism’s classic truth claims, many of which, as a modern project, it rejected or neglected a priori. Jewish feminist theology should, I think, address its historicity, its modern resistance to certain elements of Jewish belief, and its less critical adherence to others. For as Susannah Heschel, herself a Jewish feminist, pointed out over twenty years ago, feminists have come to stand in ethical authority over the religious authority of the tradition and its content (1986: 31). Consequently, some elements of the tradition have been privileged (such as the covenantal motif), and others have all but disappeared. Messianism, for example, is not characteristic of Jewish feminist theology, principally because the figure of a sole male redeemer in the role of a priest, warrior, or king is inimical to feminist hopes and values. Yet that messianic strain in the tradition, which sees the messianic era as an intrahistorical spiritual and political renewal whose justice and peacemaking radically transforms both the life of the Jewish community and that of God’s whole creation, is very far from incompatible with the feminist vision. Likewise, post- or late modern Jewish thought’s refusal of normativity and its appeal to locality and difference has introduced a new inclusivity that has replenished Judaism’s imaginal and linguistic repertoire, but it has also hampered the cross-cultural political and spiritual solidarities among diverse groups of Jewish women and hampered the development of a common discourse on the public exteriority of God’s self-revelation in a world that is cosmically as well as historically situated. Finally, Jewish feminist theologians (especially those living outside Israel) cannot any longer delay consideration and rectification of their Eurocentric, Anglophone perspective. Jewish feminist theology needs to catch up with Jewish feminist cultural anthropology. For some time now, Jewish feminist scholars have acknowledged that their particular studies do not represent all Jewish women everywhere. There is now far greater attention to the cultural specificity of Jewish women’s experience, which differs widely according to denominational background, economic standing, ethnicity, age, and geographic region (see, e.g., Sered 1992; Schely Newman 2002). However, a great deal more work remains to be done, especially with reference to ethnic and geographic factors of difference, before Jewish feminist theology can consider its discourse truly inclusive. As reflected in this very essay, Jewish feminist theology has been dominated by middle-class, privileged Reform and Reconstructionist Ashkenazic women of European background who have yet to attend to and learn from non-Ashkenazic Mizrahi (Middle Eastern and North African) and Central Asian Jewish women’s voices within and outside the State of Israel. Although there are, for example, approximately 200,000 Arab Jews living in the United States, many women, whether of a theological background or otherwise, know little more about Mizrahi Jewish women than their culinary traditions as presented by Jewish food writers such as Claudia Roden, who was herself born in Zamalek, a district of Cairo (1996). Middle Eastern and North African Jewish feminists who live in Ashkenazi-dominated Jewish communities can be subject to both the sexism of Mizrahi culture itself and

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intra-Jewish bias, including that found among Jewish feminists who unthinkingly identify being Jewish with being Ashkenazi and who regard non-Ashkenazi concerns as of marginal ‘special interest’ in the same way that male Jews identify the Jew as male and women’s concerns as the exceptions to a male rule (Khazzoom 2001: 175; Dahan Kalev 2001). Loolwa Khazzoom, who is of Iraqi-Jewish background, remembers growing up and ‘flying into fits of glee and gratitude upon simply hearing a leader mention the existence of non-Ashkenazi Jews’ (2001: 176). Ashkenazi, Anglophone Jewish feminist theologians would gain much from listening to those Jewish women who may use different prayer books, sing different Shabbat and holy day songs to different tunes, use different Jewish dialects such as Ladino or Judeo-Arabic, enjoy different festival traditions, honor different Jewish women’s historical contributions, have different body images, experience different degrees of gender discrimination, and inherit a colonial and postcolonial heritage whose ‘hyphenated’ identities could importantly inform their own and others’ theological perspective and repertoire.

Works Cited Adler, Rachel (1998). Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. (2002). ‘Feminist Judaism: Past and Future’, Crosscurrents (Winter), available at http:// www.Crosscurrents.org/Adlerwinter2002.htm accessed 26 May 2005: 1–3. Alpert, Rebecca T. (1999). ‘Another Perspective on Theological Directions for the Jewish Future’, in Elliot N. Dorff and Louis E. Newman (Eds), Contemporary Jewish Theology: A Reader. New York/London: Oxford University Press, 494–7. Baumel, Judith Tydor (1995). ‘Social Interaction among Jewish Women in Crisis during the Holocaust’, Gender and History, 7: 64–84. (1999). ‘Women’s Agency and Survival Strategies during the Holocaust’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 22: 329–47. Boyarin, Daniel (1997). Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man. Berkeley: University of California Press. (2000). ‘On Stoves, Sex, and Slave-girls: Rabbinic Orthodoxy and the Definition of Jewish Identity’, Hebrew Studies, 41: 169–88. Brenner, Athalya (1997). ‘The Hebrew God and His Female Complements’, in Timothy K. Beal and David M. Gunn (Eds), Reading Bibles, Writing Bodies: Identity and the Book. London: Routledge, 56–71. Christ, Carol (2005). Review of Melissa Raphael, The Female Face of Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 73: 577–80. Dahan Kalev, Henriette (2001). ‘Tensions in Israeli Feminism: The Mizrahi-Ashkenazi Rift’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 24: 1–16. Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard (1994). God’s Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism. Boston: Beacon. Ellenson, David (1999). ‘The Nature and Direction of Modern Jewish Theology: Some Thoughts Occasioned by Arthur Green’, in Elliot N. Dorff and Louis E. Newman (Eds), Contemporary Jewish Theology: A Reader. New York/London: Oxford University Press, 498–501.

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Ellis, Marc H. (2004). ‘Post-Holocaust Jewish Identity and the Academy: On Traveling the Diaspora and the Experience of the Double Standard’, in José Ignacio Cabezón and Sheila Greeve Davaney (Eds), Identity and the Politics of Scholarship in the Study of Religion. New York: Routledge, 163–81. Falk, Marcia (1989). ‘Toward a Feminist Jewish Reconstruction of Monotheism’, Tikkun Magazine: A Bi-monthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society, 4: 53–6. (1996). The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. (2004). The Song of Songs: Love Lyrics from the Bible. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press. Frymer-Kensky, Tikva (1994). ‘On Feminine God-Talk’, The Reconstructionist, 59: 48–55. Gottlieb, Lynn (1995). She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of Renewed Judaism. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Heschel, Susannah (1986). ‘Current Issues in Jewish Feminist Theology’, Jewish-Christian Relations, 19: 23–32. Ilan, Tal (2002). ‘Jewish Women’s Studies’, in Martin Goodman (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 770–96. Katz, Steven (2005). ‘The Issue of Confirmation and Disconfirmation in Jewish Thought after the Shoah’, in Steven Katz (Ed.), The Impact of the Holocaust on Post-Holocaust Theology. New York: New York University Press, 13–60. Khazzoom, Loolwa (2001). ‘United Jewish Feminist Front’, in Danya Ruttenberg (Ed.), Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism. New York: Seal Press, 168–80. Lefkovitz, Lori (1995). ‘Eavesdropping on Angels and Laughing at God: Theorizing a Subversive Matriarchy’, in T. M. Rudavsky (Ed.), Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition. New York: New York University Press, 157–68. Lilith, Ryiah (2001). ‘Challah for the Queen of Heaven’, in Danya Ruttenberg (Ed.), Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism. New York: Seal Press, 102–11. Long, Asphodel (1992). In A Chariot Drawn By Lions: The Search for the Female in Deity. London: Women’s Press. Lubarsky, Sandra B. (2004). ‘Reconstructing Divine Power: Post-Holocaust Jewish Theology, Feminism, and Process Philosophy’, in Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Ed.), Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 289–313. Mendes-Flohr, Paul (2002). ‘Jewish Philosophy and Theology’, in Martin Goodman (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 756–69. Nowak, Susan E. (1999). ‘In a World Shorn of Color: Toward a Feminist Theology of Holocaust Testimonies’, in Esther Fuchs (Ed.), Women and the Holocaust. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 33–46. Ozick, Cynthia (1983). ‘Notes toward Finding the Right Question’, in Susannah Heschel (Ed.), On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader. New York: Schocken, 120–51. Peskowitz, Miriam, and Levitt, Laura (Eds) (1997). Judaism Since Gender. New York/ London: Routledge. Pirani, Alix (Ed.) (1991). The Absent Mother: Restoring the Goddess to Judaism and Christianity. London: Mandala. Plaskow, Judith (1983). ‘The Right Question is Theological’, in Susannah Heschel (Ed.), On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader. New York: Schocken, 223–33. (1990). Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. New York: HarperSanFrancisco.

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(1994). ‘Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective’, in Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tenenbaum (Eds), Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 62–84. (2000). ‘The Sexuality of God’, Lecture 3 of the Sherman Lectures 2000, University of Manchester Centre for Jewish Studies, available by e-mail from Judith Plaskow (Judith. [email protected]) or in an abridged version on http://www.mucjs.org with Berman, Donna (Eds) (2005). The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism and Sexual Ethics 1972–2005. Boston: Beacon. Raphael, Melissa (1998). ‘Goddess Religion, Postmodern Jewish Feminism and the Complexity of Alternative Religious Identities’, Nova Religio, 1: 198–214. (2003). The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust. London/New York: Routledge. (2004). ‘The Price of (Masculine) Freedom and Becoming: A Feminist Response to Eliezer Berkovits’s Post-Holocaust Free Will Defence of God’s Non-Intervention in Auschwitz’, in Pamela Sue Anderson and Beverley Clack (Eds), Feminist Philosophy of Religion: Critical Perspectives. London/New York: Routledge, 136–50. (2005). ‘Judaism and Gender’, in Lindsay Jones (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd edn. New York: Macmillan. (2006). ‘Standing at a Demythologised Sinai? Reading Jewish Feminist Theology Through the Critical Lens of Radical Orthodoxy’, in Rosemary Radford Ruether and Marion Grau (Eds), Interpreting the Postmodern: Responses to ‘Radical Orthodoxy’. London/New York: T&T Clark. Rashkover, Randi (2004). ‘Theological Desire: Feminism, Philosophy, and Exegetical Jewish Thought’, in Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Ed.), Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 314–39. Roden, Claudia (1996). The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand and Vilna to the Present Day. London: Penguin. Rothschild, Sylvia, and Sheridan, Sybil (Eds) (2000). Taking Up the Timbrel: The Challenge of Creating Ritual for Jewish Women Today. London: SCM Press. Ruttenberg, Danya (ed.) (2001). Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism. New York: Seal Press. Schely Newman, Esther (2002). Our Lives Are But Stories: Narratives of Tunisian-Israeli Women. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Schwarzschild, Steven (1990). ‘Shekhinah and Eschatology’, in Menachem Kellner (Ed.), The Pursuit of the Ideal: Jewish Writings of Steven Schwarzschild. New York: New York University Press, 235–50. Sered, Susan (1992). Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem. New York: Oxford University Press. Umansky, Ellen (1983). Lily Montagu and the Advancement of Liberal Judaism: From Vision to Vocation. New York: Edward Mellen. (1989). ‘Creating a Jewish Feminist Theology: Possibilities and Problems’, reprinted in Judith Plaskow and Carol C. Christ (Eds), Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 187–98. (1999). ‘Jewish Feminist Theology’, in Elliot N. Dorff and Louis E. Newman (Eds), Contemporary Jewish Theology: A Reader. New York/London: Oxford University Press, 141–7. and Ashton, Dianne (Eds) (1992). Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality: A Sourcebook. Boston: Beacon.

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Wright, Alexandra (1994). ‘An Approach to Jewish Feminist Theology’ in Sybil Sheridan (Ed.), Hear Our Voice: Women Rabbis Tell Their Stories. London: SCM Press, 152–61. Zaidman, Nurit (1996). ‘Variations of Jewish Feminism: The Traditional, Modern and Postmodern Approaches’, Modern Judaism, 16: 47–65.

Further Reading Adler, Rachel (1998). Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. Alpert, Rebecca (1997). Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition. New York: Columbia University Press. Falk, Marcia (1996). The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Goldstein, Elyse (Ed.) (2009). New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past, Forging the Future. Woodstock: Jewish Lights. Plaskow, Judith (1990). Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: Harper and Row. and Derman, Donna (Eds) (2005). The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism and Sexual Ethics, 1972–2003. Boston: Beacon Press. Raphael, Melissa (2003). The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust. London/New York: Routledge. (2006). ‘Standing at a Demythologised Sinai? Reading Jewish Feminist Theology through the Critical Lens of Radical Orthodoxy’, in Rosemary Radford Ruether and Marion Grau (Eds), Interpreting the Postmodern: Responses to ‘Radical Orthodoxy’. New York: T&T Clark, 197–214. Ross, Tamar (2004). Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism. Lebanon, NH. University Press of New England. Umansky, Ellen (1992). ‘Reclaiming the Covenant: A Jewish Feminist’s Search for Meaning’, in Ellen Umansky and Dianne Ashton (Eds), Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality: A Sourcebook. Boston: Beacon Press, 230–4.

chapter 3

w h at is fem i n ist th eol ogy? sheila briggs

In the winter semester of 1899–1900 Adolf von Harnack, the leading historian of Christianity of his day, gave a series of lectures at the University of Berlin under the title ‘The Essence of Christianity’. Translated under the title What Is Christianity? into English, these lectures became an authoritative narrative of modern Christian theology in the West. It may seem strange to begin an essay on contemporary feminist theology with a reference to Harnack and to this series of lectures in particular, but in the 1960s and early 1970s when the movement of feminist theology got underway in the West one of its major goals was to challenge, subvert, correct, and replace Harnack’s narrative. Harnack had claimed that he sought to answer the question about the nature of Christianity ‘solely in its historical sense’ and that this method of historical enquiry would allow him to identify ‘something which, under differing historical forms, is of permanent validity’ (Harnack 1986 (1900): 6, 14). Harnack’s feminist counterparts, such as Rosemary Radford Ruether and Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, also uncovered the history of Christianity in search of its core. What they found there was different from Harnack: a history of patriarchy and of women’s resistance to it, a Christian Gospel, preserved in androcentric texts but with a liberative core behind these. The early work of Ruether and Fiorenza may seem essentialist from an early twenty-first-century viewpoint but they were caught in a modernist dilemma, one that has not been readily solved in post-modern discourse. To press the claims of the particular against a hegemonic universal can produce a continuity and stability among those who are discretely particular and thus create a mirror universal. It is very difficult not to universalize women’s experience when one is describing and criticizing the very similar ways in which women have been discriminated against and exploited, even though these have occurred in very disparate historical cultures. This problem becomes acute under globalization when the universal is not an abstract principle or metaphysical ideal behind historical phenomena but a thoroughly material

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reality, even a deeply sensuous and visceral one. At the same time globalization celebrates the particular, promising to human beings, now fundamentally understood as consumers, limitless scope and play for their individuality when they buy the right products. Post-modern critiques of essentialist notions of experience, subjectivity, and identity have proven inadequate to the needs of anti-globalization politics (Mohanty 2003). Indeed, the dynamics of globalization have breached the modern/post-modern divide just as they have displaced the modernist dialectic of universal and particular. One of the strengths of earlier feminist theology, rooted in second-wave socialist feminism, was its commitment to materialist forms of analysis. This essay attempts to renew and develop under the present conditions of globalization the position that theological insight can be gained from the materiality of human lives, in which physical processes and cultural representations are inextricably bound together. To this end it will explore two areas where little feminist theological work is currently being done and which are crucial to the operations of globalization and our understanding of them: science and technology, and popular culture.

Feminist theology’s engagement of science Feminist theology does discuss science but not broadly. There have been good reasons for this because feminist theology emerged in the West precisely at the time Westerners were becoming aware of the ecological crisis the planet was facing and of their responsibility for creating it. Moreover, the ideological roots of both patriarchy and the ecological crisis lay in a conflation of woman and nature. In the 1970s Susan Griffin (1978) and Carolyn Merchant (1980) explored how an emerging modern science opposed male rationality to a feminine passivity and materiality that many of these male scientists found both in women and in nature and which they believed a male scientific rationality was destined to master and control. The eco-feminist movement has had a significant impact on feminist theology, and feminist theology has absorbed its critique of a male-dominated modern science. Ivone Gebara has expanded this ecofeminist critique of science to challenge its epistemological hegemony and assert the knowledges of the poor in the global South as resources for combating the ecological crisis (1999: 25, 87 f.). Mary Grey does not blame science wholesale for environmental degradation but does see it as one source of an attitude to nature that feeds contemporary globalization (2004: 14–16). Consumerism, the driving force that sustains globalization, she argues, displays a ‘deep cultural pathology’ (2004: 20) of turning away from the Earth. Feminist theology is by no means fundamentally hostile to science (Hunt 2001) and the influential work of Sallie McFague (1987; 1993) shows how feminist and ecological concerns can be integrated into a theological appropriation of insights garnered from

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contemporary science. Feminists linked to process thought are especially open to engagement with the sciences because the underlying cosmology of process theology was first developed by the physicist and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Yet when we look at feminist theology that enters into conversation with science we notice the boundaries of that engagement. Within Christian theology in general science is mostly addressed in terms of the doctrine of Creation, the focus on which was intensified within Christian feminist theology by its ecological concerns. The doctrine of Creation also provides the framework for other feminist engagements of science. Although in academic theology and in liberal Christian circles the Genesis Creation accounts are not considered as an alternative to biological evolution, the Genesis description of humankind as being created in the image of God is still taken as the basis of theological anthropology. There has been a shift in the interpretation of the doctrine of the imago Dei away from the divine image residing in human cognitive abilities or in the human distinction from other animals to the divine image as the foundation and guarantor of human dignity. This is the theological presupposition behind much of the feminist work on genetics and related fields of biotechnology (Deane-Drummond 2006: 191–219). Feminist theologians can welcome such biological endeavours as the Human Genome Project when it contradicts traditionalist and patriarchal understandings of the imago Dei and underpins feminist convictions of human relatedness to the rest of Creation (Thistlewaite 2003: 152–5). However, feminist theologians also share broader feminist worries about technological control and manipulation of women’s reproduction and tend to see such technological intrusion as a violation of the human integrity of women, grounded in their divine likeness. Outside of these two areas, ecology and the implications of the new genetics and biotechnology for women, feminist theologians have largely not discussed science. Outside of these two areas, very few women write on theology in relation to science and technology, and, although they may include gender analysis at times in their work, these women tend not to write from an explicitly feminist perspective. Noreen Herzfeld (2002; 2009) explores a broad set of issues that affect the relationship of technology to religion. One of her major interests lies in the field of artificial intelligence, and here she articulates a common feminist concern that advanced technologies remain in the hands of a small Western male elite. Moreover, in an age of globalization this tiny minority of the world’s population may use their technological advantage to pursue their interests to the detriment of the other inhabitants of our planet. Some have hailed computer technology and artificial intelligence systems as an eventual means to create a cybernetic immortality in which the contents of consciousness—thoughts, memories, and feelings—would be transferred out of the individual physical body into a non-biological and non-perishable medium. Herzfeld condemns such dreams of cybernetic immortality: one must ask who would benefit from cybernetic immortality. It seems unlikely that the poor, the mentally impaired, or, indeed, most women would be given this option. Cybernetic immortality is the dream of a few highly educated North American white men. It provides a model for the continuance of the thoughts of a few but seems an unlikely way to offer immortality to the masses. (Herzfeld 2002:75)

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Herzfeld in her study of artificial intelligence also looks at its representation in popular culture, especially science fiction. Attention to science fiction is a common way of approaching science as a cultural practice. There is, in fact, a cottage industry of looking at the relation of Star Trek to religion, and although feminist scholars are numbered among the prominent writers, none are feminist theologians.

Feminist theology and popular culture The relation of feminist theology to popular culture is more complicated than its relation to science. Although the individual sciences are radically different from one another, institutionally through universities, government agencies, and corporate research laboratories they are grouped into a compact social formation. There is no such institutionalization with its regulatory practices of culture in the world of arts and entertainment, let alone popular culture. Arts and entertainment are dispersed through a myriad of social locations and the extent of their institutionalization and regulation is highly variable. There are also additional problems in defining what is popular culture and, although I am not going to enumerate all of them here, one is especially pertinent to the question of globalization. A distinction between popular culture and ‘high culture’ is always fraught with difficulties, and globalization intensifies these by the ways it commodifies and distributes culture. The cultural products of the poor have often been absorbed into elite culture, e.g., folk tunes into Western classical music. Now that process has been expanded into a global market. The genre of ‘world music’ came into being through the consumption by educated Westerners of music from the global South. Saying this does not deny the connection of world music to progressive politics, but it does make us aware that even progressive culture is distributed through a global capitalist market. How one evaluates the relationship of feminist theology to popular culture depends, in part, on how one defines popular culture. In this section I will map out the contours and deficiencies of the feminist theological encounter with popular culture. What is valuable in exploring popular culture is that it takes us beyond and outside the text. In a period when feminist theory and much of second-generation feminist theology has taken the linguistic turn, a look at popular culture shifts our attention to the material artefacts of culture. Much of the culture of the global South and of the Western past, especially of women, has been non-literate, and to treat the artefacts of such culture as texts does not do justice to their visual and other sensory character. Margaret Miles, the feminist theologian and historian, pioneered the visual analysis of religious culture (Miles 1985). Although her work began with the mediaeval and early modern periods, she later turned her attention to contemporary film (Miles 1996). Indeed, in the development of Margaret Miles’ work we see the trend that it is feminist historians of religion (rather than feminist theologians) who are interested in not only the material culture of the past but also that of the present. Feminist theologians are more comfortable with

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texts and, therefore, it is not surprising that much of feminist theological commentary has been on novels and poetry. Womanist theology emerged out of the responses to Alice Walker’s essay In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983). Katie Cannon (1988) looked for the historical precursor of womanist theology in the works of Zora Neale Hurston. Even Western women of the racial majority looked to literature, novels and poetry, for theological precedents because women of all races had been excluded from professional theology into the middle decades of the twentieth century (Christ 1980; Say 1990). Other forms of popular culture get scant coverage in feminist theology. Cheryl Kirk-Duggan (1997) has written on the African-American Spirituals from a womanist perspective. There are feminist scholars who work in popular culture and religion, but their focus is not theological. One medium of popular culture that tends to fall generally outside the discussion of popular culture in religious studies is television. Only one very recent volume has been devoted entirely to the discussion of the religious significance of the small screen (Winston 2009). Television is obviously the most popular medium of popular culture. Moreover, alongside music, it is the most globalized commodity of popular culture. The feminist theological disdain for television may be fed by the subjugation of the latter to corporate control. Indeed, as many television producers themselves will complain, the corporate control of television is pervasive and even pernicious. Television is also an example of the economic and cultural imbalances of globalization. The television series sold on the global market are invariably those created under the aegis of American studios and networks, which themselves are part of transnational corporations. This is why Star Trek, distributed by Paramount Studios, has found its way into every corner of the globe. However, it would be wrong to think just on that basis that it is simply an instrument of American imperialism and Western propaganda. Corporate economic interests may have a stranglehold on what is distributed on the global television market, but they do not control how viewers perceive, interpret, and reshape what they see on the small screen. Television is, therefore, a major site of global cultural contestation. Television is also technology and televisual products in both their creation and distribution are one of the major drivers of digital technology. Consequently, the study of popular culture as television offers a significant perspective on how science and technology are shaping lives in a global context at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Globalization, gender, and techno-science In light of the broad outlines of feminist theological treatment of science and technology as well as of popular culture, the work of feminist theologian Elaine Graham not only addresses science and technology in a broader way than usual but also connects its investigation to popular culture. Her book Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters,

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Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (2002) is exemplary in the way it explores how science and technology are part of a post-modern condition in which we are fundamentally revising our definitions of what it is to be human. Yet her approach is nuanced and avoids a radical disjuncture between post-modernity and the human past. She recognizes that our humanity has always been constituted and reconstituted through technology and that, although cyborg is a recently invented term, the human species has always been both animal and cyborg. She, therefore, replaces post-human with ‘post/human’ because post-humanity is not a developmental or evolutionary stage but a moment and site where what it is to be human can be questioned and struggled over. She stresses repeatedly that there are no inevitable outcomes and inexorably determined futures that issue from science and technology. In this essay I am going to borrow many of her insights and some of the terminology. Despite the brilliance of its insights Graham’s book is strangely theologically inconclusive. I will use Graham’s work as a steppingstone to further reflection on how techno-science figures in and (re)configures theological topoi and follow her example of connecting this discussion of techno-science to popular culture. Graham is acutely aware of how technological advances could further disadvantage the poor majority who inhabit our planet: It is a matter of debate, however, whether the digital and biotechnological revolutions have afforded opportunities to usher in egalitarian and inclusive forms of political agency or whether the biotechnological and digital age will simply enrich the privileged few at the expense of impoverished nations . . . Much technological innovation is a Western commodity. While most of those with the resources and access to enjoy advanced technologies would stress the pleasurable qualities of prosthetic, digital or biomedical enhancement, it does not follow that it is necessarily a universally or unconditionally liberative prospect, immune from material inequalities. To privileged First-World citizens, the digital and biotechnological developments bring with them an expansion of selfhood beyond the limits imposed by finite bodies and minds. To those unable to participate, however, it means further exclusion, compounded by the possibility that due to globalisation, the wealth of Western cyborgs rests on the cheap labour of their Third-World sweatshop fellows. (Graham 2002: 163 f.)

Precisely because techno-scientific innovation can drastically intensify already existing conditions of economic injustice, techno-science demands feminist theological scrutiny but not demonization. Graham does not argue that techno-science is morally neutral, but rather that its values are neither intrinsic nor inherent. Graham draws on feminist science studies that see science as a cultural practice and hence as ‘one particular form of representational practice’ (30). For her, as for other feminist theorists of science, the paramount question is that of agency and of holding up to scrutiny what forms of agency techno-science makes available. If techno-science is a cultural practice (and not a value-free activity, immune from meaningful human intervention), then it follows that techno-science can be held ethically and politically accountable.

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Yet the claim that techno-science is to be held accountable raises the question: to whom, by whom, and for whom? The answer cannot stop simply at identifying the stakeholders as the individuals, groups, and communities affected by a particular technoscientific activity. How are the stakeholders, especially when they come from poor communities, to be enabled to hold such powerful entities as techno-scientific institutions, and the corporate interests of and behind them, effectively accountable? When the stakeholders are poor women the question of assuring effective accountability of techno-science becomes more acute. Modern Western science excluded women from participating in it well into the late twentieth century and even today, when all of the formal and many of the informal barriers have fallen, educated women are still underrepresented in techno-scientific pursuits. However, women were not only prevented from becoming scientists, they were also considered incapable of implementing technoscientific knowledge, even in the most lowly occupations. Women were kept out of the technically skilled work force and in the West were segregated into semi-skilled and unskilled labour. The most devastating effect of women’s exclusion from techno-science in any capacity occurred in the global South during the twentieth century. In the global South agricultural work was and is carried out largely by women but development aid in the post-war years targeted men as the recipients of technological innovation in agriculture. The disruption to subsistence agriculture that this policy caused has been a major factor in the loss of food security in these communities. This story is well known but what is not often noticed is that the dynamics of an incipient globalization were already present not as a lack of knowledge, a failure of expertise, but as a specific distribution of knowledge. Techno-scientific knowledge may be becoming increasingly decentralized, but that does not mean that it is becoming ‘localized’ in local communities. Rather it is being relocated in ‘knowledge networks’ accountable only to actors that operate on a global level, thus favouring governments and intergovernmental agencies as well as corporations. Indeed techno-science is the poster child of global knowledge networks where international collaboration through conferences and in research projects has long been the norm but where involvement of local communities is still the exception. Ultimately, making techno-scientific knowledge networks accountable to those affected by their activities belongs to the most important political question of the twenty-first century: global governance. The inequities of our emerging global society are constantly being retrenched by an imbalance in global institutions. The Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank) provide a robust infrastructure for a capitalist free-market economy. In contrast, other international bodies, such as the United Nations and its subsidiary organizations, are weakened by underfunding and a lack of authority. What is critical in creating a global democracy, in which all can equally participate, is the existence of a global civil society, i.e., those public social networks that are independent of governments and allow citizens to debate and shape public policy. The beginnings of such a global civil society already exist in such organizations as the World Social Forum and the NGOs that are recognized and participate in the commissions of the United Nations. Only through

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the strengthening of the public networks of a civil society can one achieve a global actor that can effectively exercise oversight on the already globalized techno-scientific knowledge networks. In the meantime, we can still build models for how we would like to see technoscientific networks reformed. A characteristic of modern Western science has been its devaluation of non-Western systems of scientific knowledge. Recently there have been proposals to create a new paradigm for global science that would draw on the scientific knowledge of all civilizations but it also must be acknowledged that the scientific high cultures of pre-modern China, India, and Islam were thoroughly patriarchal (Goonatilake 1998: 256). At present, very little scholarship exists that it is widely accessible and disseminated about women’s contributions to these pre-modern scientific cultures. Furthermore, such contributions would be preserved in the textually transmitted traditions of social elites. However, we know that many technological innovations occurred at a grass roots level and were made by persons of humble origins whose names, and in some cases one suspects their female gender, have been lost from the historical record. Thus to recover women’s techno-scientific knowledges it is important to search for local and indigenous traditions that have existed independently of any scientific high culture. Such local and indigenous knowledges have been under relentless pressure first from Western colonialism and now from its successor, globalization. The goal must be not to preserve these knowledges as museum exhibits but to provide the communities in which they are situated with the resources to keep them vital in new global techno-scientific networks. Sandra Harding (2008) has warned that the dichotomy between modernity and tradition is itself a product of Western projects of modernization. It obscures the parasitical character of the ‘modern’ that depends on the exploitation of those in the ‘traditional’ sector (women in the household) and in ‘traditional’ societies (colonized peoples). Instead she adds her voice to those who recognize multiple modernities and many paths to techno-scientific advancement other than the Western. Her radical proposal is that techno-scientific research projects should start their enquiry ‘from the standpoint of women’s lives in households’ (2008: 226). When modernity has been gendered masculine and tradition feminine, this has had devastating effects on women’s life opportunities, especially decreasing their access to education since this has become viewed as the entry point into a masculine modernity. The right to an education is essential for everyone in a globalized world that is also democratic and has a thriving civil society. Such an education must go beyond literacy and include access to techno-scientific knowledge. Unfortunately in the poorer nations of the world the number of women in education and the level of education that they receive have decreased due to the impact of the policies of the IMF and World Bank, which have dismantled much of the social infrastructure in these countries. Unless this trend is reversed then the prospects are not good for a healthy global civil society capable of supervising techno-scientific knowledge networks that are hybridized and integrated with local and indigenous practices. Having outlined a feminist agenda for changing both the paradigm and operations of global techno-scientific networks, it is time to ask what might and does feminist technoscientific knowledge look like and what are its implications for feminist theology.

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Givingwomen access to techno-scientific knowledge is not just about increasing their share of income and social well being. It enables an expansion of consciousness that has cognitive, affective, and—I would argue—ethical and spiritual dimensions. Put simply, a techno-scientific education can empower women not only with new skills but also with new vision. They are able to see life on this planet and indeed beyond that, in our universe, in new ways, perceive their relationships to the planet and the universe differently, and thus come to new definitions of themselves. I am therefore proposing that the material world and our investigations of it are a site of transcendence. Such a suggestion is not new but it has been associated with the apotheosis of patriarchal science in the influential critiques of Mary Midgley (1992) and David Noble (1992; 1997). Elaine Graham also rejects transcendence as the patriarchal longing to be body- and nature-free and at the conclusion of Representations of the Post/Human she begins to offer an alternative view of transcendence.

Feminist transcendence and overcoming the nature–culture divide Any adequate feminist re-conceiving of transcendence must repudiate its patriarchal connotation of a denial of and a flight from embodiment. Feminist theology, just as feminist theory in general, starts with women’s bodies as the primary site for contesting hegemonic and hierarchal constructions of culture and society. Of course, where the various strands of feminist theology and feminist theory go from this common departure point differs greatly, and I am not going to rehearse here the many options that they take. Nonetheless, I do want to point out the limitations of understanding women’s bodies just as individual biological ones. In the beginnings of second-wave feminism the emphasis of the then feminist critique of science was to attack biological determinism. Feminists exposed the argument that anatomy is destiny as an ideological subterfuge to justify discrimination and the relegation of women to inferior and secondary roles in every domain of culture and society. One of the consequences of this direction in earlier feminist scholarship is that even today feminist science studies are weighted towards the biological sciences (Subramaniam 2009: 956 f., 966). Another factor in the bias towards the biological sciences has been the patriarchal identification of women with nature and feminist science studies also have a strong link to eco-feminism. Without denying the importance of the feminist reconstruction of biology and of eco-feminism I would contend that female and human embodiment extends beyond the individual biological body. The boundaries of the individual body are porous and it is not entirely and simply biological. Elaine Graham makes this point repeatedly and refers to the work of Donna Haraway. Our bodies are human, animal, and cyborg in such a way that the distinction between nature and artifice is confounded. As Elaine Graham concludes, the human ‘subject is always an organic-technological bodyin-relation, both creative agent and created subject within its changing environment’

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(2002: 198). The origins of Homo sapiens lie in technology when an earlier hominid species learned to control fire, began cooking meat, and thus increased its calorie intake to such an extent that the larger brains of our species could evolve (Wrangham 2009). Human intelligence, what in Western culture and theology has been called the rational soul, is in fact a technological artefact. What has distinguished hominid species from other animals has been their facility with tools, their ability to shape and reshape their environment in an intensified manner. We should not as feminists reject the significant (but not the sole) definition of human beings as toolmakers because in the past the academic disciplines of archaeology and anthropology gendered this as a male activity. The reality is that historically most technology has been developed for agricultural production and for the processing and storing of agricultural products, activities in which women have predominated. Such false genderings of technology serve the ideological equation of men with culture and women with nature, with gender holding the two realms symbolically separate. However, this is not true since our environment does not stay simply outside of ourselves. It is not simply inert matter on which we leave our mark; rather the biological body is a permeable boundary through which technical artifices are exchanged. We are embodied not only in our individual biological bodies but also in the broader materiality of our world, and that materiality is one in which nature is not divided from culture. Recently, Kwok Pui-lan has warned against the feminist appropriation of the nature–culture divide even as a critique of patriarchal socio-cultural arrangements (Kwok 2005: 217–30). From a postcolonial perspective she raises three objections. First, the Western opposition between nature and culture is far from universal— even other patriarchal cultures do not necessarily identify women with nature and devalue nature. Second, in the modern Western imagination nature has often been associated with the ‘primitive’ and the primitive with non-Western peoples, whom, it can then be claimed, are destined to be colonized and exploited for the benefit of ‘civilization’ as a purely Western achievement. Third, although the identification with nature has led to discrimination against Western women, the effects on colonized women were more dire. Romantic notions of nature and feminine nature have been prevalent in the West but in the colonial situation such romanticization was discarded in order to extract profit from the exploitation of natural resources and indigenous women’s labour. I would argue further that the separation of culture from nature has theological underpinnings and consequences that extend beyond the ideological underwriting of modern Western colonialism. On one level, human technology imitates divine creation and in a pre-modern world when nature seemed powerful, awesome, and at times threatening and human artifices puny in comparison, this was a way of locating the imago Dei in human agency. In this respect I would agree with David Noble’s interpretation of the positive views of technology in mediaeval and Renaissance Christian society (Noble 1997: 9–42). Since these were patriarchal societies techno-scientific creativity became gendered as male in imitation of the work of the first person of the Christian Trinity, God the Father, creator of heaven and earth, according to the first

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article of the creed. Noble has also seen the mediaeval period, and in particular the mediaeval university, as the origins of the male exclusivity of techno-science that endured into the twentieth century, the remnants of which still hamper women in techno-scientific fields today (Noble 1992). As science in the West gradually became more secular, the male homo faber no longer measured himself against a divine creator. Yet what was also secularized was the relation between the divine creator and His artefact and this was not only manifested in the claim to an unlimited mastery over nature. Just as problematic is the hidden theological assumption behind the relation of the human (male) subject and his artefact. The divine creator is not accountable to His creation, His creatures are entirely at His disposal, and any imperfections in the creation are not His fault. They are to be blamed on His creatures (the Fall of Adam and Eve) or in a hierarchal order of Creation they serve perfection higher up in the ladder of being. This theological model of creativity without responsibility still can be found in the most secular techno-science. One of its expressions is the belief that every techno-scientific innovation should be pursued, however harmful its immediate or near-future consequences may be, that opposition to a particular techno-scientific implementation is a foolish and futile obstacle in the way of an inevitable technoscientific progress that seems to mimic the divinely predestined course of Creation. A value-free techno-science is the ghostly shadow of a divine creator whose will and purposes can never be questioned.

The turn to matter in feminist theory The feminist theorists who have worked on an expanded notion of embodiment have often adopted a materialist approach (Hennessy 1993; Grosz 1994; Gatens 1996). Recently there has been a reinvigoration of the materialist feminism that is critical of the linguistic turn in feminist theory and the forms of constructionism and representationalism that have accompanied it. ‘Language has been granted too much power,’ writes Karen Barad (2008 : 120) and Susan Hekman expresses her frustration even more forcefully at the collapse of materiality into language: Linguistic constructionism, however, has trouble with matter. Did concepts constitute the tsunami that devastated parts of Asia? Or hurricane Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans? Or, even more disturbingly, the attack on the Twin Towers? The linguistic constructionists tell us that we understand all of these events linguistically and that it is this understanding that constitutes their reality. Yet something is missing in this explanation. Something happened in these events— and by extension all events—that escapes the strictly linguistic. . . . It is undoubtedly true that we understand our world linguistically. But what this leaves out is that there is a world out there that we understand. Dogmatic adherence to linguistic constitution cannot account for the reality and agency of that world. (Hekman 2010: 1 f.)

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We are most acutely aware that we are embodied in a material world when we suffer ourselves or feel empathy towards suffering others. Stacy Alaimo elaborated her concept of transcorporeality as a way of talking about toxic bodies and environmental justice (Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Alaimo 2010 61–83). It is in such circumstances that we feel viscerally the permeability of the body’s boundaries that cannot be pushed aside by an appeal either to the individual’s autonomy or to the linguistic construction of experience. Techno-science is simultaneously a cultural practice and an intervention in the material world. It provides the resources to understand materiality and at the same time places materiality within certain cultural frameworks that feminists need to interrogate. Karen Barad is a feminist theoretical particle physicist whose work places techno-scientific investigations into a feminist conceptualization of material reality. For her all matter possesses agency. Thus human agency lies on a continuum with that of nonhuman and even nonorganic matter, which is why she describes her position as post-humanist. Barad has developed a theory of agential realism that she derived from her appropriation of Niels Bohr’s quantum physics in which she highlights the concept of the apparatus. In Barad’s theory an apparatus is not restricted to the scientific equipment of a laboratory, but can also denote the material conditions of any area of social life. Although most accounts of Bohr’s physics describe the central insight as how the observer through the instrumentation of observation affects what is observed, Barad prefers to focus on the apparatus in order to avoid a duality of observer and observed, of subject and object. To state her position simply, matter is not composed of entities but of relationships. Consequently, Barad is denying the (Kantian) position that ‘things’ exist beyond observation as well as post-structuralist accounts of ‘things’ being constituted through language. Observers do not exist as ontologically independent agents external to their observations; rather apparatuses that are ‘specific material-discursive practices’ and ‘material configurations/dynamic reconfigurations of the world’ (Barad 2007: 146) are the site where observer and observed co-constitute one another. Barad describes this process as an ‘ongoing flow of agency through which part of the world makes itself differentially intelligible to another part of the world’ (2007: 140). She chooses to talk not about interactions between material entities but of intra-actions within matter. Barad’s materialism is non-reductionist since it is not seeking to reduce social, cultural, and linguistic phenomena to the matter beneath them. Instead she frequently employs the term ‘entanglement’, which in quantum physics explains how an action that affects one particle can also affect another, very distant particle. She prefers to speak of the ‘entanglement of material relations (including those that get named social, political, economic, natural, cultural, technological, and scientific, rather than presuming separate factors and domains of operation from the outset)’ (2007: 232 f.). To those familiar with process theology there are many resonances between it and Barad’s agential realism. Process thought posits that ‘occasions of experience’ occur not only for human beings and are not even restricted to sentient beings but take place throughout nature, including the inorganic. The ontological primacy of relationships is another feature of Barad’s agential realism shared by process thought and especially emphasized by feminist process theologians. The significance of Barad’s work for feminist theology is that it

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provides a way of reformulating ontology and metaphysics that can engage the articulations of the discursive and the performative, found in the writings of such feminist theorists as Donna Haraway and Judith Butler. It also will allow me a framework in which I can sketch how Elaine Graham’s theological insights on the post/human can be taken further. The current movement of materialist feminism as a whole allows contemporary feminist theology a greater scope for the re-appropriation of the earlier and ongoing work of the first generation, many of whom developed their theology in the context of socialist feminism. For example, materialist feminism can encourage us to undertake a fresh reading of the classic essay by Beverly Harrison, ‘The Power of Anger in the Work of Love’ (1981), in which she argues that ‘all our knowledge, including our moral knowledge, is body-mediated knowledge’ (Harrison 1981: 13). Harrison also recognized that what we call today a performative ontology was central to feminist theology. ‘Just as do-ing must be central to a feminist theology,’ she claimed,‘so too be-ing and do-ing must never be treated as polarities’ (1981: 11). More recently Harrison has articulated her theo-ethical understanding of embodiment in ways very similar to what we find in the work of Haraway, Barad, and Graham. She rejects the separation of subjectivity from embodiment, and the latter she now sees as the sum of the material conditions under which we exist as sensuous beings. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza was able to embrace an anti-essentialist conception of gender through making use of the materialist feminist critique of ideology, found in the work of Rosemary Hennessy, which in many ways anticipates Barad’s understanding of material-discursive practices. Hennessy’s connection of the linguistic, political, and economic aspects of ideology’s material effects in Schüssler Fiorenza’s view ‘extends postmodern and feminist critiques of the centered subject without giving up a belief in and a commitment to the possibility of transformative social change’ (Schüssler Fiorenza 1999: 152).

Getting rid of ontological hygiene and embracing the messy divine Elaine Graham seeks to expose the ‘ontological hygiene’ that masks hybridity and the permeable and unstable boundaries between human and nonhuman, the organic and the artefact. However, her representationalism hinders her from seeing the material configurations and reconfigurations of these boundaries. That notwithstanding, she is able to articulate a disruption of ontological hygiene that is more than a representational strategy: It is important to acknowledge the symbiotic relationship between humanity and its artefacts, a blurring of agent and object, external and internal, organic and artificial (2002: 33).

Graham is also able to convey something not too evident in Barad’s work—the messiness of reality. Graham underlines the role of the monster in defining the boundaries of the normatively human because the monstrous both etymologically and epistemologically

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‘shows’ what must be excluded from the realm of the human. Yet the monster is not easily banished because, like Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s novel, it is a human creation, the result of an attempt to redefine the conditions of being human. Many of the popular fears around techno-science are that it will violate the integrity of the human, that in its hubris ‘to play God’ it would end up reducing humanity to the subhuman. These fears show the connection of the monster with the divine and it is the implications for the divine that I want to explore when one abandons a belief in ontological hygiene. The monster can also be a divine threat or punishment when human beings engage in another boundary crossing, that between the human and the divine. In Genesis 6:1–4 we find the curious report of ‘the sons of God’ mating with human women who give birth to the Nephilim, a strange race that in Numbers 13:32 f. are portrayed as giants. Yet in Genesis 6:4 these mortal descendants of the divine are described as the heroes of the antediluvian age. The story of the Nephilim is a suspension of ontological hygiene that has caused discomfort to later Jewish and Christian interpreters. In the light of these biblical passages about the Nephilim one may ask what makes Jesus not monstrous and more than a semi-divine hero? Answering that question has never been an easy task for Christian theology. Indeed the ontological messiness of Jesus has often been resolved by placing him on one side only of the human–divine boundary. Jesus’ ontological messiness is also caused by his natality, i.e., by the fact that he is, in Paul’s words, ‘born of a woman’ (Gal. 4:4). Women’s reproduction is therefore implicated in this theological problematic of Jesus’ ontological status, and one form of solution was to divorce Jesus’ human natality from the ordinary conditions of women’s reproduction. But if what women can reproduce can never be divine, then Jesus can only be human. On the other hand, even if only one woman could reproduce the divine, then the divine is no longer the ground of masculine ontological privilege. To this quandary for a patriarchal order orthodox Christianity offered its definitive christological solution at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 ce when it promulgated the doctrine of the hypostatic union. Chalcedon imposed a strict ontological hygiene within Jesus. Jesus is neither the human side of Christ nor a divine man but a unique conjunction of the divine and human. Christ exists: in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way abolished because of the union but rather the characteristic property of each nature being preserved and concurring into one Person and one subsistence [hypostasis] not as if Christ were parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God, Word, Lord, Jesus Christ.

Mary could now safely be declared the mother of God, as she had been at the Council of Ephesus twenty years earlier, since her reproductive feat in bringing forth divinity no longer risked the danger of predicating the presence of the divine inside the cosmic and human realms on women’s reproductive capacities. But what if we queered Chalcedon, lifting its ontological hygiene by re-situating its christology within Barad’s agential realism? What if neither humanity nor divinity exist prior to their relationship in specific material configurations and material-discursive

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practices? Such a proposal presupposes that divinity (at least in its intra-cosmic manifestations) does not exist outside of or separate from matter. The entanglement of the divine with matter would also not solely be with the human. The incarnation would no longer contain the divine only within human flesh but Jesus Christ would become a membrane through which many different material intra-actions could pass and where divinity would be fully invested in the messiness of materiality. If divinity is conceived as having permeable boundaries with the human and nonhuman, with the organic and inorganic, even with the cyborg and techno-scientific artefact, then we might be able to attempt a more ambitious re-conceptualization of transcendence. Graham is clear in her rejection of a disembodied transcendence and makes a brief but very suggestive reference to a ‘sacramental sensibility’ that could ground a very different understanding of transcendence: A sacramental sensibility speaks . . . of affirming the existence of the cultural and manufactured products of human labour while placing them within a horizon of sacred value, which speaks of a transcendental—but not otherworldly—mode of being. Sacraments are thus signs of the ‘transfiguration’ of the material and not of its effacement or denial . . . a sacramental sensibility . . . attests to the same pattern of materialism and re-enchantment in which transcendence and immanence are intertwined and not separated. (2002: 218 f.)

If one follows this sacramental sensibility further, one can envisage transcendence as a limitless array of material re-configurations in which the extraordinary reveals itself in the mundane. Boundaries no longer operate as the enforcement of ontological hygiene but are points of contact and crossing over, of hybridity and exchange. Within the dynamics of matter transcendence is a boundary condition between the ordinary and the extraordinary and in which they become entangled. Transcendence so conceived is no longer the patriarchal flight from the body and matter but a (post) human practice in which our embodiment in the world opens us up to new possibilities of its becoming.

Is mortality a feminist value? Feminist theological suspicion about transcendence attaches not only to its religious expressions but also increasingly to techno-scientific projects that could end the dependence of human beings on their biological bodies. Even Graham, who accepts that the human body has co-evolved with its technology, rejects optimistic accounts of technoscience that celebrate cyberspace as liberation from many physical constraints and expect future enhancements of the human body through genetic and other biotechnology. Trans-humanist agendas may often be male fantasies, based on the fear of death and the longing for escape from it. Following Grace Jantzen, this is certainly how Graham reads trans-humanist accounts of an emerging and future techno-scientific utopia, viewing them as a ‘necrophilic’ valorization of immortality that despises the body that is

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born and subject to death (Graham 2002: 172). She concludes that ‘a particular construction of ‘religion’ has been co-opted into the trans-humanist project in order to naturalize its predilections for omnipotence, invulnerability and immortality’ (2002: 174). There are, however, two problems with Graham’s analysis. First, in her repudiation of the desire for immortality she sees this only in terms of a patriarchal identification of death and decay with women’s bodies, female bodies that give birth to other vulnerable and mortal bodies. She simply reverses the patriarchal devaluing of physical embodiment without questioning the underlying concept of nature that simplistically equates it with mortality and finitude. Second, Graham, like other critics of techno-scientifically mediated immortality, displaces onto the techno-scientific future concerns that really belong in our present-day world. We do not need to worry about immortality in a techno-scientific future where its availability may be accompanied by solutions to problems of overpopulation and scarcity of resources. To project life extension onto the future of Western white males is to ignore that in the past half-century the life expectancy of those born in the global North has increased dramatically while for the poor in the global South average life expectancy has not significantly improved and in some cases declined. Overpopulation is not simply a matter of the number of bodies but the consumption rates of those bodies. When the average inhabitant of the United States consumes fifty times the amount of an average Ethiopian, then rising life expectancy in the United States and other affluent countries means that the lifetime consumption rates diverge to an even greater extent. It is therefore disingenuous to criticize trans-humanist fantasies about immortality while ignoring that medical advances and other technological conveniences that are broadly, if not universally, available to populations in the global North have greatly contributed to their higher life expectancy. The gross inequities in life expectancy between different regions of the world reflect, of course, political and economic inequalities. Solutions to this global imbalance in life expectancy are ethically impalatable (at least for those who benefit from it). We could redirect resources away from medical research and treatment that benefit disproportionately the affluent in the global North, e.g., organ transplants, innovative and often expensive treatments of cancer, and into the provision of basic health services for those in the global South and into treatment for those affected by the AIDS pandemic, which has been the major cause of the collapse of life expectancy in many Sub-Saharan African countries. If in extreme circumstances there were absolute shortages (rather than the current maldistribution) of the basic commodities necessary to sustain life, we could resort to morally even more unacceptable measures. We could reduce lifetime consumption rates by encouraging voluntary or imposing involuntary euthanasia on those who reached an advanced age. In such a scenario women in the global North would be the greatest losers because they enjoy a longer life expectancy than men. Alternatively euthanasia could be expected of those who had exceeded their fair and equitable share of consuming the world’s resources at whatever age they reached their limit. I am sure that my list of ‘solutions’ to the global imbalance in life expectancy will horrify most readers, especially those in the West. The point I am making is that this is a crisis now, not in some techno-scientific future. I am also exposing an assumption that many are unwilling to

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acknowledge. We expect techno-science to come up with solutions to global crises, to expand the material resources of our planet and to mitigate the environmental impacts of human activity. Although many criticize the idea that science is salvation, we seem far too easily to want to live with that as an unexamined and unrecognized belief.

Learning to play God well But what if we took seriously techno-science as a means of salvation and theologically appreciated human agency as playing God? If a messy intra-cosmic divinity is entangled with our humanity, then humanity may be a site of redemption for the cosmos. In this case techno-science may provide a means through which materiality reaches its fulfilment. This is a contemporary re-appropriation of Romans 8:19–23: ‘For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God . . . We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves who have the first fruits of the spirit and, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.’ Paul’s statement may be refracted through Barad’s definition of knowledge: ‘knowing is a matter of part of the world making itself intelligible to another part’ (Barad 2008: 147). I am not arguing that science is the only or primary means of salvation or that humanity is the only or pre-eminent site in which materiality finds fulfilment in the vastness of a universe that we barely know. The more important issue is how do we learn to play God because playing God is not foremost about imitating divine power but the divine attributes of mercy, compassion, and justice. This ethical divinity is already inflected in our humanity, not as properties of human nature but as specific performances. Technoscience therefore becomes a set of practices through which we perform our humanity/ divinity in social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. The salvific role of technoscience is not inherent to it since techno-scientific practices are always embedded in the value systems of the socio-cultural contexts where they exist and from which they receive their direction. Learning to play God well and not as a destructive caricature of divine power requires us to direct techno-science to goals that promote human well being and solidarity. Giving techno-science such a direction depends to a large extent on the narratives that we tell to become ourselves.

The strange universe of science/fiction Although, as Barad complains, language has recently been given too much power in feminist theory, narrative has not. The suspicion that narrative suggests a cohesion that gives rise to the sense of a unitary self is not unfounded, but a narratively mediated

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coherence of human subjectivity may be desirable. Agency requires an alignment of characters and plot, a story in which the protagonists reveal themselves in their actions. If techno-science is to operate as a means of salvation, its practices need to be bundled with narratives of redemption. Religious narratives may supply this need but they have no monopoly here. I am going to look for narratives of redemption that could give direction to techno-scientific practices in popular culture. This is not an unusual move when one considers how science fiction is often inserted into the discussion of science in feminist theory and elsewhere. This is the case in such widely divergent writings as Noreen Herzfeld’s theo-ethical analysis of artificial intelligence, In Our Image, and Stacey Alaimo’s materialist-feminist work Bodily Natures. Donna Haraway’s books abound with visual references to popular culture, containing reproductions of Hallmark cards and Doonesbury cartoons. Elaine Graham sets out to establish ‘the inter-relationship between the institutions and practices of contemporary techno-science and the genres of science fiction, myth and literature’ and therefore prefers to use the single term science/fiction. As she explains, the distinction between them is not a simple one of fact over against fiction but ‘both may be regarded as forms of representation that serve to construct the world rather than simply reflecting an a priori reality’ (2002: 19). Technoscience as a cultural practice always has a narrative attached. By no means are all of those narratives redemptive, but in every case it is the particular narrative that indicates and instantiates the direction of the given techno-scientific practice. Popular culture also attracts scientists, especially physicists. Stephen Hawking is reputedly a Star Trek fan and the distinguished physicist Lawrence Krauss has written The Physics of Star Trek. Star Trek can also be credited with inspiring many women to pursue a career in science. The first African-American woman astronaut, Mae Jemison, has said that her inspiration for joining NASA was Lieutenant Uhuru, the black female character in the original Star Trek series of the 1960s. When a team of astronomers discovered a tenth planet in our solar system in January 2005 they named it Xena after the woman warrior in the alternative ancient world of a television show—later the International Astronomical Union demoted it from planet status and renamed it to what they considered a more proper Greek mythical name. The most famous collaboration in science/fiction was when the physicist Carl Sagan, who was writing his novel Contact about the first human encounter with alien civilization, asked his colleague at Caltech, Kip Thorne, to come up with a scientifically plausible device to move his heroine in a very short time across the universe. This request made Kip Thorne realize that the then newly proposed wormholes traversed not only space but also time. Wormholes not only link distant regions of space–time—they also connect the edges of imagination and representation. In cosmology and related areas of physics, reality is constructed beyond the empirically observable. The mathematical solutions of theoretical physics often resemble the fantastic worlds of fiction and there is frequent traffic between them. On the borders of science/fiction feminist theology can explore a reality made strange. As I have already argued, feminists must be wary of simply revalorizing the categories of classical conceptions of nature. Death and finitude are not the inevitable and inescapable ‘natural’ ends of life in the cosmos and of the cosmos itself. They are complicated by

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the agency of matter that constantly slips away even from the most sophisticated regimes of representation in mathematical notation. The most significant indication that it is matter, not language, that constructs reality is the unravelling of classical and indeed also intuitive understandings of time. In 1905 Einstein’s theory of special relativity shattered the idea that time is an absolute parameter of the Universe, a literally universal measure in which each event occupies a singular temporal location in relation to every other event in the Universe. Time and space became folded together as space–time and time became relative to the position and velocity of the observer. Since then the evidence that we live in a fundamentally timeless universe has mounted and was presented to a general audience in Julian Barbour’s influential book, The End of Time (2001). Time is an artefact of observation but this does not mean it is an illusion. On the contrary, the abolition of absolute time means that all moments are equally real—the present loses its privilege over the past and the future. Time also ceases to be in a real sense universal because it emerges under specific and local material conditions in just part of the universe. The question of temporality has been even further complicated by the growing evidence that we do not live in the Universe but only in one universe, perhaps among an infinite number of universes. One implication of the multiverse is that there are not only many worlds but also many worlds almost identical to our own. Although we associate the idea of parallel universes with science fiction, it actually originated in the Princeton doctoral work of Hugh Everett in the 1950s. The obviously bizarre character of this thesis has hindered its acceptance, but since the 1970s it has found support among leading theoretical physicists and cosmologists, including Max Tegmark (2003, 2007), and Alex Vilenkin (2006). One feature of the parallel universes version of the many worlds theory that is often overlooked is how thoroughly it historicizes time. Temporality is indelibly inscribed with the cultural, political, and economic features of historical societies. Related to the question of temporality and the theory of the multiverse are present investigations of cosmic inflation. In 1998 contrary to many expectations astronomical observations confirmed that our universe was not only expanding but also the rate of its expansion was accelerating. This finding suggests that the multiverse and its cosmic bubbles, including our own universe, may expand infinitely. In an infinite multiverse with its infinite number of worlds, each one branching out into an infinite set of parallel universes, matter can take on every possible spatiotemporal configuration. Every determinate outcome happens and does not. This is a reality of both radical determinacy and radical indeterminacy in which death and finitude lose the finality and ultimacy that they have long been considered to guarantee.

Narrative and materiality But how can we live in and with such a weird reality? If matter existing in such infinite profusion lacks teleology, then what happens to moral purpose? What does it mean to seek justice in such a world? Language copes with this reality through creating narratives.

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We create narratives of the self, memories, which are never copies of past events. We tell stories about ourselves as individuals and groups to construct an identity, our place in the Universe. Narrative historicizes materiality; it transforms stones lying on the ground into the ruins of our past. History, as we all know, is not really a synonym for the past but a narrative account of the past. An infinite multiverse allows an infinite number of histories. Fiction reminds us in the one universe where we live that a world like ours is capable of many different histories. It does matter—in Barad’s literal sense—what stories we tell because our narratively composed selves are co-constituted with the material world. Narratives of redemption not only comfort and inspire us but they are also materialdiscursive practices through which we intervene in the making of ourselves-in-the-world. I am going to look at narratives of redemption in one area of popular culture—a particular genre of television series. There are television dramas that pursue the themes of what is called speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, horror, paranormal). These series often achieve the status of ‘cult television’ with a large fandom for many of whom the series becomes a primary source of values and a major means of negotiating their identity. These television series ask the questions What if the world were different from what it is? Or, what if the world is not what it seems? These are questions that are obviously relevant to making moral sense of life in the multiverse, but I have also chosen this genre of television for two other reasons. These television series have a global distribution. Star Trek has been seen in every habitable region of the planet and another successful series in this genre, Xena Warrior Princess, has been shown in at least 117 countries. Such television series comprise, therefore, a significant portion of an emerging global popular culture, but they also reflect the imbalances of the global political economy. The audiences may be international but the television studios and networks that finance and own them are American. The other reason for selecting television for materialist-feminist enquiry is the fully evident materiality of it as a medium. One does not imagine; one sees bodies on the television screen and one hears the sounds of embodied existence. Furthermore, the material production and consumption of television can be clearly shown to be intrinsic to the narratives it tells. The television set is both the geographical location where a large number of people are involved in filming the series, and it is also the electronic device through which television is consumed in a usually domestic setting. The television set can thus be understood easily in terms of Barad’s definition of the apparatus. Star Trek has frequently been described as the longest running morality play and, in societies where religious participation has declined, many consciously watch Star Trek as a secular source for moral values. Until the 1990s religion was absent from Star Trek and other television science fiction series. Then came Babylon 5 in which science fiction blended with religious themes to create a narrative of redemption. Another achievement of Babylon 5 was that it fully exploited the episodic structure of television. Instead of each episode being made as a self-contained narrative, the creator and executive producer of the show, J. Michael Stracynski, created story arcs that spanned not only several episodes but also the entire series. Here lies an advantage of television over film, which shares television’s audiovisual materiality but must tell its story in a much more compressed timeframe.

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The critical and commercial success of Babylon 5 paved the way for other television series to be developed as narratives of redemption, including Xena Warrior Princess, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Farscape, and most recently Battlestar Galactica. This list does not include television series such as the X-Files that abounded in ethical dilemmas, religious metaphors, and themes but where the central storylines do not culminate in redemption. Indeed, the 1990s were marked by a spiritual turn in television. This was the period between the end of the Cold War and 9/11 during which economic growth increased but wealth became concentrated in ever fewer hands. It was a time when the Internet allowed ordinary people across the globe to communicate easily with each other and create online communities, and Babylon 5 was the first television series to use the Internet to connect the makers of a show with its fandom. Also it was the decade of genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda. This context of continuing and often deepening political and economic divisions that often erupted into violence and the contrast with the longing for a substantive global community, made possible by technology, became inscribed both in the narrative content of these television shows and in audience responses and expectations.

Redemption as television’s material artefact Thinking of the television set as an apparatus enables us to see how a set of materialdiscursive practices (the production, distribution, and consumption of the television series) creates a narrative of redemption as a material artefact. On one level, this is a linear process but, as we shall see, the space and time in which a television programme exists is elusive. Every television series has a ‘show runner’ who is one or more of the executive producers and who has overall responsibility for every aspect of the production of the television series. It is the executive producer who decides the narrative direction of the series but even this role is performed only through intensive interaction and negotiation with the production team. Although most show runners write and/or direct some of the episodes in the series, the tight schedule of television production requires that these tasks be taken on by others. There is always a team of writers who collectively plot out the storylines of the series and directors are hired on an episode-by-episode basis. Furthermore, it is wrong to think of the narrative of a television episode as being contained in the written script. This is a narrative to be seen and heard and not as in theatre where the background only serves to underline the actors and their dialogue. In television, like film, light composes the narrative and so the director of photography is always writing a visual script. A good example of this is the famous crucifixion scene in Xena Warrior Princess when the two main protagonists of the series, Xena and her companion Gabrielle, are crucified. In a scene with sparse dialogue the task of the director of photography, John Cavill,

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was to express through lighting decisions and camera angles that this was the dramatic culmination of what had happened in the series up to that point. He certainly had no theological agenda but his technical solutions to the aesthetic requirements of the episode resulted in visual effects that endowed Xena and Gabrielle with a palpable transcendence. These visual effects emphasized what was never verbally stated: in the alternative universe of the series the salvific death of two women, Xena and Gabrielle, performs the crucifixion of Christ. There are other departments that create the physical environment for the fictional world of the television set. The heads of production and costume design have far more influence on what the viewer sees than the director of an individual episode. There are also those who are in charge of making props and the make-up of actors, and especially in science fiction their work is to convey the intelligible alterity and hybridity of alien beings and worlds. For example, in Farscape the character who for much of the series anchors its spiritual themes is the priestess Zhaan, a humanoid form of plant life. To convey the hybridity and spirituality of the character, Zhaan was given an ethereally blue skin, the bald head of a Buddhist nun with the intricate pattern of the veins of a leaf on the crown and was dressed in long flowing robes that evoked both her role as a priestess and the petals of a flower. Alongside those with chief roles in production there work hundreds of others: camera operators, grips, electricians, carpenters, art directors, set dressers, stunts, to name just some of the skills required. In short, what eventually will be seen on the television screen is the result of thousands of small but significant decisions, made by a large number of people. Because of the relentless pace of television production many of these decisions are not made according to any grand design but on the fly. In the midst of the activity of a television set the script is not a sacred text that remains unchanged by all these other production decisions. Writers often rewrite scripts on set and actors come eventually to own their characters, so that they feel entitled to change lines that they do not believe fit their character and otherwise ad lib. After the filming of an episode is over, it enters post-production. There is always far more footage than is eventually broadcast on television. The editor’s job is to cut this footage into a narrative that not only has coherence but also is also visually compelling. It is also in the phase of post-production that music is scored for the episode. Music in film and television is used to suggest interior states of characters as well as setting the emotional tone for a scene. Translating what is interior into an exterior sensuous medium enhances the viewing of a television episode as a physical experience. The embodied viewer is also addressed by the now widespread use of digital technology in television. Since narratives of redemption are often aiming at a realistic representation of the fantastic, they deploy heavily and innovatively computer-generated images (CGI). The viewer is transported into a virtual reality, one that looks as physically real as the everyday world, and this conflation of realities through CGI is reshaping what counts as bodily experience and how we think of reality. Religion has traditionally been the realm of visions of a marvellous reality, the space in the cultural imagination where the fantastic could be thought of as actually existing. Digital technology has allowed film and television to enter this realm of traditionally religious vision. Narratives of redemption that

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use CGI tap into this history of religious vision even if they make no explicit reference to it. There are instances when these televisual narratives of redemption translate directly and consciously traditional religious symbolism into their CGI-mediated reality, e.g., when Xena and Gabrielle are carried after their crucifixion to heaven by angels. More often the visual cues are less direct such as blown highlights being used to indicate moments of spiritual insight because of the widespread and cross-cultural understanding of physical light as a metaphor for spiritual enlightenment. Despite the unprecedented ability that digital technology has brought to make whatever can be imagined visually real, this does not mean that the television set is without representational constraints. Perhaps the biggest constraint is time because at least twenty episodes a year must be filmed for the full season of a series and these episodes must fit the rigid timeframe of American commercial television. Another constraint is budget when it is less for a full television season of twenty episodes than for a moderately funded two-hour feature film. These material constraints stem from how expensive it is to make films and television. The author of a novel can write her work before she looks for a publisher. This is impossible in film and television and therefore the creative agents are dependent on studios and networks from the initial stages of developing their idea. The American studios and networks (who in many cases are or have been owned by transnational corporations with headquarters outside the United States) finance and distribute the series and thus acquire a large measure of control over it. All scripts must be submitted to the studio and sometimes studio executives ask for substantive changes. In some cases the studios that distribute and the networks that broadcast television have political agendas in what they want or more likely do not want in a television show. In other cases they may be trying to attract the lowest common denominator audience. However, neither of these is the major motivation for studio and network control of the content of a television series. American television is made not for its audiences but for its advertisers. Most narratives of redemption do not start that way but have more modest storylines that advertisers are comfortable with. When a television series is successful, i.e., has achieved a large American domestic audience, the show runner can assert a greater freedom in deciding the narrative content and direction of the series because advertisers are happy to reach so many potential consumers. Narratives of redemption are a cultural commodity that is used to sell consumer products. What the viewer sees on the television screen is not the vision of a single author. The question of authorial intention is moot because the finally televised episode emerges from the thousand decisions made during production and from the material constraints under which the narrative was fashioned and often contested. I believe that it is this dispersal of the narrative over so many different contributions and how its many makers creatively confront the representational constraints imposed on it that helps it resonate with its several audiences in the United States and around the world. The conditions of the material production of narratives of redemption resolve themselves in the internal content as the heterogeneity and incompleteness that mark these narratives. The episodic structure of a successful television series that runs for several years allows the makers and the viewers of the show to interact and these conversations can influence

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how characters and plots are developed. Indeed the fandom of a series can be a counterweight to the interventions of studios and networks because a series is less likely to be cancelled if it pursues narrative directions that studio executives have not foreseen, when it has the vocal support of its audience. The television set on which the narrative of redemption is watched is not necessarily an instrument of passive consumption. Fans create websites where they can discuss episodes and where they can also debate the moral issues and religious themes that a series may raise; they can write and read fan fiction that extend the ‘canonical’ narratives of the televised series; occasionally fans organize themselves politically and often science fiction and its related genres have been identified with progressive politics. However, this judgement should be taken with caution since fans are not a homogenous group but spread across the political spectrum. With a dearth of evidence, one suspects that there is a wide divergence in political views among fans and that this is calibrated by race, gender, class, and local culture. Since the 1980s American television entertainment has become widely disseminated in the global South, especially in urban areas but even often reaching rural communities. Most viewers do not own a television but watch television in a communal setting, and frequently transnational television programming is watched on bootleg videocassettes and more recently DVDs rather than through broadcast. Thus, many (but how many?) poor women in the global South have seen some and parts of these narratives of redemption. This audience has received little research attention and certainly not for its consumption of transnational genre television. Apart from isolated and anecdotal evidence we do not know what the reactions of this most marginalized section of our planet’s population are to these narratives of redemption. We have, however, no reason to believe that there is a homogenous response. On the global scale narratives of redemption whether on television or in religious traditions do not promote unity; rather competing interpretations of them follow the fault lines of political divisions. Sacred texts invite one to enter their own time and space, and the television narratives of redemption do the same. One of the characteristics of the moving image of film and television is their verisimilitude with the time and space of embodied experience. They present a sequence of real or realistically portrayed events as we would see and hear them if we were there and then. They make a physical time and space, not just an imagined or remembered time and space as is the case of sacred texts, simultaneous with our own. This specific materiality of filmed representations makes them analogous to a parallel universe in ways that a text can never be. Yet filmed images possess a strange materiality that distinguishes them from other visual artefacts such as paintings or sculptures. Where does the material artefact of a television episode reside? Is it in the can of film that the camera has shot on the production set? Is it in the broadcast images that appear on the screen of the viewer’s television set? There is certainly a material artefact that can be uploaded to a satellite or printed onto a DVD that resembles more that of a printed book than visual artefacts except it is more ephemeral (like a musical performance) and needs to be physically and not just intellectually decoded (unlike a book). A television broadcast is a transient human experience but because of its physical radio signals it belongs to the longest lasting effects of human beings on the universe, enduring forever in an infinite universe (Weisman 2007: 327).

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The unusual materiality is always there behind the television set with an agency that exceeds that of the human beings who produce and consume television. It is as if the Universe itself were asking us for new and unusual stories about ourselves.

Gender in television’s narratives of redemption The television set (again in both senses) is an apparatus that constructs gender simultaneously and coextensively with redemption in the narratives under discussion here. At first one is surprised by how many of the major characters in these television series are women and often young women such as Buffy, the eponymous hero of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Gabrielle in Xena Warrior Princess. When one considers that most (but not all) of the writers for these series are men and all the show runners of the major series are male, then this is more astonishing. In part, it can be explained by how pervasive feminism has been in this sector of popular culture in the West and by the gender composition of the audiences of these narratives of redemption. While in earlier decades of the twentieth century men were predominantly the consumers of science fiction, by the end of the century that had changed. The spiritual turn of 1990s television that these narratives of redemption spearheaded appealed especially to female viewers. Yet there was another reason why male writers wanted to create female characters. Women—and especially young women—have unscripted lives. There are, of course, the conventional scripts of wife, mother, and homemaker but once one looks beyond these roles then the question ‘What would a woman do?’ becomes far less clear and a lot more interesting. Women’s lives and agency furnish writers with fresh narrative possibilities and hitherto unexplored angles from which to pose ethical and religious questions. Furthermore, there can be different stories about women’s traditional roles and identities when these are juxtaposed with storylines of female protagonists entering realms from which women have been excluded. In the 1990s a new type of female hero emerged in popular culture. No longer the heroine whose actions were always measured against existing gender stereotypes (she was braver or smarter than other women), this was also not the male hero in drag. The ‘tough girls’ of television’s narratives of redemption pioneered this new type of fictional character (Inness 1999: 160–81). Some like Aeryn Sun of Farscape and Kara Thrace of Battlestar Galactica live in fictional universes where the gender stereotypes of our own do not pertain; others like Xena or Buffy may encounter sexism in their everyday world but they are part of an extraordinary reality that constantly disrupts the mundane. These new stories about gender transform it as a category, and already just in that one respect they are redemptive. Yet this is no cheap salvation, and the stories told often are not happy ones. In the fictional universes where women can indisputably be warriors they can also be mothers and this opens up a new narrative space for the hero as mother. Xena and Gabrielle in Xena Warrior Princess and Aeryn Sun in Farscape experience the

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tragedies of motherhood—the separation of mother and child, a child’s life lost to violence. Yet these fictional women and other mother characters in these series do not just tell a story of mothers as victims. They are mothers who use violence to protect their children—even at the expense of other children’s lives. There are mothers and daughters who find themselves, often unwillingly, in violent conflict with each other. There are mothers who have chosen a career of violence, sometimes for heroic reasons and sometimes not, who are separated from their children by the violent conditions of their life. The hero as mother exposes the morally ambiguity of the heroic when it is connected to violence. Although these stories have little to do with the existence of middle-class women in the global North, they do have relevance to other women’s lives. In the 1990s when welfare reform in the USA cut benefits to poor mothers, some of these enlisted in the reserve military to earn a livelihood. After the American invasion of Iraq many of these women found themselves separated from their children and deployed in an armed conflict. Some were wounded or killed and many more along with their children suffered severe trauma through their enforced separation, adding another burden to poor families. Xena Warrior Princess and Farscape told their stories of warrior mothers before 9/11, depicting their fictional characters becoming warriors through the exigencies of their life circumstances. Yet somehow these series sensed the subterranean shifts in the American cultural landscape through which warfare was being detached from both masculinity and the privileges of citizenship. Military service once the preserve of the white male citizen had now become the labour of the poor. Since the bond between poor mothers and their children could be disrupted by the necessity of their paid employment under the new welfare laws, there was no contradiction in sending poor mothers of young children into armed conflict, something that would have been unthinkable half a century earlier. Television’s narratives of redemption were often dark because they told stories about women’s lives and not simplistic happy ones where women only experience empowerment and always successfully overcome exclusion. Changing constructions of gender have often re-scripted women’s lives to their disadvantage but this does not erase women’s capacity for agency. These television series portrayed women as moving through the sadness of separation from and loss of children to the commitment to creating a world in which mothers and their children could flourish (Futrell 2003).

We are not who we seem to be Motherhood plots are often enclosed in larger story arcs that show a disruption of ontological hygiene. The television series that may mess up ontological hygiene the most is Battlestar Galactica. A human civilization (that looks remarkably like our own in the early twenty-first century) had created intelligent robots who eventually rebelled against their human masters. The story begins fifty years after the rebellion when the robot race, known as the Cylons, re-appears with the intent of eradicating the human race. Yet there is an irony in their genocide since some of them, their elite, have evolved into human

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forms indistinguishable from those of their human enemies. These humanoid Cylons have also become devoutly religious, passionate monotheists who want to cleanse the Universe of a flawed and polytheistic humanity. However, Battlestar Galactica does not portray human beings as simply the victims of Cylon malevolence. The human society that Battlestar Galactica depicts is again remarkably like our own contemporary world— there are severe political and economic inequities between human groups; there is intense racism directed not only towards the Cylons but also towards the poorer human groups; and there is violence. As the series develops the distinctions between human and Cylon collapse both morally and ontologically. Some of the Cylon-hating humans discover they are Cylons themselves. In the course of the series some humans and Cylons fall in love with each other—not an unusual plot for science fiction. Yet this provides the final twist in the story of Battlestar Galactica, its final narrative undermining of identity—this time the identity of the television audience. The humans have been obsessed with the search for a lost humanity that inhabited a planet called Earth. The audience assumes that our planet and we are the goal of their search. When the humans of Battlestar Galactica finally reach Earth, they discover that it is a wasteland, destroyed by nuclear war. In the last episode of the series the surviving remnants of the human and Cylon races (now working together) find another inhabitable planet. In the final minutes of the series the audience discovers that this planet is our Earth and that the daughter of a human father and a Cylon mother is our Eve, the origin of Homo sapiens. Battlestar Galactica not only disturbs its audience’s assumptions about human identity, origins, and destiny but also upsets clearly defined concepts of the divine. Myths about the divine have given the human society of Battlestar Galactica its cohesion and prophetic guidance that will lead them to the original (not our) Earth. Belief in the one true God is evolutionary programming of the Cylons to give them a sense of higher moral purpose. On the surface, it would seem that Battlestar Galactica has a functionalist definition of religion as a successful means of preserving historical memory, of establishing collective unity and action. Yet in the final minutes of the series this conclusion about the divine is undermined. Central to Battlestar Galactica is a love story between two of the most complex characters— the devout and brilliant Cylon woman (Caprica 6) who is largely responsible for the military destruction of most of humanity but later comes to regret this and the brilliant but self-seeking human male scientist (Gaius Baltar) who disastrously betrays humanity twice, an atheist who later has a religious conversion. An ontological ambiguity attaches to this couple because throughout the series each is accompanied by the double of the other who has a bodily presence but not one of which others are usually aware. Who the ‘real’ Baltar and Caprica 6 are is not a question that the series ever attempts to answer. Indeed there is a fragility to identity in Battlestar Galactica that is linked to a fractured mortality. The humanoid Cylons can undergo resurrection through uploading their individual consciousness into a new body. But this cybernetic immortality is trumped by one that seems akin to the traditionally religious, the immortality of angels, and yet this angelic immortality is embodied in flesh. Kara Thrace, the tough, heavy drinking, and sexually erring fighter pilot, has the visions that will lead to both the finding of the first Earth and the events that bring the series to its conclusion on the new Earth. On the devastated first Earth she makes a shocking discovery—her skeletal remains in the crashed plane in which she

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had previously gone missing. Is she the real Kara Thrace? Is she living or dead? In her final scene she tells her lover and the television audience that she is not returning to him, that her journey is complete and then when he and the camera turns around she has vanished. Has death finally reclaimed her or does she belong to a material existence that is beyond presence? Then a little later in the episode Caprica 6 and Gaius Baltar have a seemingly final encounter with their doubles and are told that God’s plan is never complete. In the final scene of the series these doubles appear again in the far distant future, which is our present. Their bodies are visible only to the television audience, a sacramental presence that reveals the body transcendent but not transcended. They deliver the final commentary on the human condition of us, the audience.‘It has all happened before and it will all happen again’ has become a frequently uttered axiom in Battlestar Galactica to indicate the countless human histories like our own and that they end in destruction. But Caprica 6 blends mathematics and theology together. If a complex system repeats itself enough times, she says, eventually something surprising may happen and this time history might have a different ending. Our hybrid humanity may be the one that will survive. She adds that this too is in God’s plan or in that of the one whom, Baltar reminds her, does not want to be called God. So the audience is delivered a message to hope for its own redemption by two fictional characters whose ontological and moral ambiguity represents the messy interventions into the cosmic and (post)human realms of the divine that eludes representation.

Conclusion: remaking what we were as the origins of what we wish to become Battlestar Galactica and Xena Warrior Princess offer us fictional histories that invite us to think differently about our past. Xena Warrior Princess constructs a fictional alternative to Greco-Roman antiquity and early Christianity, an alternative past in which women get to play the central roles of history, including that of crucified saviours risen from the dead. Battlestar Galactica creates a fictional alternative to the evolution of our species in which a hybrid Eve is not the cause of humanity’s fall into sin but the source of its hope for redemption. These narratives remind us that the past we have was not inevitable and the only one possible. Like some versions of scientific cosmology they tell of a past that is still open. Narratives of redemption that present an alternative chronicle of origins let us consider what we might become if we can imagine another beginning to what we are. Religious traditions are deeply concerned with origins, with how the cosmos began and with their own foundation. The memory of origins, whether enacted in ritual or circulated in scripture, is central to the formation of religious identities. The first generation of Western feminist theologians sought to remember the past differently so that the work of memory could make possible new forms of religious identity. This is still an unfinished task and feminist theologians should not hesitate to embrace narrative for fear that it might impute to our lives coherence, continuity, and stability. These are not intrinsically patriarchal values and such narrative can be mobilized to counterbalance the disruptions of globalization.

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Globalization and its techno-scientific projects pit modernity against tradition, as Sarah Harding points out. The material-discursive practices of local and indigenous communities are often mediated and communicated through narrative and these narratives must be recognized if the cultural practices of techno-science are to change. On television the work of redemption is never done, identity is never unambiguous, and death, though real, is not final. The material conditions and constraints of television production, coupled with its episodic structure, result in these narratives always remaining incomplete. Where one story of redemption ends, the next begins. Xena at the moment of her resurrection becomes pregnant and gives birth to a daughter, appropriately called Eve, and a new narrative of redemption. The explosion of storylines complicate plot and characters but in the midst of all this rich and untidy fiction one can still discern a provisional teleology, a here and now when justice is won, or where mercy and compassion make life bearable, even to flourish. History imitates fiction in the multiverse since it too is a narrative and one without closure. Our moral agency is episodic, a sum of performances, which in history’s narrative are given cohesion and purpose. There is denouement and fulfilment within the boundaries of the episode but these are markers on space–time and not its container. Television’s narratives of redemption carry within themselves two contradictory constructions of the universal. As material artefact they are a commodity distributed and exchanged within a global market economy. Their consumption in an emergent global popular culture manifests globalization’s claim to create the real universal, one based on no abstract or metaphysical idea, but on material products that can be monetized and that attain a literally universal availability. Yet globalization’s universal of global consumption is displaced within television’s materiality as the creative product of many agents that in its narratives of redemption endlessly creates fictional doubles of our world. The implicit narrative of globalization is not the only story that can be told about our world and there is nothing historically inevitable about it, as its own cultural commodity exposes. There may not be one universe but there is only one universal—the infinite expanse of cosmic materiality, the simultaneously real and imagined home of television’s narratives of redemption. This is also ever-widening context in which to ask the question ‘What is feminist theology?’ and in looking for its origins to realize that they constantly change in relation to what we want to become as moral but ontologically unfinished agents. To attempt an answer during the historical episode of globalization is to inquire about the material conditions under which we shape our memory and to undertake a narrative intervention in the making of ourselves-in-the-world. As feminist theologians we always need to remember that our material existence is incomplete, permeable to the nonhuman and the nonorganic and entangled with the divine.

Notes 1. In The Body of God Sallie McFague sees contemporary scientific cosmology as the source for a ‘common creation story’ that allows for a new organic model that privileges embodiment and radicalizes notions of both unity and diversity (1993: 27–63). 2. See, for example, Nancy R. Howell, A Feminist Cosmology: Ecology, Solidarity, and Metaphysics (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2000); Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A

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Theology of Becoming (London/New York: Routledge, 2003); Carol P. Christ, She Who Changes: Re-Imagining the Divine in the World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). See the collections of Jennifer E. Porter and Darcee L. McLaren (Eds), Star Trek and Sacred Ground: Explorations of Star Trek, Religion, and American Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); and Ross S. Kraemer, William Cassidy, and Susan L. Schwartz, Religions of Star Trek (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001). Among the small body of feminist theological work on contemporary popular music, there is also Anne-Marie Korte’s essay on Madonna (Buikema and van der Tuin 2009) and Deborah Withers’ (2010) book on Kate Bush. But where are the in-depth studies of the thick theological references and agendas of Sweet Honey in the Rock or Sinéad O’Connor? In what follows I replace the unwieldy phrase ‘science and technology’ with the phrase that Graham uses in common with other feminist theorists of science, such as Donna Haraway: techno-science. Medicine seems to have been one area where women in pre-modern societies were active in the creation of scientific knowledge (Leung 1999) but much of the evidence for this seems to lie in gynecology and obstetrics (Selby 2005). ‘When I talk about embodied feminist ethics, I image us as existing in the personal, the interpersonal (the face-to-face intimacy), the cultural community, and the political economic order. Most people can no longer see the political and economic levels of our embodiment. They are just mystified. Now we need to add the whole cosmic dimension too. Everything we produce and manufacture impacts our existence as sensual beings’ (Harrison 2004: 70). ‘Representational practices are part of the human activity of building material and symbolic worlds; of encompassing metaphysical and theological systems as well as cathedrals, canals, and computers’ (2002: 14). In Botswana life expectancy in 2003 was 32.26 years but in 2009 it was 61.85 years. The radical improvement was due to the availability of anti-retroviral drugs to treat HIV. However, the global economic crisis that began in 2008 is threatening the foreign aid that supplies these drugs. Already in 2010 there was a slight decrease in life expectancy in Botswana and it could plummet again, if AIDS is left untreated. For a recent update on time in cosmological theory, see Craig Callender, ‘Is Time an Illusion?’, Scientific American (June 2010), 58–65. Callender’s article grew out of his submission to the 2008 contest of the Foundational Questions Institute (FXQi)) on the topic of the nature of time. An essay by Julian Barbour won first prize. All of the winning essays are available on the FXQi web site: http://www.fqxi.org/community/essay/winners/2008.1 ‘The existence of the quantum discontinuity means that the past is never left behind, never finished once and for all, and the future is not what will come to be in an unfolding of the present moment; rather the past and the future are enfolded participants in matter’s iterative becoming. Becoming is not an unfolding in time, but the inexhaustible dynamism of the enfolding of mattering’ (Barad 2007: 234). Karen Barad follows the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics and thus would seem to reject the many worlds interpretation. However, her universe is no less strange. Instead of everything possible happening in an infinite number of worlds, everything possible can happen in our world. One consequence of this is that the past can change! She also insists that temporality is historicized—‘Time has a history’ (Barad 2007: 180). Although I cannot expand this point fully here, I want to briefly indicate the physiological processes involved and their epistemological consequences. In the 1980s neuroscientists working in Italy discovered the existence of mirror neurons that become active in the brain

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both when a human or other animal performs an action and when the animal sees the same action being done by another. Mirror neurons are fired also when people watch televised actions. This raises the question of whether our physical sense of our bodies is affected when we see realistically portrayed bodies behave in ways that go beyond what our physical bodies are capable of. There is therefore the possibility that contemporary narratives of redemption, using CGI to allow their human or human-like protagonists to have extraordinary bodily experiences, may be transforming their viewers’ own sense of embodiment. This could be why some viewers report that watching such television gives them a visceral feeling of spiritual fulfillment—something akin to the physiological phenomena that have accompanied reported mystical experiences. 14. Such political organization by fans is local and around a pressing issue of the moment. Hence, it often remains unrecorded and unknown outside its immediate context. This makes it difficult to evaluate whether these narratives of redemption are more often linked to progressive politics. In May 2004 at the March for Women’s Lives in Washington, DC, there was a group marching under the banner ‘Xenites for Choice’ but this cannot provide evidence that most Xena fans support women’s reproductive rights. Battlestar Galactica took a strong anti-torture stance in several episodes. Its show runners, Ronald Moore and David Eick, with several of the cast took part in a panel with representatives of the United Nations, entitled, ‘Battlestar Galactica: TV’s Role In Making Global Issues Relevant’ in Los Angeles in June 2007 that focused on human rights. However, when an American television station, G4, broadcast a rerun of one of the episodes on torture in January 2006 and allowed viewers to vote online whether torture of the enemy was morally permissible in war, the majority voted yes. Neither from this poll nor from the series makers’ views can one extrapolate what the moral opinion of the majority of Battlestar Galactica viewers on torture is. 15. The actor Renee O’Connor, who starred as Gabrielle in Xena Warrior Princess, was the sole character in the short film One Weekend a Month (2004). The plot is a string of phone conversations in which a poor single mother discovers that she has been called to active duty and frantically tries to arrange for the care of her children.

Works Cited Alaimo, Stacy (2008). Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (2010). ‘Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature’, in Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Eds), Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 237–64. Barad, Karen (2006). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham NC: Duke University Press. (2008). ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, in Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Eds), Material Feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 120–54. Barbour, Julian (2000). The End of Time: The Next Revolution in Physics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Callender, Craig (2010). ‘Is Time an Illusion?’, Scientific American, 302/6: 58–65. Cannon, Katie G. (1988). Black Womanist Ethics. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press.

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Carroll, Sean (2010). From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. New York: Dutton. Christ, Carol P. (1980). Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest. Boston: Beacon Press. (2003). She Who Changes: Re-Imagining the Divine in the World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Deane-Drummond, Celia. (2006). Genetics and Christian Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler (1999). Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Futrell, Alison (2003). ‘The Baby, the Mother and the Empire: Xena as Ancient Hero’, in Frances H. Early and Kathleen Kennedy (Eds), Athena’s Daughters: Television’s New Women Warriors. Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press, 13–26. Gatens, Moira (1996). Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power, and Corporeality. London: Routledge. Gebara, Ivone (1999). Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation. (Trans.) David Molineaux. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Goonatilake, Susantha (1998). Toward a Global Science: Mining Civilizational Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Graham, Elaine (2002). Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Grey, Mary C. (2004). Sacred Longings: The Ecological Spirit and Global Culture. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Griffin, Susan (1978). Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her. New York: Harper & Row. Grosz, Elizabeth (1994). Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Harding, Sandra (2008). Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. Durham NC: Duke University Press. Harnack, Adolf von (1986). What is Christianity? (Trans.) Thomas Bailey Saunders. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Harrison, Beverly Wildung (1985). Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics. (Ed.) Carol S. Robb. Boston: Beacon Press. (2004). Justice in the Making: Feminist Social Ethics. (Ed.) Elizabeth M. Bounds. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Hekman, Susan (2010). The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hennessy, Rosemary (1993). Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse. London: Routledge. Herzfeld, Noreen L. (2002). In Our Image: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Spirit. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. (2009). Technology and Religion: Remaining Human in a Co-Created World. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press. Howell, Nancy R. (2000). A Feminist Cosmology: Ecology, Solidarity, and Metaphysics. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Hunt, Mary E. (2001). ‘Designer Theology: A Feminist Perspective’, Zygon, 36/4: 737–51. Inness, Sherrie A. (1999). Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Keller, Catherine (2003). Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. London: Routledge. Kirk-Duggan, Cheryl A. (1997). Exorcizing Evil: A Womanist Perspective on the Spirituals. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Korte, Ann-Marie (2009). ‘Madonna’s Crucifixion and the Woman’s Body in Feminist Theology’, in Rosemarie Buikema and Iris van der Tuin (Eds), Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture. London: Routledge, 117–33. Kraemer, Ross S., Cassidy, William, and Schwartz Susan L. (Eds) (2001). Religions of Star Trek. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Leung, Angela Ki Che. (1999). ‘Women Practicing Medicine in Premodern China’, in Harriet T. Zurndorfer (Ed.), Chinese Women in the Imperial Past: New Perspectives. Leiden: Brill, 101–34. McFague, Sallie (1987). Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. (1993). The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Merchant, Carolyn (1980). The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Midgley, Mary (1992). Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning. London: Routledge. Miles, Margaret R. (1985). Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture. Boston: Beacon Press. Miles, Margaret R. (1996). Seeing and Believing Religion and Values in the Movies. Boston: Beacon Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2003). ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity Through Anticapitalist Struggles’, Signs 28/2: 499–535. Noble, David F. (1997). The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. New York: Knopf. Noble, David F. (1992). A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science. New York: Knopf. Porter, Jennifer E. and McLaren, Darcee L. (Eds) (1999). Star Trek and Sacred Ground: Explorations of Star Trek, Religion, and American Culture. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Pui-Lan, Kwok (2005). Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Say, Elizabeth A. (1990). Evidence on Her Own Behalf: Women’s Narrative as Theological Voice. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Selby, Martha Ann (2005). ‘Narratives of Conception, Gestation, and Labour in Sanskrit Ayurvedic Texts’, Asian Medicine 1/2: 254–75. Subramaniam, Banu (2009). ‘Moored Metamorphoses: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Studies’, Signs 34/4: 951–80. Tegmark, Max (2003). ‘Parallel Universes’, Scientific American 288/5: 40–51. Tegmark, Max (2007). ‘Many Lives in Many Worlds’, Nature 448/5: 23–4. Thistlethwaite, Susan Brooks (Ed.) (2003). Adam, Eve, and the Genome: The Human Genome Project and Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Vilenkin, Alex (2006). Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes. New York: Hill and Wang. Walker, Alice (1983). In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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Weisman, Alan (2007). The World Without Us. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press. Winston, Diane (Ed.) (2009). Small Screen, Big Picture: Television and Lived Religion. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Withers, Deborah M. (2010). ‘Kate Bush, The Red Shoes, The Line, the Cross and the Curve and the Uses of Symbolic Transformation’, Feminist Theology 19/1: 7–19. Wrangham, Richard (2009). Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. New York: Basic Books.

section ii

CH A NGI NG CON T E X TS

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chapter 4

tr a nseth n ic fem i n ist theology of asi a: gl oba liz ation, iden tities, a n d solida r itie s namsoon kang

To see the twenty-first century truly, one’s eyes must learn a different set of aesthetics. One must reject the overly stylized images of travel magazines, with their inviting photographs of exotic villages and glamorous downtowns. Robert D. Kaplan (1994) What we must reconquer and reform is our entire world. In other words, personal conversion and structural reform cannot be separated. Pedro Arrupe, SJ (1988) The moment you publish essays in a society you have entered political life; so if you want not to be political do not write essays or speak out. Edward Said (1996)

Discursive location in a global space Questioning the invisible assumption of the ‘dominant’ group is the beginning of resistance for liberation. Those who are in the center do not ask the ‘who-am-I’ question because they are the normative. Their identity is self-evident and, therefore, there is no

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need for further explanation. So for them, such a fundamental question as ‘who-am-I’ is either an existential question or a spiritual one, but hardly a sociocultural or geopolitical question. Therefore, they do not need any adjective for the entry point of their discourse—Asian, feminist, Latino/a, womanist, gay, lesbian, and so on. This absence of adjectives in most discourses by the dominant group underlies the concept of the universal and shows their discursive hegemonic power, where only certain groups of people are expected to adopt an analytical axis such as gender, race/ethnicity, class, or sexual orientation in their discourse. The absence of such an adjective makes people think as if they were gender-less, race-less, or class-less, or had no sexuality. This hidden universalizing practice among the dominant group needs to be addressed. Especially those people who happen to belong to a dominant race/ethnicity need to be aware that they also belong to a specific ‘racial/ethnic’ group because ‘to ignore white ethnicity is to redouble its hegemony by naturalizing it’ and ‘[w]ithout specifically addressing white ethnicity there can be no critical evaluation of the construction of the other’ (Wallace 1994: 184). As Zillah Eisenstein criticizes, ‘Whiteness silences itself by pretending that it has no meaning, no particular relation to a cultural privilege that is power-filled’ (2004: 59). People who belong to the dominant culture rarely speak about their own ‘name’, whereas the marginalized must constantly identify their ‘name’ to enter the mainstream. Therefore, the authority of the dominant race/ethnicity/culture is based on ‘absence’. I would also argue that the invisible structure of this ‘absence’ of the ‘whoam-I’ question, the absence of an adjective describing one’s identity becomes the ground of its power. By absenting its overt specificity (i.e., gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.), it is simply assumed to be universal and normative. The production and use of the classification of an ethnic group, such as Asian, is in a way a production of West-centrism, even when one may use it as self-claimed. This kind of ‘ethnic’ classification perpetuates and internalizes the hidden value of the Anglo-asnormative, and the ethnic-as-deviant. Ethnicizing people on the margin makes them the object, and people at the center the subject. This act of ethnicizing people has been ongoing on a global, regional, and national level. In this regard, how many adjectives one needs to identify who one is reveals the multiple layers of discrimination and exclusion in a specific historical time and space. By using two adjectives, feminist and Asian, I reveal two layers of exclusion: feminist from the patriarchal world, and Asian from an Anglo-dominant world. The difference between these two adjectives is that feminist is a self-chosen political statement, while Asian indicates both my cultural and discursive location. Asian can be regarded as ‘subsocial in a Euro-US-centered context’, whereas feminist can be considered anti-social in a patriarchal world. Being Asian ‘ethnic’ is truly embedded, a mark upon one’s body, often surpassing gender, class, sexuality, or political standpoint. I adopt these adjectives, Asian and feminist, as my primary discursive location and a provisional starting point, but not as an ending point. These two adjectives are indicators of my geopolitical locationality and discursive positionality, but they are ‘provisional’ because what I envision is to move beyond the boundary of Asia as a physical continent and ethnic entity, and beyond the binary of men and women toward geopolitical and intellectual solidarity. Therefore, although the

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point of departure of my feminist theological discourse is Asia, the point of arrival is to be trans-ethnic, embracing a geopolitical context of Asia but moving beyond any form of rigid ‘we–they’ binary position.

Whose globalization? Today the word ‘globalization’ becomes an all-purpose catchword in both popular and scholarly discourse; it is ‘on the lips of politicians, professors, and pundits alike’ (Brecher and Costello 1994: 4). People in different areas use the term in highly disparate ways and its meaning often becomes elusive. Now globalization easily risks becoming a global cliché as different people use and misuse it for their purposes. The most common interpretation of globalization is the idea that the world is becoming more uniform, homogenized, standardized, and compressed through a technological, commercial, and cultural synchronization emanating from the West. Corporations, markets, finance, banking, transportation, communication, and production more and more cut across national boundaries. It is obvious that the West (i.e., its culture, discourse, values, lifestyle) is moving to the center of the world through this process of globalization. The rise of the globalization paradigm in the 1970s became consolidated at the Seventh (1973–9) ‘Tokyo Round’ of negotiations of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), which was established in 1947 (Waters 1995: 68 ff.). This Tokyo Round coincided with the emergence of the ‘Washington Consensus’, a global economic model based on the principles of privatization, free trade, and deregulation (i.e., neo-liberalism). Economic globalization, therefore, refers to neo-liberal internationalization and the spread of capitalized market relations. The most prevalent view of globalization comes from those who see it in the light of increased economic interdependence and the integration of all national economies into one economy with the framework of a capitalist market, initiated by those countries in the global North. According to this analysis, the world economy has been transformed and ‘has already changed—in its foundations and in its structure—and in all probability the change is irreversible’ (Drucker 1986: 768). The most important aspect of this change entails a shift in commodities, from capital and materials to knowledge, and with this, the price of raw materials has collapsed, causing a drastic change in the mode of production from industry to information technology. The power of technological communications has changed the nature of finance and trade, transcending time and geographical borders. In economic globalization the information holder becomes a powerholder and economic profit becomes the highest ‘virtue’. National interest is geared toward maximum economic interest, which has created multiple forms of conflict, violence, and war in many regions of the globe. It is undeniable that the much of the United States’ foreign policy is now triggered by the oil wealth of the Muslim states in the name of the ‘war on terror’, and that the ‘war on terror’ impacts poor countries in the global South more than affluent countries in the global

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North. Who benefits from economic globalization is, of course, a complex and controversial issue. While some people argue that economic globalization improves living standards of people in all parts of the world, others maintain that the entire neo-capitalist project of economic globalization benefits only certain groups of people but harms the majority of people in the global South. This contradictory assessment of economic globalization is also true of Asia, which long ago adopted this world capitalist system. Thus, most Asian countries are also a part of the problem. The political world has ‘moved from a First/Second/Third World division to a multipolar condition’, and the focus is on the increasing density of interstate relations and the development of global politics (Schreiter 2004: ix). What divides the world now is not the old political ideology, but the huge discrepancy between the rich and the poor. According to Kaplan: We are entering a bifurcated world. Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel’s and Fukuyama’s Last Man, healthy, well fed, and pampered by technology. The other, larger, part is inhabited by Hobbe’s First Man, condemned to a life that is ‘poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. Although both parts will be threatened by environmental stress, the Last Man will be able to master it; the First Man will not. (Kaplan 1994: 60)

This change makes us think that ‘the end of ideology’ has already arrived (Bell 1966), especially in the post-Cold War era, and that ‘the universalization of Western liberal democracy is the final form of human government’, as Francis Fukuyama argues in his ‘The End of History’ (1989:4). However, it would be naive to affirm that ‘there is a fundamental process at work that dictates a common evolutionary pattern for all human societies—in short, something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy’ (Fukuyama 1992: 48), as he also optimistically predicts. So many polities are democratic only insofar as they adopt democratic processes and institutions. However, they fail to share the underlying value system that ensures human rights and the freedom of individuals regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, class, ability, or orientation. We hear one of the pessimistic voices in the following observation: The American diplomat Richard Holbrooke pondered a problem on the eve of the September 1996 elections in Bosnia, which were meant to restore civic life to that ravaged country. ‘Suppose the election was declared free and fair’, he said, and those elected are ‘racists, fascists, separatists, who are publicly opposed [to peace and reintegration]. This is the dilemma.’ . . . Democratically elected regimes, often ones that have been reelected or reaffirmed through referenda, are routinely ignoring constitutional limits on their power and depriving their citizens of basic rights and freedoms. (Zakaria 1997: 22)

A perception of ‘good’ or ‘evil’ is formulated in terms of national interest in many parts of the world and gives way to parochial tribalism. In this process, ‘technology will be used toward primitive ends’ (Kaplan 1994: 73). Transnational trade and legal organizations, such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, and WTO, are now replacing

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the state in claiming the rights to control the affairs of global cities and even the economies of sovereign nations. The links between politics and economics are becoming ever stronger. Therefore: Firms will be motivated not by productivity, but by profitability, for which productivity and technology may be important means, but certainly not the only ones. And political institutions, being shaped by a broader set of values and interests, will be oriented, in the economic realm, towards maximizing the competitiveness of their constituent economies. Profitability and competitiveness are the actual determinants of technological innovation and productivity growth. (Castells 1996: 81, italics mine)

This pursuit of profitability and competitiveness has propelled a new international division of labor, and more people, especially women in poor households, become workers. A large number of people in Asia immigrate, legally or illegally, to economically developed areas within and outside Asia. Cultural globalization discourse mostly focuses on global communications and worldwide cultural standardization (e.g., CocaColonization and McDonaldization; Nederveen Pieterse 1995: 45). If we adopt Clifford Geertz’s definition of culture in the sense that it ‘denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms’ (1973: 89), then culture not only helps humans define themselves but also can be the means of communication, perpetuation, and development of knowledge about human life. Globalization has no doubt removed visible barriers in the way of cultural interaction. However, the practical problems of seemingly ‘intercultural’ communication increase the problem of power issues among and between different cultures, as it shifts toward a cultural standardization of the West in the guise of multiculturalism. Capital, information, products, and people flow through the networks of information and transportation of the new global structure. These various kinds of flows ‘produce fundamental problems of livelihood, equity, suffering, justice, and governance’ (Appadurai 2000: 5). For example: Media flows across national boundaries that produce images of well-being that cannot be satisfied by national standards of living and consumer capabilities; flows of discourses of human rights that generate demands from workforces that are repressed by state violence which is itself backed by global arms flows; ideas about gender and modernity that circulate to create large female workforces at the same time that cross-national ideologies of ‘culture’, ‘authenticity’, and national honor put increasing pressure on various communities to morally discipline just these working women who are vital to emerging markets and manufacturing sites. (Appadurai 2000: 5)

All these issues are relevant if we view globalization as a very complex multidimensional process. However, one should note that many ‘discursive diasporas’ are excluded from the main-/male-stream discourses on globalization: women and children. For instance, in Empire Hardt and Negri (2000) do not discuss the labor of women in sweatshops or as migrant workers. What would it then mean to be Asian women in the age of globalization, when globalization is not strictly Asian or Euroamerican but a planetary phenomenon? What

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would it mean to ‘do’ feminist theology as Asian women? For constructing a feminist theological discourse, we must make a decision about whose opinion of globalization we adopt: Do we adopt the one by those who maintain that globalization offers new opportunities for development and accumulation of wealth for humanity? Or the other one, by those who argue that globalization makes the discrepancy between the rich and the poor greater than ever? It is time for feminists to rethink their slogan from the 1970s: ‘the personal is political’, because ‘doing’ feminist theology involves ‘being political’. In the age of globalization, however, the meaning of ‘being political’ is often distorted. We must therefore remind ourselves of the difference between ‘being political’ and ‘being politicized’: Being political is different from being directly and blatantly politicized—being made to serve interests and ends imposed by militant groups, whether in the name of heightened racial awareness, true biblical morality, androgyny, therapeutic selfesteem, or all the other sorts of enthusiasms in which we are currently awash. (Elshtain 1995: 81)

‘Being political’ in feminist theology gives rise to public awareness and responsibility for what is going on in reality, while ‘being politicized’ leads to blind extremism. As politics cannot be just politics, religion cannot stay within the ‘holy’ tower of religion. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton prophetically pointed out in 1895, ‘Let us remember that all reforms are interdependent, and that whatever is done to establish one principle on a solid basis, strengthens all’ (Stanton 1898: 11). Doing feminist theology in the age of globalization requires us to be more passionately ‘political’, because the purpose of ‘doing’ feminist theology is not, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton said of the object of human life, just ‘to carry one fragmentary measure in human progress, but to utter the highest truth clearly seen in all directions’ (1898). I understand ‘doing’ feminist theology as a theological commitment of both interpreting new reality from a feminist perspective and engaging in a common vision for a betterment of humanity that God creates (and will be creating) and is in the ongoing process of creating. ‘Interpreting’ our reality of globalization as an initial stage of ‘doing’ theology is itself a political act because the way we see reality seriously indicates whom we stand for and where we stand. Needless to say, there is no ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ reading and interpretation of reality. As a theologian, I am constantly reminded that we are to belong ‘on the same side with the weak and unrepresented’ (Said 1996: 22), on whatever ground (i.e., gender, race/ethnicity, nationality, class, orientation, or ability, and so forth). All forms of discrimination and exclusion begin with one epistemological ground: the logic of domination based on dualistic modes of thinking, which justifies, reinforces, and perpetuates the pattern and practice of domination–subjugation. In this regard, when feminist theologians try to comprehend ‘globalization’, the question of whose globalization we are looking into and whom we are standing for becomes a significant issue in doing feminist theology. Clearly, powerful homogenizing forces/nations affect and reshape the day-to-day lives of the underrepresented, and there is a fundamental contradiction between ‘placeless power and powerless places’ (Henderson and Castells 1987: 7).

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Asian women at multiple crossroads From its outset, feminism used the phrase, ‘Women are marginalized’. By this phrase, the movement meant simply that the main-/male-stream marginalizes women. However, it is becoming more and more difficult to answer the question, ‘marginal to what/whom/ where?’ The place where the hegemonic power is exercised and privileged often seems invisible or hidden. Nowadays the line between the center and the margin is hard to draw and seems to be always ‘out-there’, not ‘in-here’. On a global level, the center is usually Euro-US, white, male, middle-upper class, heterosexual, and Christian. Although each of these characteristics bears different weight and connotation, their combination describes a status with which people are mostly familiar. However, this fixed pattern of who the center is seems to be too simplistic and monolithic to reveal the tremendously complex reality where the rise of globalization affects the lives of women in different parts of the world in a very complicated way. The issue of the center and the margin, therefore, cannot be just a matter of women versus men, for instance, people of color versus white, or Asia versus the West. Asian countries, especially East Asian, have long since adopted neo-liberal capitalism to ‘catch-up’ with the West. East Asian countries and regions, such as South Korea, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan, have been causing a lot of problems in violating human rights of migrant workers, for instance. We cannot, therefore, simply say that ‘Asia’, as an umbrella ethnic category, is entirely the pure victim of the Western, dominating powers of globalization. Identifying ‘the victimizer’ and ‘the victimized’ in the age of globalization requires both the micro- and macro-approach, and at the same time we need to approach this issue from multiple angles. Asian women today embody the complexities, contradictions, and ambivalences that shaped Asian women’s identity in the past few years as they grappled with the multiple and divergent issues of globalization. I am not using the category of Asian women in a manner of ‘naturalization’ of cultural/geographical boundaries or nostalgic homogenization. Constructing the similarity of Asian women as a discursive category through homogenization when histories between them indicate otherwise is very problematic and even dangerous because doing so ignores and distorts the difference of their material reality. Therefore, whenever one uses a politics of location in a manner of all innocence and cultural purity, I would argue that such politics of location is more problematic than useful. However, a politics of location, in my case using Asia as a primary location, can be useful when one uses it to destabilize stereotypical and culturally essentialist images of a certain group of people and further to establish a geopolitical coalition. This new politics of location that I employ is therefore ‘neither simply oppositional in contesting the mainstream (or malestream) for inclusion’, but a discursive articulation in order to ‘empower and enable social action and, if possible, to enlist collective insurgency for the expansion of freedom, democracy, and individuality’ (West 1999: 257). What scholars have often overlooked in the name of communitarian harmony is this

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power of ‘collective insurgency’ among the women of Asia and also people across ethnic/ racial boundaries, who become aware of the serious problems of Euro-US-centrism, white supremacy, Western monoculturalism, or English linguicism in an era of globalization. I try to avoid a mono-factor analysis whenever I adopt a politics of location of ‘as-Asian’, because I think such mono-factor discourse has the danger of losing sight of and touch with the complexities and diversities of the material reality of the group that one tries to stand for. One of the responses to globalization in non-Western countries is reshaping and reclaiming traditional cultural/national identity. People in non-Western countries often interpret West-centered globalization as a fundamental threat to their own ethnic and national identity. The fear of assimilation to the Western norms and culture urges them to seek and reclaim their ethnic and national identity. ‘Women’s questions’ once received central attention in the arena of social reform in many non-Western countries, but have now become secondary to the issues of cultural and national identity. So the issues of cultural and national identity and women’s questions are in serious conflict. People in Asia often regard ‘feminism’ as fundamentally ‘foreign’, and consider feminists as those who destroy, at worst, or dismiss, at best, their own cultural and national ‘virtue’, only to follow the ‘individualistic’ lifestyle of the West. Asian women must often take a stance between nation and gender. In this context, it seems ‘natural’ that the so-called Asian values discourse emerged as a reactionary discourse to the threats of West-centered globalization. Those who defend Asian values start challenging Western-style civil and political freedoms, and strongly emphasize the significance of family and social harmony as uniquely Asian (Bauer and Bell 1999: 5 ff.). Lee Kuan Yew, a former prime minister of Singapore and one of the prime defenders of Asian values, argues that Asians believe that a ‘society with communitarian values where the interests of society take precedence over that of the individual suits them better than the individualism of America’ (International Herald Tribune 1991). In this Asian values discourse, binarism between Asia and the West, and communitarian Asia versus individualistic West, become unavoidable and those who emphasize Asian values exalt and idealize the traditional Asian family, which often means, in fact, a patriarchal family where men/sons are the head of the household. This Asian values discourse has created a huge controversy, especially over the issue of human rights as to whether there is a ‘universal’ notion of human rights that can be applied to the entire world. People expand this Asian values discourse to the issues of ‘universality versus particularity’ of human rights. One of the criticisms of Asian values discourse is that ‘culture is often no more than a convenient excuse deployed by authoritarian leaders to violate rights’ (Bauer and Bell 1999: 12). One of the serious problems of the nationalist/regionalist/ethnic claim for their own identity is the tendency for Asians to internalize Orientalism. Non-Western nationalism or regionalism continues to project itself in a ‘we–they’ binarism, but reverses the role of the Orient. The difference between the Orientalism by the West and the Orientalism by the ‘Orient’ is that the ‘Orient’ in non-Western nationalism becomes an

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active subject, rather than a passive object. The politics of Asian ‘authentic’ identity is not only by Asians but also projected by Western feminists, as Gayatri Spivak (1987) criticizes Julie Kristeva’s ethnocentric projection of Chinese women in Huxian Square. ‘An enormous crowd is sitting in the sun: they wait for us wordlessly, perfectly still. Calm eyes, not even curious, but slightly amused or anxious: in any case, piercing, and certain of belonging to a community with which we will never have anything to do’ (Kristeva 1977: 11). When Asian women no longer stay in this frame, people regard them as ‘inauthentic’ or ‘Westernized’ Asian women. The fascination with the image of ‘authentic’ Asian women is becoming stronger in the age of globalization and is often used as a rallying point by nationalists in Asia with their explicit nativism. In this context, contemporary nationalism in Asia tends to be more cultural than political and thus is geared toward the defense of a traditional culture, which is, in most cases, strongly patriarchal. So in the case of Japan, for instance: Cultural nationalism aims to regenerate the national community by creating, preserving, or strengthening a people’s cultural identity when it is felt to be lacking, inadequate or threatened. The cultural nationalist regards the nation as the product of its unique history and culture and as a collective solidarity endowed with unique attributes. In short, cultural nationalism is concerned with the distinctiveness of the cultural community as the essence of a nation. (Yoshino 1992: 1)

Thus, the resurgence of nationalist identity becomes very evident in the age of Westcentered globalization. For Asian culture, in the process of formulating a national identity in response to the threats of the West-centered globalization, women function as a signifier in many ways in the contrary dialectic of stasis and change in the imagining of Asia. Women become a site for mystic unity in the face of fragmentation, and a site for countering the challenge posed by ‘Westernization’. Women become the dream of a unified nation and ‘an infinite untrodden territory of desire which at every stage of historical deterritorialization, men in search of material for utopias have inundated with their desires’ (Theweleit 1987: 294). In this process of claiming national/ethnic identity, ‘women’ and the ‘land’ become identical. Like the land, women are often regarded as eternal, patient, evergiving, and essential. Nationalist claims have always accompanied claims to the soil. In Korea, for instance, the term Shin-to-bul-e, which literally means the ‘human body and the soil cannot be two’, was popularized first by the agricultural associations after the 1989 Uruguay Round, and then used as propaganda for the national identity with the phrase, ‘The most Korean is the most global’, against the ‘invasion’ of West-centered globalization. In this moment of rearticulating and reclaiming a national identity in the face of the threat of globalization, the linking of ‘Mother’ with the Land gained exceptional popularity, and ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ are used as powerful metaphors for land and soil. Women, regardless of their marital status, are portrayed as caring, evergiving, everembracing, and everenduring, following Asian/Korean virtues and the ideal image of motherhood, which are allegedly different from Western values: One of these roles given to Asian women by their families and communities is to be the upholders and preservers of ‘our culture’. So what happens if a woman wishes to

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have her own identity and wear clothes which she alone has chosen? . . . It is obvious that more than modesty is at stake. (Wilson 1989: 10)

In this ethnic and national identity politics in the age of globalization, Asian women are frozen to the tradition and culture as the keepers of ‘our culture’, protecting ‘our own’ tradition and virtue against the threat of assimilation to the West. Therefore, ‘woman, symbol of Hindu nationalism, covers real women in India, heterogeneous, various, of many castes, religions, and geographical regions’ (Natarajan 1994: 85). The tension between cultural homogenization as a desire to go back to the ‘unpolluted’ locality and cultural heterogeneity as a reality of globalization is a serious dilemma in Asia today. Most Asian countries have positioned themselves in an ironic situation in that they are afraid of ‘Westernization’, and thereby try to go back to their tradition and culture, claiming their own cultural homogenous identity. In their desire to go back to the ‘unpolluted’ past, men often portray women as bearers of ‘intact’ culture and custom. However, at the same time, they ironically want to be more ‘globalized’ and ‘heterogenized’ by trying to catch up with ‘America’, meaning the United States of America, and this desire to catch up is explicit in commercialized sectors of music, movie, technology, fashion, food, sports, lifestyle, and so on. Men in most Asian countries place women in this paradoxical situation of two conflicting national desires and women are often caught in the intersection of sexism, nativism, commercialism, capitalism, nationalism, and Asian regionalism. The Internet in an era of globalization also contributes tremendously to the production and reproduction of stereotypes of Asian women, and has been used as a means of perpetuating and globally disseminating distorted stereotypes of Asian women. Websites frequently depict Asian women as ‘ “naturally feminine”, “beauty queens”, “sexual objects”, “consumptive agents” and always an integral but subordinate component in the “normal and nuclear modern” family’ (Wong 2003). The global male gaze of the Internet eroticizes Asian women as a collective entity without individuality. In the intersection of all these complex problems, it is not difficult to imagine Asian women, who are located in this ‘uncontrollable’ paradoxical situation of globalization, saying: What kind of a self am I to myself if all I can be interested in is pleasing someone else’s demands of me? What kind of self am I if in my encounter with the other I am always the one who is named, framed, looked at? What kind of a self am I if my very ontological reality is the absolute function of the other’s gaze? What kind of a self am I that I am not able to influence the other through my self-image or persuade the other to see himself as a function of my gaze? (Radhakrishnan 2003: 55)

In this context, what globalization brings to us through the Internet is twofold, positive and negative: a space for ongoing empowerment and solidarity amongst like-minded people who are seeking a better world, and, at the same time, a space of re/production and dissemination of the essentialist homogeneity of a certain ‘ethnic’ group of people. This negative function of cyberspace contributes to dissemination and perpetuation of distorted stereotypes of Asian women. If we define an identity politics as ‘a social practice

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in which a person or persons who identify with or are identified with a recognizable group such as “women” or “gays” make arguments or take action with the purpose of affecting social, economic, or educational policy relative to that group’ (Moya 2001: 103 n. 7), what will happen when one’s multiple identities coexist or are in conflict? Is there a hierarchy of identities, or hierarchy of marginalities, such that the ‘gender’ identity, for instance, subsumes ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’ identity, or does this relationship produce an endless hyphenated identity, such as Asian–Korean–woman/man-lesbian/gay–Christian/Muslim/Buddhist/Hindu? This question of the multivalent, if not just ambivalent, nature of one’s identity becomes more and more anguished in the age of globalization.

Asian women and displacement Disparity is the the most striking feature of the world in the age of globalization (Bradshaw and Wallace 1996). An effect of the globalization of capital is increased disparity between the rich and the poor. Those who suffer the most when disparities grow are, in both industrialized and developing countries, women and children, especially single mothers. The well-known concept of the feminization of poverty captures this phenomenon. The poor people in poor countries must leave their hometown and homeland to find financial resouces for their day-to-day survival. In this regard, it seems natural that one of the significant phenomena to which economic globalization has contributed is that it makes people and capital ‘flow’. World trade implies this ‘flow’, which makes international division of labor between nations more visible. Under the neo-liberalist capitalism in economic globalization, Asian countries and regions such as Hong Kong SAR, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan (the so-called four dragons of Asia), and Malaysia and Thailand have generally used export-oriented measures, therefore requiring cheap labor for their own interests, and have become major receiving countries of migrant workers. They produce sophisticated consumption items and components, often at the leading edge of technology as well as traditional labor-intensive items, such as clothing. In this new development of a neo-liberal economy, corporations practice inhuman exploitation of migrant workers, and women migrant workers are the most vulnerable victims. The neo-liberal globalization has produced millions of displaced workers and women in Asia, especially after the Uruguay Round (1986–94). According to recent statistics provided by the Migrant Forum in Asia, there are about 30 million laboring migrants in Asia, and half of them are women (Asian Migrant Yearbook 2004). There are also millions of so-called undocumented migrant workers without visas or work permits, who are more vulnerable to multiple forms of exploitation by the receiving countries. Many lessdeveloped Asian countries, such as Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Bangladesh, become major sending countries of migrant workers. These workers are doing ‘3-D’ (dirty, dangerous, difficult) work as factory workers, plantation workers, fishery workers, construction workers, domestic workers, and sexual workers. One of the serious

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problems in many receiving Asian countries is that there are no standard employment contracts for migrant workers, and no institutionalized channels for consultation or representation on policies directly affecting them (Asian Migrant Yearbook 2004). For instance, one of the top migrant-importing countries and regions in Asia is Hong Kong SAR, and the 495,200 foreigners constituted at least 7.1 of the total Hong Kong SAR population in 2000 (Asian Migrant Yearbook 2000). One of the striking changes in the global workforce during the age of globalization is its composition. What David Coats describes as a ‘change in [the world’s] geographical centers of gravity’ defines globalization as much as the extraordinary mobility of capital (2000: 37). Since the 1970s, an increase in service sector jobs has resulted in the increased recruitment of women. It is, therefore, a big mistake if we speak about globalization ‘without center-staging women of color’ (Aguilar 2004: 16) because they are the ones who have been an important source of the global labor market as lowpaid/underpaid workers. Since globalization has encouraged industrialization in many Asian countries, women workers in Asia have been increasingly drawn into the new international division of labor. However, they are the extremely exploited class of workers due to their lower level of skill training and lack of organized representation, as well as the patriarchal value system that tends to devalue work by women. With higher productivity expected from the new working system, women workers feel more pressure, leading to greater stress and tension at the workplace. As a result of the increase in population areas due to the influx of workers, as well as an increase in the birth rate, the demand for housing and other basic amenities has increased in these areas. Part of the economic plan developed by the IMF and World Bank for many Asian countries during the late 1960s and 1970s was the idea of labor export. In this flow of labor, trafficking in Asian women emerged as one of the serious problems. Asian women become part of the globalization of the world’s economy through various forms of trafficking. In 1998, the United Nations estimated that 30 million women and children in Asia were trafficking victims (Zvekic 1998). As goods to be shipped across borders, they are ‘shipped’ all over the globe. For instance, the Philippines Department of Labor and Employment estimated that every day over 2,000 people leave their country to look for work abroad. Over 8 million Filipino/a migrant workers also work in over 186 countries and 65 of these migrant workers are women, excluding trafficked women or illegally recruited, or those who migrated for marriage (Chang 2004: 242). The victims come from poverty-stricken or conflict-ridden areas of Asian countries. There are several categories of trafficking, but the first and largest in Asia is that of the transnational sex industry, including the mail-order bride industry. Websites frequently portray an Asian woman as an ‘ideal bride’ for the man in the West. So the websites for the mail-order Asian bride market are booming with advertisements such as ‘Use these Asian bride dating sites and international marriage services to find a beautifully young and sexy Asian wife’, or ‘Asian women seeking American and European men for dating and marriage’ (CleanAsia.com 2001–8) with photos of an elderly

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Anglo man holding a young, innocently smiling Asian woman. GABRIELA Network, a US-based Philippine–US Women’s Solidarity organization, estimates that since the 1980s there are annually at least 5,000 Filipina mail-order brides in the USA alone moving through mail-order bride agencies or international matchmaking agencies, a multimillion dollar business. Those mail-order brides, classified as ‘MOBs’ in the ads in US newspapers such as the San Francisco Bay Guardian, get married to Anglo, often elderly, males as their sex partners and housemaids. Furthermore, about 25,000 Filipinas have been brought into the USA to work in various sex industries (GABRIELA Network 2005–8). The trafficking of Asian women happens within Asian countries as well. Offering Asian women and young girls ‘for sale’ to prospective husbands is becoming a serious violation of human rights in Asian countries. In China from 1991 through 1996, for instance, Chinese police freed 88,000 kidnapped women and girls from other Asian countries and arrested 143,000 people for participating in this new form of slave trade. At a fair in Singapore in 2005, there was a public exhibition of Vietnamese brides for ‘instant marriage’ with single men in China. At a trade fair booth at the Golden Mile Complex trading center in Singapore, Vietnamese women were ‘put on display’ like products (Lam 2005). In South Korea, there have been many billboards advertising marriages to foreigners, especially Vietnamese brides, and fliers are scattered on the subway that say, ‘Marry Vietnamese virgins, they will never flee. If they do, we will return your money back.’ The matching business that emerged in the late 1990s targeted South Korean farmers or physically disabled males matching to Asian women from poor countries. There were 2,000 to 3,000 matching agencies in Korea in 2005. The major reason for this phenomenon is allegedly twofold: the shortage of women and the increase of Korean women’s educational and employment opportunities, which can also be factors in the rising divorce rates (Onishi 2007). Since the 1980s, the widespread availability of ultrasound technology, through which one can screen the sex of the fetus, has resulted in the imbalance of ratio between male and female. However, this is just a surface issue. It seems to me that a more fundamental issue as to why this kind of unthinkable arrangement can be possible is the extreme poverty in many Southeast Asian countries after economic globalization. Poverty makes possible human trafficking in a benign form through ‘matching’ agencies, if not through the overt use of force. On April 21, 2006, the Chosun Daily, one of the leading Korean newspapers, published an article entitled ‘Vietnamese Virgins Coming to Korea—A Nation of Hope’, with a photo of 11 Vietnamese women whose faces appeared unconcealed (Chosun Daily). Under the photo are the words ‘Korean princes, please take me home.’ The article described a matchmaking process whereby a Korean suitor called Kim went to see his would-be brides and browsed through ‘a chorus line of 11 Vietnamese women’. The paper also wrote that ‘he [the suitor] is also shown a catalogue on CD-Rom containing just the pictures of the [150] would-be brides—just scanning them all would have taken an hour and a half.’ It says that those 150 Vietnamese women, tagged with number tickets on their breast, appeared on the computer screen, which sometimes zoomed in their faces, sometimes their

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whole bodies. According to this article, it cost US$8,000 and took 7 days and 6 nights for the Korean man to get married to a Vietnamese woman that he chose. The newspaper did not criticize this kind of act, and has been harshly protested by Korean social activists. The Vietnam Women’s Union also asked the Chosun Daily to publicly apologize for the article. On July 11, 2006, thirty Korean NGOs filed this case with the National Human Rights Commission of Korea to ban bride advertisements that violate women’s human rights and perpetuate sexism, classism, and racism (http://www.viewsnnews.com/ article/view.jsp?code=NCF&seq=4214). A list of incidents of this kind, showing an extreme violation of women’s human rights, would be endless in Japan, Hong Kong SAR, and Taiwan. Women have become a commodity of exchange. One may wonder why these Southeast Asian women seem to ‘volunteer’ and give ‘consent’ to this unbearably humiliating deal. They come from extremely poor families and take a risk to escape poverty. They are willing to try their luck even with the potential dangers. Neo-liberal globalization has destroyed the self-sufficient system of the agricultural sector, which has led to the bankruptcy of farming areas. This bankruptcy of rural areas has forced residents in farming areas to leave their homes for the cities to look for jobs, but they end up in extreme poverty and are victims of various forms of crime. The urban sector is also in trouble. In Vietnam, for example, 75 of the population is classified as farmers (Quynh 2004). According to a study on the trade in Asian women: Transnational marriages strengthen the internationalization of capital by (1) stabilizing the reproduction of cheap domestic labor in core and semiperipheral states, as well as by offering a new source of cheap labor; (2) enhancing the primitive accumulation of capital in the peripheral countries; and (3) personalizing the abstract international division of labor. (Hsia 2004: 219)

Transnational marriage for women in Southeast Asian countries is a way out of poverty and bankruptcy. Displaced women, especially from Southeast Asia, who are either in the mail-order bride pool or working as migrant workers, are driven by extreme poverty after their nation’s adoption of a neo-liberal capitalist system of globalization. Structural adjustment imposed by the First World on many Asian countries has caused the massive displacement of Asian women.

Toward a transethnic feminist theology In order to ‘do’ theology in the age of globalization, feminist theologians may have to ask a fundamental question about the role of feminist theologians in the public world. Outside of a small number of readers and audiences, few members of our own ‘guild’ may know what we do or who we feminist theologians are. Are feminist theologians mere commentators on Christianity and religions? Given the analytical tools that feminist theologians employ in their wide-ranging research, studies, writing, teaching,

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and lecturing, I have come to firmly believe that feminist theologians have a role to play in helping to decide issues in the public world as ‘the intellectual’. According to Edward Said: The intellectuals are individuals with a vocation for the art of representing, whether that is talking, writing, teaching, appearing on television. And that vocation is important to the extent that it is publicly recognizable and involves both commitment and risk, boldness and vulnerability. . . . [T]he intellectual belongs on the same side with the weak and unrepresented. (1996: 13, emphasis mine)

Feminist theologians analyze and criticize religious institutions, traditions, Scripture, and rituals from a feminist perspective. They are equipped to scrutinize the ideological sleight of hand that leads to a seemingly perfect fit between the models constructed and those ‘divinely’ sanctioned by the society or congregations in question. In this regard, feminist theologians have clearly played the role of ‘social critic’. Then what type of reality do feminist theologians expect to find represented? If the reality that feminist theologians expect to find represented and envisioned is something apart from concrete reality, what it can mean is to encourage theologians to settle their public concern by enacting the ‘divine will’ only within our religious circle. Therefore, such questions as to whether women can be ordained, for instance, can be reduced to a fundamentally religious reality, not a sociopolitical reality, because ‘the answer has everything to do with discerning and then enacting the will of God, and nothing to do with the rights of women’ (Carter 1993: 77). In this context, feminist theologies in the age of globalization need to reaffirm that the personal is not just political: the personal is religious and theological as well. What happens in the world should become a serious feminist theological issue, and this is why feminist theologies in the light of globalization should re-shape their theological identity as a ‘vocation for the art of representing’ and reaffirm that feminist theologians belong ‘on the same side with the weak and unrepresented’ (Said 1996: 13, 22), as ‘public intellectuals’ in Said’s sense. Feminist theologies in the age of globalization are to expose the ways in which people construct norms in politics, economics, culture, and religion and to display the ways people employ these norms in the contest over power, privilege, and control. Along the issue of the interrelatedness of the personal, political, religious, and theological, feminist theology in the era of globalization needs to critically wrestle with the issue of the interconnectedness between the local and the global, and the universal and the particular. Among different feminist discourses today there is a strong tendency toward compartmentalization in the name of respecting difference, locality, and particularity of one’s context. This tendency is clearly to avoid being falsely ‘universal’. However, I would argue that there is no such thing as a ‘purely particular/local’, especially when the ‘particular/local’ is inextricably interlinked to the ‘universal/global’ dimension. It is nowadays becoming harder than ever to draw the line between the particular and the universal, between the local and the global. The term glocalization, which captures this interconnectivity of the local and the global well, means that the local is ‘an aspect of globalization’ (Robertson 1995: 30). Celebrating the local and the particular should not be an excuse for ghettoization and compartmentalization of feminist theologies from various regions.

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In any fragmentation among feminist discourses, there is a danger of developing an ‘invisible discursive hierarchy’. Spivak points out that ‘international feminism’ is defined in the USA ‘as feminism in England, France, West Germany, and the part of the Third World most easily accessible to American interests: Latin America’ (1987: 134). Feminism in countries other than these is categorized as ‘Third World feminism’, which freezes ‘third world women in time, space, and history’ (Mohanty 1991: 6). So there is a discursive rankism in feminist scholarship such that feminism in the USA is the normative, the first rank, which does not need any adjective. International feminism is the second rank feminism, and Third World feminism takes up the third rank. Furthermore, those feminisms considered ‘international’ or ‘normative’ tend to denote the global, while other feminisms the ‘local’. However, all discourses are in fact ‘local’, in the sense that each discourse reflects one’s situatedness in a specific time and space. Today, however, no one has the luxury to live just ‘locally’. As we have witnessed, what is happening in one place is interlinked to what is happening in the rest of the world. This inter-affectivity shows the ‘transregional’ and ‘transethnic’ aspect of globalization. In the age of globalization, one’s ethnic identification serves only as a provisional starting point, not as what I would call a theological tribalism. In the age of globalization, feminist theologies from non-Western regions should shift their gaze from cultural contextualization, which focuses primarily on ‘ethnic/cultural’ difference from the West as an ‘ethnic’ group of people, toward geopolitical contextualization, which emphasizes the interconnectivity of our ‘destiny’ across the regions of the world. Asian feminist theology has focused more on the Asian cultural context than on geopolitical context. But now the geopolitical context of Asia and its relationship to the rest of the world needs to come to the fore to construct feminist theological discourse and alliances. Theology can no longer reside only in the castle of ‘religion’. I propose a transethnic feminist theology of Asia, where one’s ethnicity can be an entry point but where one moves beyond geographic, cultural, or ethnic boundaries and interests. This transethnic perspective requires a radical ecumenical spirit that adopts a very dialectical approach to race, ethnicity, and culture, and a fundamental awareness that the local, the particular, or the ethnic has always been shaped by the global and the global by the local. This transethnic perspective ought to produce not a blind universalism but a relational and dialectical universalism that promotes ‘shared sensibilities’ across the boundaries of class, gender, race, ethnicity, ability, or orientation without sacrificing the particular situatedness of one’s geopolitical and discursive location. This transethnic positionality that I propose further establishes a firm ground for the ‘recognition of common commitments’ and will ‘serve as a base for solidarity and coalition’ (hooks 1990: 27) amongst those who work for the betterment of our society. In this regard, transethnic feminist theology should be, first, a discourse and practice of social and geopolitical criticism. We must rearticulate and retheologize the histories of how people in different geopolitical locations and circumstances are interlinked by the spread of capitalism and the neo-liberal market. The failure to see that patterns of dominance, which prevail in global settings, are repeated in local settings can account for the failure in obtaining equality between the genders, classes, or

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racial/ethnic groups. Furthermore, any theologies that do not take into account the power play between the macro and micro level, between the dominant and the dominated would not have theological accountability. Second, transethnic feminist theology should be a discourse and practice of ‘world-travelling’ through which one acknowledges and experiences multiple locations and realities. This is not merely physical travel but engaged, discursive travel through which one is able to get politically engaged in the reality of different religions/contexts of the world. In this sense, ‘world-travelling’ is different from ‘world-tourism’, which lacks one’s political engagement in the places where one travels: Through travelling to other people’s ‘worlds’ we discover that there are ‘worlds’ in which those who are the victims of arrogant perception are really subjects, lively beings, resistors, constructors of visions even though in the mainstream construction they are animated only by the arrogant perceiver and are pliable, foldable, file-awayable, classifiable. (Lugones 1990: 402)

This world-travelling makes possible the acknowledgement of different temporalities of struggle and offers an epistemological and theological space of connections and solidarity between people of different gender, class, race, ethnicity, physical ability, or sexual orientation in the realm of materialized history and politics. Third, transethnic feminist theology should be a discourse and practice of geopolitical alliances across the globe, transcending borders between nations, cultures, and ethnicities. ‘What is crucial to such a vision of the future is the belief that we must not merely change the narratives of our histories, but transform our sense of what it means to live, to be, in other times and different spaces, both human and historical’ (Bhabha 1994: 256, italics in original). Doing theology in the age of globalization would mean world-travelling in order to know, to feel in what kind of life situation marginalized people are positioned, what kind of theological implications these new contexts of globalization have, and how feminist theology can offer a vision for a better world to the theological community and society. Feminist theologians are to play a role of ‘world-travellers’ as ‘social critics’ who raise a countervoice in existing society, envisioning an alternative reality through the lens of postkyriarchy. In the age of globalization, vulnerable groups of people in global society have emerged and reflect serious problems not just in Asia and the West but all over the world. The emerging problems are poverty, inadequate housing and living conditions, lack of access to medical care, environmental destruction, and extreme violation of basic human rights for dislocated people. These problems are inextricably interlinked from nation to nation and from region to region. This new context of globalization points to the mandate for a new approach to feminist theological issues and concerns, an approach based on a recognition of fundamental mutuality and interconnectivity of nations and regions, and a desire for transnational, transregional, and transethnic cooperation, alliances, and solidarities, rather than the balkanization or theological tribalism of feminist theological discourse and issues based on cultural, regional, or ethnic divide.

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Notes 1. Qtd. in Brown (1988: 34). 2. Paraphrase of Jean Genet by Said (1996: 110). 3. My heterosexuality, for instance, does not require me to adopt any adjective to identify who I am, such as ‘heterosexual’, simply because heterosexuality is considered the normative, while homosexuality the abnormal/deviant. In terms of sexual orientation, therefore, I am not expected to ask the ‘who-am-I’ question because I am at the center, whether or not I claim it, whereas homosexual people are ‘forced’ to keep asking themselves this fundamental question of identity due to their sexual marginality. 4. Differentiating racism/racial prejudice from other forms of social intolerance, Oliver Cox offers this analysis: ‘The dominant group is intolerant of those whom it can define as anti-social, while it holds race prejudice against those whom it can define as subsocial’ (italics mine). While the dominant group wants to assimilate the anti-social group, they refuse to let the subsocial group assimilate (1959: 321). This view offers us the fundamental nature of racism and different reactions by the dominant group toward the respective cultural or racial minority group, such as the Jewish people. It is clear that racial prejudice is based on the physical distinguishability from the dominant group, rather than cultural distinguishability. In this regard, feminists or sexual minority people are anti-social for the dominant group, while people of different physical appearance are subsocial, which can be used as a fundamental ground for a permanent divide from the dominant group. 5. Here Fukuyama attributes the origin of the notion of ‘the end of history’ to Karl Marx and then to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who interpret history as a purposeful and dialectical process. 6. Multiculturalism can be characterized as ‘the new tribalism’, in which the hegemony of ‘whiteness’ is unmarked and thereby naturalized (cf. Wallace 1994: 182–4). 7. As Edward Said’s remark related to the appropriate alignment for intellectuals. 8. The English language, in the age of globalization, is becoming more and more an unavoidable tool of power, domination, elitism, and communication across the continents, in a manner of neo-imperialism. For an extensive discussion regarding linguicism and linguistic imperialism, see Phillipson 1992. 9. I notice that many people that I have met in non-Western countries use the word ‘America’ to indicate the United States, without thinking that there are many countries that can use the word ‘America’, in both North and South America. The powerful image of the United States in the world overshadows so many countries in the Americas. 10. I have my homepage in the Korean language. I activated this homepage after I left Korea for the United States, to stay in close touch primarily with my former Korean students. To my surprise, this homepage has been used, not just as a means of communication, but more as a transgeographic space of solidarity and empowerment especially amongst women in theological studies and ministry both in and outside Korea. I come to realize that these correspondents share not only their intellectual, theological issues but their day-to-day experiences as a whole through this cyberspace. By providing an opportunity for mutual sharing of life as the marginalized, this e-space functions as a space of healing of inner wounds and pains, mutual empowering, affirming and reaffirming what they do, and ongoing solidarity with one another, which most of them, as the marginalized group in church and society, rarely find elsewhere.

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11. See http://www.trudating.com/asian-bride.html There are countless websites on Asian brides or Asian wives, such as http://www.asianeuro.com http://www.asiankisses.de and http://www.blossoms.com 12. This website has individual boxes to click for Filipino, Thai, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Taiwanese, and Malaysian women so that people can pick the nationality of woman they wish. 13. For more details, see the website of Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), http://www.catwinternational.org/factbook Founded in 1988, the CATW is a nongovernmental international organization dedicated to combatting sexual exploitation of women, especially focusing on sex trafficking. The CATW has regional networks in Asia, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Australia. CATW obtained Category II Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council in 1989. 14. This website is in Korean and there is no English version of this article. 15. Although the term ‘Third’ in Third World may mean an alternative to the First or Second Worlds, ever since the term was employed by the nonaligned nations at the Bandung Conference in 1955, one cannot deny that its connotation has been the ‘third rank’, or ‘third class’. 16. The term ‘kyriarchy’ is a neologism by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. She argues that the term ‘patriarchy’ refers only to the domination of the father/male over women and, therefore, does not reveal the multiplicative structures of domination based on gender, race, class, and ethnicity. For this reason, she goes on to suggest replacing the notion of patriarchy with kyriarchy as a key analytical category. According to her, ‘ “Kyriarchy” means the domination of the lord, slave master, husband, the elite freeborn educated, and propertied man over all wo/men and subaltern men. It is to be distinguished from kyriocentrism, which has the ideological function of naturalizing and legitimating not just gender but all forms of domination. Kyriarchal relations of domination are built on elite male property rights over wo/men, who are marked by the intersection of gender, race, class, and imperial domination as well as wo/men’s dependency, subordination, and obedience—or wo/men’s second-class citizenship’ (Schüssler Fiorenza 2000: 95).

Works Cited Aguilar, Delia D. (2004). ‘Introduction’, in Delia D. Aguilar and Anne E. Lacsamana (Eds), Women and Globalization. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Appadurai, Arjun (2000). ‘Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination’, Public Culture, 12/1: 1–19. Asian Migrant Yearbook 2000 (2000). Hong Kong: Asian Migrant Centre. Asian Migrant Yearbook 2004 (2004). Hong Kong: Asian Migrant Centre. Bhabha, Homi (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bauer, Joanne R., and Bell, Daniel A. (1999). The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bell, Daniel (1966). The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. New York: Free Press. Bradshaw, York W., and Wallace, Michael (1996). Global Inequalities. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge. Brecher, Jeremy, and Costello, Tim (1994). Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up. Boston: South End.

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Brown, Robert McAfee (1988). Spirituality and Liberation: Overcoming the Great Fallacy. Philadelphia: Westminster. Carter, Stephen (1993). The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion. New York: Doubleday. Castells, Manuel (1996). The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Chang, Grace (2004). ‘Globalization in Living Color: Women of Color Living Under and Over the “New World Order” ’, in Delia D. Aguilar and Anne E. Lacsaman (Eds), Women and Globalization. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 230–61. Chosun Daily (2006). ‘Vietnamese Virgins Coming to Korea— A Nation of Hope’, April 21. CleanAsia.com (2001–8), http://www.cleanasia.com Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), http://www.catwinternational.org/ factbook Coates, David (2000). Models of Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, qtd. in William K. Tabb (2000), ‘Turtles, Teamsters, and Capital’s Designs’, Monthly Review, 52/3 (July–Aug.): 37. Cox, Oliver (1959). Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics. New York: Monthly Review Press. Drucker, Peter F. (1986). ‘The Changed World Economy’, Foreign Affairs, 64/4: 768–91. Eisenstein, Zillah (2004). Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism, and the West. London/ New York: Zed. Elshtain, Jean Bethke (1995). Democracy on Trial. New York: Basic Books. Fukuyama, Francis (1989). ‘The End of History’, National Interest, 16 (Summer): 3–18. (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Gabriela Network USA (2005–8), http://www.gabnet.org/campaigns.php?page=2.2 Geertz, Clifford (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic. Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Henderson, Jeffrey, and Castells, Manuel (1987). ‘Techno-economic Restructuring, Socio-political Processes and Spatial Transformation: A Global Perspective’, in Jeffrey Henderson and Manuel Castells (Eds), Global Restructuring and Territorial Development. London: Sage, 1–17. hooks, bell (1990). ‘Postmodern Blackness’, in bell hooks (Ed.), Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End. Hsia, Hsiao-Chuan (2004). ‘Internationalization of Capital and the Trade in Asian Women: The Case of “Foreign Brides” in Taiwan’, in Delia D. Aguilar and Anne E. Lacsamana (Eds), Women and Globalization. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 181–229. International Herald Tribune (1991). Nov. 9–10, qtd. in J. R. Bauer and D. A. Bell (1999), The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 6. Kaplan, Robert D. (1994). ‘The Coming Anarchy’, Atlantic Monthly, Feb.: 44–77. Kristeva, Julia (1977). About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows. New York: Marion Boyars. Lam, Tran Dinh Thanh (2005). ‘Singapore Fair Puts Brides on Display’, Asia Times, April 2, available at http://www.atimes.com/atimes/southeast_asia/gd02ae01.html Lugones, María (1990). ‘Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and Loving Perception’, in Gloria Anzaldúa (Ed.), Haciendo Caras / Making Face, Making Soul. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation, 390–402. Mohanty, Chandra T. (1991). ‘Introduction: Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism’, in Chandra T. Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes

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Torres (Eds), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Moya, Paula (2001). Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles. Berkeley: University of California Press. Natarajan, Nalini (1994). ‘Woman, Nation, and Narration in Midnight’s Children’, in Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Eds), Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nederveen Pieterse, Jan (1995). ‘Globalization as Hybridization’, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (Eds), Global Modernities. London: Sage, 45–68. Onishi, Norimitsu (2007). ‘Korean Men Use Brokers to Find Brides in Vietnam’, New York Times, 22 Feb. Quynh, Nguyen Trung, et al. (2004). ‘Policy and Measures to Promote ICT Application and Deployment for Business Development in Rural Areas in Vietnam’. Technical Report on the Progress of Project. Ministry of Science and Technology, December. Phillipson, Robert (1992). Linguistic Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Radhakrishnan, R. (2003). Theory in an Uneven World. Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell. Robertson, Roland (1995). ‘Glocalization: Time–Space and Homogeneity–Heterogeniety’, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (Eds), Global Modernities. London/ Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 25–44. Said, Edward (1996). Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Vintage. Schreiter, Robert J. (2004). The New Catholicity: Theology between the Global and the Local. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elizabeth (2000). Jesus and the Politics of Interpretation. New York: Continuum. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1987). ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Ed.), In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London: Methuen. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady (1898). ‘Introduction’, in Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Revising Committee (Eds), The Woman’s Bible. New York: European. Theweleit, Klaus (1987). Male Fantasies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wallace, Michele (1994). ‘Multiculturalism and Oppositionality’, in Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren (Eds), Between Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Studies. New York/ London: Routledge. Waters, Malcolm (1995). Globalization. London/New York: Routledge. West, Cornel (1999). ‘The New Cultural Politics of Difference’, in Simon During (Ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader, 2nd edn. London/New York: Routledge. Wilson, Amrit (1980). Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain, London: Virago, qtd. in Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989), Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wong, Loong (2003). ‘Colour-Blind and Exclusive: The Internet and Asian Women’, available at http://www.mngt.waikato.ac.nz/ejrot/cmsconference/2003/proceedings/exploringthemeaning/Wong.pdf accessed Feb. 14, 2007. Yoshino, Kosaku (1992). Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A Sociological Inquiry. London: Routledge. Zakaria, Fareed (1997). ‘The Rise of Illiberal Democracy’, Foreign Affairs, 76/6: 22–43. Zvekic, U. (1998). Criminal Victimization in Countries in Transition. UNICRI publication 61. Rome: United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute.

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Further Reading Audinet, Jacques (2004). The Human Face of Globalization: From Multicultural to Mestizaje. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Benhabib, Seyla (2002). The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Friedman, Susan Stanford (1998). Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. John, Mary E. (1996). Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory, and Postcolonial Histories. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2003). Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Narayan, Uma (1997). Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism. New York: Routledge. Spelman, Elizabeth V. (1988). Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon Press.

chapter 5

gy nocen tr ic th e a l ogy of ta n tr ic hi n du ism: a m editation u pon the dev i  neela bhattacharya saxena

Introduction Can a woman ‘theologize’ from the space within, the inner sanctum, the nowhere of being, and look at the world of texts from her own privileged position to examine how these texts construct and disseminate particular and provisional truths, to erase in the process, the hegemony of the masculine universal? Theology after all has traditionally been the purview of a certain kind of men, a small minority even among the male of the species. Shall we call such an act a Gynocentric assertion, a way of proclaiming the ‘pregnant nothingness’ of a primordial image of the Feminine Absolute? The Great Goddess of Indic traditions who speaks through the voice of a woman in The Rigveda, pronouncing she is the primordial Vac, or Word. One who later appears in myriad forms enveloping and saturating the Indic horizon with innumerable forms of the Devi, who inhabits especially women’s bodies and their generative power? Her knowledge resides deep within the human body for those who recognize her within their own finite existence that can potentially free us from all forms of oppression—internal as well as external. How can we talk of such an absolution, such liberation, in a world where the mark of the feminine has been designated as mere matter, the dust on the road to be trampled on by men on their transcendentalizing adventure into a world beyond, when centuries of androcentric theologies have made every effort to write women out of all religious discourse? In the Indic traditions, though, that effort never quite fully succeeded. Despite ascetic denials that permeate some Indic and Western

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orientalist traditions of scholarship, India has lived by the embodied vision of the Goddess while definitive patriarchal theologies have triumphed in most of the world’s religious ways. It is not easy to comprehend such matter, the maternal materiality, the matrix of our being whose at-one-ness with the world asserts her transcendence. She is the maternal underground that threatens the unity of the self, a concept so dear to many androcentric ways of the world; human beings awaken to their full potential once the pretensions of the subject find their final dissolution in her. How can women, especially of the ‘Third World’, marked by Western theories, even feminist ones, as mute victims, speak of such a divinity? Until very recently that voice was pushed to the margins of discourse as inauthentic, self-deluded, and too much under the hegemony of its own patriarchy to understand what feminist liberation might mean. Quiet voices around the world are now taking to the podium, to the streets, and breaking the sometimes chosen, sometimes imposed silence of the ages, to pronounce, to theorize, and to re-imagine the world—a new Axial world that has the promise of a radical freedom that may rediscover in the earth, the here and now, the sure ground of our being, a familiar metaphor for the transcendent. I plan in this essay to contribute to what Raimon Panikkar calls a dialogical dialogue, by speaking in the voice of a Shakta (Shakti worshipper) woman who grew up with the symbol of an all powerful female deity—Kali, the presiding center of the Tantric tradition. Tantric Advaita, or non-dual thinking, and meditation practices permeate Indic traditions, making the world itself saturated with the spirit of the Divine Feminine. Let me first offer my description of this often maligned, and susceptible to misunderstanding, spiritual path: Tantric meditation upon the Devi that finetunes the entire being of the practitioner awakens her to the vibrant and subtle Shakti—the energy source of all that animates the universe—within her own body. This awakening at once annihilates the limited self bound by conditioned thinking and opens a window into the infinite potentiality that only an encounter with death, symbolized by cremation ground imagery of Kali, can inaugurate. I will present this Gynocentric core of the Indic tradition within the larger context of Hinduism and its long, complex history. Later I will show how pluralist postmodern worldviews are more congenial to understanding polymorphous Hinduism(s) as opposed to absolutist Western perspectives influenced by imperial, missionary, and reductively rationalist ideas that misread the Great Goddess as a remnant of primitive religiosities, needing the light of masculine reason of Western Enlightenment. I will then locate the Indian context in a fast-changing world of global commerce that has the potential to impinge upon human diversity by imposing its own hegemonic vision. However, I would like to imagine a positive side effect of globalization—a new global consciousness strengthened by women’s voices and spiritual convictions that would possibly herald what has been proclaimed as the second Axial age, opening up intercultural dialogues for the benefit of all—women, men, and the planet as a whole.

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The Indic context and Gynocentric thealogy To articulate the Indic context, it is important to set the parameters of my discourse, especially because there is no ‘monologic/monotheistic’ tradition in India that can be spoken of in relatively homogenous terms. In the Indic dharma traditions—that consisted of early Vedic Brahminism and its later development into theistic ‘Hinduisms’, different articulations of historic Buddha’s teachings, Jainism, and Sikhism and myriad other folk practices—these paths have traditionally been regarded as ways of reaching the final goal of liberation, known as Moksha in Hinduism and Nirvana in Buddhist terminology. It is important to assert that all retain a Tantric substratum; and in their practice all have created powerful images of the Goddess. It is within this wider Indic context that we must locate the Shakta worldview that eloquently asserted the Divine Feminine as the manifest aspect of Brahman. My project throughout also includes a wresting of the tradition from androcentric hermeneutics, both Indian and Western, that have either been unable to ‘see’ the Gynocentric matrix or consciously resisted its radical potential for real women. This matrix of the Indic tradition is Shakti, the source, energy, force, the Feminine Divine; and for the Shaktas who emphasize the primacy of the Goddess over all, she is the be-all and end-all of our existence. Gynocentric Tantric thinking overcomes the problem of a perceived duality of spirit and matter to argue that the fundamentally polycentric Indic dharma traditions are sustained by Shakti, force or energy that is imagined as the Divine Feminine. The tradition thus creates dancing dualities of feminine and masculine principles and a strategic duality of the lover and beloved so that the flavorful Rasa, or tasting and sensuous aspect of the Divine, can be retained even when the transcendent function of the ultimate non-duality of the Devi is asserted. My particular interest is in articulating the Shakta way, the strategically asserted supremacy of the Divine Feminine in both its bhakti, or devotional, aspect and more comprehensive Tantric thought and practices. So the ‘theology’ I will speak of is the always already feminine ‘thealogy’ rooted in that tradition. I claim that this matrix, the Shakti substratum, saturates the Indic tradition despite the social superstructure of patriarchy, which can be and has been tapped for feminist purposes. While feminist rage and consciousness against patriarchy are useful tools for freeing oneself from an uncritical acceptance of societal structures that often offer a false sense of security to some women, it is imperative that we theorize patriarchies with a more nuanced understanding lest we normalize patriarchy in the very process of universalizing it. Thinking about the need for affirming symbols of the Divine Feminine by feminist theologians, we must recognize that one problem that Indian women, feminist or not, do

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not have to worry about is the lack of female symbols of the Divine. In fact, they are too numerous to catalogue. Every village has its own little goddesses and they resist their subsumption under what can be named as an elitist unitary Great Goddess, as Gayatri Spivak argues in ‘Moving Devi’. In the process of looking at them, we might discover the meaning of the Goddess in our contemporary world. Carol Christ articulates that hope: Whatever God the Mother and the Goddess may have meant in ancient cultures, today God the Mother and the Goddess symbolize the emerging power of women, the celebration of the powers of the female body, and an acceptance of humankind’s rooting in nature and finitude. . . . As long as Goddess remains unspeakable, female power is not fully expressed. . . . Goddess is a more clear validation of the legitimacy and autonomy of female power. (1989: 249)

The Indian notion of Shakti, feminine force, can be translated as power if we recognize its complex formulation as an inner and subtle energy source, not brute power over others. The spirit/matter, transcendent/immanent, logos/mythos dualism needs to be placed under erasure for this has plagued traditional theologies that have usually relegated women to the world of mute matter. Carol Christ in a recent essay interprets the word ‘logos’ when she claims it for her ‘thealogy’: ‘The word thealogy comes from the Greek words thea, or goddess, and logos, or meaning’ (2002: 79). She also argues against the philosophical meaning of the word ‘immanence’ because it: does not do full justice to the meaning of the Goddess. The word ‘immanent’ was devised as the other half of the polarity ‘transcendent–immanent’. It is generally understood to mean that the divinity is nature, denying that nature is a unified living organism (as is alleged in the ‘Gaia hypothesis’) or ‘person’ who also interacts with individuals in the world and can be addressed in prayer and ritual. (87–8)

This particular problem does not appear in the Indic tradition since nature is never seen as absolutely separate from the divine; but nature/Goddess is not a ‘person’ either; she is adored by her devotees in many anthropomorphic forms but as trees, rivers, mountains, and animals as well. For the Hindu of whatever denomination, consciousness of Shakti as female power is extensive and it manifests in various forms in the entire subcontinent. Samjukta Gupta explains the concept of Shakti: Sakti cannot be adequately translated by a single word. The concepts of power, potency, and potentiality are all present. . . . Everything in the world, from souls to stones, is an aspect of sakti because it is a manifestation and effect of divine power. . . . Thus, she is the supreme active godhead and wields her divine power through a myriad of secondary powers or goddesses, each of whom represents one special divine area of cosmic activity. (2000: 93–4)

There is a deep connection between bhakti and Shakti. Bhakti mode allows us to surrender to the divine so that Shakti can awaken. Once awakened in human consciousness it may manifest in forms that might not appear compatible with modern notions of liberty. Vasudha Narayanan writes:

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Bhakti is devotion, Shakti is power. In bhakti there is both surrender and mutual love, in shakti there is vigor and energy; in both there is potency. Both bhakti and shakti are major components in female religiosity in the many Hindu traditions. Paradoxically, in some Hindu theologies surrender and devotion lead to power. (1999: 25)

In the Bhakti movement of the medieval period, the Brahminic mode of knowledge (JnanaYoga) was challenged by folk religiosities that asserted the emotional component in the knowledge of ultimate reality. The experiential bhakti theology of relationality to the divine, as the image of the lover or baby Krishna denotes, was perhaps mainly imagined by women saints such as Mira and Akka Mahadevi, but this path was equally attractive to men. The origin of the word bhakti is saturated with affect and an intentional dualism of lover and beloved; it offers a solution to problems of ontology and philosophy that typically flatten the ever-changing diversity of life into abstract monist sameness: The term bhakti is usually translated as ‘devotion’, but its meaning is more complex than our English equivalent would suggest. Bhakti comes from the verb root bhaj. In its earliest usage, bhaj means to divide or share, as one divides and partakes of the sacrificial offerings. Bhaj can also denote experiencing something, as one enjoys food or relishes music. It signifies waiting upon someone, as an attendant serves a king. It can mean to make love in a very corporeal sense and to adore in a more disembodied, spiritual manner. As its Indian adherents define it, bhakti partakes of all these shades of meaning. It is a way of participating or sharing in divine being, however that is understood, of tasting and enjoying a god’s presence, of serving and worshipping him, of being as intimate as possible, of being attached to him above all else. (Davis 1999: 33)

Indic philosophical history of dualism and non-duality While bhakti tradition emphasizes relational duality, hierarchical dualism between spirit and matter is of another order. Here I sketch a brief philosophic history of the problem of hierarchical dualism and explain the complicated term Tantra. It is important to realize that in India, the dual nature of the manifest Divine is universally acknowledged and no exclusively male god ever becomes too powerful. Even when the Kashmir Shaivas emphasize the Shiva aspect, there is no access to quiescent Shiva without the grace of the Goddess. Vaishnvas (Vishnu and Krishna worshippers) adore Radha, Krishna’s beloved, and wish to imitate what is known as the mode of Radha (Radha bhava), the best way to reach Krishna. The philosophical tradition on the other hand created a sort of hierarchical duality that acquired a gendered terminology, and in its ascetic emphasis relegated

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human women to the world of flesh and temptation that mires men into Samsara, the cyclical world of maya, mistakenly interpreted as illusion, from which one must escape. Tantras resisted this tendency. In my book In the Beginning IS Desire (2004), I have described a Samkhya–Yoga–Tantra continuum that solves this dualism: the history of philosophy in India indicates an ancient system of thought called Samkhya, which in conjunction with Patanjali’s later articulation of another old practical notion of Yoga in Yogasutra created a wonderful substratum upon which Tantric philosophical ideas were articulated. Samkhya thought posited a fundamental duality between inactive but conscious Purusha (Person) and an active but unconscious Prakriti (Nature) that are roughly translated as Spirit or Witness and Matter or Prima Materia. That radical dualism and the subsequent effort to come to terms with/overcome/deconstruct it has been an integral part of Indian philosophical history. This Samkhya root has permeated Indian thought, whether Buddhist or Brahminical, ascetic or nonascetic. While the ascetic traditions such as Patanjali’s Yogasutra and some forms of Advaita Vedanta have emphasized the ascetic mode and therefore attempted to separate the Spirit from Matter, leading to misogyny and other world-denying ways, the Tantric tradition is able to overcome that duality by seeing in Samkhya Prakriti the active and conscious force that is the Great Goddess without whom Purusha/Shiva remains an inert dead body, or shava. C. Mackenzie Brown, discussing a Shakta text, the Devi Bhagavata Purana, which explicitly rejects the Samkhya view of Prakriti as unconscious matter, writes: The Sakta school perceived even more in the idea of sakti, making the female force dominant over the male counterpart. In the process, a series of feminine concepts, including maya and prakrti, . . . came to be seen as fully conscious, living forces. With prakrti becoming a goddess, or even identified with the Goddess, Devi, the old Samkhyan dualism between conscious spirit-person and an active but insentient material force was basically transcended ‘from the ground up’. (1990: 30–1)

The immanence/transcendence problem inherent in these formulations is not an easy matter to solve, but we can see how androcentric devotees of the sky gods have a difficult time equating divinity with whatever they named as bodies. The hunger for transcendence is quite understandable given the precarious nature of life itself. However, the male priesthood and philosophers made God, Being, Purusha, Shiva in their own perceived image and projected a ‘pure male spirit’ onto human males, radically subordinating everything posited as impure and female, even when identifying the Absolute as pure spirit beyond gender. What is interesting about Kali-centered, non-dualist Tantric thought is that it does not bother with the neutral Brahman and its masculinist assumptions. The idea of a neutral Brahman in the form of pure consciousness of Shiva is a projection of a human, and often male, desire to escape the body, and thus it retains the elements of a reductive dualism. Kali’s supremely female body in Tantra becomes the ultimate site of liberation, thus, strategically deconstructing the spirit/transcendence bias.

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Tantras What are the Tantras? As opposed to the popular view of a religion of sexual excesses and antinomianism, or about obtaining occult power over others (which do, however, appear in some forms), Tantras are a body of texts and a method (sadhana) of realizing or actualizing the Upanishadic non-duality. I have engaged in detail with the Tantric tradition in my above-mentioned book; here I will quote a few scholars to point toward the complexity of the tradition. John Woodroffe explains the root meaning of the term: ‘According to the derivation of “Tantra” from Tan, to spread, Tantra is that [Scripture] by which knowledge Jnana is spread’ (1994: 34). Gayatri Spivak, although unsympathetic to the tradition, explains the role of the body in Tantra: Theoretically, the body that tantra wants to engage is a representation of the universe, not the text and instrument of affects. ‘The universe’ is most often understood as a sexually differentiated force field. The body engages in sex and comes to jouissance and has the skill to experience it [mahāsukham] as advaita transcendence. This skill is tantra. (2001: 146)

In Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening, Daniel Odier writes, ‘Returning the senses, desires, passions, emotions, and sexuality to the spiritual being is the most profound and the most audacious inner adventure ever imagined by these Buddhist, Hindu, and Kashmiri Tantric masters’ (2001: 9). While theories and practices within the Tantric tradition vary and its history is too complex and widespread to be recounted here, what is most important for me is its Gynocentric emphases that overcome the body/spirit dichotomy. Miranda Shaw sees the connection between Hindu Shaktism and Buddhist Tantra in this regard: Tantric Buddhism and Saktism (goddess-worship) share an emphasis upon female deities and women as embodiments of female divinity. Both movements display a tendency to see the universe as generated by female creativity, a recognition of femaleness as ontologically primary and maleness as derivative and dependent, and a deference to women in social and ritual contexts. . . . The confluence of Buddhism and Saktism is such that Tantric Buddhism could properly be called ‘Sakta Buddhism’. (1994: 32–3)

The presiding deity of the Shakta Tantric tradition of Bengal that I am a part of is the terrifying Goddess Kali. While famous Kali worshippers are men, it should be emphasized that in this Gynocentric world of Shaktas, as Ajit Mookerjee says, ‘Women and men are not at war, but through their collective uniqueness realize the feminine fullness of the universe’ (1988: 27, emphasis mine). Kali is the supreme Brahman for the Shaktas for whom this strategically gendered Ishvari or Thea figure forcefully marks the dissolution of the body/spirit dichotomy. While in Shaiva and Vaishnava emphasis is on Shiva or Vishnu and their ‘consorts’ are seen as their Shaktis, in the Shakta thought, Kali is supremely alone and is no one’s consort. She creates

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Shiva as a part of her creative play. All over India the figure of Kali appears as the fiercest aspect of the Divine Feminine. In Shakta philosophy she takes the place of the ineffable Brahman. Madhu Khanna writes about the Goddess’ autonomy even over the male trinity of Hinduism: One of the most distinctive features of the Sakta goddess is that she is no longer idealized as merely a wife of the male god, but is conceived of as his creator. . . . Several sources reiterate that the power and strength of the holy trinity comes from the goddess alone. . . . From a purely Sakta perspective, the goddess not only contains the functions of the trinity but also eclipses the supremacy of the quiescent Siva and the trinity. She is a complete representation of all the attributes of Siva. (2002: 42)

Kali’s iconography of a dark and naked body with a lolling tongue and sword-wielding arms may suggest an aggressive sexuality and violence as she appears standing atop Shiva wearing a garland of severed heads, but for the devotee, she is the mother of the universe, beloved by the bhakta and internalized by the Tantric sadhaka, or practitioner. While in recent and especially in Western books about Tantra, her sexuality is emphasized, the traditional Kali lover is enamored of her death-wielding aspect. S/he must face the annihilation of the small self in the symbolic fires of the cremation ground—Kali’s preferred playground—before the great self can awaken to its full potential. Kali is superficially seen as a devouring and violent Goddess; she also creates anxiety in many psychoanalyzing readings as she is seen as a castrating Goddess (Kripal 2000). Such reductive readings often come from Freudian interpretations that are fundamentally androcentric and incapable of understanding a radically Gynocentric path to freedom. There is also a tendency in quick readings of these traditions that emphasize the notself experience to ask women to sacrifice their egos when women need strong egos to fight sexism. This is a serious misunderstanding. I can say that once the devotee is devoured by Kali, s/he has nothing to fear. It is also important to recognize that ego in the Indian tradition is seen as hypermasculine: the only mark of the demonic where there is no ultimate evil, only the veil of ignorance. The witness within arises as a result of the Kali lover’s total submission to the Goddess; once the sword of Kali severs the head that is too full of ‘himself ’, the soul of the watcher arises. Mystical traditions of the world speak of such a watcher. I would say that once a Kali lover merges in Kali as ‘pregnant nothingness’, s/he emerges as a no-body and is, hence, free from the constraints that the limited self imposes. It is also a different kind of subjectivity that is not dependent on ego-centered assertion of the unity of the self. The fear of desire in androcentric assertions arises from the fear of annihilation and a possible death of the male ego. As I have written in In the Beginning IS Desire, the role of an ego-effacing desire is central to the Tantric tradition, and when the desired goal is the annihilation of the ego, there is no fear of desire, which is co-terminous with Shakti in her Kamakhya—One Whose Name is Desire, another epithet of Kali—aspect. The Tantric Sri Yantra, an aniconic geometric symbol of the Devi, emphasizes the creative manifestation of Divine Desire. However, not to confuse this divine desiring energy that turns toward her playmate in a profound reaching out to the other in complete

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plenitude, we must separate it from the appetitive and possessive aspect of a desire that seeks out the other to fulfill a lack in the self. Odier quotes the Vijnanabhairava Tantra: ‘Desire exists in you as in everything. Realize that it also resides in objects and in all that the mind can grasp. Then, in discovering the universality of desire, enter its radiant space.’ He goes on to explain the objectless desire of a Tantrika where each being, even inanimate ones like the falling leaf, is a subject that desires. In such a vibrant universe, one does not consume the other but ‘enters into an extremely subtle and refined relationship with objects’ (2001: 46–7).

A textual history of the Devi At this point, I will look at a couple of texts where this Gynocentric tradition takes its textual shape. If we time-travel to the fifth century ce, when the Great Goddess reappears on the Indic scriptural horizon, and sit together with the old texts in the way of the Upanishad, we may hear sruti, or the heard wisdom, once again of a text such as The Devi Mahatmya. While scholars debate whether an old Goddess was Sanskritized or a suppressed Goddess was reclaimed, the fact remains that since the very early days, the Devi was worshipped in the subcontinent regardless of whether she appears as a supreme deity in Brahminic texts. Scholars who trace her tracks show that she was very much a part of an early theistic impulse as it was being crystallized in the Indic mind. C. Mackenzie Brown writes: Hymns to goddesses in the late portions of the great Mahabharata epic and in the Harivamsa (c. ad 100–300) reveal the increasing importance of female deities in Brahminical devotional life. . . . The reemergence of the divine feminine in the Devi–Mahatmya was thus both the culmination of centuries-long trends and the inspirational starting point for new investigations into the nature of feminine transcendence. (1990: 2)

When she does appear in The Markandeya Purana, in the section known as Chandi or The Devi Mahatmya, she proclaims her preeminence: I resemble in form Brahman . . . From me emanates the world Which has the Spirit of Prakriti and Purusha I am empty and not empty I am delight and non-delight I am knowledge and ignorance I am Brahman and not Brahman.

This text recounts the tale of male demons and their destruction by the Great Goddess and traces its lineage through the Devi Sukta or the Vac Sukta in The Rigveda, mentioned earlier, and also connects with the Samkhya Prakriti to establish itself as a canonical text for the Shaktas.

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What is curious about the Indic tradition is that while definitive patriarchal deities begin to triumph in other parts of the world, and older goddess traditions eclipse under them, the Great Goddess becomes prominent in later Indian history. By the time we reach the second millennium ce, innumerable Tantric and Shakta texts appear all over India. The Kashmir Shaiva tradition is saturated with her presence, while Sri Vidya tradition in South India is deeply Shakta in nature. A powerful tenth-century thinker such as Abhinavgupta, a Kali worshipper, refers to twelve different forms of Kali (Mookerjee 1988: 85–8), who is understood as the ‘self-luminous conscious energy’ that remains unaffected through her many manifestations. C. Mackenzie Brown examines in depth the Devi–Bhagavata, whose initial composition began in the eleventh or twelfth centuries and shows how: in contrast to the Devi Mahatmya, [it] is far more studied, far more self-conscious in its deliberations on the nature of the Goddess. Certainly the Devi–Bhagavata wishes to show that the ultimate reality is truly ultimate, but it also feels compelled to establish that this reality is, or at least most adequately conceived of, or apprehended as, feminine. (1990: 3)

Based on the better known Vaishnava text, the Bhagavata Purana, it wrests the preeminence of the Devi from Vishnu in cleverly marked ways that show how the redactor is a self-conscious Shakta worshipper. While as feminist readers, we are put off by occasional derogatory remarks about human women, clearly an ascetic construction marked by male anxiety, a close reading such as Brown’s shows a more Tantric orientation in the valorization of the woman’s body. In the story about the Jeweled Island (Mani Dvipa), the Great Goddess transforms the male trinity into beautiful young women ‘forcing them to abandon all their pride in their supposed uniqueness. Combined with the shock of their sexual transformation, they could only doubt the substantiality of their own existence, including their sexual identities’ (207). They enjoy their female forms as the sakhis, or female friends, of the Goddess in that island paradise for a hundred years. Shiva’s adoration shows how the text vindicates the female body when he abandons his desire to regain his male form, saying: There is not the slightest such desire for me, having attained the form of a young woman in your presence. How can manhood lead to happiness, if it is unable to lead to the sight of your feet? Always let this glory of mine spread in the three worlds, O Mother, that I became acquainted with your lotus feet having received the form of a young woman. (208)

There are many such stories including Buddhist ones that challenge masculinist assumptions about their primacy, and in our efforts to wrest the tradition for contemporary women, such stories help rend the veil of ignorance that clueless men and deluded women, who have interiorized their inferiority, suffer from. In major Tantric texts such as Sakti–Sangama Tantra, the role of the female guru is preeminent.

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Mahanirvana and Kularnava Tantras exhort reverence for all women as fundamental requirements for Tantric sadhana. The notorious practice of sati is expressly forbidden by Shiva, the speaker of Mahanirvana Tantra: ‘Do not burn the woman with her husband. Because woman is your own form [swarupa], her body appearing in the world in your concealed form, if she, under delusion, climbs the funeral pyre, she will surely suffer hell’ (Tarkaratna 1991: 119, my translation). The playful dialogue between Shakti and Shiva in these texts is meant to illumine the human devotee. In some of these texts, Shiva is the speaker and in others Shakti takes up that role. In Mahanirvana Tantra, Shiva addresses her as ‘Adya Parama Kalika’, the primordial and ultimate Kali, and the text describes Mahakala (another name of Shiva), or the Great Time that withdraws all into himself, but she devours Mahakala and hence she is Mahakali (25). The word Maha, or great, is often added to denote a supreme form among many.

Other Goddess traditions and non-duality It may be fruitful to see other traditions in this context to show the relevance of non-dual paths within a broader feminist theology. Thomas McEvilley in The Shape of Ancient Thought sees the goddess connection in the monistic Greek philosophy. Talking about the Philosophic Goddess, he describes Parmenides’ goddess of doxa—Ananke, who like Mahamaya the great deluder (another name of the Devi), makes the illusion work and is at once beyond it—who ‘tells Parmenides that she will teach him first perfect truth and then “opinions in which there is no true conviction” ’ (2002: 55). Shakta tradition too speaks of her as the one who deludes as well as awakens her devotee to her true nature. Tantras see maya as her creative principle and not as the mark of an unreal world of phenomena, simply an illusion according to some readings of Shamkara’s Advaita Vedantic philosophy. McEvilley gives an elaborate account of the dual goddesses of Greece and India but his account shows, when abstracted by philosophers, that she is made to serve masculinist/logocentric purposes: ‘On the one hand, she is the mother of Eros, the spirit of life, and the source of the world illusion through her bewitching dance; on the other, she is the wielder of the sword of reason (the Eleatic elenchus, or trial by reason), enforcer of the law of pure being, which devours all forms’ (56). In Tantric tradition, there is a vigorous opposition to this transcendentalizing and form-devouring mode. The fact remains that non-dualism of both Greek and Indic traditions proclaim the power of the feminine principle over both life and death, at once transcendent and immanent, while the Western monotheistic traditions of an absolute transcendent deity suppresses her within the clearly named male God who appropriates her generative function but remains utterly outside the created and fallen world.

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In order to assert the difference of the Shakta Indic tradition from the Greek logocentric turn/reading, let’s coin a different word, or say, theorize a sort of Gynology— perhaps an oxymoron and therefore deconstructive of logocentric hegemony—where neither Theos nor Logos retains its primacy. Questioning the Western truncated reading of logos as ‘reason’, let’s use a more integrated sacred word, Vac, the creative energy of sound that is one aspect of the all encompassing Goddess herself. If theology is the discourse on the nature and attributes of God, and thealogy a feminist insertion within that very tradition, then, can we have a Gynology of Indic tradition that takes into account the a-theology and non-theology of early Brahminism and Buddhism? This can also explain the strategic appearance of Ishvara/i or Theos/Thea at a later time to move away from the apophatic ‘not this, not this’ of the way of knowledge. But in this dialogical dialogue, I use the word thealogy in solidarity with scholars such as Carol Christ to assert the primacy of the Goddess in the lives of Hindu women; however, the lines are not as clearly demarcated in the Indic tradition since the woman’s mode of being was highly prized even by men who sought the joy of union with the Divine. I must also refer to the impressive work done by French feminist thinkers such as Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva to articulate, to name, and to re-instill the Feminine within Western philosophical tradition. In addition, new generations of women theologians have begun to look critically at this voluminous oeuvre of foremothers; some are theorizing feminist theology itself as Rebecca Chopp does in Horizons in Feminist Theology. In my textual dialogue with scholars, I find myself more in tune with those who want to wrest and rename the tradition for women than with those who want, for good reason, to reject religion and men altogether. I also find exclusivist lesbian spiritualities, although fascinating and illuminating as far as intellectual exercises go, rather constrictive and of limited application. I am interested in a feminism that speaks to the hopelessly heterosexual women, to those women who want to live a life of dignity with their men and relate to the Divine in a nonsexist milieu to strengthen their journey through life. A radical move for me is to invite more and more voices, both theoreticians and practicing lay people to reread tradition in an interpretive move to establish and emphasize those ways that value women as they see themselves in the twenty-first century. That move recognizes the plurality of women and does not try to compartmentalize ‘woman’ in some abstract homogeneity and a-historicity of an oppressed group.

Western misreading of Hinduism and contemporary relevance In order to assert contemporary relevance of this vast Gynocentric tradition, we need to present a critical reading of how Hinduism in general and Hindu women’s voices about their goddesses in particular have fared in dominant scholarships. When I look at the world of theology and the challenge that feminist theology has posed in the Western

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world, I recognize the groundswell that the entry of feminist theoreticians of religion has brought about in the field. Even a cursory glance at the range of this work shows that in the past few decades powerful feminist scholarship has radically revamped the field of religion, especially Jewish and Christian. Feminist theologians have also won a victory over the supposed illegitimacy of ‘confessional’ theology vis-à-vis ‘true’ objective scholarship. Practicing Buddhist scholars and Muslim feminist voices have also begun to find their way in the global arena, but I find it quite extraordinary that Hindu women’s voices are conspicuous by their absence. In general, Hinduism, by itself a tremendously plural world, is rarely a contributor in these dialogues. It remains mainly within the objectivist purview of male Western scholars, although recent scholarship by a new generation of women scholars has begun to bridge the gap. Still, they remain within the disciplinary boundary of Indology, and have not crossed into a broader dialogue with feminist theology. Rita Gross admonishes Western feminists for not yet facing the challenge of religious pluralism: ‘Theology of religions’ is a relatively new term that has to do with noting the diversity among the religions of the world and developing conceptual tools for relating with and understanding that diversity. Critical to an adequate theology of religions is that it be knowledgeable about and conversant with the great Asian Wisdom traditions; merely raising one’s gaze to include other monotheisms does not really constitute serious encounter with religious diversity. To date, theology of religions has been largely a Christian activity, but only because religious diversity is more theologically challenging to monotheisms than to non-monotheistic religions. (2002: 61)

Here I feel compelled to refer to the stock question hurled at the Hindus: why are Indian women oppressed when there are these great goddesses? It has also been argued that powerful goddesses are used to justify real women’s oppression and the very recognition of women’s power has led to male control over that power. All these are only partial truths in a complex web of at least four thousand years of history, made more complicated by Western hegemonies of the past few centuries that used the very idiom of women’s oppression to create an ideology of the white man’s burden to save non-white women from their men. Many Third World feminists, including Chandra Mohanty, claim that the very construction of an oppressed Third World woman in discourse creates the self-identity of a First World free woman. While the reality of economic and social oppression of Indian women has been certainly true, it is too simplistic to mark all Indian women of all time as eternally oppressed. Without denying the reality of struggle against dominating impulses of every kind, I distrust the discourse of an oppressed Third World woman. Madhu Kishwar, a leading activist for women’s rights, argues in ‘A Horror of “Isms”: Why I Do Not Call Myself a Feminist’ (1999: 268–90) about the complex realities of India and cultural and historical forces that shape specific movements. She contends that often Indian women’s

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refusal to follow Western feminism or to identify with ‘extreme individualism’ is seen as ‘a product of lower self-esteem even when a woman is not facing problems or oppression as a consequence of such beliefs’ (272). Also, the idea of liberation is different in different cultures. The wholesale construction of oppressed women is a consequence of de-historicized ideologies that ignore intersections of imperialism, neo-colonialism, and poverty that lead to women’s impoverished lives. Having lived and taught in an equally complex United States for two decades, I can vouch for many First World women who not only live under cultural constrictions and often denounce feminism but fall easy prey to a consumer culture’s misappropriation of their sexuality and apparent freedom. Besides, grassroots Indian women’s organizations have been resisting ‘kyriarchies’ (Fiorenza’s term) with such intensity that it is an embarrassment for privileged women to describe them as oppressed, which implies a passive victimhood. It is the job of serious feminist scholars to observe the world’s women and see how they find their spiritual identity and hopefully, then, they can participate in their own mode of resistance rather than impose Western visions of liberation, which are often rejected by most of the world’s women. The struggle continues to include more women in an economic comfort zone while decolonizing cultures slowly break away from colonial devastations of their economies, only to face the new challenge of neo-colonial global capitalism. Still, there is cause to believe that what is known as the second Axial period might also inaugurate a positive global consciousness that will resist totalizing impulses of masculinist power structures that privileged women often participate in. Thinking of a differently recorded past, let us imagine an alternative history; without denying that women have been historically dominated by brute force of male hegemony, may we assert that perhaps they have not been spiritually dominated? What if women were historians of religion and saw everything from their perspective and picked up all the references to women and their power? Will a woman appear ‘domesticated’ when she appreciates and acknowledges her role as mother and nurturer? Will she appear powerless simply because she inhabits the inner world? Shall we still see nothing but an oppressed/passive woman, or is she to some extent a product of male scholarly fantasy in both the primary and secondary ‘recording’ of religion? Appreciating women’s studies that apply hermeneutics of suspicion to religious studies, David Kinsley, a sympathetic Indologist, acknowledges that we have learned to be wary of sources that ‘condemn, belittle, or ignore women’ and when we come across figures such as ‘the ideal Hindu woman’, women’s studies methodologies have taught us to ask, ‘Whose view this is and whose interests are being served by idealizing women this way’ (2002: 9–10). Hinduism poses particular problems since theoretical frameworks used to study nonWestern religions were heavily influenced by colonial as well as missionary impulses of Enlightenment Europe. Moreover, an uncritical acceptance of androcentric scholarly interpretations led to a serious misreading of women’s role in Hinduism. Then, there has been a persistent unwillingness to explore any religious tradition that came under the sweeping generalization of patriarchy; it was either ignored or too quickly dismissed.

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Rita Gross points out: ‘Quick condemnation of unfamiliar religious or cultural beliefs and practices is one of the greatest pitfalls of cross-cultural studies in general. The purpose and the promise of such study is not to feel smug and superior’ (2002: 69). Unfortunately, superior construction of one’s cultural position is very human; certain forms of feminism too suffer from those pitfalls. Nor can we ignore seriously imperialist attitudes that plagued hegemonic feminism as shown by Chandra Mohanty in ‘Under Western Eyes’, revisited in her recent book Feminism without Borders. Her arguments ‘in solidarity with the critics of Eurocentric humanism who drew attention to its false universalizing and masculinist assumptions’ (2003: 226) resulted in her being ‘cast as the “nondutiful daughter” of white feminists, [and she was] even told “not to dabble in ‘feminist theory’ ” ’ (225)! However, despite misreading and other pitfalls of such scholarship, those efforts have paved the way to more recent revisions and self-recognitions that have been slowly but surely changing the Western critical landscape.

Recent postmodern perspectives and Hinduism More recent critical perspectives, often shelved under the complicated heading of postmodernism, that have questioned the supremacy of the subject of history, the white male, also curiously lend themselves to a better understanding of non-monotheisms such as Hinduism. The amorphous nature of Hinduism is better understood in recognition of reality as polysemic, multi-vocal, plural, and relational. Even within the Indic non-dual recognition of ultimate reality as That One, there has always been an understanding that as experienced in the world, That One is dazzlingly plural; no one label can ever capture the vast shimmering world of the Goddess’s Lila, or play. Axel Michaels in a recent book quite perceptively declares: ‘Indeed, Postmodernism looks as if it could have been created for India because it makes no attempt to produce one order, construct one principle, where—perhaps—there is none’ (2004: 9). It is also important to point out that relationality is not relativism as today’s scholars are discovering. The global exchange of knowledge and self-reflexivity of the postmodern age has led to at least a few reevaluations of hegemonic Western notions. In The Study of Religion in an Age of Global Dialogue, Swidler and Mojzes write: ‘Up to the past century, our Western notion of truth was largely absolute, static, and monologic, or exclusive. It has since become de-absolutized, dynamic, and dialogic—in a word, relational’ (2000: 47). This reevaluation has the potential to create a dialogue with very different traditions, but this particular study, focused on world religions, does not even acknowledge the vast range of feminist and women’s scholarship in religion. The Indic world had from its very conception recognized the dynamic interplay, say, relationality, between Brahman as transcendental unity and Brahman as the play of the many.

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However, scholars working within hegemonic and orientalist frameworks attempted to define Hinduism from their own perspectives, valorizing the androcentric abstractions over the concrete multiplicity of the Tantras; although they produced massive volumes of impressive scholarship, a deeper understanding of the tradition as a whole remained elusive and confined to a select few. New scholarship coming from Western traditions is conducive to a better understanding of these other ‘thea/ologies’ now that theirs have been de-absolutized. In The Study of Hinduism, editor Arvind Sharma asserts that the contributions ‘will go a long way toward confirming the description of Hinduism as a religion of mobile and multiple thresholds’ (2003: 1). By holding onto one of those thresholds, the Shakta one, I have shown how the Gynocentric impulse of the Shaktas has created, retained, and continues to imagine life-giving symbols of the Divine Feminine that sustain and provide a spiritual identity that has been the source of strength for Hindu women as well as men for centuries even when more masculinist imperial ways have dominated their political and economic landscapes.

Western theologies and the Indic difference Looking critically at the word theology itself, we can examine and stretch the meaning of the word to situate the Indic tradition within a global perspective. In that mode, when I read the history of philosophy and religion in the West, I find immense diversity and malleability in a relatively more monologic tradition. We can’t homogenize the ‘West’ any more than we can the ‘East’ as its mystical/heretical tradition contains the feminine. However, there is no doubt that monotheistic religions remain seriously androcentric, both theologically and psychically, and there is some truth to the claims of radical feminists that in its very conception is written the erasure of woman; and fear of sexuality, marked by woman as flesh and barrier to spirit, seems to be more pronounced than in the traditional Indic ways of old. It is also quite obvious how closely related Western philosophy has been to its various religious roots; the claim that Western philosophy is rational and logical and devoid of the messy spiritualities that complicate Eastern philosophical traditions is not evident at least in this particular overview that I examined. Indeed, excessive and reductive rationality led to such thinning of the tradition that the dynamic and lived aspect of the sacred lost itself to mere rationality. Most of the thinkers in the Western tradition from Plato onwards have been operating within a religious worldview where the existence and non-existence of the Divine is clothed in the language of being and nothingness. Christian and Jewish philosophers contended with the religious language of the Scripture in order to develop an exclusive philosophical vocabulary that would assert the supremacy of Logos, the prime attribute of the monotheistic God, the transcendental signifier that stands behind, ghostlike, most theological as well as philosophical articulations. When we

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come to Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, the trinity of the hermeneutics of suspicion, they too operate from under the shadow of the Name of the Father, even when radically attempting to unseat that Father; thus, they too remain bound to the dueling and oedipal discourse of a skewed father–son conflict. The mother and daughter are completely removed from the scene since men after all are competing for the feminine as the object of desire. I found in my discussion with students and colleagues that even those who claim to be atheists are non-believers of a Judeo-Christian Father God; the psychic emblem of that God that is to be denied remains intact in the very process of erasing him. Notwithstanding the presence of the Virgin Mother within Christianity, whose divinity has been traditionally denied, the idea of a Mother God is beyond the imagination of most Westerners; she cannot even be brought to the horizon of discourse so that she can be denied. So the issue of theology for a Mother Goddess-worshipping tradition is, by its very nature, different. Neither Theos nor Logos—terms that comprise traditional Western theology, the majority voice in the discourse even within its feminist critique—can quite easily be applied to the Devi. However, as we looked earlier at the source of Western tradition, the Greek academy of Plato comes close, perhaps sometimes uncomfortably close for some, to ancient Indic thought to be called radically different from the East. I am aware of the high rationalist condemnation of more oriental/mystic Plato in favor of more occidental/rational Aristotle in many circles, but the fact remains, Platonic and Neoplatonic thought deeply influenced Christianity and the whole of Western tradition. Thomas McEvilley shows how racist notions shaped the ideology of a rational West versus an irrational East that served to justify colonial domination; it is well known that high Enlightenment philosophers retained deeply prejudiced views regarding the non-white world. I would not like to enter the messy issue of diffusion and the question of influences because it seems it was a two-way street that operated over a very long stretch of time to saturate the human intellect where who influenced whom becomes an irrelevant discussion; it is enough for me to recognize that the kind of dialogue we are hoping for in today’s always already hybrid global world was definitely happening in a sort of parallel universe of the ancients in the sixth century bce. Some say we are entering a second Axial period in human history, a term coined by Ewert Cousins, who draws on Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of ‘planetization—the age of global consciousness rather than the awakening of individual consciousness that marked the first Axial period’ (Swidler and Mojzes 2000: 89–90). If so, women’s consciousness of their difference, their relationality, and their full humanity that equally participates in logos and mythos will definitely be a major contribution to this global discourse of shifting paradigms.

Globalization and the Indian scene It is impossible to engage in any critical discourse, even a thea/ological one, without reference to the rather imposing and vast category called globalization as a phenomenon and as a new discipline becoming increasingly popular as globalization studies.

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The events of September 11, 2001, have given a new poignancy, urgency, and religious overtone to this extraordinary and yet not terribly new phenomenon. Let me give a few references to globalization scholarship and popular writing on the subject and look at their implications within the context of my claim that reclaiming Tantric thealogy for women and men will serve a useful purpose in the newly ‘emerging’ and yet ever-changing old world of India. It is not a surprise for many of us that India and sari-clad Indian women have been playing a major role in both globalization’s economic and cultural manifestations. But it sure was a surprise for many, if the self-consciously provocative title of a book by Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India, is any indication. Yet let us look at the vexed question, What is globalization? Here I will provide one of the definitions, given by the high priest of globalization, Thomas Friedman, whose many books, including The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (2005b) and earlier The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (1999), have been run-away successes. In the prologue to his 2002 book Longitudes and Attitudes: Exploring the World after September 11, Friedman defined current globalization as the inexorable integration of markets, transportation systems, and communication systems to a degree never witnessed before—in a way that is enabling corporations, countries, and individuals to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before, and in a way that is enabling the world to reach into corporations, countries, and individuals farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before. (2005a: 164–5)

As we can see, this definition basically focuses on economic globalization and does lend itself to the critics of globalization who would see in the key words of this definition—‘corporations’, ‘markets’, and ‘individuals’—the Eurocentric rhetoric of progress that suggests that ‘primitive’ cultures such as India relegated to the ‘waiting room of history’ will ‘emerge’ into the light of prosperity and progress if they embrace individualistic capitalism. Such rhetoric ignores that the impoverishment of India and its relegation into the Third World of primitive religiosities unable to engage in rational economic activity is itself a result of colonial ideologies of both economic and epistemic exploitation. A simple piece of information, although cited by another high priest of globalization theories with dangerous religious overtones and crusading zealotry, Samuel Huntington, would give the lie to the fact that ancient cultures such as India were perennially ‘mystical’ and averse to ‘rational’ economic activity. Huntington refers to the fact that ‘in 1750 China accounted for almost one-third, India for almost one-quarter, and the West for less than a fifth of the world’s manufacturing output’, and the table cited by him shows that the productivity of undivided India of 24.5 in 1750 had reduced to mere 1.4 by 1913 (1996: 86). Racist ideologies of passive and feminized Indian men who oppress their women even as they behave like ‘women’ in their economic passivity had to have ‘ignored’ how the dates match perfectly the times of massive and systematic destruction, sheer pillage, and

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outright devastation of India’s economic resources, structures, and modes of being by British imperialism. Despite Huntington’s xenophobic and agonistic rhetoric in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, he is quite honest in acknowledging that ‘the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do’ (1996: 51). I find it heartening that India, problematically described as ‘Hindu civilization’ by Huntington, does not seem to play any significant role among the eternally warring civilizations of Huntington’s phobic imagination. India does not seem to need to be at war with the West. I will claim that the elasticity of the culture that has resisted all kinds of monomania and has retained its Gynocentric core with its celebration of pluralism will remain its greatest strength as it faces the complex forces of globalization. While there are many competing groups either claiming the destruction of the world’s diversity under the homogenizing impulse of Western capitalism or promising a new world order of prosperity for all under free trade and entrepreneurial spirit, it is remarkable that the fate of the world’s women has become the standard against which the success or failure of any such development is gauged (Marx 2006). This is a major mistake because it relegates women to mere object position and equates globalization in its economic sphere as the ‘penetration’ of Western capital into the world’s deeper recesses, ignoring all forms of economic activities that made the pre-colonial worlds so enticing to Western explorations by the likes of Columbus and Vasco da Gama. Indian women played important roles even as homemakers, mothers, artists, workers as well as teachers, and not infrequently rulers as contributors to the socioeconomic health of their communities. That story is still being unearthed by groups such as ‘Narivad-Gender, Culture and Civilization Network’, led by the preeminent Tantric scholar Madhu Khanna in Delhi. Also, as I have argued in my essay ‘Gaia Mandala: An Eco-Thealogical Vision of the Indic Shakti Tradition’, given the environmental crisis and limited resources of the world, the consumerist mode of being as the prime mode of identity posited by economic globalization must be resisted. For that, we must look at alternate ways of being via the world’s mystical paths where the Divine Feminine resides and facilitates spiritual enlightenment without sacrificing the here and now of our material existence for a heaven above. Toward such a path, which I believe is vital for our planetary well-being, the notion of a Gynocentric thealogy could play a radical role by strengthening spiritual feminisms. Globalization from my perspective is a new technologized version of old ways of the world’s connecting with each other (Chanda 2007) that could easily be perceived by historians of the ancient world. If the world is entering a second Axial period, despite my serious misgivings about consumerist modes of globalization, I want to think that women’s modes of being and paths to spiritual enlightenment would bring a new dimension to the always already changing world. Yet I must be cautious, because at this point, survival of most of the world is dependent on the largess of corporations that by definition are motivated by profiteering and not by enlightenment. While globalization is bringing new wealth to old peoples, nations must resist the overarching ideologies that further impoverish the world’s poor in order to

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make the super rich even richer. Since no ideology is static and one can’t predict how a particular energy unleashed by collective forces would take its future shape, I am confident that Indian women who never abandoned the compassion of the Divine Feminine will find new strength in recognizing that feminine ‘power’ in the sense of ‘Shakti’ that denotes power over oneself must be invoked to resist the masculinist power over others. However, governments must provide education and allow indigenous modes of economic activities to flourish with cautious access to global solidarities through such revolutionary technologies as the Internet, which is still the playground of the world’s elite, but is quietly changing Indian landscapes wherever education has been given a prime focus. It takes a long time for a country this big with serious colonial baggage, including its failed romance with Soviet-style totalitarian bureaucracy under the guise of socialism, to recover from the economic and ‘epistemic’ devastations, but if what I saw during my recent visits is any evidence, India will persist not in spite of the gods but perhaps because of them as long as it resists the homogenizing impulse of the reactionary Hindutva movement. Such a regressive movement in its pathetic quest for external power has been aping Western monotheisms in supplanting King Ram for polymorphic and plural Indian deities, but again recent defeats of fundamentalist political parties show that the diversity of India will not tolerate for long any homogenizing and mono-theologizing impulse of any kind. I will contend that since India is deeply Gynocentric, time and time again it has shown its resistance to anything that impinges on its celebration of the variegated play of the Great Mother’s Lila who never reduces her other masculine self to any self-same identity. The Gynocentric thealogy I have explored thrives on difference. The variegated play of color that our phenomenal existence is blessed with is the very manifestation of the Divine Feminine, which resists the return to sameness in its drab homogeneity. Also, while some forms of feminisms can unleash a battle of the sexes, the Tantric tradition imagines dancing dualities rather than dueling ones; inherent in that idea is a more harmonious relationship between the sexes that can be fully realized by women and men who are ready to reclaim that tradition. From a spiritual rather than a dogmatic perspective, it is possible to live in many worlds at the same time. Perhaps in the religion of the future, there is a pluralist vision that Panikkar (2007: 7–23), who claims to be 100 Spanish Catholic and 100 Indian Hindu, imagines. In this age of global consciousness, if we can sincerely listen when the other speaks, we may yet hear the harmony of the spheres in the awareness of our planetary Oneness without sacrificing the distinct difference that each voice brings to this global chorus.

Notes 1. I thank Suzanne Ironbiter for her perceptive comments on the draft; her book Devi (1987) is a testimony to the influence the Divine Feminine can have over individual women. 2. In my book In the Beginning Is Desire: Tracing Kali’s Footprints in Indian Literature (2004), I have outlined a Gynocentric theory of the Great Goddess as pregnant nothingness (deliberate use of capital G to denote the Shakta tradition in Hinduism that takes the

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supremacy of the Divine Feminine for granted). The origin of the word ‘gyne’ has interesting connections with Greek ‘gune’ for woman and the three ‘gunas’ or attributes of Indic traditions that make up Samkhya Prakriti, the Feminine Principle. These are Satva (truth), Rajas (energy), and Tamas (inertia). 3. See Vac Sukta in The Rigveda, which is traditionally known as heard by Abhrini; she proclaims her oneness (tadatmya) with the entire universe in the form of Vac, which can be variously translated as Speech or Word. This hymn is known to the Shaktas as the Devi Sukta. 4. See Panikkar (1998) for a brief discussion of the need for intercultural dialogical dialogue, which he had developed in his earlier works. Dialogical dialogue, as distinguished from dialectical dialogue, assumes the subject position of the other as a source of intelligibility not as an object, as Vachon explains (1998: 9). Also, see April 2007 issue of INTERculture, titled ‘Identity and Religious Pluralism’, for Panikkar’s understanding of pluralism as ‘an attitude which emerges when we acknowledge the limits of reason and do not identify them with limits of Being’ (13). 5. It is important to note that the Sanskrit word Advaita (both a school of philosophy known as Advaita Vedanta of Shamkara and a general term to denote the Absolute) is better translated as non-duality rather than monism. Duality and its flowering into multiplicity must be posed and appreciated before one can contemplate non-duality. Discussing pluralism and religion of the Future, Panikkar writes about the ‘Trinity of Advaita’, which is neither monism nor dualism and he prefers the expression non-dualism, which ‘underlies most of the traditional wisdoms of the world’ (1990: 41). 6. It is preferable to use the Sanskrit word dharma, from the root dhri (to hold) to denote Indic traditions. See Michaels for a discussion of the difficulties of using the word ‘religion’, ‘which is often used normatively or strategically in order to defend one’s own belief against others’, while dharma, ‘related etymologically to the Latin firmus (solid, strong) and forma (form, shape), is what holds the world together and supports it, the eternal (sanatana) law, “the order in consummation” ’ (2004: 15). 7. ‘Brahman is not a translation for “God”, since the concepts do not correspond (their attributes not being the same), and since the functions are not identical (Brahman not having to be creator, providence, personal, as God is)’ (Panikkar 1998: 102). Also, the root meaning of the word Brahman means one that expands and swells, which can incorporate an expanding and open universe. 8. The word ‘matrix’ has interesting connections, not just with Sanskrit matri or Latin mater for mother, but it is the site of all the activity of the mitochondrial DNA, the energy source as the popular film Matrix shows. Besides, I also see a network of meaning that connects maya, the creative principle and its measuring activity, with metric in geometry and other disciplines. See Lawlor (1982) for an interesting study of the feminine principle. 9. I concur with Ruether, who argues: ‘It is necessary for any woman who wishes to be authentically autonomous to pass through [at] least something of this rage. But to pass through it means not to translate it into a total ideology. One needs to come out to a firm ground of autonomous humanity as a female who can continually resist and refuse the snares of patriarchy without confusing this with the humanity of males. One needs to recognize one’s own fallibility, one’s own capacity not only to be victimized, but also to be victimizer, and, in the mature self-esteem, also be able to affirm the humanity of males behind the masks of patriarchy’ (1985: 60). 10. See Dalmiya (2000) for a construction of a different subjectivity apart from Western norms. 11. See Harper and Brown (2002) for an extensive examination of its origins.

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12. See Woodroffe (1994) for an esoteric meaning of Kali iconography. 13. Spink writes: ‘The world of India, curious as it may seem to parts of the world beyond, does not properly fit within the Freudian schema; for the Freudian schema is based, tautologically, upon a set of expectations and observations which such a culture does not fulfill. Freud does not even begin to explain the unexplainable nature of man, nor the discontents of civilization, unless man is to be defined as “Western man” and civilization as “Western civilization” ’ (1973: 10). 14. Jonte-Pace explains: ‘The experiences of maternal absence and castration anxiety establish unconscious links between absence and the feminine; the fear of death and non-being (absence of a different sort) is displaced onto the fear of women. Misogyny displaces death anxiety . . . as the difference of gender stands in for the absence of death’ (2002: 105). 15. See Mookerjee and Khanna: ‘The Sri Yantra is a symbolic pattern of Sakti’s own form (svarupa), powers of and emanations, the form of the universe (visvarupa), symbolizing the various stages of Sakti’s descent in manifestation. It is a pictorial illustration of the cosmic field in creation. Like creation itself, the Sri Yantra came into being through the force of primordial desire. The impulse of desire (Kamakala), born of the inherent nature of Prakriti, creates a throb (spanda) which vibrates as sound (nada). This manifestation is represented by a point, or bindu’ (1977: 57). 16. See Markandeya Purana and Devi Bhagavata Purana (qtd. in Beane 1977: 153). 17. See de Nicolás’s review essay ‘Remembering Kali’, based on my book In the Beginning IS Desire (2004), where he asserts that the embodied vision of reality inherent in Plato’s way of doing philosophy was left out of Western academia, creating a radical split between various ways of knowing. 18. Padoux sees the connection between ‘the energy of Consciousness, or of the Word’, and the first movement of creation that ‘appears as a creative pulsation, a continuous movement of contraction and expansion (sankoca-vikasa)’ (1990: 82). In the Indic tradition, this activity is always an activity of the feminine principle since she is the active force while the male counterpart remains passive. See my chapter ‘Desire in the Beginning: The Rigveda 10: 129’ (2004). 19. See Irigaray (2002) for her engagement with Indic traditions. Also, see Khasnabish (2003) for a comparative study of French feminist and Indian philosophies. 20. David Kinsley acknowledges androcentric problems in the study of history of religions: ‘Women’s studies has had a devastating effect on many of the underlying claims of the history of religions. . . . The effect has been to show, often in shocking and dramatic ways, the extent to which history of religions has not been true to its own mandate. It has been neither all-inclusive nor objective in its study of human religiousness’ (2002: 2). 21. Carol Christ argues that ‘thealogy’ begins in experience but to say so is to risk being ‘dismissed as “merely confessional”, a code word . . . for “not worthy of serious consideration”’ (1989). She then proceeds ‘to demystify the mythos and ethos of objectivity’ rooted in the Enlightenment project of rationality (31). 22. There was a tendency among some Indian feminist groups, under the sway of mostly Western theories, to denounce religion wholesale but that has changed. Madhu Kishwar, editor of Manushi, has been speaking about goddess worship as a living tradition that inspires all women, sometimes to righteous rage against oppression. Kishwar’s magazine, Manushi, has recently created a new goddess of cleanliness called Swaccha Narayani. 23. See Sangari and Vaid (1989) for an analysis of the construction of ideal womanhood under nationalist formations of resistance, the other end of the binary struggle between imperialism and nationalism.

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24. Also, contributors of Is the Goddess a Feminist? (Hiltebeitel and Erndl 2000) deal with this thorny issue. 25. Schüssler Fiorenza shifts the focus from ‘patriarchy, based on gender dualism, to kyriarchy (the rule of emperor/master/lord/father/husband over his subordinates), to signal more comprehensive, interlocking and multiplicative forms of oppression’ (Kwok 2002: 29). 26. See Shiva’s work beyond mere victimology. She argues, ‘Patriarchal categories which understand destruction as “production” and regeneration of life as “passivity” have generated a crisis of survival. Passivity, as an assumed category of the “nature” of nature and of women, denies the activity of nature and life’ (1996: 66). 27. I have discussed these issues at length in the introductory chapter of In the Beginning IS Desire (2004). 28. I was fascinated by Cary’s thirty-two lectures in the video series Philosophy and Religion in the West (1999), which spans the entire tradition with extreme precision and depth. 29. See Spink for an interesting comparison between phallic sexuality of the Western man as opposed to the creative dance of Shakti and Shiva or Radha and Krishna of the Indic ways: ‘Western man, charged by his guilt and his compulsions, continues (we begin to see, blindly) to strive, to progress, to prove himself, to achieve the conquest of the world, in his proud and phallic but inevitably doomed and defeating death-dealing thrusts. We dance, not free of repressions, as Shiva dances’ (1973: 171). 30. British scholar W. K. C. Guthrie dismisses Indian philosophy in his history, saying: ‘The motives and methods of the Indian schools, and theological and mystical background of their thought, are so utterly different from those of the Greeks that there is little profit in the comparison’ (qtd. in McEvilley 2002: xx). 31. Nasr writes about the desacralization of knowledge in the modern world: ‘The reduction of the Intellect to reason and the limitation of intelligence to cunning and cleverness in the modern world . . . caused sacred knowledge to become inaccessible and to some even meaningless’ (1989: 4). 32. Nietzsche is an exception to this as, I believe, he comes very close to the Feminine in his thinking. 33. See Pedersen (1991), who examines the harmful effects of the grand narrative of oedipal theory on men and their relationships. 34. See Amartya Sen’s (2001) criticism of Huntington in ‘A World Not Neatly Divided’. 35. See the series published by Narivad, including Indian Femininities (Khanna 2007) and Rethinking Epistemologies (Poonacha 2007).

Works Cited Beane, Wendell Charles (1977). Myth, Cult and Symbols in Sakta Hinduism. Leiden: Brill. Brown, C. Mackenzie (1990). The Triumph of the Goddess: The Canonical Models and Theological Visions of the Devi-Bhagavata Purana. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cary, Phillip (1999). Philosophy and Religion in the West (video series). Springfield, VA: The Teaching Company. Chanda, Nayan (2007). Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chopp, Rebecca (1997). ‘Theorizing Feminist Theology’, in Rebecca Chopp and Sheila Greeve Davaney (Eds), Horizons in Feminist Theology: Identity, Tradition, and Norms. Minneapolis: Fortress.

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Christ, Carol P. (1989). ‘Symbols of Goddess and God in Feminist Theology’, in Carl Olson (Ed.), The Book of the Goddess: Past and Present. New York: Crossroads. (1997). Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. (2002). ‘Feminist Theology as Post-Traditional Thealogy’, in Susan Frank Parsons (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dalmiya, Vrinda (2000). ‘Loving Paradoxes: A Feminist Reclamation of the Goddess Kali’, Hypatia, 15/1: 125–50. Davis, Richard H. (1999). ‘Religions of India in Practice’, in Donald S. Lopez (Ed.), Asian Religions in Practice: An Introduction, Princeton Readings in Religions. Princeton: Princeton University Press. De Nicolás, Antonio (2004). ‘Remembering Kali’, Journal of the Interdisciplinary Crossroads, 1/2: 379–87. Friedman, Thomas (1999). The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. New York: Anchor. (2005a). Prologue, Longitudes and Attitudes. New York: Farrar Straus, 2002. Rptd. as ‘Prologue: The Super Story’, in Gilbert H. Muller (Ed.), The New World Reader: Thinking and Writing about the Global Community. Boston: Houghton. (2005b). The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar Straus. Gross, Rita M. (2002). ‘Feminist Theology as Theology of Religions’, in Susan Frank Parsons (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 60–78. Gupta, Samjukta (2000). ‘The Goddess, Women, and Their Rituals in Hinduism’, in Mandakranta Bose (Ed.), Faces of the Feminine in Ancient, Medieval and Modern India. New York: Oxford University Press, 87–106. Harper, Katherine Anne, and Brown, Robert L. (Eds) (2002). The Roots of Tantra. Albany: State University of New York Press. Hiltebeitel, Alf, and Erndl, Kathleen (Eds) (2000). Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. New York: New York University Press. Huntington, Samuel (1996). The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New Delhi: Penguin. Irigaray, Luce (2002). Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, trans. Stephen Pluhácek. New York: Columbia University Press. Ironbiter, Suzanne (1987). Devi. Stamford, CT: Yuganta. Jonte-Pace, Diane (2002). ‘The Impact of Women’s Studies on the Psychology of Religion’, in Arvind Sharma (Ed.), Methodology in Religious Studies: The Interface with Women’s Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press. Khanna, Madhu (2002). ‘The Goddess-Woman Equation in Sakta Tantras’, in Durre S. Ahmed (Ed.), Gendering the Spirit. London: Zed. (2007). ‘Paradigms of Female Embodiment in the Hindu World’, Narivad Series Indian Femininities. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. Khasnabish, Ashmita (2003). Jouissance as Ananda: Indian Philosophy, Feminist Theory, and Literature. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Kinsley, David (2002). ‘Women’s Studies and the History of Religions’, in Arvind Sharma (Ed.), Methodology in Religious Studies: The Interface with Women’s Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Kishwar, Madhu (1999). ‘A Horror of “Isms”: Why I Do Not Call Myself a Feminist’, in Madhu Kishwar, Off the Beaten Track: Rethinking Gender Justice for Indian Women. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. (2005). ‘Emergency Avatar of a Secular Goddess: Manushi Swachha Narayani Descends to Protect Street Vendors’, Manushi, 147 (May–June). Kripal, Jeffrey (2000). ‘A Garland of Talking Heads for the Goddess: Some Autobiographical and Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Western Kali’, in Alf Hiltebeitel and Kathleen Erndl (Eds), Is the Goddess a Feminist? The Politics of South Asian Goddesses. New York: New York University Press. Kwok, Pui-lan (2002). ‘Feminist Theology as Intercultural Discourse’, in Susan Frank Parsons (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lawlor, Robert (1982). Sacred Geometry: Philosophy and Practice. New York: Crossroad. Luce, Edward (2006). In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India. London: Little Brown. Marx, John (2006). ‘The Feminization of Globalization’, Cultural Critique, 63: 1–32. McEvilley, Thomas (2002). The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophy. New York: Allworth. Michaels, Axel (2004). Hinduism: Past and Present. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mohanty, Chandra (2003). ‘Under Western Eyes’, in Chandra Mohanty, Feminism without Borders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mookerjee, Ajit (1988). Kali: The Feminine Force. New York: Destiny. and Madhu Khanna (Eds) (1977). The Tantric Way: Art, Science, Ritual. London: Thames and Hudson. Narayanan, Vasudha (1999). ‘Brimming with Bhakti, Embodiments of Shakti’, in Arvand Sharma and Katherine K. Young (Eds), Feminism and World Religions. Albany: State University of New York, 25–77. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein (1989). Knowledge and the Sacred. Albany: State University of New York Press. Odier, Daniel (2001). Desire: The Tantric Path to Awakening. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger (trans.) (1981). The Rig Veda: An Anthology. New York: Penguin. Padoux, André (1990). Vac: The Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras, trans. Jacques Gontier. Albany: State University of New York. Panikkar, Raimon (1990). ‘Religious Pluralism: The Metaphysical Challenge’, INTERculture, 108: 25–78. (1998). ‘Religion, Philosophy and Culture’, INTERculture, 135: 99–120. (2007). ‘Religious Identity and Pluralism’, INTERculture, 152: 7–23. Pedersen, Loren (1991). Dark Hearts: The Unconscious Forces That Shape Men’s Lives. Boston: Shambhala. Poonacha, Veena (2007). ‘Writing Women’s Lives: Some Methodological Questions for Feminist Historiography’, Narivad Series Rethinking Epistemologies. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. Ruether, Rosemary Radford (1985). Women-Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities. San Francisco: Harper. Sangari, Kumkum, and Vaid, Sudesh (1989). Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Saxena, Neela Bhattacharya (2004). In the Beginning IS Desire: Tracing Kali’s Footprints in Indian Literature. New Delhi: Indialog. (2006). ‘Gaia Mandala: An Eco-Thealogical Vision of the Indic Shakti Tradition’, INTERculture, 150: 23–34. Sen, Amartya (2001). ‘A World Not Neatly Divided’, New York Times, 23 Nov. Sharma, Arvind (2003). ‘What Is Hinduism?’ in Arvind Sharma (Ed.), The Study of Hinduism. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Shaw, Miranda (1994). Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shiva, Vandana (1996). ‘Let Us Survive: Women, Ecology and Development’, in Rosemary Radford Ruether (Ed.), Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Spink, Walter M. (1973). The Axis of Eros. New York: Schocken. Spivak, Gayatri C. (2001). ‘Moving Devi’, Cultural Critique, 47: 120–63. Swidler, Leonard, and Mojzes, Paul (Eds) (2000). The Study of Religion in an Age of Global Dialogue. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Tarkaratna, Panchanan (Ed.) (1991). Mahanirvana Tantram. Kolkata: Nababharat. Vachon, Robert (1998). ‘IIM and Its Journal: An Intercultural Alternative and an Alternative Interculturalism’, INTERculture, 135: 4–69. Woodroffe, John (1994). Garland of Letters, 10th edn. Madras: Ganesh. (1994). Sakti and Sakta: Essays and Addresses, 10th edn. Madras: Ganesh.

Further Reading Bhattacharyya, N. N. (1982). History of the Tantric Religion. New Delhi: Manohar. Bose, Mandakranta (Ed.) (2000). Faces of the Feminine in Ancient, Medieval and Modern India. New York: Oxford University Press. Brown, C. Mackenzie (1974). God as Mother: A Feminine Theology in India. Hartford, VT: Claude Stark. Feuerstein, George (1998). Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy. Boston: Shambhala. Gupta, Sanjukta (trans.) (1972). Lakṣmī Tantra: A Pāñcarātra Text. Leiden: Brill. Khanna, Madhu (1979). Yantra. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions. Kinsley, David (1997). Tantric Visions of the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Mishra, T. N. (1997). Impact of Tantra on Religion and Art. New Delhi: D. K. Print World.

chapter 6

gl oba liz ation a n d gen der i n equa lit y: a con tr ibu tion from a l ati no a fro -fem i n ist per specti v e maricel mena lópez

Racism and discrimination produce exclusions and inequalities in the dimension of the reproduction of everyday life: in access to the work market, in the system of professional promotion, in the value of the work force dependent on race or sex, in the permanence of employment, or in the reintroduction into the work market, establishing racial and sexual division in the workplace.

Introduction My intention in setting out to analyze the context and daily life of Afro-Caribbean women within globalization is to find ethnical praxis. This is prevailing and necessary in the actual social model where multiple social relations of power foment a civilization based on divisions and antagonism. The holocaust suffered by black and indigenous people because of colonialist mentality reinforced the concentrations and divisions of power that continue today to generate racist, gender, and classist ideologists. With the confirmation that we live in a society where the poverty of women is accentuated and black and indigenous are the most affected, we women have been obligated to reflect upon our resistance and to demand a better quality of life on the planet. My option prioritizes women registered not only within the globalized patriarchy, but also women that are being violated and discriminated against everywhere. Even though

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my fundamental focus is on Afro women, I imagine a great movement of women and men willing to dream about and build a different world, a world in which speeches and practices have representation of equanimity, not a speech of normative masculinity, with only one final word, but a huge discovery of the different words available, different paths that represent a horizon of multiple possibilities. When speaking about Latin American Afro-feminist theology, I am not proposing a sectarian and isolated movement; on the contrary, I am affirming that a different world is possible. In the same manner, when I affirm the relatedness of our identity as women, I am conscious that within black women, similar to rich, poor, young, old, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual women, there are differences. There are infinite identities and this is why this essay cannot become, in the end, an object of reflection; we cannot forget that our fight is also against our particular oppression. We must fight against patriarchy, domination, privileges, and control, as these are values that dehumanize us all. Due to patriarchal logic, reason has become associated with members of dominant political, social, and cultural groups, while emotion has become associated with the subordinate groups, in which Afro and indigenous women stand out. Men, in contrast, should be unexpressive. These ideas somehow disqualify the knowledge that comes from feelings. In this way, the myth of partiality promotes an epistemological conception that wants to silence those groups that are culturally defined as tendentious, emotional, and irrational. Within this context, to perceive and articulate the suffering of people and the planet become essential in all future politics of peace, in all forms of social solidarity, in order to reduce the ever-widening gap between rich and poor. This is an important challenge to consider in today’s era of neoliberal globalization. Due to global capitalism and societal stereotypes that discriminate against those who are different, people have become disposable, a situation endured by women, minor ethnics, and immigrants in general. However, the paradoxical of this neoliberal model is that while the market expands, the social and geographic borders close even more. So in this study we focus on the effects of globalization in the daily life of Afro-Colombian women and their cultural and religious resistance. Starting from an approximation of the globalization phenomenon, I detect some inequalities of gender and race in the Colombian socio-cultural context, with the idea of presenting new conceptual categories in which women’s body represents a valuable category of knowledge.

Starting points Globalization: a homogeneous, harmonious, and happy society? Globalization is a modern concept that proposes economic interdependence between the countries of the world and affects all of us. In historical terms, there have been two waves of globalization, the first spanning from 1850 to 1914, and the second starting in the 1950s and continuing today (Estefania 2002: 28). This second wave has also been called neo-liberalism.

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Neo-liberalism, as found in societies described as democratic, proposes the market as the solution to all the world’s economic and social problems. For neo-liberals, the freedom of economic action guarantees personal freedom (de Sebastián 2002: 53–88). But how is it possible to have freedom in a society of free competition where inequality is inescapable? We cannot speak of freedom in contexts in which people have no possibility to choose what to produce or to consume. Although when we talk of globalization we are instinctively referring to an economic process, it is also a cultural, social, political, and religious one. And it is perhaps precisely this difference that exists between the economic and social worlds that we will delve into here. Because, as the French historian Fernand Braudel has pointed out, world history cannot be explained from an economic perspective alone, and if such a perspective is the only one employed, our observations become problematic and even dangerous. This is why we will tackle the subject with criteria more complex than a mere macroeconomic description. This complexity and difference is expressed in the idea, ever more widespread in the world, that economic growth is harmonious, homogeneous, and absolute everywhere, with the same characteristics, benefits, and sacrifices (Alonson 1997: 3–26). But a look at the social situation of Afro-American and Caribbean people reveals precisely the opposite. The capitalist economic system known as the market never reveals who the big shareholders are, nor their values, and less still who are the users of the dollar. The media show us the balance sheet in such a way that it might seem as if we lived in ‘one big great homogeneous, harmonious and happy society’ (Da Silva 2004: 4). However, we know this is not true. What we see in the everyday life of the poor is a ceaseless struggle for survival. This leaps out at us in the shanty towns of any Latin American or Caribbean city, particularly when we notice that the vast majority of the poor is of African origin. Black culture is not part of the globalized world, because the language of economics ignores the cultural universe of the descendents of Africans.

Latin American Afro-feminist Theology (TAFLA) Bearing in mind that knowledge is part and parcel of ideological struggle, our priority, from an Afro-feminist theological perspective, is to recover our right to know and feel from our own viewpoint, which, in turn, will help us to see the economic, social, and religious realities from our own experience. By basing this analysis on the view of Afro-Colombian women, their subjectivity is to be considered as an essential prerequisite for socio-economic analysis, which must inevitably entail the recognition of their bodies. ‘What we call “knowledge” is the most plausible way to say something about the mystery of what we are and what we feel’ (Gebara 1997: 72). This is why if we do not start with our own experience, we run the risk of breaking the link with real living experience. And then knowledge is perceived as ‘truths’ above and beyond our bodies and our everyday experiences. The Latin American Afro-feminist Theology (TAFLA) (Mena López 2003: 40–3) we describe here springs, then, from the need to create theology from experiences of

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community and religious life, of women of Christian faith, and women of faiths of African origin in Latin America and the Caribbean. This theology is concerned first and foremost with the situations of racism, sexism, classism, colonialism, and anti-semitism which mark the life experiences of the oppressed in our societies. This means that theological reflection is the second stage of a first theology, which is the everyday reality of women. This theology presents and recognizes itself as a theology that wants to manifest the revelation of the Divine in the lives of poor black women. It interprets reality as a source of emancipation and seeks to redefine the experience of the Divine in corporality (Aquino and Támez 1998: 54). Its aim is to deconstruct the political systems of enslavement, protesting through silence even, by touching, through songs, poems, meals, and slogans. It manifests itself in a variety of forms of expression: in spoken language, in symbols, in gestures, in the body, in aesthetics, etc. It expresses itself through a process of liberation and faith in black women. TAFLA does not spring only from the pain caused by the discrimination and racism lived by black women, but also from their struggles and resistance. It is a theology that goes beyond the mere inclusion of black women in the category of the poor, obviously without forgetting that we continue to be slaves to hunger, disease, and the highest rates of unemployment. However, Afro-feminist theology rescues black woman from the role of the poor servant or slave, a role invented by the learned creators of socio-religious imagery, since we know that black woman was reduced to this role by the cruel genocide, plundering, and slavery of her people. It sets black woman up as the protagonist of a history of struggle and resistance, even while the official history tries to hide her power, wisdom, and resistance. In this way, our theological reflection aims to eliminate the hiding places of classism, racism, and sexism camouflaged in biblical and theological erudition. This is why we want to underline here that we, as women, are not just the source of knowledge about our condition, but above all agents of this knowledge. As a way of getting back to our reality, black women’s words themselves are used here, words that were heard here and there, in talks, in conversations, in expressions of relief or pain, in setbacks or moments of joy, words read or sung in different situations. With these words, which speak of what we lived, what we feel now, what we hope for in the future, we are no longer objects, but become subjects through our voices of freedom (Ama 1995: 260).

Historical background of the marginalization of women and of the Afro-American people under globalization To know you are black is to know the experience of . . . deciding to recover your history and recreate its potential, seeking out change that generates new power relationships in society. (Silva 1998)

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How is the so-called personal freedom proclaimed by neo-liberals seen from the perspective of the Afro-American woman? To answer this question we must remember that by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the first phase of the Industrial Revolution and period of transformation into a capitalist society, the black people of Latin America and the Caribbean had been suffering for at least a century their own holocaust, with the African slave trade providing a work force for the export-based economy of the colonies, endorsing the profits of the rich of Spain and Portugal. As well as working as slaves in the sugar cane plantations, mines, and big estates, women were sexually exploited by both white and black men. It is only too clear that we helped to build the economy as both producers and reproducers, but derived little benefit from this. The second phase of industrialization, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was dominated by the mechanization of production processes and the accompanying emigration of Europeans to look after the machines and whiten the economy. The emergence of production, however, did not reach black people, although we continued to strengthen the economy. And so an economy more autonomous and hegemonic than that of the South was built, and alongside this economic consolidation, those who wrote about the influence of mercantile society perceived whiteness as the representation of their identity and a point of reference to legitimize the superiority of white people, thus ensuring their position of privilege (Gueser 2001: 13). Racist theories increased with nineteenth-century colonialism, using supposed scientific claims about racial inferiority to justify the need for colonization and control. Non-whites, considered inferior, were severely discriminated against and were consequently the victims of prejudice. Afro-Americans were treated with contempt, depicted as devils, and their religious places were defiled and their icons destroyed. Because of their active role in ancestral religious cults, women were branded witches and sorceresses, and their bodies violently stereotyped as evil, ugly, and dirty. Nonetheless, their words and gestures became an important symbol of resistance: Speaking up for black women has become, as time has gone by, an act of destruction of the identity imposed by a racist, sexist society and a decisive gesture of casting off what oppresses them as human beings. That is why, when they speak, they ‘frighten white people and blackmen’, and so they are ‘regarded with indifference, left on one side’. (Silva 1988: 40–1)

The third phase of industrialization continues up to today and is marked by post-industrial technological production and the dominant role of international financial speculation. Black people continue to be excluded and have no significant representation in the world of machines, since they do not fit the expectations or the aesthetic pattern of white people. Economic exploitation is marked by contempt for our cultures. For us this period is also characterized by the denial of access to education and consequently to professional opportunities. Ideological discourse claims that ‘the lack of integration in society of the individual is the responsibility of individuals themselves’. This means that, according to today’s economic order, racism does not exist, only the incompetence of individuals themselves who are unprepared for the new economic reality. That is why they call us lazy,

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incompetent, stupid, and more. The history of black women shows us clearly that equality to compete in logical and economic terms was never symmetrical between black and white in the market, and the fundamental difference lies in racial prejudice, the ideological doctrine of inferiority conferred on the black race. Despite this, it is paradoxical that the previous Secretary General of the United Nations (UN), Kofi Annan, in one of his speeches during the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, describes in simple and synthetic terms the situation of social exclusion of a large group of people around the world: In the whole world, ethnic minorities are still disproportionally poor, disproportionally less educated than the dominant groups. They are under-represented in the political establishment and over-represented in the prisons. They have less access to quality health services and consequently a lower life expectancy. These and other kinds of racial injustice are the cruel reality of our times, but they need not be inevitable in our future.

In Colombia there are no clear official statistics on the black Colombian population, as the inclusion of ethnic origin in censuses is relatively recent and the level of racial mixing makes identification difficult. However, Document 2009 of the National Council for Social and Economic Policy (Consejo Nacional de Política Económica y Social, COMPES), published in 1997 and based on the 1993 census of the Department of National Statistics (DANE), estimates that there are 10.5 million Afro-Colombians, representing 26 of the total Colombian population. The Atlas of the Colombian Economy, on the other hand, published in 1963 by the national bank (Banco de la República), calculated a black population of 6 and a mixed race (mulatto) population of 24, which gives a figure of 30 of people who can be categorized in this ethnic group. Other present-day estimates point at a similar percentage: out of a total population of around 37 million in the year 2000, it is estimated that 29 are Afro-Colombian, that is, 10,730,000 inhabitants, or a quarter of the Colombian population, which puts Colombia among the American countries with the largest black populations, after the USA and Brazil (Etnias de Columbia). Based on these statistics, perhaps the concept of ‘ethnic minority’ as expressed by Kofi Annan is in no way applicable to the Afro-Colombian population. However, the word ‘disproportional’ can certainly be applied to our situation when we compare the living conditions of black and white in the country. Racial inequality flows inside, outside, through the center, over and under our complex social structure. Our social reality is marked by a structural racism that seems to be invisible. While it is constantly affirmed that racism does not exist and that racial integration is the norm, racism is nevertheless an integral part of our reality and forms part of the permanent structure of our society. In the declarations of Kofi Annan, as in most official summits, we can see a discourse more rhetorical in nature, given that rich countries continue to see the benefits of poverty and inequality, although they may claim that the gulf between wealth and poverty cannot be allowed to widen. Despite these claims, the essence of the policies that motivate them do not change. Nevertheless, these problems related to inequalities in poverty, schooling, politics, and health, raised by Kofi Annan, will be examined now.

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Globalization and gender inequality The exclusion and marginalization of people of African origin has often been examined in generic terms, but little has been said about exclusion on the basis of gender. Historically women of African origin have been excluded for a variety of reasons: because they are black, because they are women, because they belong to the most underprivileged sectors of society, because of their civil status, and even because of their sexuality (Grajales Gallego 2005). Of the estimated 30 of people of African origin mentioned, the majority are women who live in a state of extreme poverty. While there is a dearth of statistical analyses about Afro-Colombian women, in the view of the historian Wania Sant’Anna, UN data show that gender inequality is strongly related to human poverty (Sant’Anna): To speak about the feminization of poverty is to speak about one of the most serious consequences of economic globalization, of the imbalances that the imposition of one economic model on a ‘global scale’ has caused in many regions of the world and in certain sectors of society. (Lopez Plaza 1997: 153)

This global model views development in terms of certain parameters of economic development and takes into account neither the negative consequences for the less privileged sectors of society nor the ecological imbalance caused, and certainly not the negative effects on the lives of women and children. An examination of globalization, as a process that involves all humanity, must include questions related to gender, class, and ethnic origin, as when we look at the overall situation of women in Latin America we are confronted with scandalous figures as regards the position of black women. In 2003 in Brazil, for example, the leading newspaper in the country revealed that: White men are the largest possessors of wealth in the country, receiving 50 of all income. Black women are in the worst position, with only 8.1. White women, with 24.1, are in a better position than black men, with 17.7. (Folha de São Paulo: 2003)

In the globalized world, the particularities of black women’s situation mean that we come off worst, with the relative poverty of both women and black people. The dollars do not reach the favelas (shanty towns), where, owing to the lack of clean drinking water, mostly black children die of diarrhea and where women must deal with their children’s health problems. We are the ones who face long queues in under-resourced public hospitals waiting for remedies for our children as they suffer from the effects of contaminated water and hunger. Given the hierarchical structure of society and the division of labor, women, especially black women in the favelas, are thus the first to feel the impact of ecological and urban problems such as the mingling of rubbish with the water supply. These appalling environmental conditions are mostly caused by the growth of industry and capital. We need do no more than remember that those 20 of the richest countries in the world consume 80 of the world’s energy, and that this tragic ecological crisis is caused by the industrial economic model of the first world.

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Political inequality In politics, as in the economy, the traditional exercise of power does not afford women the space to compete on equal terms. Therefore, black women’s movements work to increase their participation in political contexts and so to allow them to reconstruct their identity. So, for example, the struggle to affirm Afro-Colombian identity has gained strength with the judicial and political changes brought about by the 1991 constitution, which recognized the multiethnic culture and society of Colombia and institutionalized multiculturalism in the constitution (Barbary 2001). With Law 70 in 1993, also known as the Law on the Black Communities, and its predecessor, Transitional Article 55—the result of the new constitution—the notion of black communities began to gain currency. This concept (of black communities) is understood as a group of inhabitants of a specific area, the Pacific coast and the islands of San Andrés and Providencia, who can prove Afro-Colombian ancestry going back several generations to between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when they first arrived as slaves (Urrea). It is precisely because of the value attached to development policies on a world scale, and the application of these by government organizations, the Church, and the State in the Pacific region, that the Afro-Colombian communities have begun to appear on the political stage. For example, the department of Chocó, where 95 of the population is Afro-Colombian, has become a region of strategic importance as its location between two oceans makes it the focus of current global maritime development policies. However, owing to the constant and systematic violence, exploitation, and environmental degradation, the area is caught between two opposing interests: one focused on economic development and the other concerned with the environment and the population. This situation has led to a resurgence of demands for greater regionalism, pride in ethnic identity, and the protection of the environment. Under these conditions, access to the statute and subsidies planned in Law 70 depends on the existence of a cultural and ethnic identity linked specifically to a region—rural areas of the Pacific coast—and to an economic system of exploitation of resources based on the traditional family microbusiness with its combination of agricultural, fishing, and mining, under grave threat in the modern world. Therefore, those communities most directly affected by the new law are trying to stick as closely as possible to the affirmation of a neo-ethnic identity that the constitution demands of them, at least in some sense. It is reasonable to have one’s suspicions of the constitutional interest in the reaffirmation of identity, as in most cases this discourse makes it harder to analyze the factors that have caused our marginalization today. Traditionally, Afro-Colombian women have been marginalized in the political arena, and their limited participation in national politics can be easily summarized: in the town of Buenaventura, almost two decades ago, two women of African origin were elected Mayor, Astrid del Rosario Alvear Guerrero and Marina Arango Rivas; in the House of Representatives, Leonor Gonzáles Mina and Zulia Mena were present; and in today’s Congress, we have María Isabel Urrutia and Piedad Córdoba. However, these figures certainly do not demonstrate that the political marginalization of Afro-Colombian

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women has disappeared, even though it is true that, in the past decade, women of African origin have managed to take part in grass roots organizational processes such as departmental consultation committees and the National Pedagogical Commission, as well as in local government. When it comes to the major political decisions, however, black women continue to be marginalized (Lozano 1996). Significantly, of these women, those who have worn the flag of their blackness too openly have been quickly removed from their posts, as their philosophy was incompatible with today’s neo-liberal model. However, some of them forgot about the defense of Afro-Colombian rights when they came to power or simply made use of such rights discourse to legitimize their positions. This in particular appears to be a strategy common to so-called democracies where political freedom means the reproduction of the politicking discourse imposed by the dominant global model of today.

Social inequality In social terms, the causes of oppressive social relations are still hidden today. Mobility between social classes remains uncommon. Many black women live in the shanty towns of metropolitan areas, in makeshift dwellings, often dangerous, and without basic sanitation, water, electricity, or health services or education for their children. These services, when they are available, exist because of pressure exerted and demands made by women. On the Pacific coast almost 60 of the Afro-Colombian population lives without health provision, only 48 have running water, and infant mortality is four times the national average. Life expectancy is also less than the national average. This situation is in stark contrast with the wealth of natural resources of the area in which they live: the tropical rainforest region is extremely rich in biodiversity, and produces 58 of the country’s wood (Etnias de Columbia). Public health here is characterized by the reappearance of diseases believed to be eradicated, such as tuberculosis, malaria, and typhus, and, more commonly still, conditions such as malnutrition, made worse for women and children by the shortages of basic products and internal displacement caused by the war. As one witness stated: We had to put up with being thrown out of our houses and watching those who threw us out armed in the streets around our hostels. We were frightened and humiliated. Our children could not go to school. We began to suffer from diseases we had never had before. The marks of horror and fear began to grow in our bodies and those of our children.

More expensive foodstuffs like meat, eggs, and pulses are also scarce. In rural areas, people rely on natural medicine to cure traditional diseases, as midwives are still the only people who look after women’s health. In Colombia, birth control forms part of government policy and sterilization is legal. The government has undertaken family planning programs as part of a wider plan for population control. These policies, however, which pay more attention to the democratic

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problems that concern the international community, are far from addressing questions about women’s rights to control their bodies and health care. In urban areas, those who failed to complete secondary education usually find work in factories or shops or as cleaners. Those who do complete their education tend to work as school teachers, nurses, or factory supervisors. In rural areas, black women, like others, work on large farms or in other rural businesses, or as domestic servants. For some women, their work is ‘boring, extremely hard, exhausting, and in the best possible case acceptable’. Female involvement in productive work is not widely recognized. It remains invisible, particularly in the agricultural sector, where female labor in fact plays an important role, although almost always within the family, as women are rarely the owners of the land they work. Most women work part-time as domestic servants or are housewives, and so do not qualify as beneficiaries of social security. Domestic workers can join private insurance plans, but few do, owing to the high cost and low pay in their sector. Generally, salaries on offer to black women are lower than those paid to white women, even if they have similar education, experience, and training, and perform the same job. This situation creates an additional burden, as they have to combine their paid work with their reproductive roles, which is made even more difficult by low pay and insecure working conditions. And it is even worse for those who cannot find work in the formal sector, as many are obliged to work in the informal economy or to beg (the majority of beggars in urban areas are women). On top of this, there has been significant growth in informal child and juvenile labor in the streets of the large cities. At the same time as the armed conflict deepened in the Pacific region of Colombia, so the level of unlawful killing rose too, especially in rural areas of Chocó department. ‘Unpunished crime in urban areas increased alarmingly; in 1997 alone there were more than 221 murders in the city of Quibdó, and in Istmina and Condoto there were 56 and 32 violent deaths respectively, a level of unlawful killings disproportionate to the low population of the area and its peaceful history up to that point’ (Observation Mission on the Situation of Communities of African Origin in Colombia). Press reports estimate that the death toll in that period was actually higher still, as armed conflict spiralled out of control in Riosucio, Bojayá, Murindó, Vigía del Fuerte, and other areas, where lawlesness reached a barbaric level, and fear, massacres, displacement, and ‘disappearances’ were the only constants (ibid.). Displacement is one of the phenomena that infringes most severely on the rights of Afro-Colombian women: I have four children and I had to leave Riosucio (Chocó) after my husband and one of my in-laws was killed. That was in December 1996 when the paramilitaries arrived. Everything has been so hard here . . . sometimes I get desperate and I take it out on the kids, I know it’s not their fault . . . they cry a lot, and get up in the middle of the night, and it makes me feel so bad.

According to the Commission for Human Rights (Consultoría para los Derechos Humanos, CODHES), 53 of those displaced in Colombia are women, and 28 of these

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of Afro-Colombian origin. Afro-Colombian households form 10 of all the displaced households in the country. Women are the heads of 49.5 of these households, and men the remaining 50.5 (Observation Mission on the Situation of Communities of African Origin in Colombia). An examination of these figures leads us to the conclusion that in Afro-Colombian communities, women represent half of all the displaced individuals, and this is made worse by the fact that almost half of them are the heads of their households, obligated to ensure the social survival of their families and provide basic necessities, even when men are present. Therefore women are forced to face drastic changes that exacerbate the inequity of traditional roles and leave them with neither time nor the chance to come to terms with the psychological scars of this process. Children, when displaced along with their families, also suffer the effects of this, with low levels of school attendance caused by the severe economic problems of their parents or by the lack of school places when they arrive in the cities. Because of the breakdown in family structures, girls are at risk of violence and sexual exploitation, and it is common to find pregnant girls of twelve or thirteen in displaced families. For displaced girls, the struggle to get enough to eat, and the problems with health, housing, and security lead to premature sexual relationships and marriage. Girls trade sex for clothes, money, or places at school. Prostitution is another source of employment for young women, and it is more common today than in recent years. It is believed that one of the causes of this increase is the high rate of displacement affecting the young, particularly those who choose not to join one of the armed groups. Despite this, Afro-Colombian communities have always been involved in a permanent search for roots and stability, giving their settlements, villages, and towns distinctive cultural characteristics that we can call Afro-Colombian. However, although a large part of the population is subject to a constant mobility and dispersal to the various regions and cities of the country and elsewhere—caused by their need to find better living conditions and improved standards of health and education—this mobility has not led to the breaking of links with their places of origin, families, and communities. They have managed to create networks of solidarity and support that allow them to survive even under the most adverse conditions, and to conserve, strengthen, and recreate their culture wherever they have settled.

Religious inequality In religious terms, a Roman Catholic hegemony reigns supreme. Ancestral religions continue to be marginalized, even now that the rich ethnic diversity of the continent of America is recognized. This recognition hides, however, the traps of a dominant white ideology that, as well as excluding us on the grounds of skin color, generally views our spiritual and religious experiences as a somewhat ridiculous and even primitive synonym for backwardness.

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Most Afro-Colombian people have been baptized as Catholics, but despite this we maintain our African roots in our forms of everyday religious expression. In the Pacific region of Colombia, for example, people have historically managed to keep alive the dances to honor the African deities through syncretic dances such as valsadas or the beating of drums, held in parallel to the celebrations organized by missionaries. Even though Catholicism is the official religion in Colombia, in the Caribbean region there are a number of religious traditions, such as the lumbalú rites, in which we can see the ancestral spirits and in which women’s role is of vital importance. The lumbalú of Palenque de San Basilio is a sacred ritual that uses rhythm, melody, feelings, and images to bring life to a deep religious and philosophical view of the world. In the poetic chants there are many social and linguistic traces of our African ancestry. But how did our people manage to keep its traditions alive behind the back of official religion? The Church baptized us and we went along with the missionary’s words, adding our symbology, but then we seized the image of the saint and danced in her or his honor in communal ceremonies at night. As elements of Christianity were taken on board, ways were also found to camouflage our own traditions, and the patron saints of santería became the bridge between us and the lives of our ancestors in different parts of Africa (Granja 2003). Through these syncretic, Afro-Catholic practices, with their superimposition of images and ideas, in chains and on our knees facing the cross, African people began to give fresh expression to their religiousness. Christian saints and orishas were subject to a process of syncretization and mystification. Syncretism ceased to be seen as a measure of the relative effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the evangelization of the Christian missionaries and became the means of survival of a people who were spiritually threatened but who wanted to create a space for resistance, autonomy, and self-affirmation. Syncretism took aim at the political control of images, symbols, and Western ideas, but also watched over the pulse of resistance of a view of the world that refused to lie down and die (Olivella 1986: 105). When religious syncretism is mentioned, the first thing that comes to mind is that it is something that has been degraded, a production defect, the degradation of Jesus’s original Christianity. But why? In Brazil, for example, the church of the Senhor do Bonfim is considered to be in honor of the orisha Oxalá. So what does this mean? Was it the Africans who corrupted Spanish and Portuguese Catholicism, or was it Catholicism that violated the ancestral traditions of the Africans? One of the problems that prevent the acceptance of syncretism lies in the fact that the phenomenon of religion has always been studied in relation to the hegemony of Catholic or Christian religion. And so it is impossible to believe that indigenous and black people, Creoles and mestizos, are claiming their ancestral identity through the practice of Catholic religion, because their own religious and community beliefs were labeled witchcraft. The fundamental problem lies in the credo that Christianity is the only religion that possesses the true revelation of God. Afro-Catholic religious syncretism forces Europeanized Christianity to relearn its dogma and its pastoralism. Far from a deformation of true Christianity, syncretism functioned as a brake on the Catholic ideological hegemony of the time of slavery.

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So how can Christian churches vehemently reject theological religious syncretism and at the same time claim that in Jesus of Nazareth two radically different natures (human and divine) are present in the same person, without mixing, confusion, or separation? How can they reject in principle people’s attempt to join two different, and even contradictory, gods in one religious experience? How is it possible not to see before us the symbolic and theoretical enterprise of Trinitarian dogma, which seeks a difficult balance between monotheistic conviction and the experience of multiplicity in divinity? Cultural exclusion, proselytism, and religious intolerance continue to be a reality in Afro-America, despite the emergence of new analytical categories like multiculturalism and interculturalism. It is my belief that these categories fit into the global model of inclusion and so-called freedom. Yet despite this, the silence regarding the sacredness of ancestral traditions persists. Although ecumenical thought has been present in Latin America and the Caribbean for decades, it never became a popular movement, as it was always a subject for the institutional churches and their leaders. And so it is important to reject male ecumenicalism and focus on the creation of active ways of resistance for women’s spirituality.

Impact of black feminism on religious studies To analyze the impact of black feminism on studies of religion, it is important to look at the history of the black political movement. Black theology in the Americas began with the arrival of the slaves, as they brought their philosophy, culture, and religiosity from Africa. However, on American soil, they were the object of evangelization by a Christianity that considered them sub-human, and in fact, repressive and discriminatory measures were employed to kill off black religion. Nevertheless, being a highly religious people, Afro-Americans found great liberating potential in the Christian religion, which inspired many rebellions, political boycotts, and escapes. The second phase of black liberation theology included the struggles for emancipation of the abolitionist movements and continued up to the 1960s. This phase was characterized by a radical critique of institutional racism. The third phase began in the mid-1970s, a period in which emerged North American academic theology or Black Theology, and continued until the end of the decade. In Latin America and the Caribbean, liberation theology drew attention to the significant presence of black people in poor communities, and correlations between racism and classism were exposed. A militant political critique of colonialism made itself heard, and there was now little doubt over the use of religion as an instrument of control over both black and women’s bodies, and its responsibility in maintaining their social and religious subordination.

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In the 1980s the fourth phase began and continues today. Apart from a general critique of the capitalist system, black women have seen that up to now black theology has focused entirely on men. The vast majority of black theologians said little about the situation of women, despite being conscious that half the population and half the churchgoers were women. Sexism was therefore added to racism and classism, but now an attempt has been made to deconstruct the gender asymmetries that characterize our thought constructs. Throughout this process, we must recognize the impact of feminism on the development of the theological thinking of black women, and particularly on the study of religion. White feminism, however, was also elitist and exclusivist. The universality of its supposed claim to fight for the cause of all women has been criticized by black women, who see a camouflaged racism in this. While we recognize the activity and resistance of many anonymous women, who did not become known because of lack of education or recognition of their wisdom, it remains important to highlight the work of North American womanist theologians, our precursors. The black theologian Dolores Williams proposes the categorization of feminist theology from a black perspective as womanist theology, the term womanist having been introduced in 1982 by the writer Alice Walker, author of the novel The Color Purple. The term was then adopted by black theologians like Katie Geneva Cannon, Jacqueline Grant, and Emilie Townes, who consider it to be an important political current of women’s fight in the liberation of black people, men and women. In Latin America and the Caribbean, the first attempt to bring together people working in the field of black theology occurred in Rio de Janeiro in July 1985, with the First Symposium on Black Theology and Culture, organized by the Atabaque Center of Black Culture and Theology with the support of ASSET (the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians), where the focus was on ‘Identity and Religion’. Together with Christians of different denominations, practitioners of voodoo (Haiti), candomblé (Brasil), and lumbalú (Colombia) also took part. At this time the subject of black women was making its first timid appearance. In 1994 a second event was held in São Paulo, and this time the topic was ‘Afro-American Culture and Theology’, and one of the workshops was an introduction to Latin American black feminist theology, and the main features of this theology were outlined. In 2003 the third symposium took place, and feminist theology was discussed particularly in the workshop ‘Afro-theology and Gender’, although a certain cross-pollination was also clear in the influence, for example, of the perspective of ‘Afro-theology and Biblical hermeneutics’. Among the most notable Latin American and Caribbean participants were Silvia Regina de Lima, Tirsa Ventura, Marli Wandermuren, Eliade dos Santos, Sonia Quirino, Caterine Chalá, and Maricel Mena López. In the field of biblical study, we must highlight the two intercontinental conferences on black hermeneutics, held in en Quito in 1997 and Santo Domingo in 2002. Although general hermeneutic and cultural themes were discussed, women have always made use of these spaces to express their theological positions, articulate ideas, and propose common agendas. The belief that women’s experience is the starting point for a theological

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reflection that surrounds their daily lives is why Afro-feminist theology has become an important methodological space. At present, gender is an important tool as it helps us to critique the power of the dominant patriarchal culture, as well as power relationships between women.

Women’s experience I am black, yes, as God made me I know how to fight for life, to sing for freedom, To enjoy this color (Music from Mocambique singer to Araguari/MG—Brazil)

Black women are confronted not only with the racism and sexism of dominant society and its patriarchal structures, but are also faced on one side by the racism of a feminist movement dominated by white women, and on the other by the antifeminism and heterosexism standard in the black movement. We are forgotten and ignored by virtue of being black, and of being women, and that is why Latin American Afro-feminist theology wants to place the experiences of black women on center stage. Experience is necessarily a key element in feminist liberation theologies, which recognize the role our lives play in our theoretical formulations, whether historical, political, or theological. This is why we recognize women’s experiences of oppression and their struggles for liberation as epistemological keys vital for the deconstruction of monolithic fixed ideas. The plurality of experiences does not allow us homogeneous results, as not all experiences are shared and lived by all women, just as not all black women are Christians or follow African religions. So we must respect the polyphony of voices and experiences, while at the same time questioning the academic principles of neutrality and universality and their camouflaged racism that sets up only one experience as a parameter. The experience highlighted here is unquestionably a bodily experience, passed down through memory and the oral tradition. When we rethink the experience of Divinity from the perspective of our corporality, we are proclaiming the liberation of the images of God that continue to be used to justify racist and sexist structures in our society. Woman’s body is the bearer not only of an ancestral memory that manifests itself in oral language, but also in the language of gestures, which serves as the vehicle for an ancestral consciousness. This body is an important political tool for liberation. In claiming this, we are recognizing these black bodies as the bearers of socio-cultural resistance, the result of the needs of an adverse and hostile everyday situation. Our bodies are important because movement is part of life, and indeed is life itself. While Westerners separate their existence into a higher and a lower part, AfroAmericans express themselves with their whole bodies in their ceremonies. These bodies, among other elements, characterize their cultures as cultures of struggle and popular resistance. Through gesture and movement, when they walk with loose limbs, Afro-Americans seek to hold on to their corporality, considered ‘sensual’, but also as a political means to

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find their place in the world. In this posture, Afro-American women establish a relationship with themselves and with the world, deconstructing the prisons and ties imposed by mechanization and the standardization of the body (Fonseca 2001: 66). Through ritual dances women incorporate cosmic forces, creating the possibility of bringing about change, making their bodies into a free territory of their own, with rhythm and freed of their chains. African wisdom understood as memory, the way communities produce knowledge, is expressed through specific experiences of groups and individuals. The role of knowledge is in the community and in communion with the universe. Women who have memory have power. It is an ancestral power shared in the community, the value of which transcends time and space. African myths are one of the expressions of this knowledge, a knowledge without contradictions, a knowledge different from rational knowledge. It must not be contrasted to reason, however, as this knowledge is just as ‘authentic’ as scientific ‘rational’ knowledge. To speak of oral tradition means to speak of myths, rites, and ancestral practices. In Afro-American religions, songs, dances, movements, ceremonies, and myths are intrinsically linked and form one mythical reality. Myths aim to explain and provide answers as to why things happen. They are stories told with the object of unveiling mysteries, and they form part of a body of knowledge cultivated by the ancients, where language consists of symbols and enigmas, images, and parables.

Afro-feminist identity When we attempt to discover what it means to be black for an Afro-Colombian, we are presented with a variety of comments ranging from negation to the process of reconstruction of identity. To be black means ‘to put up with discrimination every day’, ‘to have difficulties finding work’, ‘to be exploited by white women who refuse to pay even the minimum wage for a domestic worker’, ‘to be exhibited as a mulatta’, ‘to be obliged to demonstrate that you are black but also cultured’, ‘not to be recognized for your intellectual abilities’. (Silva 1998)

However, in diverse opportunities in which black women met and conversed about issues related to their rights in society, we found expressions that referred to exclusion and their fighting for their rights. The following is an example of such comments: ‘the courage to face each day’, ‘she is a fighter’, ‘it is an never-ending struggle to change the way things are’, ‘she demands her space’, ‘the strength to get over obstacles’, ‘struggle against racism’, ‘she talks and her words shock’.

It seems impossible to speak about black identity without being politically conscious of the structural oppressions of society. As we come to terms with ourselves as black or of African origin, we discover important clues for changing oppressive social and political structures.

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Therefore to be black is not only and exclusively to have black skin, but a philosophy, a political choice or attitude, in the sense of assuming a position in life. To adopt our identity as an identity still being built is a highly revolutionary stance, as it offers us clues as to the transformation of our society. It makes it possible for us to humanize relationships, to grow, discover, reinvent, re-create. The construction of a person’s identity is a process that takes place in a historical context; it is a relationship involving others in which we become conscious of what we are by relating to other identities, by feeling part of a group. In the African view of the world, everyone belongs to a group; we identify with our history through the awareness we have of belonging and the commitment to reconstruct this history. We live the history of our ancestors because we share a common past. However, the fundamental aim of the Afro-feminist debate of our praxis lies in the relativization of identity and religious and cultural fidelity. Because, above all, we are not a body isolated from the many women’s movements of the Americas, and together we strengthen our popular, ecumenical, and macro ecumenical vocation. That is why we believe that the concept of gender, like that of identity, depend on the two variables, race and ethnic group: Gender and ethnic group are inseparable in our approach, proposals and denunciations. They are the two factors which have caused our exclusion and, as black women fighting for change from the base of our gender, ethnic origin and of course our socio-economic situation, they will be the factors that contribute to the transformation of Latin America and the Caribbean into just societies where diversity is respected.

Critique of philosophical universalism Women are challenging philosophical knowledge and its pretensions to universality. Philosophy is not a body of knowledge specific to one race, civilization, or social class. Philosophy is the thinking process of human beings themselves, built up by different civilizations at different times, and cultivated by a variety of peoples using different paradigms. It could be argued that one of the key factors that led to the present-day crisis of reason was the negation of the particular (the black) in favor of the universal (the white). This is negation in the sense of exclusion, of ‘not being’. The black person cannot, does not have, and therefore is not, while the white person ‘thinks’, ‘creates’, ‘gives meaning to white man’, to the ‘history of mankind’, to ‘the sciences’, to ‘life’. The black person does not exist, but works to make the white person rich (Da Silva 2003). The black woman does not exist, but she takes sole responsibility for sons and daughters of white and black men, for single motherhood is a reality in Afro-America. She is not, and so her activity becomes invisible. We want to break with the patterns and values pre-established by Western tradition and question the European model of access to knowledge, the concept of a world

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that is universal for all peoples and cultures, because in this philosophical model so-called peripheral groups are not taken into account. We believe precisely the opposite: ‘the black person is’, ‘the black person knows’, ‘the black person thinks’. In this sense, women are constantly reviving the wisdom of our ancestors. In the field of biblical study, for example, we have revived the tradition of wise African women like, among others, the queen of Saba (Mena López 2002: 25–33), the Egyptian slave Agar, the wise old woman Sefora, the queen Candace. These women empower us as the builders of a philosophy of our own, constructed together with those men who take up the cause of women.

Religious pluralism One vital question that women are asking today is about how we are managing the question of pluralism and interreligious dialogue between Christianity and other ancestral religions. Pluralism and the richness of symbols of Afro-American religions challenge us to a symmetrical dialogue between the different religions, though this dialogue cannot be an absolute one, nor can it become the ultimate aim of theology. Through this dialogue we can come to accept that our truths cannot be objective and universal. The theology of pluralism encourages us to search for an ethical consensus on unresolved questions like hunger, economic inequalities, injustices, lack of respect for differences, ecological abuse. Together with our theology of liberation, we must provide a new spirituality that transcends religious borders and respects the emergence of new religious identities. Let us recognize that Christianity, as well as the religions of African origin, are cultural constructions linked to Western and to African culture, and so no religion can be universal. And as cultural constructs they must be subject to criticism in the cause of the reconstruction of our traditions to serve life itself.

An Afro-Colombian response to the globalized world From a social perspective The periodic and increasing demands for the rights of black populations made by the black consciousness movements of Latin America and the Caribbean have had a major impact in Colombia, especially in the past decade. These movements, as well as denouncing all kinds of discrimination or acts of xenophobia committed against black citizens, have campaigned to end the exclusion, marginalization, and poverty of communities of African origin.

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Through this process women have exposed a whole macabre system characterized by a growing ‘feminization of poverty’. Black women for their part have discovered that poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean is a phenomenon of race as well as gender, that poverty has the face of a black woman. This realization has led not only to the reinforcement of black and feminist consciousness groups, but also to the recognition of this debate in academic circles and even in Colombian politics. The silent conquests of the women who have played a part in Colombian political life have allowed them to put forward, together with the black movement, affirmative policies that aim to give dignity to the lives of black communities. In this sense, it is important to mention the silent work that academics have performed to reformulate curricula and educational materials as part of the ethnic education project, soon to be implemented in the country’s schools and colleges. The movements of the Colombian Pacific region are fighting for the recognition of territoriality established in the national constitution and for the development of important concepts of territory and biodiversity. Territory can be understood as a space for the creation and recreation of values and social, economic, and cultural practices within communities, and the defense of territory is assumed to be part of a historical process that links past and future. In the past autonomy was maintained through the reliance on forms of knowledge, visions of the world, and ways of life suited to certain uses of natural resources. Faced with national and international pressure as regarding biodiversity and the generic and natural resources of the region, organized black communities are preparing for an uneven strategic battle to maintain control over the only territorial space in which they still exert a significant social influence. Respect for and communion with nature are among the principal demands of the black communities today in the quest for a brighter future where respect for women and nature go together. The defense of territory implies the rejection of a complex pattern of social relations and cultural constructs that promoted asymmetrical relationships between men and women and with nature. That is why the uncovering of macho and sexist ideologies within communities is among the challenges set by women.

From a religious perspective Our African heritage, inherent in our experiences of God in the world, has allowed black women to preserve and transmit a religious and cultural legacy of resistance in our churches. This legacy goes beyond mere incorporation into Christian churches; women are demanding the right to be and exist as members of a church that values their way of being and feeling. This value is based on acceptance of the idea that black women have a special way of celebrating their faith and of relating to the Divine, to that God who is both Father and Mother, the orishas of the ancestors and those of everyday life today. Black women involved in theology and the church aim to provide a critical expression of revelation in the everyday lives of women throughout the history of the black community, in the form of a history of salvation and liberation. Our purpose is to rethink

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God from the perspective of our own corporality, of our own roots coming from mother Africa, of a past of slavery, and a long journey marked by protest, resistance, and victories over oppression. What we are proposing is an unmasking of racist, sexist, and colonialist ideologies that are still alive and well in our churches. We see theology and the church opening up and taking part in a dialogue with other religious traditions, and by so doing, affirming its macro-ecumenical dimensions. In this way the Christian God is involved in respectful dialogue with other forms of Afro-American and Caribbean religious and cultural experiences: candomblé in Brazil, voodoo in Haiti, santería in Cuba, and lumbalú in Colombia. Women see the figure of Jesus as respectful of different peoples and cultures, especially after his meetings with the Samaritan woman, the woman of Canaan, and the Syro-Phoenician. The revival of the Christic dimension of Jesus also helps women in their search for dignity for black women and men. For us the Christic dimension is not only the identification of and identity with a black Christ, but even more importantly, a messianic commitment to and praxis of liberation. By putting forward the idea of an ecumenism that transcends the limits of official Christianity and embraces religious and cultural expressions of African origin, women are proposing something more than a dialogue: it should be a communion between Christianity and African religions and serve as a way of coming nearer to a design for liberation that respects individual choice and values the word of God both within and outside the Scriptures. And this is why we must challenge and question the patriarchal structures of power within churches and religious groups, even when the leaders of these organizations are not themselves women. The utopia of the creation of a space that the Afro-American community can inhabit with dignity remains a utopia today, and this can be clearly seen in the beliefs, rites, ceremonies, and religious organizations of African origin. In the Afro-American view of the world there exists a great life force, the orishas, which are the ancestral spirits that manifest themselves in people and in nature. The figure of the ancestor is one way in which the sacred is perpetuated in people’s lives; community life gives birth to the sacred, which is manifested in nature, in people, in things, in the community, and in the family. The ancestral element speaks to us about the primordial fundamentals of a group, as it is something that permits the preservation of identity, an identity that weeps over the forests that have been cut down and demands the universal elements: land, water, justice, life, fertility, love, peace, wealth, etc. And this leads us to our next challenge, that of creating a church in the citizenship itself, especially important because of the established church’s insistence on the inferiority of women as regards the ministry. A new reflection on Christ will help us to take this step, rescuing the image of Christ reborn and committed to the holistic struggle of man as well as of woman, and committed also to dialogue and the revival of the activity of women priestesses and spiritual leaders. Women’s actions must encourage the construction of new male and female identities, identities that overthrow the patriarchal stereotypes held up for so long and that lend dignity to the lives of the poor black women of our continent.

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Notes 1. Sueli Carneiro. Strategies to Combat Racism. Palestra proferida no 8. Encontro da Pastoral Afro-americana (EPA) (Salvador: EPA, 2000) (mimeo). 2. Chistiane Girard Ferreira Nunes, Panel. Globalization, Poverty, and the Working World. Workshop documentation on Feminization of Poverty, Employment, and Income. House of Representatives, Special Committee on Year of Women, the Labor, Public Service, and Administration Commission and External Analysis of Feminization of Poverty in Brazil (Brazil: Center for Documentation and Information, 2004), p. 17. 3. Marga Janéte Ströher. ‘Feminist theology and gender—territoriality, deslocamentos and horizons’. In: Communication of the Third World Forum on Theology and Liberation, 21 to 25 January 2009. 4. Johann B. Metz. ‘Compassion Over a universal program of Christianity in the era of cultural and religious pluralism’, delivered in Murcia, 25 October 1999. Available at http:// www.foroellacuria.org/publicaciones/metz-compasion.htm 5. Dolores Juliano, Excluded and Marginalized (Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 2004), 18. 6. For more on the processes of political structuring in the black community, see for example J. Arocha (1992), C. E. Agudelo (1998), M. Agier and O. Hoffmann (1998), N. S. De Friedemann (1998), and C.E. Agudelo et al. (1999). 7. Observation Mission of the Situation of Black Communities in Colombia: Part VII. Impact of Conflict on Black Communities in Colombia. Available at http://www.nadir.org/nadir/ initiativ/agp/free/colombia/txt/2002/afrocolombia07.htm 8. Witness interviews conducted by researchers from developing CODHES fieldwork. 9. With the aim of defining and redefining their identity, black organizations have in recent years adopted the term ‘of African origin’, which groups together the socio-cultural and historical identity of dark-skinned peoples, zambos (people of mixed black and indigenous origin), and mulattos. However, it seems to me that the adjective ‘black’ is still valid when accompanied by a noun, such as people, community, or woman, if it is used consciously by black communities who identify themselves as such. In my opinion it is still an eminently political term, as it reveals by its very existence that we live in a racist society which we must fight against. The prefix ‘Afro’ suggests a common ethnic and historical culture and does not necessarily imply an ideological and political struggle against the racist structures that prevail in our society. 10. Epsy Campbell, Costa Rican deputy of African origin and well-known political activist. Gender and Ethnicity from African women. The Bighorn 6 (April 2000).

Works Cited Alonso, Luis Enrique (1997). ‘Globalización y vulnerabilidad social’, in Virginia Maquieira D’Angelo and Maria Jesús Vara (Eds), Género, Clase y etnia en los nuevos procesos de globalización: XI Jornadas de Investigación Interdisciplinaria sobre la Mujer. Madrid: Instituto Universitario de Estudios de la Mujer: Ediciones de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 3–26. Ama, Ata Aidoo (1995). ‘Ghana: To be a woman’, in Safro Kwame (Ed.), Readings in African Philosophy: An Akan Collection. Latham, MA: University Press of America. Aquino, María Pilar, and Támez, Elsa (1998). Teología Feminista Latino-Americana. Quito, Ecuador: Ediciones Abya-Yala.

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Barbary, Olivier (2001). ‘Identidad y ciudadanía afrocolombiana en Cali y la región Pacific: pistas estadísticas para una interpretación sociológica’, Scripta Nova: Revista Electrónica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales, 94/22, 1 Aug., available at http://www.ub.es/geocrit/sn-94-22. htm Da Silva, Oswaldo José (2003). ‘Pistas para a construção de uma filosofia afro-brasileira’. Talk given at the Third Symposium on Black Theology, São Paulo, Brazil. (2004). ‘O visível e o invisível na conjuntura Afro-American e Caribbeannha’, in Consulta Ecumênica de Teologia Afroamericana e Caribenha (Ed.), Teologia Afroamericana II, Avanços, desafios e perspectivas. São Paulo, Brazil: Centro Atabaque de Cultura Black y Teologia. Estefanía, Joaquín (2002). ‘Maravillosa excusa para muchas cosas’, in Juan José TamayoAcosta (Ed.), 10 Palabras Clave Globalización. Estella, Navarra: Verbo Divino. Etnias de Colombia, Fundación Hemera Comunicación, Vida y Desarrollo. http://www. etniasdecolombia.org/groups_afro_poblacion.asp Folha de São Paulo (2003). ‘Brancos detêm 74 da renda brasileira’, 20 Nov., http://www1.folha. uol.com.br/fsp/cotidian/ff2011200315.htm Fonseca, Dagoberto José (2001). Negros corpos (i)maculados: mulher, catolicismo e testemunho. São Paulo, Brazil: Pontificia Universidade Católica. Gebara, Ivone (1997). Teologia ecofeminist. São Paulo, Brazil: Editora Olho d’Água. Grajales Gallego, Jhon Jairo (2005). ‘Marginalización y exclusión de la mujer afro-colombiana a través de 500 años de historia’, Centro de Medios Independientes, http://colombia. indymedia.org/news/2005/01/20959.php Jan. 13. Gueser, Rossato (2001). ‘A experiência da branquitude diante dos problemas raciais: estudos de realidades brasileiras e estadunidenses’, in E. Cavalheiro (Ed.), Racismo e Anti-Racismo na educação: repensado nossa escola. São Paulo: Selo Negro. Lopez Plaza, María de los Angeles (1997). ‘Efectos de las políticas de ajuste estructural en la situación de las mujeres magrebíes’, in Virginia Maquieira D’Angelo and Maria Jesús Vara (Eds), Género, Clase y etnia en los nuevos procesos de globalización: XI Jornadas de Investigación Interdisciplinaria sobre la Mujer. Madrid: Instituto Universitario de Estudios de la Mujer: Ediciones de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Lozano, Betty Ruth (1996). ‘Marginalización y exclusión. Mujer y Desarrollo’, in Arturo Escobar and Álvaro Pedrosa (Eds), Pacífico ¿Desarrollo o Diversidad? Santa Fé de Bogotá, Columbia: CEREC- ECOFONDO. Mena López, Maricel (2002). ‘Mulheres Sábias em 1 Reis 3–11’, in Sean Freyne and Ellen van Wolde (Eds), ‘As muitas vozes da Bíblia’, Concilium, 294: 25–33. (2003). ‘Pensando en una teología negra feminista de liberación’, in La Habana, Centro Memorial Dr. Martin Luther King (Ed.), Caminos, 26: 40–43. Observation Mission on the Situation of Communities of African Origin in Colombia (2002). ‘Appendix 1: Specific cases of violation and infraction of human rights in areas with black communities’, available at http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/index.htm Olivella, Manuel Zapara (1986). ‘El sincretismo afro-católico en las luchas liberadoras de América’, in Quince Duncan et al. (Eds), Cultura Negra y Teología. San José, Costa Rica: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones. Orobio Granja, Aida (2003). ‘Espiritualidad afro-colombiana’, in Etnias de Colombia, 21 Aug., Latinoamericaonline, available at http://www.latinoamerica-online.info/ Sant’Anna, Wania. ‘Desigualdades Étnico/Raciais e de Gênero no Brasil: as revelações possíveis do IDH e do IDG’, Jornal da Rede Saúde, 23.1.

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Sebastián, Luis de (2002). ‘Neoliberalismo’, in Juan José Tamayo-Acosta (Ed.), 10 Palabras Clave Globalización. Estella, Navarra: Verbo Divino, 53–88. Silva, Petronilha B. G. (1988). A mulher negra nos anos 80: Proposta para elucidação da presença e diagnostic dos problemas da mulher negra nos estados do sul. UFRGS—Núcleo Interdisciplinar de Estudos da Mulher, Fundação Carlos Chagas, 40–1. ——— (1998). ‘ “Chegon a hora de darmos a luz a nós mesmas”—Situando nos enquanto mulheres e negras’, Cadernos CEDES, Campinas 19. 45 (July). http://homolog.scielo.br/scielo. php?script=sci-arttext&pid=SO101-32621998000200002&lng=es&nrm=iso&tlng=pt Urrea, Fernando (2001). ‘Identidad y ciudadanía afrocolombiana en Cali y la region pacífica, indigenismo, ruralismo y estudios afrocolombianos: ¿premisas de la Ley de Negritudes?’, available at http://www.ub.es/geocrit/sn-94-22.htm

chapter 7

‘the wor ld pa lpitates’: gl oba liz ation a n d the r eligious fa ith a n d pr actice s of l atin a m er ica n wom en nancy e. bedford

As a result of capitalist globalization’s ever-accelerating dynamics, in recent decades income inequality across Latin America has risen steadily: Latin America as a whole presents the most unequal distribution of income in the world. This has led scholars to speak of a ‘New Poverty’ in Latin America, which is both more structural and more exclusionary than that of the mid-twentieth century (Ward 2004: 183). As wealth continues to concentrate evermore fiercely in the top 10 of the population, women, men, and children from the middle and lower classes are forced to look for ‘adaptive solutions’, which include informal, unregulated self-employment and micro-entrepreneurialism, urban crime, and international migration (Portes and Hoffman 2003: 41). At the same time, religion in Latin America, and particularly women’s participation in religion, remains vibrant. Globalization and religious practices are intimately related. Take, for instance, the case of a group of Quiché-speaking Mayan Pentecostals from the mountainous region of Totonicapan in Guatemala. As a result of job losses in traditional sectors unleashed by economic globalization, young people decide to emigrate as undocumented workers to the region of Houston in the United States. Throughout the process, from the moment they decide to emigrate until they arrive in Texas, their Pentecostal communities of origin and their leaders are present: a male Pentecostal pastor leads a time of fasting and discernment at the top of mount Xe Cacal Xiquin, a sacred space for the Mayas; a female pastor blesses the young persons who are about to leave. In Houston, the migrants join Pentecostal Mayan communities that creatively reproduce Mayan social structures in an

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urban environment, and also begin to send remittances to support their families and their churches of origin (Hagan and Ebaugh 2003). Their experiences illustrate the relations between economic globalization, migration, and the circulation of culture, ideas, and practices. Worthy of note here are the presence of a Pentecostalism able to incorporate ancestral religious customs and the agency of a female religious leader, the Pentecostal pastor, who is so intimately involved in the process that she is the one who selects the coyotes that are to escort her people across the border. Given the fact that religion and globalization are significantly intertwined (GarrardBurnett 2004: 256), what should we make of the contemporary religious faith and practices of Latin American women? Do religious conversion and active participation in a community of faith amount to ‘adaptive solutions’ to the crisis unleashed by capitalist globalization, analogous to those made by women as economic agents? From the perspective of sociology of religion, it has become a byword that the faith and religious community-building of women—be it the Pentecostalism of Maya women in Guatemala or the activism of Brazilian women in Roman Catholic base communities—can and do serve as coping or indeed as survival strategies in times of globalization (see, for instance, Green 1993; Mariz 1994; Drogus 1997a; Hallum 2003). A theological perspective does not necessarily contradict the sociological insight that discovers ways in which religious faith and practices serve in coping and surviving; as Howard Thurman put it, Christianity as it was born in the mind of Jesus was ‘a technique of survival for the oppressed’ (1996: 29). Because theology speaks in an engaged voice from within the realm of faith, however, it can allow itself—indeed it must—to delve differently than the social sciences. From the perspective from which I write, that of a theological feminism itself engaged with the practices of the Christian faith, it seems to me that the religious faith and practices of Latin American women in these economically globalized times often serve in rather unexpected ways to make space for life in all of its messiness and materiality; this observation is what I will explore in what follows.

Capitalist globalization and its discontents While the term ‘globalization’ is admittedly multivalent, it often serves as an ideological discourse that legitimizes the strategies of imperialist capital (Amin 2000: 127). In fact, the discourse of globalization easily becomes what one author has cleverly termed a ‘global fetish’ that serves to naturalize the effects of late-modern capitalist development as if it were impervious to human agency (Giménez 2002). To naturalize capitalist globalization—as if it were similar to the rotation of our planet, a force over which we have no control—tends furthermore to obscure the fact that these processes are not gender-blind; indeed, gender is both embodied and embedded in capitalist globalization. The foreign debt of the countries in the Southern Hemisphere, for instance, serves to

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keep women strapped into a system of institutionalized servanthood in which their countries of origin orient their economies toward servicing their foreign debts rather than responding to internal necessities. Thus, for instance, in Africa national planners in tandem with foreign corporations push the industrial cultivation of soybeans or coffee meant for the export market, replacing subsistence crops traditionally planted by women. At the same time, the small businesses managed by many women in the global South cannot compete with cheap industrialized products that flood their countries as a result of neoliberal economic policies that pressure national economies to reduce fees and taxes on imported goods. The global playing field is indeed so riddled with inequality that Alison Jaggar criticizes the discourse of religious groups who seek ‘debt pardon’ for countries in the global South, stating that in reality it is the global North that should be asking for ‘forgiveness’ (2002). Though gender inequality is embedded and embodied in the globalized capitalist economy (Watkins et al. 2005), it is often also made invisible, as for instance when the link between capitalist production and human reproduction is ignored (Acker 2004; Gottfried 2004). Put in concrete terms, economic statistics and discourses often gloss over the fact that the same women who are responsible for providing financially for their families are also responsible for the physical welfare of children, the sick or infirm, and/or the elderly: they change diapers, wash clothes, iron, cook, supervise school tasks, help with hygiene, and often struggle to obtain water. As Karina Batthyány points out, in Latin America, as in other parts of the world, the care of children or of other dependents, with its material, economic, and psychological costs, tends to be a nonremunerated feminine activity that is not valued socially (2005: 225). In sum, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty reminds us, we need to to ask what the concrete effects of global restructuring are on the actual bodies of real women in the Third World: in workplaces, on the streets, in their households, in cyberspaces, in their neighborhoods, in prisons, in social movements, in universities (2003: 245). A critical feminist theological perspective is particularly interested in the interplay of such concrete bodily effects on women and their religious faith and practices: careful attention to the interstices and intersection of faith and capitalist globalization can allow us to grasp that the predominant logic of capitalist globalization is not inexorable, not intractable, though hegemonic globalization narratives would have us believe that it is. Inasmuch as capitalist globalization implies the liquidation of space (Fornet-Betancourt 2001: 273–84), Latin American women’s practices of faith—including their oral and written theological production—can represent creative ways of reclaiming and reinventing space. As such, they resist the reduction of life to a commodity of more or less value in a global marketplace and test out lifegiving alternatives, subverting the ‘McDonaldization’ of all of creation. In the midst of the ambiguities represented, for instance, by religion’s own transnational character, such religious practices can thus weave together threads of hope and patterns of resistance that include coping and survival, but also transcend them. As Argentine poet and early feminist Alfonsina Storni (1892–1938) wrote in her poem ‘Vida’, el mundo late, the world—our globe—palpitates (http://amediavoz.com/storni.htm#VIDA), its heart beating with promise and possibilities. Religious faith and practices, when they

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resonate with the rhythms of that heartbeat, open up spaces that defy death and destruction as ‘common sense’, just as the resurrection denies the finality of the cross. Given the creative force of religious faith and practices, it would indeed be insufficient to speak merely of the impact of capitalist globalization on religion and gender in Latin America; we need to keep in mind that there is also an effect of the religious faith and practices of women in Latin America on globalization. At the very least, such practices can provide an inkling of a different sort of global interaction, one not driven solely by late-modern capitalism and its logic of lucre regardless of the cost to creation and to life. We might say that in the present contexts of Latin America, religious faith and practices become liberating to women in the measure in which they are able to question the inevitability of capitalist globalization in its deadlier guises, imagining other possible and sustainable ‘spaces’ in which local and global interaction might take place in just and lifegiving ways. This is urgent at a time when the espacios comunes (common spaces) in Latin America, as elsewhere, are being eroded through privatization and violence (Barbero 2003), as well as by the postmodern dream of ‘post-spatiality’ and ‘postmateriality’ (Catanzaro 2002: 57).

Beyond coping and surviving Though religious faith and practices can infuse people with hope, it is always necessary to remember their ambiguous character, for just as they can be liberating, they can also be extremely noxious for women (Bedford 2003, 2005). If to this ambivalence, which is constitutive of religiosity in general, we add the increasingly pluralistic nature of the religious sphere in Latin America, it becomes difficult indeed to present any sort of reliable feminist map of this shifting and fertile topography. To that must be added the rather diffuse nature of the concept ‘Latin America’ in itself, which often obscures as much as it reveals. My own life is like that of the swallows that fly from South to North America and back South again year by year, but as will be evident in these pages, the South Cone of South America is the face of Latin America most familiar to me, and Argentina is home. For the purposes of this essay I will define ‘Latin America’ as the countries in the Hispanic Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America. By extension, the over 30 million Latin Americans and Latinos/as in the United States can also be said to form part of ‘Latin America’ in a cultural and, for that matter, religious sense (Bedford 2004). Religious life in Latin America is tremendously varied. First of all it must be said that in Latin America Roman Catholicism has increasingly lost its symbolic monopoly, though not its hegemony or its ubiquity (Mallimaci 2002). It appears in a multitude of forms, in an arc that stretches from Opus Dei with its conservative stance and its strong presence in the higher echelons of politics and education, through charismatic manifestations and movements, to the popular church linked to liberation theology, hanging on despite the Vatican’s distaste. Protestantism in a wide sense, but particularly in its Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal embodiments, has seen a marked numerical increase and has steadily

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deepened in cultural and political significance, particularly as of the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time, the growth of Pentecostalism seems to have leveled off even in countries such as Guatemala, and that many of those converted to Pentecostalism, perhaps as many as 40, leave Pentecostal churches after a time, often dropping out of institutional religion altogether (Cleary 2004). The rich presence of Judaism in Latin America should not be overlooked either, for its influence is greater than might be imagined on the basis of its population, as can be seen in the presence of ‘mestizo Jews’ in Peru (Segal 1994) and in the ordination of women rabbis in Argentina since 1994 (Kochmann 2005; Sribman de Grynberg 2005). African Diasporic religions, such as Umbanda, Batuque, Santería, and Candomblé, are ebullient, not only in Bahia and Matanzas, but also in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and New York (see Oro 1999; Bernardo 2005). Since 1992, the 500-year mark of the invasion of the ‘Americas’ by the Europeans, the religious faith and practices of the pueblos originarios (First Nations) have been enjoying a renaissance in various forms. Some of them are closely linked to popular Catholicism as they have been for hundreds of years (Cline 2000: 250), but in other cases they have adapted to Protestantism, particularly in its Pentecostal guises (Gross 2004), or indeed define themselves in conscious contrast to Christian beliefs (Gossen and León-Portilla 1993). In sum, religious pluralism is growing, expressed both as variants of Christianity and by the presence of explicitly non-Christian faith practices, as well as in the lives of those who adhere to no religion at all. This said, in a phenomenological sense the dominant meaning of ‘religious pluralism’ in Latin America at this point in its history has primarily to do with ‘Christian pluralism’ (Garrard-Burnett 2004: 258). In all of these faith practices, Christian and non-Christian alike, women are present and active, as base community organizers and pastoral agents, Protestant pastors or local church leaders, preachers and missionaries, rabbis and nuns, healers and visionaries, mâes de santo and mediums, that is, as creative leaders and adherents of one or more forms of religiosity and, as a rule, numerically predominant over men. Often a mystical religious vision is combined with struggles directly related to materiality, as can be seen in many women of the Movimento Sem Terra (MST—Movement of Landless Workers) in Brazil (Zordan 2003). In what ways is this participation empowering and/or disempowering for women? I will focus on that question by taking a look at the ‘so-called’ Pentecostal gender paradox (Martin 2001).

The ‘gender paradox’ in Latin American Pentecostalism In order to be able to ‘locate’ Pentecostalism in Latin America at all, much less to discuss its paradoxes, it is necessary to understand its relationship with other forms of the Christian faith. One useful way to map out Catholics and Protestants (or evangélicos, as all Protestants are called in Spanish) is to follow Hallum (2003: 172–5). She groups Catholics

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as Traditional Roman Catholics, Liberation Theology Catholics (or Catholics of the iglesia popular), and Charismatic Catholics. As for Protestants, she likewise suggests a tripartite grouping of ‘Historic’ Churches (those Protestant denominations present in Latin America for over a century, most often ecumenically minded, socially progressive, and usually open to the ordination of women), neo-Pentecostals (who tend to be urban, middle-class, technologically savvy, and accepting of the ‘health, wealth, and prosperity gospel’), and Pentecostals (characterized by experiential worship, testifying and prophesying often carried out by women, faith-healing, glossolalia, local malleability, strong presence of persons from the lower classes, and a strict moral code). Hallum’s typology is problematic in that it does not contemplate the place of Charismatic and neo-Charismatic Protestants who by definition are not Pentecostal but rather remain in their denominations, incorporating the practice of speaking in tongues, ecstatic forms of worship and/or healing and casting out of demons, and elements of the prosperity gospel. She likewise makes no place for missionary-minded Evangelicals (such as the Plymouth Brethren, Baptists, Christian and Missionary Alliance, Church of the Nazarene, and many other dynamic groups) who are neither Pentecostal nor usually comfortable with liberation theology and ecumenism in the way the Historic Protestants tend to be. The tripartite grouping does have the important virtue, however, of making clear the distinction between Pentecostalism and neo-Pentecostalism; it is the former that Hallum presents as a women’s movement. For some time, anthropologists and sociologists of religion have been observing and describing the fact that gender dynamics in Latin American Protestantism are too complex for feminists to summarily dismiss as oppressive (Tarducci 2002). For instance, although Pentecostal uses of religious language tend to be androcentric, in practice the religious discourse of Pentecostal women engaged in prophesy and healing often subverts and ‘feminizes’ that language (Martin 2001: 54). It would seem that the conversion of men to Pentecostalism often serves to soften patriarchal excesses. This is in part a result of the importance of moral codes in traditional Pentecostalism, such as monogamy, sobriety, and active participation in church. After a careful study of a group of Colombian Pentecostals, in her much-quoted book Elizabeth Brusco goes so far as to call this phenomenon the ‘reformation of machismo’ and a ‘strategic women’s movement’ (1995). Others, proceeding a bit more cautiously, have spoken of a Pentecostal gender paradox (Martin 2001), in reference to the paradoxical fact that an apparently closed, androcentric discourse might open up liberating horizons for some women. As Martin points out, this paradox is in reality a pattern in Christian history, in which women repeatedly have shaped Christian patriarchy to fit their needs and those of their children, often making use of androcentric language to do so (2001: 58). The limitations of this phenomenon are not hard to envision: it does not leave behind machismo, but simply softens it; it does not signify a rupture with the inequities of patriarchal structures, but rather a way of life within an apparently more benign paternalism. Mónica Tarducci, a feminist anthropologist who has studied in careful and loving detail Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal women (including female pastors) in Buenos Aires, is in the end skeptical of Pentecostalism as an unambiguously empowering force for women.

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She is astounded that Pentecostal women, including female pastors, have virtually no historical memory of the female founder of the Pentecostal movement in Argentina, Alice Wood (2005). Still, she points out that Pentecostal women, upon feeling chosen by God, are able to find the strength and fortitude to construct a new identity for themselves and a new project for their lives, which in the ‘terrible time’ in which they live— that is, in a time of capitalist globalization—is no mean feat. In their Pentecostal faith and practices, they find a place where they can articulate their hopes, fears, desires, and moral convictions (2002: 191, emphasis added). As Tarducci’s conclusion illustrates, it would be shortsighted to ignore the fact that even an apparently minimal shift away from an androcentric organization of their world allows many women to breathe and live better—and is indeed one of the reasons for Pentecostalism’s attractiveness to them. It is probably no coincidence that men who convert to Pentecostalism, where they are expected to exercise their sexuality within a framework of strict monogamous fidelity, persist in that faith in numbers proportionately smaller than those of the women, who have often already been socialized in such an expectation. As Martin puts it in her rather tongue-in-cheek way, ‘For women there are few downsides to conversion other than the regulations imposed to keep them modest, chaste and sexually unprovocative’ (2001: 56). Beyond the domestic realm, Latin American Pentecostalism provides certain spaces for the development of women’s leadership, such as the practices of glossolalia and prophecy, through which in some cases a subversion of androcentric language referring to God takes place. What seems to occur is a fragile movement in the direction of equality, as long as the women involved refrain from exercising authority over men in formal and public ways (Martin 2001: 54). The movement toward equality is thus carried out primarily in the sphere of intimacy and of daily life, which is admittedly limited, but does have some systemic implications. How might the symbolic universe of Latin American Pentecostal women be interpreted from the perspective of a critical theological feminism, particularly given the disturbing catalytic interaction between capitalist globalization and the privatization of faith in certain Pentecostalisms? On the one hand, in the Chaco province of Argentina, Toba ancestral lands were lost in part because the people were encouraged by their Pentecostal theology to ‘leave everything’ in order to be freed up to preach the gospel—and while they were off preaching, their land was taken. On the other hand, the witness of some Pentecostal Toba women today is that reading and interpreting the Bible has given them the self-confidence to go before municipal and provincial governments to defend their rights, or as they put it, ‘We are no longer timid’ in the face of male churchgoers and leaders, of los blancos (white people), and of others who obstruct justice (Bazán et al. 2006: 92–3). This is perhaps the ‘gender paradox’ characterizing not only indigenous Pentecostal women, but many women of faith in Latin America: their faith and practices empower them to become interpreters of their sacred texts and traditions, public speakers and fierce defenders of their convictions, while at the same time they are instructed not to overstep certain implicit boundaries, which are constantly negotiated and shift across time, but which almost invariably have to do with gender, class, and race.

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In the face of this ambiguity, what is necessary is the flexibility to interpret the Pentecostal faith and practices of these women as an open question. The subtle displacement of patriarchal logic in some Latin American Pentecostal circles may not seem like much, but it has permitted many women to fortify their self-esteem, try on the garb of leadership, and begin to envision new possibilities. This may constitute only a small opening of a window, the merest gap through which air may enter, and yet I would argue that it is too important to be ignored. Even the smallest crack in the window can allow fresh wind to blow into dark, closeted spaces.

Places of intersection Carol Ann Drogus suspects that the key difference between Latin American women involved in Pentecostalisms and those active in the ecclesial base communities of popular Roman Catholicism is that the first group focuses more on the domestic sphere, while the second engages primarily in the participation of women in the public sphere. She wonders whether it would be possible to constitute alliances between women in both of these movements (1997b). It seems to me that her point about possible ‘alliances’ is well taken; it might be tweaked and expanded a little and become a question about finding places of intersection, and perhaps of a fertile friction between the self-understandings of these and other groups of women of faith. In her analysis of Argentine feminisms between 1983 and 2004, Cecilia Lipszyc provides a scheme that can be helpful in thinking through this matter. She makes the point that though Argentine feminism is and has been numerically small, it can point to some significant achievements. Among them are the formation of a ‘subterranean counterculture’ that contributes to building a political culture capable of going beyond the political party structures and their servility to neoliberal globalization (2004). In her essay, she completely ignores the liberating potential that religious faith and practices can have for women, even though she states that ‘the access of activists to theoretical knowledge is fundamental’. If that is so, then it is ironic that she either does not know or has forgotten that some of the most creative production of Latin American feminist theory is the fruit of women doing theology, biblical interpretation, interdisciplinary work, and pastoral praxis at the point of intersection with the complexity and materiality of women’s lives all over the subcontinent. This has been documented extensively by the Teologanda research project as it ‘maps out’ theological work in Latin America and the Caribbean (Azcuy et al. 2006). Be that as it may, Lipszyc sketches three important suggestions for how feminisms and women’s organizations can help transform the system of power in Latin American societies. In her view women must (a) develop a feminist theory capable of inspiring and challenging women, (b) translate their theories into political practices, and (c) construct a new subjectivity. If we turn her scheme on its head, beginning with her third point and relating it to women in the context of their religious faith and practices, the contribution of Latin

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American Pentecostal women immediately comes to mind. As we have established, many of them know a great deal about the ‘construction of a new subjectivity’, or in Tarducci’s words, about the ‘construction of a new identity for themselves’ (2002: 191). As in the case of the Pentecostal women in Appalachian communities studied by Mary McClintock Fulkerson in the United States, within certain constraints, such women ‘display considerable, distinctive performative power’ (1994: 286). They indeed provide patterns of transformative praxis out of which theory can grow, and which feminist theory will ignore to its peril. At the same time, many female pastors, pastoral agents, theologians, and active laypersons in the more progressive ecclesial sectors in Latin America are trained in developing theoretical formulations ‘capable of inspiring and challenging women’, as suggested in Lipszyc’s first point. Some examples that come to mind are the work of the feminist biblical scholars all over Latin America involved in Revista de Interpretación Bíblica Latinoamericana (RIBLA), the Con-spirando Collective in Chile (Ress 2002), the Permanent Seminar on Feminist Theology of Forum on Theology and Gender at ISEDET in Argentina (Bazán et al. 2006), and the Symposium of Latin American and Latina feminist theologians who came together for the first time in Mexico in 2004 to begin to discuss feminist theology and interculturality across border spaces (Aquino and Rosado Nunes 2006). For women of faith, whether they are immersed in popular Pentecostalism or other religious practices close to the concrete lives of people, or involved in academic work, or indeed in both, a crucial point of encounter is precisely Lipszyc’s middle point, that is to say, the translation of a new subjectivity under construction and of feminist theory into political practices. Such practices must be understood in the widest sense as material practices, that is, as practices that contribute to an abundant life for all. Too-strict a divide between theory and praxis, between feminist theorists and activists, and, for that matter, between feminist theologians and pastoral agents is simply not viable. For most Latin American women, a strict theory-praxis binary is not feasible, given the productive and reproductive demands of the economy (Rodríguez Enríquez 2005) and the need to respond creatively in practical and theoretical ways to multiple situations. In fact, what I perceive as one of the most liberating potentialities in the religious faith and practices of Latin American women is precisely how they are able to bring together the construction of new subjectivities, a hermeneutic enriched by the perspective of gender (which in some cases blossoms into full-fledged feminist theory), and material transformative practices. One sees this, for instance, in the work of Emma Almirón, who in the 1970s began solidarity work in the Villa 31 (a densely populated slum in Buenos Aires near the central bus and train stations) alongside Roman Catholic priest Carlos Mugica, who was killed in 1974 by right-wing paramilitaries. Almirón went into exile during the military dictatorship of 1976–83, and when she returned she found the situation of the people in Villa 31, which currently has a population of over 120,000, worse than ever. In response to the acute economic crisis of 2001, Almirón and a group of women who lived in the Villa put their heads together to come up with some sort of economic activity to help them survive, and a cooperative of women knitters was slowly born, which now places its products in Argentina and abroad. A group of 20–5 women and a few men meet

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weekly to perfect their craft, fine-tune cooperative business, but also to highlight ‘basic values like self-respect, dignity, and the idea that another world is possible’ (Kearny 2004). Almirón’s translation of the praxis and theory of early liberation theology into a group of women meeting and knitting products for the international fair trade market is a literal example of how theory and praxis, economic survival and consciousness, faith and works can be intertwined in the lives of Latin American women. This is the case in more consciously theological settings as well, as can be seen in the response to an invitation put out by the Latin American Council of Churches (CLAI) for a three-day symposium on Gender and Economy in November 2005 in Buenos Aires. Rather to the surprise of the organizers (which besides the CLAI included the Protestant ecumenical seminary ISEDET and the Evangelisches Missionswerk), though the invitation was directed particularly to women pastors of the Historic Protestant churches in the South Cone of South America, when lay women in Argentina and neighboring countries got wind of the meeting, they immediately showed interest in participating. In fact, they showed up in much greater numbers than did the pastors. Women (and some men) from Historic Protestant, Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Roman Catholic communities in Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, and Argentina participated, as well as some visitors from Europe and North America. All of them seemed to be looking for ways to translate their theories into effective political and material practices as a means of transforming their communities and also as a way of continuing to construct their subjectivities. In order to better do so, they were eager to develop a theoretical base sturdy enough to make sense both of global reality and of their localized particularities. They responded to lectures by feminist scholars on economics, globalization, migration, human trafficking, prostitution, pastoral responses to social challenges, and theology. They analyzed documents on globalization such as the Accra declaration (WARC 2004). They worked in groups following a Freirean model. Through it all, one of the transversal concerns that began to emerge was the problem of the global ecological crisis manifested in particular spaces, that is, in the concrete suffering of the land. In one small group discussion in which I participated several Paraguayan participants spoke of how genetically modified soy was being planted in the Itapú-Alto Paraná region by large agribusiness firms able to pay good prices to local farmers to buy their land. Five years later, they said, the farmers had spent that money and often had nothing, while the land suffered as a result of industrial, nonorganic farming methods, often becoming virtually infertile as a result. Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, along with the United States and Canada, grow the largest amounts of genetically modified soy; each of them cultivates over a million hectares of transgenic crops (GMO Compass 2006). A woman living in the Argentine Chaco spoke of the high levels of cancer in the area around Castelli, which seemed to correlate with the contamination of water by agrichemicals. Indeed, contamination with agrichemicals is becoming so widespread in Argentina that one researcher speaks of it in terms of ‘agrocide’ (Domínguez 2006). A Chilean participant spoke of pine and eucalyptus plantations where once there had been forests, and of links between the production of cellulose and dioxins that lead to infertility in swans,

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ducks, and humans in the area of Valdivia (WWF 2005). Everyone in the group testified in personal ways of how economic pressures tied into ecological destruction in the place where they lived, compromising soil, water, and air. The group also noted how religious language is co-opted by some of the large foreign companies present in Latin America, as seen in their discourse about ‘mission’, ‘vision’, and ‘co-laborers’ (colaboradores). The group members manifested in different ways their realization about how important the land is and how difficult it is to recover it, both in the sense of ownership and in the sense of ecological rehabilitation. As one participant put it, ‘Es difícil recuperar la tierra’. Despite the difficulties, a hopeful ethos seemed to prevail, as the people in the group seemed determined to defend the quality of life in their locality. The group discussion highlighted connections between global and local concerns, awareness of the force and ambiguity of religious language and practices, and the need to take concrete steps in order to enable the recovery of spaces where life can flourish. The group was made up of perhaps a dozen people, most of them women. It included two female pastors and a theologian, but was composed mostly of active laypersons, some of them quite sophisticated in their theological articulation, some of them less so, yet all of them able to lucidly express ways in which economic inequities and the ecological crisis were interrelated in times of capitalist globalization, and able to give concrete examples of how severely this is affecting the life of humans, animals, and plants in specific regions of Latin America. Most of the participants in the symposium described themselves as messengers from and to their church communities, charged with engaging with new persons and ideas, forming networks of information exchange, optimizing their resources by sharing, and making visible what is often invisible in the society’s ‘common sense’, particularly gender inequities. In the plenary session, when six groups shared their conclusions, one proposed taking inspiration from ants, whose work seems so small and insignificant when seen in isolation, yet is extremely effective as a whole (in Spanish, un trabajo de hormiga can refer to rather tedious, detailed, but necessary work on a small scale, often in order to achieve a larger goal). Many of the women expressed how empowering they had found the exchange of information and know-how, the theoretical tools presented by the lecturers, and the hope of forming networks of support between groups faced with similar challenges. This hope was also expressed in deep and moving prayer, creative retelling of biblical stories, and songs of worship.

Theology as a work of friction Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing makes the point that capitalism, science, and politics have aspirations to fulfill universal ‘dreams and schemes’, but that their universality ‘can only be charged and enacted in the sticky materiality of practical encounters’. She describes such ‘worldly encounters’ and ‘global connections’ in terms of friction, that

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which gives grip to universal aspirations, and reminds us that ‘the specificity of global connections is an ever-present reminder that universal claims do not actually make everything everywhere the same’ (2005: 1). Playing with this image from a theological perspective, it seems to me that we might imagine the religious faith and practices of Latin American women in times of globalization as points of friction. They require a material intersection of religious narratives with a global horizon with particular spaces where bodily practices are enacted: praying out loud, singing in worship, interpreting the Bible, preaching, providing undocumented workers with legal advice, anointing with oil, sharing financial resources, visiting the sick and imprisoned, sheltering abused women, handing out condoms and clean syringes, resisting impunity and corruption in the judicial system, barricading roads, preparing community meals, and exchanging information. Such practices of faith—if I may focus for a moment on the practices, which as a Latin American follower of Jesus I know from ‘the inside out’—are regularly carried out by women of faith in Latin America and can contribute to furthering the development of their subjectivities and to make space for the flourishing of life in adverse circumstances. The theologies that arise out of such faith practices will necessarily be works of friction: theologies engaged in working out the implication of faith’s involvement in the ‘sticky materiality of practical encounters’. Indeed, theologies that wish to ‘get a grip’ on globalization will necessarily be engaged in such friction. We might say that the traditional theological method of ver—juzgar—actuar (seeing—judging—acting), so common in Latin America, is thereby enriched and transformed by the kind of attention to space and materiality expressed in the ocupar—resistir—producir (occupying—resisting—producing) of the Brazilian movement of the landless (MST) and the movement in Argentina of business and factories ‘recuperated’ and owned collectively by workers (MNER; on this see Lewis and Klein 2004; Magnani 2006). This is also seen in the concrete practices of faith of women all over Latin America who are engaged in making spaces for flourishing. In all their ambiguity and fluidity, in the midst of globalization the faith and practices of Latin American women can thus be read as an enticing invitation to rework classical doctrinal loci (literally, ‘places’) of the Christian theological tradition. Pneumatology, theological anthropology, or ecclesiology can all be viewed as sticky points of materiality and friction that warrant inhabitation, struggle, and production, in the assurance that the friction they entail produces light and warmth as well as conflict.

Works Cited Acker, Joan (2004). ‘Gender, Capitalism and Globalization’, Critical Sociology, 30/1: 17–41. Amin, Samir (2000). ‘Capitalism, Imperialism and Globalization’, in Ronald Chilcote (Ed.), The Political Economy of Imperialism: Critical Appraisals. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 157–68. Aquino, Maria Pilar, and Rosado-Nunes, Maria José (Eds) (2007). Feminist Intercultural Theology: Latina Explorations for a Just World. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

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Azcuy, Virginia, et al. (2006). El itinerario de las mujeres en la teología de América Latina, el Caribe y Estados Unidos, available at http://teologanda.com.ar/ accessed 29 Jan. 2006. Barbero, Jesús Martín (2003). ‘Notas para la lectura de algunas metáforas de la experiencia social’, in CLACSO: Grupo Cultura y Poder, available at http://www.clacso.org/ wwwclacso/espanol/html/grupos/grupos/cultura/cultura.html accessed 3 Feb. 2006. Batthyány, Karina (2005). ‘Sistema de genero y relaciones entre la esfera productiva y la reproductiva’, in María Luisa Femenías (Ed.), Perfiles del feminismo Iberoamericano, vol. 2. Buenos Aires: Catálogos. Bazán, Mirta, et al. (2006). ‘La palabra de mujeres empoderadas a partir del trabajo bíblicoteológico en la interculturalidad’, in Nancy Bedford and Marisa Strizzi (Eds), El mundo palpita. Economía, género y teología. Buenos Aires, CLAI/ISEDET, 87–94. Bedford, Nancy E. (2003). ‘Hacia una cristología saludable para mujeres pertinaces: La doctrina de la expiación bajo la lupa de la crítica feminista’, Cuadernos de Teología, 22: 105–33. (2004). ‘Escuchar las voces de las nepantleras. Consideraciones teológicas desde las vivencias de latinoamericanas y “latinas” en Estados Unidos’, Proyecto, 15. (2005). ‘Fidelidad y deslealtad: Testimonio martirial y pastoral’, Cuadernos de Teología, 24. , García Bachmann, Mercedes L., and Strizzi, Marisa (Eds) (2005). Puntos de Encuentro. Buenos Aires: ISEDET. Bernardo, Teresinha (2005). ‘O Camdomblé e o Poder Femenino’, in Revista de Estudos da Religião—REVER 5, available at http://www.pucsp.br/rever/rv2_2005/t_bernardo.htm accessed 22 Feb. 2006. Brusco, Elizabeth (1995). The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia. Austin: University of Texas Press. Catanzaro, Gisela (2002). ‘Materia e identidad: el objeto perdido. Apuntes para una problematización materialista de la identidad’, in Leonor Arfuch (Ed.), Identidades, sujetos y subjetividades. Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 57– 84. Cleary, Edward (2004). ‘Shopping Around: Questions about Latin American Conversions’, International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 28/2: 50–4. Cline, Sarah (2000). ‘Competition and Fluidity in Latin American Christianity’, Latin American Research Review, 35/2: 244–51. Domínguez, Diego (2006). ‘El agrocidio argentino’, in Biodiversidad en América Latina, available at http://www.biodiversidadla.org/content/view/full/22129 accessed 21 Feb. 2006. Drogus, Carol Ann (1997a). Women, Religion and Social Change in Brazil’s Popular Church. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (1997b). ‘Private Power or Public Power: Pentecostalism, Base Communities, and Gender’, in Edward Cleary and Hanna Stewart-Gambino (Eds), Power, Politics and Pentecostals in Latin America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 55–75. Fornet-Betancourt, Raúl (2001). Transformación intercultural de la filosofía. Bilbao: Desclée de Brouwer. Fulkerson, Mary McClintock (1994). Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and Feminist Theology. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock. Garrard-Burnett, Virginia (2004). ‘The Third Church in Latin America: Religion and Globalization in Contemporary Latin America’, Latin American Research Review, 39/3: 256–69. Giménez, Martha E. (2002). ‘The Global Fetish’, Latin American Perspectives, 29/6: 85–7.

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GMO Compass (2006). ‘GMOs Gain Ground for the Tenth Consecutive Year’, available at http://www.gmo-compass.org/eng/agri_biotechnology/gmo_planting/194.global_ growing_area_gm_crops.html accessed 21 Feb. 2006. Gossen, Gary, and León-Portilla, Miguel (1993). South and Meso-American Native Spirituality: From the Cult of the Feathered Serpent to the Theology of Liberation. World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest, vol. 4. New York: Crossroad. Gottfried, Heidi (2004). ‘Gendering Globalization Discourses’, Critical Sociology, 30/1: 9–15. Green, Linda (1993). ‘Shifting Affiliations: Mayan Widows and Evangélicos in Guatemala’, in Virginia Garrard-Burnett and David Stoll (Eds), Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 159–79. Gross, Toomas (2004). ‘Protestantism and Modernity: The Implications of Religious Change in Contemporary Rural Oaxaca’, Sociology of Religion, 64/4: 479–98. Hagan, Jacqueline, and Ebaugh, Helen Rose (2003). ‘Calling Upon the Sacred: Migrants’ Use of Religion in the Migration Process’, International Migration Review, 37/4: 1145–62. Hallum, Anne Motley (2003). ‘Taking Stock and Building Bridges: Feminism, Women’s Movements, and Pentecostalism in Latin America’, Latin American Research Review, 38/1: 169–86. Jaggar, Alison M. (2002). ‘A Feminist Critique of the Alleged Southern Debt: Highlights from the Ninth Symposium of the IAPH’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, 17/4: 119–35. Kearny, Tiffany (2004). ‘La Cooperativa de Mujeres Artesanas de la 31’, available at http://www.villa31.org/english/ accessed 20 Feb. 2006. Kochmann, Sandra (2005). ‘O Lugar da Mulher no Judaísmo’, in Revista de Estudos da Religião—REVER 5, available at http://www.pucsp.br/rever/rv2_2005/t_kochmann.htm accessed 22 Feb. 2006. Lewis, Avi, and Klein, Naomi (2004). The Take. Montreal: National Film Board of Canada/ Barna-Alper Productions. Lipszyc, Cecilia (2004). ‘Los feminismos en la Argentina (1983–2004)’, in María Luisa Femenías (Ed.), Perfiles del feminismo Iberoamericano, vol. 2, Buenos Aires: Catálogos, 83–120. Magnani, Esteban (2006). ‘El cambio silencioso’, available at http://www.estebanmagnani. com.ar/ accessed 18 Mar. 2006. Mallimaci, Fortunato (2002). ‘Crisis terminal, pobreza y sentidos en la Argentina contemporánea’, in THEOMAI: Estudios sobre Sociedad, Naturaleza y Desarrollo (invierno de 2002), availabe at http://revista-theomai.unq.edu.ar/numespecial2002/artmallimaci.htm accessed 20 Oct. 2005. Mariz, Cecilia (1994). Coping with Poverty: Pentecostals and Christian Base Communities in Brazil, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Martin, Bernice (2001). ‘The Pentecostal Gender Paradox: A Cautionary Tale for the Sociology of Religion’, in Richard K. Fenn (Ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 52–66. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2003). Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Oro, Ari Pedro (1999). Axé Mercosul: As religiões afro-brasileiras nos paises do Prata. Petróplis: Vozes. Portes, Alejandro, and Hoffman, Kelly (2003). ‘Latin American Class Structures: Their Composition and Change during the Neoliberal Era’. Buenos Aires: CLAI/ISEDET/EMW, 10 November.

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Ress, Mary Judith (2002). Lluvia para florecer: Entrevistas sobre el ecofeminismo en América Latina. Santiago: Colectivo Con-spirando. Rodríguez Enriquez, Corina (2006). ‘Resistiendo la ceguera del Mercado: Elementos básicos para el análisis de género en economía’, in Nancy Bedford and Marisa Strizzi (Eds), El mundo palpita: Economía, género y teología. Buenos Aires: CLAI/ISEDET, 17–45: 8 ff. Segal, Ariel (1999). Jews of the Amazon: Self-Exile in Earthly Paradise. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society. Sribman de Grynberg, Graciela (2005). ‘La mujer en el judaísmo’, Criterio, 78/2308: 494–6. Tarducci, Mónica (2002). ‘ “Servir al marido como al Señor”. Las mujeres pentecostales desde una perspectiva de género’, PhD thesis, Universidad de Buenos Aires. (2005). ‘Sólo respondo al llamado de Dios’. El precario liderazgo de las pastoras pentecostales. Asociación de Antropólogos Iberoamericanos en Red 20, available at http://www.aibr.org/antropologia/40mar/articulos/mar0502.php accessed 6 Feb. 2006. Thurman, Howard (1996). Jesus and the Disinherited. Boston: Beacon. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2005). Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) (2004). Covenanting for Justice in the Economy and the Earth—‘The Accra Confession’, available at http://warc.jalb.de/warcajsp/side. jsp?news_id=181&part_id=0&navi=1 accessed 20 Feb. 2006. Ward, Peter (2004). Introduction and overview, ‘From the Marginality of the 1960s to the “New Poverty” of Today: A LARR Research Forum’, Latin American Research Review, 39/1: 183–7. Watkins, Kevin, et al. (2005). Human Development Report 2005. International Cooperation at a Crossroads: Aid, Trade and Security in an Unequal World, available at http://hdr.undp.org/ reports/global/2005/ accessed 30 Jan. 2006. World Wildlife Federation (WWF) (2005). Findings and Recommendations Report, available at http://www.worldwildlife.org/toxics/pubs/Rio_Cruces_Report_OK.pdf accessed 21 Feb. 2006. Zordan, Laura (2003). ‘Militanza politica e fede nel Movimento Sem Terra’. Revista THEOMAI. Estudios sobre Sociedad, Naturaleza y Desarrollo, available at http://redalyc. uaemex.mx/redalyc/pdf/124/12400810.pdf accessed 8 Jan. 2007.

Further Reading Aquino, Maria Pilar, and Rosado-Nunes, Maria José (Eds) (2007). Feminist Intercultural Theology: Latina Explorations for a Just World. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Bedford, Nancy Elizabeth (2008). La porfía de la resurrección. Ensayos desde el feminismo teológico latinoamericano. Colección FTL número 30. Buenos Aires: Kairós. Pérez, Emma (1999). The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington/ Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Petrella, Ivan (Ed.) (2005). Latin American Liberation Theology: The Next Generation Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Pribilsky, Jason (2007). La Chulla Vida: Gender, Migration, and the Family in Andean Ecuador and New York City. Gender and Globalization. New York: Syracuse University Press. Staudt, Kathleen (2008). Violence and Activism at the Border: Gender, Fear and Everyday Life in Ciudad Juárez. Austin: University of Texas Press.

chapter 8

gl oba liz ation, wom en, a n d r eligion in the middle east azza m. karam

Background. Globalization and women in the Middle East: Colonial legacies The Middle East, understood as the Arab world plus Israel, Iran, and Turkey (the ‘middle of the East’ for the British and French colonizers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) is a turbulent region of agony and hope, challenges and opportunities. With several conflicts both inter- and intrastate brewing over a variety of issues—a mix of disputable borders, ethnic and confessional rifts, and struggles over identity and resources— it is the cauldron that the old colonialism has set to boil. As of the early days of 2011, the region is the crucible of challenges to authoritarianism and injustice, and of new forms of communication and expression articulated in the hearts, minds, and through the lives of a large population (60 are under the age of 30). Colonialism can be likened to a process of emasculation: it left those who were traditionally the decision-makers and owners of the public spaces in the Middle East (i.e., the men) feeling evermore protective of what they perceived as the last bastion of their manhood and identity—and by implication the sovereignty and dignity of their nation—i.e., their women. Robbed of the power to make the decisions over their political, military, and economic destinies, colonized men felt it was critical to ensure that they had that ultimate power of self-determination in their own homes and over their cultural spaces and male identity. The more dominant and oppressive the colonial influence was, the more those who felt violated by it perceived the need to ‘protect’ (and often reinvent in order to give a sense of strength) ‘authentic’ norms, values, and traditions.

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Such ‘protectiveness of authentic values’ often entailed restrictions on women’s roles and appearance, or more concretely, on women’s real and symbolic political, social, and economic participation in the larger polity. In short, this discourse could, and did, jeopardize women’s access to and articulation of their human rights. Since colonialism happened at a time when women were not themselves pervading the public space (in neither colonized nor the colonizer’s own lands, incidentally), and since most colonized women felt the sense of violation and injury resulting from colonialism just as pervasively, it follows that resisting (the discourse of authenticity so intimately linked to resistance of colonialism), would be a challenge. Therefore, any attempts to argue for women’s rights (to education and employment, let alone voting and/or standing for elections) were often labeled as procolonial (and since the colonizers were Western, womens’ rights were maligned as pro-Western) and anti-Islamic. The Middle East is the birthplace of the world’s monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and remains one of the most ‘religious’ regions, with a Muslim majority population. Secularism continues to be misunderstood and relatively unpopular—with the exception of Turkey, where it had to be strongly imposed by an autocratic leader, and legislated into history. Anticolonial discourse was largely built on and framed within religion and religious references, the key components of cultural authenticity. However, it is worth keeping in mind that such religious discourses were based on, and historically articulated and imposed by, men. The history of women’s contributions to religious interpretation and heritage had long been erased, and only relatively recently is it being retrieved and shared, albeit against strong accusations of illegitimacy. Women’s absence from public life, their treatment as secondary citizens in a troubled polity, and their lack of access to equal rights were considered by many (including some women), as an important means of resisting colonialism. Although colonial occupation, of the forms taken in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has ended, the labeling of women’s rights activists as pro-Western and the association of religion with authenticity are ongoing legacies. Other living legacies of colonialism include the state of Israel itself and the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, several ethnic (e.g., Sudan), confessional (e.g., Lebanon), and territorial/boundary (e.g., western Sahara) conflicts, and the persistence of authoritarian and illegitimate ruling regimes. Continued Western engagement in the region’s affairs, whether through economic, political, or military means, or ostensibly to support human rights and democratization efforts, can still be perceived by some as a continuation of external hegemony. The events of September 11, 2001, led to a dominant global discourse of war and ‘clashes’. Prior to the invasion of Afghanistan, US and British media were rife with news and documentaries about the oppressive conditions that Afghan women suffered under the Taliban regime. It seems to have escaped the notice of this vast media machine, however, that the Taliban were in power for over fifteen years before 2001, and that none of those years were any different for Afghan women. Nevertheless, some Western nations gave the impression that they were invading Afghanistan not only to eradicate terrorism, but also to liberate the oppressed Afghan (Muslim) women. Interestingly, the argument that war, or invasion of another nation, is necessary to ‘save the women’, is the very same argument that former colonial powers articulated as a way to legitimize their presence in any country. Leila Ahmed documents in her seminal

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work on Women and Gender in Islam how this happened; she gives the example of Lord Cromer during British colonialism in Egypt. According to Ahmed, Cromer cited the ‘backward’ condition of Muslim women as a means to partially justify why the British had a civilizing mission to undertake in their colonies in the Middle East (Ahmed 1992). The clamor within the US establishment to ‘support’ Afghan women attracted significant Western women’s voices, such as that of Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, Lynne Cheney, and Britain’s Cherie Blair. All of them reiterating the argument that the mission of Western ‘civilization’ includes, as a significant part of its mandate, the ‘liberation’ of Muslim women. And yet many varied and diverse Muslim women continue to insist that this is not necessarily the kind of help required from their Western counterparts. ‘Pro-West and anti-Islam’ allegations leveled against women’s and human rights activists could be life-threatening.1 Toward the end of the 1990s, (the late) Cairo University professor, Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid, was accused of apostasy for daring to argue, among other things, that the interpretation of certain texts in the Qur’an required contextualization. Invoking an obscure clause in some law, Islamist lawyers raised a case against him, not only accusing him of apostasy, but demanding that he divorce his wife (since no Muslim woman is legally allowed to be married to a non-Muslim man). Abu Zeid was effectively forced into exile in order to keep both his life and his marriage. He was among many ardent male adacates for women’s rights, a feature which continues to be a source of strength for the region’s human rights’ movements. Global politics relates almost directly to local dynamics. Activists for women’s rights in the Muslim majority countries, together with those intellectuals arguing for both moderate Islamic and secular political dynamics, were constantly attempting to ward off criticisms from two sides:2 the religious right in their own countries (for whom they are never ‘authentic’ or ‘Islamic’ enough) and the Western political right (who see much of what takes place in the Muslim world as principally anti-Western, anti-Israel and anti-US interests). For generations, both right-wing discourses built on the fear of the other, echoed each other in political, military, economic, and cultural spaces. This resulted in backlashes against the discourse of gender equality, and muted many of the voices which sought alternative articulations of self-determination, demexiatization, human rights, and dignity. Authoritarian regimes in the Middle East played upon the fears by portraying themselves as the guardians of law and order, and as the dependable protectors against the tyranny of those who spoke in the name of religion and/or regime opposition.

The panorama of women and religion in the Middle East There is a great deal of argument as to how all religions (as interpreted, narrated, and organized by men) can discriminate against equal rights of women. Narrowing women’s roles, and/or excluding women from the public sphere; justification for violence and

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domestic and public abuse; the rationale for denying them rights of ownership over property (amongst other rights); unjust blame for the decline of decency and/or values; all of which are counted among the ills religion spells for women. It is too common a refrain, indeed a cliché, to assume that Islam alone determines the debate around women and women’s rights in the Middle East. The complex reality is that religion (whether Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or any other faith tradition in this fertile religious landscape) plays an important role as an identity marker, a phenomenon that increased significantly toward the latter part of the twentieth century. This heightened role and awareness of religion has entailed a redefinition of the role of the state, civil society, economy, and within these, women’s rights. Nevertheless, just as it is important to realize the significant roles that religion plays, it is equally important not to overemphasize its role—and thus simplify the complex realities. Whether Muslim or Christian, and regardless of their religious affiliation, many women in Middle Eastern countries (barring a couple of countries such as Turkey and Israel) have become increasingly conscious of the fact that no matter how qualified and capable they are, a glass ceiling prevents them from occupying important decisionmaking positions in the military, political (e.g., as presidents or prime ministers), judicial (as judges), and/or religious realms (e.g., as muftis). And yet, women form nearly 60 of the population of these states, and in some countries, they make up approximately 60 of the student body at various levels of education. The first feminist movement in the Arab world was fashioned in the shadow of the colonial era and manifested itself first in Egypt in the late 1800s, later traveling to all corners of this subregion, such that by the 1960s many of the seeds of contemporary feminist organizations had taken root. When it comes to the everyday practice of religion, however, there is no simple account of why and how women are impacted. How the religion is interpreted and by whom; the traditions of the society in which religion is housed; the economic status of the practitioners; the history of the area in which the faith is practiced; the nature of the relationship between rulers and the clergy and between the military and ethnic and religious demography; the current political system; types of social movements; and global geopolitics, are naming but a few. For instance, it would make little sense to a casual observer why the practice of female circumcision, purportedly Islamic, is only practiced in African countries when the areas with the largest Muslim populations (e.g., in Asia) effectively do not practice it at all. If, however, we contextualize female circumcision by looking at the history of the practice together with the traditions of some parts of the African continent, we would realize that this is an old custom, predating Islam, and is in fact practiced by both Muslims and non-Muslims in most African countries. In addition, if we factor in the interpretations of the faith, we would further realize that there are competing, if not directly opposed, interpretations and readings of the Islamic texts around this issue. In fact, the Islamic shari`a (jurisprudence), mistakenly believed by most to be a unified set of laws, itself contains some of these opposing interpretations. This complex reality is not just relevant to the issue of female circumcision, but to most issues.

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The only reason I use female circumcision as an example here is that it is one of the most painful customs frequently practiced in the name of the religion. However, there are plenty of other preconceived notions dealing with the position of women insofar as it relates to ‘Islam’: questions of women’s inheritance (men inherit twice what women do); testimony (two women’s testimony equals that of one man); wife-beating (supposedly called for); polygamy for men (that it is not only permissible but advocated); and stoning (also supposedly the Islamic ‘thing’). These issues are amongst those frequently cited as examples of how ‘Islam’ is inherently oppressive toward women. While there are indeed many interpretations claiming that the above notions are based on an inherent belief that women are ‘less than’ men in value, intelligence, capacity, and so on, it is important to point out that many of these concepts also come with a wealth of alternative interpretations, which are also perceived by other activists as empowering for and considerate of women. Below I will cite some of these debates which emphasize the importance of context and meaning, and the subsequent differing interpretations and implications for women. In pre-Islamic Arabia, women were considered chattel, or belongings, of men and the tribe. Women’s ownership over anything was rare and was the experience of those, few and far between, who were protected by their male lineage. Property ownership was largely seen as a favor bestowed upon women by their fathers or husbands. Muslim laws giving women a legitimate right to inherit from any member of their family an amount equal to half that of their male brethren, and allowing them to keep their inheritance untouched and exclusively their own while their male brethren are required to spend their inheritance on the welfare and protection of these self-same women, were actually quite revolutionary. In other words, under the Muslim code, Muslim women are entitled to inherit (not as a favor, but by law). At the same time, men who inherit double what women do are required to support all the women and children with that inheritance, while the women can keep their money or do with it as they please. This, in theory, at least. The context of the practice of legal testimony is also mere insightful. Prior to Islam, at no point were women considered reliable witnesses to anything legal or significant, and a man’s word would override that of any woman—if her voice was heard at all. However, by urging that women testify in the first place, the Qur’an effectively mandates women’s words an existence as part of legal practice, so they could act as witnesses, and be heard as such. Another contextual reading of two women’s testifying as one, is a mutual endorsement of the presence of each other—in a society dominated by male primary—and thus potentially strengthen their resolve against potential belittlement or retaliation. Also cited is the discourse around the verse in the Qur’an which is understood as urging husbands to beat their wives when/if they appear to ‘disobey’. Given the richness of the Arabic language the same root (of a verb) has multiple word derivations, each with differing meanings. One of the debates concerns the roots of the verb for ‘beat’. It appears that, from the same root, emerge other words which mean ‘refrain’, ‘abstain’, and/or ‘leave be’. If the verse were interpreted with this in mind, then it is

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posited that rather than urge husbands to beat wives, it would seem to urge them to let women be, or leave them alone for a while. As for stoning, the practice is not mentioned in the Qur’an, but it was a practice existing in the wider region for some time, as evidenced by the words of Jesus in the Bible, during a situation where a crowd wished to stone an adulteress. Once again, far from being ‘Islamic’, this is one of the legacies of older days and ways. Polygamy is by far the most controversial of the Islamic injunctions, and has certainly received its fair share of misunderstandings within and outside the Muslim world. The verse where polygamy is mentioned is frequently only partially quoted by pro-polygamy advocates. A detailed theological explanation is beyond the purview of this article, but suffice it here to say that those who come up with interpretations of the text that oppose polygamy usually cite the fact that the call for polygamy is highly conditional (men have to be egalitarian to each of the maximum of four women they espouse) and is based in a context that no longer has validity for contemporary times (i.e., wars that led to the deaths of many fathers and heads of households, thus leaving women destitute and vulnerable to exploitation in maledominated societies, so taking some of them in marriage would be considered a way to offer them protection). Wide disagreement on the rights, responsibilities, and roles of women and the significant diversity in the practice of all aspects of the Islamic faith, are clear indicators that ‘Islam’ is not ‘inherently’ discriminatory toward women. For something to be inherent, it needs at least to be agreed upon by all those who believe and/or practice, and it should be deeply ingrained. This is very difficult to assert given the brief insight into the diversity of understanding, interpretation, laws, and praxis mentioned above. Further, it is problematic to assume that there is such an entity as ‘Islam’ in the first place. The holy Qur’an is the one undisputed document held, learned, referred to, and considered sacred (the word of God) by most Muslims. Yet, even with this holiest of holies, interpretation and practice can differ widely from one religious school of thought to another, from one sect to another, and from one country to another. Other Islamic sources of reference include the Hadith (the Prophet’s sayings), the Sunna (the Prophet’s actions), and the shari`a, built on all of these and ultimately man-made. However, the practice of the faith, which is spread over almost the entire planet, is not uniform in any way, shape, or form. Hence, the following questions must always be asked when the term ‘Islam’ is used: What does it really mean to refer to ‘Islam’? Do we speak of the faith itself through its diverse references (mentioned above), and if so, which reference are we using and which interpretation thereof? Do we mean the culture of Islam, which has become part and parcel of most cultures around the world, and is also prevalent in areas with a rich diversity of non-Muslims (e.g., Indonesia, Malaysia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Nigeria, to name but a few)? Do we mean particular aspects of tradition that have become part of certain Islamic societies (such as the practices mentioned above)? Or do we mean Islamic societies, which are also part and parcel of all multicultural and global societies around the world?

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Feminisms in the Middle East Furthermore, what do feminism and gender mean in this regional context? To many, feminism, insofar as it is an attempt to struggle for more rights for women (whether the right to vote, to earn equal pay, or to divorce and retain custody of children without the legal harassment currently in store for many women), has become a permanent feature of the social, cultural, and political landscape. Although the first modern feminist movements (as opposed to feminist discourse which was, in some instances, articulated by men in Egypt and Tunisia) are often spoken of as appearing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, students of religious history (whether of Islam or Christianity) are quick to unearth examples of much earlier champions of women’s rights. As indicated earlier, reclaiming this history (or ‘herstory’) is in fact slowly gaining credibility as a legitimate enterprise in social science, and even in religious jurisprudential study in the Middle Eastern academe. These endeavors are also being supported by several activists in the nongovernmental (academia and broader civil society) spheres as well. ‘Feminism’ as a term, however, is far from widespread. With no equivalent in the local languages, the word itself contributes to the misperception of the entire movement as ‘foreign’. Few women activists feel comfortable with the term, and those that do are not necessarily consistently vocal about it as a self-definition. It is not uncommon to find researchers referring to feminism—or to certain activists as feminists—while the activists themselves balk at the reference. At the same time, however, an alternative mode of reference to these women and men has yet to arise. Some have toyed with the Arabic term niswiyya or nisa’iyya (which acts as a translation of the word feminism) but such terminology has simply not become popular. Similarly, the term ‘gender’ does not have an equivalent in local languages and is more often used by feminist groups and sometimes social scientists as a descriptive or analytical category. Gender is still seen as synonymous with ‘women’, and a widespread or popular appreciation of the nuances of the term—whether semantic or actual or both— remains lacking. At the same time, the social construction of masculine and feminine roles and identities is central to an understanding of the forms of oppression and violence that affect both women and men in the Middle East.

The continuum of feminism For the sake of clarity in this article, a broad definition of the term feminism is used with two key components: a consciousness that women are oppressed in many ways, and actual attempts to rectify or deal with this oppression (Karam 1998). This working definition is inspired by the extensive legacy of research carried out by women researchers such as Leila Ahmed, Mahnaz Afkhami, Haleh Afshar, Fatma Göçek, Yvonne Haddad, Mervat Hatem, Deniz Kandiyoti, Lila Abu Lughod, Valentine Moghadam, Margot

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Badran, Beth Baron, Susan S. Davis, Elizabeth Fernea, Sandra Hale, Nikkie Keddie, Cynthia Nelson, Barbara Stowasser, Judith Tucker, to name but a few. With the above definition, we can identify three main feminist streams in the Arab world, streams that align clearly along a continuum: secular (herein understood as nonreligious discourse), religious (largely, but not only, couched in Islamic terms), and Islamist (framed within and advocating for a political ideology of Islam). None of these streams is by any means homogeneous or generic, each category is full of diversity (and ambiguity), and often the ‘barriers’ delineating one form of discourse from another are tenuous, hence the importance of imagining a continuum rather than distinct discursive practices (see Figure on p. 203, this volume). Secular feminists on the whole tend to shun faith-based discourse. This does not mean that they disrespect religion or are themselves nonreligious. On the contrary, some of them are devout (and are keen to describe themselves as such) in their personal lives. However, when it comes to framing their discourse on women’s rights publicly, many secular feminists will skirt religious issues or argue that to engage with religion is to risk endangering women’s rights—because of the dominance of conservative religious discourse and/or they fear creating a rift amongst their own ranks (since they may not all share the same faith tradition). Secular feminists are generally comfortable with the term ‘feminist’, and many have strong connections with their feminist sisters from other countries, advocating for the implementation of all international legal human rights instruments and challenging all forms of discrimination, evidenced by their support for the Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Beijing Platform for Action, and others. Some secular feminists can be openly antagonistic about and toward religion, maintaining that religion itself is the cause for much of the oppression women suffer, and are thus unwilling to engage with their more ‘religious’ sisters, seeing them as ‘laboring under a false consciousness’. The more ‘religious’ the message of the social or political activists, the more suspicious the secular feminists tend to be. Rarely in the Arab world is there any praise from religious circles for those outside of religious frameworks who advocate for women’s rights. Similarly, wherever there is an active Islamist movement (e.g., in Turkey, Iran, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, and Lebanon), some of the strongest opposition will be from secular feminists who believe that women’s rights will be the first casualty of any Islamist regime. On the opposite end of the continuum, Islamist feminists—to many, a contradiction in terms—have an important role to play. In the same way that not all secular women are feminists, not all women members of Islamist movements (which themselves exist right across the region) are feminists by any means. On the contrary, some of the most vociferous critiques of feminists and feminism emanate from Islamist circles—men and women. So who are Islamist feminists then? These are the activists within the movement advocating for political Islam who subscribe to the working definition of feminism used above. In other words, these are the women who acknowledge that women are oppressed and see the Islamist reality as an option to bring about a better world for both men and women. For Islamist feminists, broadly speaking, the reasons for women’s oppression are often explained in terms of society’s lack of adherence to Islam (or to God) and to the demands

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The Continuum of Feminism in the Middle East ®

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Religious

Islamist

of that faith in general. Because Arabs are not following God’s laws (which can only be just), runs the argument, we confront the social, political, and structural problems we have today. A society which follows God’s injunctions is one that, in these women’s opinion, will guarantee justice for women. These women see Islamism as an advocate for a more just society and perceive it as the means to achieve this end. Islamist feminists share one thing with their secular counterparts: at best a sense of unease, and at worst, outright suspicion, vis-à-vis each other. They argue that international legal instruments are redundant since all the guidance needed by Muslims can be found in the Qur’an. Religious feminists fall somewhere in the middle of the continuum. They are distinguished from Islamists in that they do not advocate for any one political philosophy or ideology, and in fact, many of them can be uncomfortable with what they perceive as the homogenizing tendency of Islamists and the dogmatism which some of those who advocate for shari`a can esponse. They share with their Christian and Jewish counterparts the same discomfort with ‘fundamentalist’ interpretations of religion. With a healthy respect for the role of faith in empowering and liberating women and men, religious feminists are nevertheless keen to emphasize new and evolving interpretations of doctrine, and they advocate for the meeting point between international legal instruments (e.g., CEDAW) and the essence of all faith traditions. Religious feminists stand apart from their secular counterparts by maintaining that no discourse of women’s rights that rejects religion can achieve its objectives in contexts where such a religion is the pervasive lingua franca of the masses and the politicians. Religious feminists are as vociferous in urging caution toward blind espousal of a religio-political cause (without a distinct women’s rights agenda) as they are toward an outright rejection of religion as a sole framework for reference. For many of them, faith traditions (in this case mostly Islam) guarantee a context of infinite justice for women, but the way the religion is preached, interpreted, and manipulated (politically and legally) can be highly problematic. In order to counter this manipulation, many religious feminists are keen to learn or advocate for a rereading of religious and nonreligious law, history, and texts. They maintain that familiarity with the religious language is one of the strongest tools for rejecting dogmatism, political obfuscation, and the manipulation of religious rhetoric against women, as well as for developing constituencies that can engender social transformation. As indicated earlier, women activists are confined within these feminist categories. In fact, on some women’s rights issues (such as the abolition of female circumcision,

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reform of family and/or civil laws) and with certain political dynamics (such as support for the Palestinian cause and calls for democratization), there is often an overlap of interests and a commonality of agendas amongst the otherwise different streams. Regardless of their position on the continuum, many of today’s feminist organizations had some of their roots in charity work in the late 1800s and early 1900s. By the middle of the twentieth century, as mentioned earlier, charity work gave way to activities that ranged from promoting women’s electoral participation and running for political office, to organizing and providing small grants to rural development projects, microfinancing and income generation initiatives, organizing and lobbying politicians, and producing some seminal academic research.

Islamism in the Middle East: The future and whither women? It becomes particularly important to clearly understand the terms used when there is also plenty of confusion between Islam, Islamism (or political Islam), fundamentalism, religious extremism, and terrorism. As if that were not complicated enough, these terms are further confused with average, everyday ‘Muslims’ in their practice of Islam, and the Islam practiced or endorsed by states. Elsewhere I have explained at length the differences between these terms (Karam 2004), but here we look at political Islam/Islamism, given the questions around the future of such movements, and the potential impact on women, in the ‘Arab Spring’ events. Fundamentalism and rising religious extremism are not one and the same phenomenon. In fact, the term ‘fundamentalism’ is frequently (ab)used to refer to all manner of highly diverse and often contradictory movements. Originally, the term was coined to define a Christian movement that was literal (hence, ‘fundamental’) in its interpretation of Christian texts in the Western world and particular to a certain era. While the literal interpretation of texts (be they religious and/or even non-faith-based documents such as legislation) remains an important part of the term ‘fundamentalist’, the movements today understood as ‘religious fundamentalist’ vary widely in their composition, objectives, organization, and mode of operation. The difference between and amongst such movements is so vast, in fact, that it is a distortion to see them as one and the same. Muslim, or Islamic, fundamentalism, is thus a problematic concept unless used to apply narrowly to those who espouse in their lives and outlook very literal understandings of the Qur’an, Sunna, and Hadith. Primarily, fundamentalists may follow a relatively strict interpretation of their religious tradition in their personal lives. There is, therefore, a substantial difference between Islamic fundamentalists and Islamists, the latter characterized by an almost exclusively political engagement. Whereas Islamists organize and distinguish themselves as political parties with an agenda to compete for political and state power (e.g., the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and more extreme (read: armed) groups such as Jihad in Egypt, Hamas in Palestine, and Hizbullah in Lebanon), many fundamentalists abhor political engagement, believing that the entire process of politics is impure at best, and downright corrupting at worst.

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Some fundamentalists may also be Islamists (i.e., members of Islamic political organizations), but many Islamists are not even well-versed in the religious doctrine per se, and are not literal in their interpretation and practice. In fact, one of the leading Islamist ideologues, the earliest ‘star’ Sayyid Qutb, is credited with being creative and often innovative in his interpretation of text and tradition so as to adjust them to contemporary political discourse. Not all Islamist or fundamentalist movements are extremist, since most of them are based on principles that condemn violence in any way, shape, or form. Many Islamists have a track record of setting up social institutions that perform important social services (healthcare, shelter provision, education, etc.), and participate peacefully in electoral politics. In short, Islamism is first and foremost a political ideology and movement. Just as there are differences within any political movement, Islamism also embodies various (and sometimes competing) streams of thought. Most share the ultimate objective of Islamizing (rendering more Islamic through the application of shari`a law) both the state institutions and legislation, as well as the society as a whole. However, although they may agree on the broader objectives, Islamists differ radically as to the how, the methods. On the political continuum of Islamism (see Figure on p. 206, this volume), and for the sake of description only, one can illustrate the relative differences in methods as they veer from the moderate to the extreme. On one end of the spectrum, the moderates believe in civic education and political participation; condemnation of violence as a means to achieve an end; and the importance of active social service (i.e., through donations of various forms of resources—personal, financial, or other—to education, healthcare, community empowerment, etc.). The moderates tend to believe in political participation, democratization, and respect for human rights as principles and standards advocated by Islam itself, and they sometimes seek to create alliances across the political spectrum. On the opposite end of the continuum are the radicals, or extremists, many of whom believe that the ends justify the means. This Machiavellian way of thinking often justifies taking up arms in a struggle tailored to wreak mass havoc and destruction, either to bring about a more religious (and in their eyes, ‘just’) political order, or to consolidate an existing one—such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, and modern day splinters of al-Qaeda. Most of the radicals eschew existing political arenas as fundamentally corrupt and opt out of mainstream participation at best. At worst, extremists decide to wage war against political regimes and people in their own societies. Some of these may also believe in contributing to social work, but very often such contributions are made available only to a limited circle of those who are ‘on their side’.

Restricted rights? In part because of the occasional fluidity among Islamist movements (some may veer from peaceful coexistence to civil war, and then back to mainstream political

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Moderate

Radical/Extreme

Muslim Brotherhood (Egypt)

FIS (Algeria) Jihad (Egypt)

Muslim Brotherhood (Jordan)

GIA (Algeria)

The Islah Party (Yemen)

Hizbullah (Lebanon)

Jamaat-u-islami (Pakistan) Taliban (Afghanistan) Hamas (Palestinian Territories) Jama`a Islamiyya (Indonesia) Al-Qa`ida

participation but stay armed, as we see, for instance, with Lebanese Hizbullah), secular politicians tend to be deeply suspicious of Islamists. As one prominent Iranian secular feminist said, ‘What happened in Iran is that [Islamists] abused democracy to get to power and then they turned around and suppressed all democrats brutally. We will all lose if we believe in their propaganda.’3 On the other hand, an Islamist woman activist from Egypt is on record as saying, ‘Islam is all about consultation, consensus, and justice and these are the founding blocks of democracy. Islamic politics has been about democracy long before we heard of this term.’4 What is critical to bear in mind is that women are active members of all of the groups: secular, religious, fundamentalists, religious extremists, and the myriad shades of Islamists. When the first Islamic political party in the twentieth century—the Muslim Brotherhood, or Ikhwan, of Egypt—was nearly annihilated by the then-president and Arab nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, it was almost single-handedly kept alive, against great odds, by one woman—Zaynab al-Ghazali. Al-Ghazali was instrumental in maintaining the infrastructure and even the ethos of the movement and eventually went on to become a strong proponent of women’s activism within Islamist movements around the Arab and Muslim world. Through various research on members of Egyptian Jihad and Lebanese Hizbollah, writers came across women members, fully (and diversely) veiled, who were prominent not only during the executive meetings of the movement(s), but in undertaking activities that could—and in some cases did—imperil their lives and those of others. Whether it was discussing strategies to confront state repression, or carrying arms from one location and contact to another, highly educated and eloquent women were often crucial actors and partners within extremist movements. In other words, not only are women not immune to religious extremism, but they play as role in recruiting and mobilizing others within these movements and can be critical to the success of such movements.

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Can it be claimed that all such women suffer from ‘false consciousness’? In fact, many secular women activists in the Middle East can and do claim this. Unable to fathom why women would be part of movements that ‘limit’ other women’s public roles, secular women activists often regard their female counterparts in Islamist and extremist movements as being either ‘brainwashed’ or downright unintelligent. Islamist women activists, and to a large extent the women members of extremist movements, in turn, see their secular counterparts in much the same terms: brainwashed by Western values and agents of corruption. It can be argued that no movement is as polarized as the women’s movement between the religious and more secular activists. What must be borne in mind, however, is that the women members of Islamist movements differ widely in and amongst themselves. Even though many Islamist women prioritize women’s roles as mothers and wives, some of them will argue that, far from limiting women’s active participation in the public arena, these roles can also be strategic forms of public engagement should the women wish them to be. How? By performing these roles, the proponents argue, women are learning and practicing important skills that strengthen the family unit (the most important nucleus of any society), which, in turn, is a critical means toward propagating certain ways of thought and, eventually, building a powerful national infrastructure that services both din wa dawla (religion and nation): in other words, ‘political motherhood’. Thus, in an ironic twist on feminist language (‘the personal is political’), some Islamist women activists interpret the political to be broader than the traditionally defined public space, and inclusive of the (previously) ‘private’ domain of family. The family is conceived of as a mini-state, and women, as leaders of that mini-state, become important political actors. There remains a group of women and men, active within fundamentalist and Islamist extremist groups, who openly advocate against women occupying any public roles whatsoever and, indeed, feel that many of the rights granted to women in legislation (whether, for example, equal pay to men in labor contexts and/or equal access to divorce in some Arab family law contexts) were contrary to the spirit and letter of religious advocacy. But the louder these voices, the stronger, the indication that women’s rights are mainstreamed as the norm.

Conclusions With the aid of global communications such as social media, an unprecedented and mostly unanticipated wave of democratic father has gripped the Middle East since January of 2011. An act of desperation—self-immolation by burning—undertaken by a young Tunisian man, set off revolutions across the region, which led to two strong autocratic regimes (Tunisia and Egypt) collapsing, and the remaining regimes effectively struggling for their survival. These revolutions happened because women’s

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roles in Arab societies as a whole have already been undergoing a sea change. Studies of Arab societies in the last thirty years attest to how socially active, politically informed, and economically engaged women have been. The magnitude, scope, and diversity of their participation in the revolutions are a testament to how intrinsic to the social, economic, legal, and political fabric these women are—and have been. What is now transpiring with women’s rights in the Arab region is a continuation of the struggle for gender equality within the emerging political framework, which is part and parcel of the larger effort to safeguard all human rights in the new polity that is now being collectively fashioned. With the empheria of ‘people power’ and the images of hated dictators being rendered ever more incoherent with rage against an inevitable loss of power, come some real concerns. One of these is that the unfolding chaos and loss of lives in some countries will render the certainty of unchanging religious beliefs (and those who speak in their name) alluring. The concern extends to the fact that Islamists in particular are among the best organized movements in the emerging political spaces—whether as the ruling clergy of the Iranian regime or the quick political footwork of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Given the old suspicions about Islamists’ democratic credibility, there is a pervasive sense of threat among the more secular communities, that Islamists may hijack the available political opportunities to entrench their own. Religious discourse will always have an important role in the Middle East. Nevertheless, it is seriously myopic to assume that the Muslim Brotherhood—and all other Islamists—are ‘anti-women’ and ‘anti-democratic’, as previous nuancing holds. Even within the one organization itself, there are diverse perspectives on women’s rights. There are extremely active, very well-educated, cultured, and articulate women members of the Brotherhood, for example, just as there will always be those who are uncomfortable with women’s public roles. What must be appreciated is that in tandem with regime change (and calls for it) are revolutions occurring within almost every group, party, and institution in the Middle East today. The army, political parties, universities, professional associations, media, non-governmental organizations, and more. Within religious institutions as within the Islamists, a revolution continues to unfold among the members—young and old, men and women, Arab and Persian. These revolutions are a transformation of consciousness of the average man, woman, boy, and girl, child and elderly person throughout the Middle East—from humiliation and emasculation, to a sense of dignity and empowerment. After all, it was the mediocrity and violence of ruling regimes that shaped the mediocrity and violence of the oppositions thereto—including Islamist oppostion. To allow the fear of the consequences to be the only lens through which to judge the events and predict their outcomes, is to be intentionally blind, deaf, dumb, and mute. If the people of the region can change then so can the ruling regime.

Moving forward: Women’s strategies: Respecting some traditions, challenging some traditions Women are daily challenging their traditions on both the individual and collective levels. There are a number of strategies that women have employed to remain respectful and

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indeed to adhere to deeply held beliefs, while nevertheless seeking widespread social transformation. What follows is an enumeration of some of the successful modi operandi: (1) Accept that religion is here to stay. This is largely an attitudinal matter since various human rights activists still find it difficult to accept that the majority of the Middle East remains religious in one way or another. The success stories emerged when it dawned on several activists (by no means all) that, regardless of their personal convictions and/or feelings about religion, it continues to play an important role in the average person’s life. To ignore, denigrate, or outright criticize religion remains a relatively risky enterprise that can alienate rather than mobilize larger constituencies, as evidenced by the relatively small-scale mobilization of women in many parts of the Arab world by extreme secular empowerment discourse. (2) Familiarize oneself with the language of religion and use it to articulate and convince. Keeping in mind that religion is here to stay, some women undertake formal religious studies so that they can articulate the discourse of women’s empowerment in a manner and language coherent with their surroundings. One of the most frequently leveled critiques against women activists is their lack of knowledge of the religious texts/ Scriptures, which can be a major hindrance in arguing against certain harmful customs. Qualified women scholars and activists now form a key part of the women’s movements, providing important advice and argumentation if and when necessary. There is little doubt that the knowledge garnered by in-depth study of the religious texts and traditions, and the articulation thereof can be powerful deterrents against some of the arguments and practices that have become part of everyday life. This also begs the question raised earlier as to the benefit of forming alliances with those who, despite espousing an openly religious platform, could also share similar goals and objectives. (3) Multi-faith work. There is increasing evidence that discussing different faith perspectives and working collectively across religious divides on concrete issues creates a common ground amongst and between women. Creating networks of women of faith often enables them to realize that at grassroots levels women are already working together on a number of issues, foremost among which is a sharing of experiences on best practices regarding women’s advancement and human rights from within religious perspectives. (4) Issue-based alliances. It is inconceivable and unrealistic to assume that all women can have the same objectives or be willing to adopt the same methods to achieve their objectives even if/when they

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are shared. Hence, the rhetoric of permanent solidarity amongst and between women has proven itself unworkable. What has made more pragmatic sense, however, is for women to come together on particular issues and around specific objectives (e.g., amendments to legislation that would enable women’s suffrage in Kuwait, or a new personal status law in Morocco). Far from creating or furthering polarization (especially between religious and secular groups), these alliances, when focused toward a particular aim, have proven successful and achieved their targets. (5) Advocacy within religious communities. It is becoming increasingly evident (not to mention ‘palatable’) to many women activists that to bring about social change, it is important to involve all actors in society, including men, but especially religious leaders. The experience of Egyptian women in passing laws to regulate female circumcision and then citizenship rights for children of Egyptian mothers (married to non-Egyptian men), for example, demonstrated the importance of mobilizing not only the male constituency, but also the religious male establishment. Recruiting the ‘progressive’ voices remains a critical step in influencing public opinion, particularly where it concerns deeply held customs (such as honor killings in Jordan and Turkey). On the global, regional, and local levels, religious advocacy and the mobilization of the progressive voices of religion are becoming increasingly more accepted amongst those struggling for social transformation. In fact, the human development work is a good indication of the move to take religion and faith-based organizations more seriously. Some UN development agencies for instance, are now openly seeking to either consolidate or introduce and systematize their outreach to some segments of the religious communities, as important advocates for democracy, human rights, and mediators of conflict. Some are more advanced in doing this selective and targeted outreach than others—precisely because of the sensitive nature of a mandate dealing with reproductive health, gender equality, and sexuality. Yet others, also dealing with sensitive women’s rights issues, remain wary of faith-based outreach and engagement. This diversity in approaches and attitudes, far from being a drawback, presents important checks and balances within the global development context. I believe we may even be going to the other extreme, in terms of seeing every social and political development through predominantly religious prisms, and seeking to instrumentalize religion and particularly religious leaders as the panacea to every ill. That, too, is a biased perspective. However, that is for another discussion. Suffice it here to conclude by stressing that contemporary globalization means that religion will be seen to play a key role in all our futures, not least in terms of unfolding events in the shifting sands of the Middle East. Middle Eastern women are at the centre and the forefront of many of the changes taking place and will shape the character and the future not only of their countries and region, but of multiple global dynamics. One can only look on in wonder, be in awe, and hope that her story will not repeat history, except in the best of what that had to offer.

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Notes 1. Some radical Islamists maintain that it is legitimate to kill an apostate. 2. I have elaborated on the relationship between political Islam and women’s activism and the manner in which a gender discourse is intimately connected to the power dynamics that take place between Islamist political thought and governmental reactions (Karam 1998). 3. In a personal interview—speaker preferred not to be named—in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 4. Amany Khattab—personal interview—in Cairo, Egypt.

Works Cited Ahmed, Leila (1992). Women and Gender in Islam. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press. Karam, Azza (1998). Women, Islamisms and the State: Contemporary Feminisms in Egypt. New York: St. Martin’s Press. (Ed.) (2004). Transnational Political Islam: Religion, Ideology and Power. London: Pluto Press. (Ed.) (2008). Culture Matters. New York. UN Population Fund. The Immanent Frame Interview. ‘The Rubicon is in Egypt’. An Interview with Azza Karam. http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/06/07/ the-rubicon-is-in-egypt-an-interview-with-azza-karam.

Further Reading Afkhami, Mahnaz, and Friedle, Erika (Eds) (1997). Muslim Women and the Politics of Participation: Implementing the Beijing Platform. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Ahmed, Leila (1992). Women and Gender in Islam. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bodman, Herbert L., and Tohidi, Nayereh (Eds) (1998). Women in Muslim Societies: Diversity Within Unity. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Erdickson, Victoria Lee, and Farrell, Susan A. (Eds) (2005). Still Believing: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Women Affirm Their Faith. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Mernissi, Fatima (1993). Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland. London: Virago. Norris, Pippa, and Inglehart, Ronald (2004). Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

chapter 9

i n ter ru pti ng ‘gl oba lspe a k’: a fem i n ist theologica l r e sponse from sou th er n a fr ica to gl oba liz ation 1 denise m. ackermann

In this globalised world, no single country can live or work on its own. We are all tied together in a common destiny. Nelson Mandela, Cape Town, September 1999 (Wilson 2001: 323) Only yesterday did we leave the delivery room, smiling, with a newborn baby: a free and independent Africa. It is still a newborn child we have been breast-feeding . . . And just as we began to smile, watching this child lift its foot to take its first step as an independent being . . . bang! Another oppressor struck Africa: HIV/AIDS. Dube (2003a: 85) Zelphina Maposela, who voluntarily cares for and feeds seventeen children, most of them AIDS orphans, in her one-room Nyanga home, was recently recognized by Western Cape HIV and AIDS organizations as an ‘unsung hero’. Her household lives on R800 (approximately $130) a month, most of it from state welfare grants. A church collects food and clothing for her, and she grows her own vegetables. As a child, Zelphina was treated as a servant for her stepmother’s children. ‘I don’t want any other child to experience the neglect and lack of love I experienced’, she says. ‘So if more children come to me, I will take them in. I have it in my heart to do this because of the strength God gives me daily.’ Cape Times, 29 November 2004

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The so-called democratic system is more and more a government of the rich, and less and less a government of the people. It is impossible to ignore the evidence: the masses of poor who are called to vote are never called to govern . . . Power, real power is elsewhere . . . In our era of liberal globalisation, the market is the instrument par excellence of the only power worthy of the name: economic and financial power. This power is not democratic because it has not been elected by the people, is not managed by the people and, especially, does not have as its objective the happiness of the people. José Saramago, Portuguese author and Nobel Prize winner (Business Report, 4 October 2004)

Introduction These disparate fragments paint fleeting pictures of situations that frame present debates on globalization in southern Africa. They prompt two questions for discussion in this chapter. First, what critical issues raised by globalization in southern Africa will define the spaces for feminist theologies over the next decades? Second, how can a feminist theology that is attentive to its public voice and its interest in just and liberating praxis ‘interrupt’ globalizing processes by offering alternative ways of addressing this complex reality? A few comments on the enigmas of using the term ‘southern Africa’ are the starting point for addressing the first of these two questions. This is followed by comments on the multiple understandings of feminist theologies in this part of the world. Thereafter the potential and the perils of globalization for women will be discussed with reference to selected issues, such as employment, poverty, information technology, the environment, human rights, HIV and AIDS, and Christian attitudes. These issues are chosen as being pivotal to women’s well-being, in fact to the well-being of all those for whom it is a daily struggle to survive. Turning to the second question posed above, various features of a public feminist theology of praxis that can ‘interrupt’ present ‘global-speak’ (Scholte 2000: 43) and offer other ways of approaching globalization will be described. I write as a white South African whose ancestors were religious refugees who came to live at the very southern tip of Africa some 315 years ago and who identifies herself as a South African feminist theologian of praxis. My ancestry is a complex mixture of cultural identities that result in a global/local hybridity (Ackermann 2003a: 2–3). I situate my theology contextually in my particularity while at the same time I identify with other women scholars of religion who seek liberation from all forms of injustice, oppression, and degradation. I understand feminist theologies as intrinsic to the struggle for the dignity, worth, and well-being of women. This concern extends to all people who experience discrimination, deprivation, and marginality and also applies to the welfare of the Earth.

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Southern Africa—national or transnational states? What is meant by ‘southern Africa’ and does it represent a clearly identifiable region? There is no general agreement on how to divide the regions of Africa. For purposes of this paper ‘southern Africa’ comprises Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Within this region there are a variety of cultural traditions, languages, religions, customs, economies, and histories. Historically, this region has experienced colonization by the Dutch, the Portuguese, the Germans, and the British. Some countries like Botswana and South Africa are democracies and others like Swaziland, which is an absolute monarchy, are not. In South Africa alone there are eleven official languages and the major world religions coexist with African Traditional religions (Prozesky and de Gruchy 1995). The very concept ‘southern Africa’ is complex, often contested, and impossible to deal with as an entire region except in the most general of terms. This region is also home to a great variety of women’s voices, experiences, and histories. Attempting to discern influences and trends between different countries in a large region raises the question of boundaries. Are nation-states impermeable, autonomous, and self-regulating? Are earlier modes of colonialism being replaced by an economic version that is challenging concepts of borders, as transnational corporations—that are no longer tied to national allegiances—spread their influence across the world? In a critical response, Mogobe Ramose states that in former colonized territories ‘[O]nly limping or defective sovereignty was restored to the indigenous conquered people. Their sovereignty remains defective because their newly acquired sovereignty was already burdened by economic bondage to the former colonial ruler’ (1998: 634). Today the historicity and contextuality of local social categories are claimed in resistance to processes of globalization, while at the same time the notion of impermeable borders is challenged as cultures are increasingly opened to these processes. A highly complex web of industrial production, distribution, and socio-political relationships exists across national borders. These transnational relationships cross national borders and relativize the impregnability of the nation-state. The nation-state in southern Africa is not dead, neither is it the same as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. In this state of flux, religion asserts itself in both local and global garb. Religious communities themselves are among the oldest of transnationals. Christian missionaries carried their beliefs and practices to the African continent long before nation-states were established here. Religion provides important insights into the new cartographies produced by globalization. Space, place, and the notion of territory have become important to the understanding of religion. Manuel Vásquez and Marie Marquardt point out, ‘ “Religious mappings” are particularly important to transnational migrants faced with the dislocation produced by globalization’ (2003: 55). This is true for southern Africa as migrants crisscross borders and seek places and spaces where they can belong.

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Religious spaces provide such alternative ways of belonging. Thus religion is part of the processes of globalization while at the same time, as an independent variable, it challenges traditional maps of reality (Vásquez and Marquardt 2003: 5). Southern Africa is thus a region characterized by a mixture of globalizing and localizing forces. This means that, as a region, it is internally pluralistic, culturally and religiously diverse, and socially and politically differentiated. No culture or state or ethnic group is immune from the impact of others. There are no longer any self-contained political, social, or religious units that are protected from the winds of globalization.

Feminist theologies—different voices, different views Feminism The very term ‘feminism’ is contested in the southern African context and the term ‘feminist theologies’ in the title of this section can be misleading. There is no single understanding of ‘feminism’, neither is there a coherent view on its suitability for the southern African context. It is used here as a cover term for critically conscious women’s scholarship. Historical and cultural contexts are fundamental to addressing gender in southern Africa. Colonialism, ethnic and cultural differences, neo-colonialism, and apartheid are historical realities with abiding consequences for women’s lives in this part of the world. Not surprisingly, some African women scholars have rejected the relevance of feminism, perceiving it as a foreign, Western import that cannot engage the complexity of African historical, cultural, and contextual diversity. There are, however, signs that the term ‘African feminism’ is gaining ground in women’s theoretical discourse. This kind of African feminism, Beverly Guy-Sheftall (2003: 31) notes,‘compel[s] us to re-imagine what is meant by “feminism” in a global context’. It promotes the joint struggle of African women and men against oppressive legacies of the past while at the same time African women challenge African men to eradicate inequities and limitations suffered by women in African cultures and traditional societies.

Feminist theologies Turning to women theologians in southern Africa, there appears to be no agreement on the appropriateness of the term ‘feminist’ to describe their theological approaches. This is amply illustrated in the publications of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians. No scholarship on women and religion can truly engage the cultural and contextual diversity of Africa without active participation in the Circle. The Circle was officially inaugurated at Trinity College, Legon, Ghana in 1989 on the initiative of Mercy Amba Oduyoye. According to founder member Musimbi Kanyoro, the inaugural meeting identified ‘religion and culture

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as the crucial foci for creating a liberating theology that would respond to the needs of women in Africa’ (2002: 17). Out of this concern the Circle was born, consisting of women who ‘will concentrate their efforts on producing literature from the base of religion and culture to enrich the critical study and empowering practice of religion in Africa’ (Kanyoro 2002: 17; Phiri 2004: 17). Circle women meet regularly to discuss and critique their writing, an exercise of doing theology in community (Phiri 1997a: 70; Ackermann 2000a: 7–12). From its inception the Circle has striven to be inclusive of the different religions, races, and ethnicities in Africa (Phiri 2004: 19). Today the Circle has local chapters in many parts of southern, eastern, central, and western Africa. Books are published, research groups are established and regional and pan-African gatherings are held. Circle members’ writings are characterized by a scholarly critical consciousness about gender, culture, and history. While African women theologians may not explicitly label their scholarship as feminist, their work expresses a deep concern for the well-being of women who experience discrimination and violence in this part of the world. The well-being of women is a central hermeneutic for feminist theologies in southern Africa. This is in keeping with the Final Statement of the 1994 Costa Rica Dialogue ‘Women against Violence’, called by the Women’s Commission of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT). Concerned about the increase of global and systemic violence against women and children, the EATWOT Statement says, ‘Whatever is good and life-giving for marginalized and excluded women, is good for all’ and calls for ‘inter-connectedness, equality and the well-being of all in harmony’ (Mananzan et al. 1996: 182). The research of Circle members is consonant with my understanding of feminist theologies (Ackermann 2003a: 29–38) that accommodate a variety of approaches to women’s theological tasks under the inclusive rubric of ‘African women theologians’. However, with regard to the effects of globalization on women’s lives, there is currently more debate among secular feminist theorists than in the Circle. In the writings of the latter, narrative plays an important role while issues of cultural rituals, widowhood and inheritance, and women’s histories are researched. Church-related matters such as ordination, biblical hermeneutics, and women’s ministries also occur frequently in the writings of the Circle. In a recent article, Phiri identifies issues of ownership of land, poverty, democracy, issues raised by the New Partnership for African Development, and a constructive debate on gender (2004: 23). More recently, the HIV and AIDS pandemic, violence against women, and theological education have come to the fore.

Globalization in southern Africa— potential and perils for women ‘Globalization’ is one of the most frequently used buzzwords of our times. It has entered the vocabulary of all major languages (Swahili is a rare exception—for the moment, see Scholte 2000: 14). ‘Global-speak’ (a colloquialism for globalization discourse) is uttered by

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television presenters, journalists, academics, politicians, economists, and environmentalists. As Zygmunt Baumann complains, globalization ‘is on everybody’s lips; a fad word turning into a shibboleth, a magic incantation, a passkey meant to unlock the gates to all present and future mysteries’ (1998: 1). Globalization is not new. In southern Africa, migration and cultural interaction have been integral to the development of this region for millennia. These forces have, however, accelerated greatly in the past fifty years under the hegemony of neo-liberal market forces and are characterized by certain distinctive features. ‘Shrinking space, shrinking time and disappearing borders are linking people’s lives more deeply, more intensely, more immediately than ever before’ (UNDP 1999: 1). Although ‘global-speak’ focuses chiefly on the economic interdependence of countries, globalization is in fact a complex interplay of dynamic forces that affect people’s cultural identities, communications, political governance, social arrangements, and the generation of ideas and knowledge. However we understand globalization, it is having an undeniable impact on the lives of everyone on the planet wherever we live, and is a defining feature of twenty-first-century human societies. For women in southern Africa, globalization has brought both potential and perils. The structural dominance of men over women is hardly new to present globalizing processes. Patriarchy has a long history and has been implicitly part of many societies before the rise of modern globalization. Globalization is not the original source of discrimination against women. But it does raise the question: has globalization reduced or intensified gender injustice in southern Africa? The connections between globalization and gender trends are not easy to verify empirically. Recent gender-based social research suggests that the contemporary acceleration of global relations has been both beneficial and detrimental to women’s well-being (Scholte 2000: 250). In southern Africa the most immediate and gravest impact of globalizing processes is on women’s health as the AIDS pandemic ravages this region. HIV and AIDS do not, however, occur in isolation from issues of employment, poverty, education, communications, human rights, political governance, Christian patriarchal attitudes, and environmental concerns. These issues, which are touched on below, are interwoven in a complex web that defies facile analysis.

Women and employment Women’s well-being is inseparable from opportunities for gainful employment. The growth of exports, tourism, and the manufacturing sector has offered women in southern Africa more employment opportunities than ever before. Increased employment is, however, a mixed blessing. Too often women do not receive equal pay with men for the same work (McDowell and Court 1994; Scholte 2000: 251). Commenting on this phenomenon, Liesl Orr writes, ‘The increase in women’s employment is referred to as “feminisation of labour” and is driven by the private sector’s desire for low wages, labour control, productivity, and flexible labour’ (2001: 32). A feature of globalization is the

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emergence of non-standard forms of employment. This ‘casualisation of labour’ occurs through part-time, temporary work. Today, women occupy a greater proportion of parttime and casual employment than men do, while men occupy 60% of full-time jobs (Orr 2001: 36). Thus women have increasing employment opportunities as casual workers at lower wages, with less safety measures and less potential for collective bargaining (Taylor 1997: 14). Privatization of state enterprises is taking place in southern Africa, not just at the expense of consumers, but at the expense of workers as well. In industrialized countries the pain of dismissal is somewhat ameliorated by the safety net of unemployment insurance (Stiglitz 2002: 57). In most southern African countries this net does not exist to the extent that it acts as a buffer against additional financial burdens to already impoverished family members. Trade liberalization and the reduction of tariffs have, for instance, led to job losses in the textile and footwear industries in South Africa, which accounted for 37% of all women in the manufacturing sector (Orr 2001: 34). While trade liberalization is supposed to enhance a country’s income by moving resources to more productive uses, its immediate impact is often the destruction of jobs (Stiglitz 2002: 59–64).

Women, poverty, and education In 1998 the number of poor living on less than $2 a day was estimated at 2.801 billion (World Bank 2000: 29). Despite repeated promises of poverty reduction over the past decades, the actual number of people living in poverty has increased by almost 100 million, of whom a disproportionate number are women living in southern Africa. These figures indicate the growing gap between those who have sufficient means for a decent life and those who do not. A 1995 survey commissioned to determine the extent of poverty in South Africa found that 53% of the total population live on less than R300 ($50) a month and that female-headed households are the most vulnerable to poverty (Haddad 2001: 9). A further ‘startling reality is that 41% of all African households are headed by women in South Africa today’ (Haddad 2001: 9). The effects of unemployment and the ‘casualisation of labour’ described in the previous section have had a significant effect on women’s well-being. In southern Africa, rural women are affected by poverty the worst, with little access to basic services. In South Africa the legacy of apartheid has further entrenched poverty for rural women by denying them a formal education; their literacy rate is estimated at 50%. There is also a huge gap between the quality of education available in the affluent areas and the rural schools in this region. Lack of access to proper education has made illiterate rural women vulnerable to exploitation (Pandy in Longwe 1999: 18–25). Throughout the ages the poor have been driven to sell not only their labour but also their bodies, their children, and their futures. Herein lies the paradox of the age of globalization. Immense wealth and a new awareness of the world are created, which in turn ‘endanger the meaningfulness of life through unjust distribution and rampant

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consumerism’ (Schweiker 2000: 109). The overriding effects of globalization on women in southern Africa are found in women’s susceptibility to irregular forms of work, exacerbated by policies of privatization, and public and private sector cutbacks, all of which lead to increased poverty.

Women and information technology Resulting from the revolution in information technology, the exchange of goods, services, and finance across the globe are now possible at an unsurpassed pace. This increased access to communications has allowed women, through networking, to lobby for causes in their interest (Taylor 2001: 52). Globalization has reduced feminist women’s sense of isolation and has given access to knowledge and information and the possibility of strategic connectedness to feminists in other parts of the world. The use of sophisticated, technologically advanced means of communication has, however, yet to reach marginalized groups of people. Its potential to furnish women living in the rural areas of southern Africa with information related to their rights and interests is still severely limited. Increasing poverty has intensified an increase in the nefarious side of the technological revolution in communications. ‘The globalization of the trade in human beings for sex industry work and the continued trafficking of women are major changes in prostitution in the late twentieth century’, according to Rita Brock and Susan Thistlethwaite (1996: 122). The role of sophisticated communications networks using the Internet is a growing feature of these phenomena. The Internet has become a sophisticated vehicle, offering ‘opportunities’ to needy women (and children) as sex workers, in sex tourism, and as pawns in the pornographic industry.

Women and the environment The depletion of the ozone layer in the Earth’s atmosphere has caused planetary climate changes, popularly known as ‘global warming’. Droughts, floods, and violent weather patterns are becoming increasingly common. These phenomena are signalling nature’s distress in the face of what Thomas Berry calls ‘the turn from the earth’ (1999). Contributing to this state of affairs are the ‘ecocidal’ (Grey 2003: 12) policies of some of the world’s most prosperous nations, increasing consumerist lifestyles and the myth of continuous growth. Climate-change is the most serious problem facing the poor. The hard-won developmental gains of the past fifty years can be wiped out by the effects of global warming and climatic changes on agriculture and food production. Environmental degradation has telling consequences for women’s well-being. This is vividly illustrated by the relationship between women, water, and wood in southern Africa. ‘World-wide, the demand for water is doubling every 21 years’ (Grey 2003: 38). According to the World Bank, eighty countries with 40% of the world’s population are suffering a scarcity of water (Grey 2003: 38). Southern Africa is not a region blessed with

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abundant water and natural forests; it is, in fact, facing increasing desertification due to patterns of low rainfall. Walking long distances daily to fetch water and wood is the dangerous and exhausting task of many rural women. Globalization is characterized by the increased mobility of people, a fact that—as Baumann points out—is an ‘unequally distributed commodity’ stratifying people (1998: 2). Being local in a globalized world is a sign of ‘social deprivation’. Global mobility is for the privileged, while local mobility is a process driven by need. As poverty bites in the rural areas, processes of urbanization are accelerated. Today, Africa is the fastest urbanizing continent in the world (Shorter 1991: 8). Rapid urbanization has a morbid face. Millions of people live in informal settlements or squatter camps, characterized by insecurity, impermanence, illegality, and all the attendant social problems that result from social dislocation, profiteering landlords, and official incompetence. The majority of these shack dwelling households are headed by women who, as primary supporters, wage a daily battle for the survival of their families against disease, fire, overcrowding, crime, inclement weather, and generally degrading environmental conditions.

Women’s human rights The increased willingness to recognize women’s human rights and to outlaw gender discrimination is a distinct potential of globalization. This is the fruit of the worldwide recognition of the rights of all. The United Nations convened four global conferences on women and their rights between 1975 and 1995, culminating in the Beijing Conference in 1995, which was attended by over 30,000 women, including sizeable delegations of southern African women. It is debatable, however, whether these conferences have made a significant impact on global governance in relation to gender justice. Most of these global initiatives recognize women’s subordination and the need for gender justice, but still fall short on implementing significant and concrete steps for change. Gender justice demands the full participation and representation of women in the state organs of power (Gouws 1999: 54–8). Furthermore, women’s full citizenship depends on the enforcement of socio-economic rights such as access to essential foodstuffs, water, shelter, basic education, and primary health care (Liebenberg 1999: 59). As long as poor women are excluded from effective access to social services, full rights for all women in southern Africa have not been achieved.

The feminization of the HIV and AIDS pandemic Against the multi-layered reality of poverty, unemployment, lack of education, and gender injustice, the HIV and AIDS pandemic cuts a swath of death across the southern African landscape. AIDS is a globalized disease (Whiteside and Sunter 2000: 36–46) and no respecter of boundaries. In economies struggling to find their rightful place in the globalized market, the inevitable cutbacks on health expenditure and education are

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directly responsible for the increase in diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV and AIDS (Stiglitz 2002: 8). Where poverty, unhealthy living conditions, sexual discrimination, and exploitation exist, HIV and AIDS thrive. The bare facts about AIDS are chilling. Well over 20 million people have died since the first cases of AIDS were identified in 1981. Of the some 37.8 million people living with HIV today, 25 million live in what is called ‘sub-Saharan Africa’ (UNAIDS 2004: 30). This globalized pandemic is manifesting a new and ominous feature—the feminization of AIDS (Ackermann 2003b). In Africa alone 58.7% of those infected between the ages of 15 and 49 are women (UNAIDS 2004: 22). Its effect on the lives of women of all ages is devastating. An estimated 5.3 million South Africans are HIV positive, that is, 18.78% of the total population. Of these 3.12 million are women. HIV infection among females between the ages of 15 and 24 is eight times higher than that among males of same age. This disproportionate impact of AIDS on women is due to women’s biological susceptibility and patterns of gender inequality exacerbated by cultural and religious taboos. As women are the principal caretakers for families, the producers of food, and the guardians of family life in many southern African countries, they bear the largest burden of AIDS. Often young girls are withdrawn from school to care for members of the family who are ill (UNAIDS 2004: 43). Grandmothers are shouldering the care of grandchildren whose parents have succumbed to AIDS-related diseases (UNAIDS 2004: 64). Younger women who are widowed may lose their land and property, whether or not inheritance laws are designed to protect them (UNAIDS 2004: 43). Unable to manage alone, faced with hunger and the lack of the most basic means of survival, ‘some are driven to transactional sex in exchange for food and other commodities’ (UNAIDS 2004: 43). The particularly rampant nature of HIV and AIDS in southern Africa appears to be due to a combination of factors working in concert (Whiteside and Sunter 2000: 61–7). ‘These factors include poverty and social instability that result in family disruption, high levels of other sexually transmitted infections, the low status of women, sexual violence, ineffective leadership during critical periods in the spread of HIV’, and, more recently, the deadly extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB). An important factor, too, is high mobility, which is largely linked to migratory labour systems (UNAIDS 2004: 32) and the globalized nature of employment. When subjected to gender analysis, AIDS is a tragic case study in power relations. Gender, as the socially constructed and culturally defined differences between men and women, influences the manner in which tasks are defined, human worth is understood, and how structures and relationships are biased in favour of men. When seeking to understand why AIDS has touched almost every family in southern Africa, and infected women, particularly young women, disproportionately more than men, analysis of the way in which gender relations are conducted is essential. Due to the AIDS pandemic, southern Africa today has the worst orphan crisis in the world. Over 4 million children ranging in age from a few days or a few months to 18 years of age have lost their parents to AIDS-related diseases. The emergence of child-headed households is a common feature of the southern African landscape. The trauma of the loss of parental bonds, support, and care, the emotional anguish of watching a parent die, and the fact that often a child loses both parents in quick succession are all breeding

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grounds for experiences of anger and depression that can translate into severe social problems. The loss of intergenerational knowledge and the family structures that provide moral and ethical guidelines for a child are not only tragic, but have frightening consequences for the future.

Christian trends and globalization Although labels such as ‘fundamentalism’ or ‘the new Christian right’ capture something of the anti-intellectualism, the crusading spirit, and the conservative political agenda of certain contemporary Christian movements, they do not sufficiently encompass the complex historical and theological developments of these movements to be helpful in critical analyses. Of concern for women’s well-being is the present tie between a conservative ideology of gender and these movements. ‘Understanding the centrality of gender in fundamentalist thinking helps to explain the attempt to exercise power over gender relationships and set limits on women’s public life among those who oppose equal rights for women in an era of globalization’ (Bayes and Tohidi 2001: 37). Of further concern to feminist theologies is the declared opposition to both the agendas of the social gospel and liberation theologies and the highly selective choice of issues such as ‘family values’ and women’s bodily rights as platforms for ‘moral regeneration’ by these movements (Beyer 1994: 16–17). The literal use of Scripture to enforce oppression and deny full equality to women on the basis of women’s secondary status and male headship are highly problematic, if not life-threatening, in the context of HIV and AIDS. For effective strategizing, a realistic assessment and understanding of the role of globalized and localized religion in shaping women’s status is vital.

Assessing the impact of globalization on women’s well-being In summary, assessing the impact of globalization on women in southern Africa produces a mixed bag. On the one hand, the modernizing aspects of globalization have brought new ideas about gender roles and relationships, which have had an encouraging impact on how women are recognized in society and how they perceive themselves (Bayes and Tohidi 2001: 7). Globalization also offers increased opportunities for some women in terms of employment, communications, education, and health care. On the other hand, globalization reinforces existing patterns of social, political, and religious exclusion, leads to changes in labour patterns to women’s detriment, deepens poverty and increases social inequality, and intensifies the impact of HIV and AIDS. On balance, the values that drive the present processes of globalization have not dignified the lives of the poor and the vulnerable who, too often, are women. The worldview that drives globalization is focused on the acquisition and enjoyment of wealth more than it is concerned with human well-being. ‘Getting and spending have become the human project’

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(Gorringe 2004: 85). When acquisition of profit becomes the highest good, it results in the inevitable loss of relationship, the loss of human dignity and worth, and the loss of ultimate meaning. Marked by huge imbalances in power, processes of globalization have shown no respect or prudence for the Earth’s diminishing resources, and have not moved from hierarchal patterns of domination to an ethic of sharing that values the interconnectedness of all life. Women have borne the brunt of the consequences of this all-encompassing web of globalization. Globalization in its present hegemonic form needs to be ‘interrupted’, not only with prophetic words, but with courageous actions that enhance social justice.

‘Interrupting’ global-speak ‘Interrupting global-speak’ is shorthand for a prophetic challenge to the values and practices that drive present processes of globalization and a demand for viable and sustainable alternatives for a more just social order. ‘Interrupt’ is a strong word, chosen deliberately, that indicates the desire to thwart existing global-speak by injecting alternative values into present discourse. The ethical challenges of globalization are complex and daunting and require a value-driven summons from southern African women to a more just social order. At heart, such a challenge lies in matters of equity, identity, and agency. In this section a number of the more salient aspects of a public feminist theology of praxis (Ackermann 2003c) are set out, with constant reference to the most urgent and vexing predicament faced by women and their families in southern Africa—the HIV and AIDS pandemic. A feminist theological response to globalization will need to avoid simplistic judgments and rhetorical denouncements, while at the same time remaining alert to patterns of power and oppression. Feminist theologians will require wisdom to forge strategic alliances, courage to examine our own contradictions, and resoluteness as we face inevitable setbacks. This is a tall order. Yet it is a vital one if God’s preferred option for the poor, the sick, the downtrodden, and the marginalized is to take on flesh. ‘God’s option for the poor represents divine protest against human disorder and divine advocacy on the side of those who struggle for justice’ (Ruether 1995: 95). The certainty that God is a God of justice and love is indispensable for dealing with the HIV and AIDS pandemic with courage and hope. I suggest that the following features of a public feminist theology of praxis offer useful tools for ‘interrupting’ global-speak in the cause of women’s wellbeing and they begin with drawing strength from the values of the reign of God.

Reign of God values The hermeneutical point of departure for a public feminist theology of praxis is that all theology should be done in service of the fulfilment of God’s reign on Earth. The reign of God brings good news to people in terms of their life situations, however difficult they may

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be. It speaks of justice, love, peace and wholeness, the flourishing of righteousness, and shalom. ‘Wholeness’, so desirable for women’s well-being, is described by Catharina Halkes as ‘not a reality in or extraneous to me which is flawless and avoids all tension, but a possibility, a desire for a fruitful and dynamic integration of various polarities (woman/man; spirit/body; etc.) so that these . . . relate to one another, respond critically to one another and do not place another in superior or inferior positions’ (1984: 20, my translation). The reign of God, like the Gospel, does not promise an instant utopia. Instead it is founded on Christian hope, unveiled for us in the praxis of Jesus. His life revealed the critical and transforming vision of what it would mean if the fullness of God’s presence were to be known on Earth. The challenge to follow Jesus’ lead and live by the values of the reign of God is never free from risk. Opposition, cynicism, and burnout are constant threats. Nowhere is this more apparent in southern Africa at present than in the lives of those engaged in work related to different aspects of the HIV and AIDS pandemic: countering stigma, training, counselling, lobbying, protesting against the slow statedelivery of medication, giving hope, or just simply surviving. The values of the reign of God, as embodied in the ministry of Jesus Christ, demand practical realization. If the reign of God remains no more than a comforting eschatological concept, it loses its profound connection to the life and ministry of Jesus. The plight of those to whom Jesus ministered is in many ways similar to the experience of women and marginalized people today who struggle against the hegemonic processes of globalization. Reign of God theology demands that the faithful act in ways that will hasten the coming of this reign on Earth. Such action is of necessity a very public affair.

The public face of feminist theology Making the link between public theology and the metaphor of the reign of God, Jürgen Moltmann points out, ‘Theology for the sake of God is always kingdom-of-God theology. As kingdom of God theology, theology has to be public theology; the public, critical and prophetic cry for God—the public, critical and prophetic hope for God. Its public character is constitutive for theology, for the sake of the kingdom of God’ (1998: 1–2). Public theology has many faces and is easier to describe in terms of what it is not. A public feminist theology will not make magisterial theological pronouncement claiming to teach the public ‘out there’ in a prescriptive way. It will not resort to theological discourse that is obscure and inaccessible, technical and laden with academic jargon, with its own agenda understood only by specialists. It will not succumb to being no more than ‘the inhouse chatter or domestic housekeeping of a sect’ (Forrester 2000: 127). Crucial themes in our common public discourse should reflect these values: the integrity and inviolable worth of every human being regardless of gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, or whatever other categories tend to separate us; human rights in their widest possible application, including political, economic, and environmental rights; justice that is more than a call for equal treatment but which holds the common good and individual integrity as its goal; spaces where the voiceless can speak, in

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particular those who are marginalized because they have little means and diminished power; and innovative and unending action for transformation and solidarity that crosses denominational, ethnic, class, and gender barriers (see Peukert 1992: 62). Then feminist theologies can offer an authentic counter to present Christian discourse that emphasizes exclusivity and judgment.

Feminist theology as praxis The term ‘praxis’ points to intentional social activity, an interruptive act measured by accountability, conceived in collaboration with diverse women scholars while taking into account our differences, and carried out in response to calls for justice and compassion. Such a feminist theology is explicitly ethical and contextual. It speaks from specific situations, names experiences, identifies suffering, and articulates possibilities for change and hope, testing them within a given moral and ethical framework. Here the relation between knowledge, power, and interests is of ethical concern. Rebecca Chopp describes praxis in Christian feminism as not only reflecting on praxis, but as seeking ‘actively to be a form of praxis [my italics]: to shape Christian activity around the norms and visions of emancipation and transformation’ (1996: 222). Feminist theologies that embody transformative praxis should occur in a variety of intersubjective domains: in local communities, in broader communal networks that share cultural and historical traditions, and in the public sphere of politics and economics (see Chopp and Taylor 1994: 15–18). The growing network of courageous women in southern Africa, like Zelphina Maposela who are caring for AIDS orphans, educating their neighbours, tending to the sick, and speaking publicly about HIV and AIDS, demonstrates how these domains are connected and how transformative praxis penetrates to the heart of matters—the well-being of people. Faced with the perils of globalization, a communal praxis of grace is required to confront the corporate powers of globalizing forces. This grace abides in history, promising human flourishing. The vision of a world in which God is at home needs more than the prayer ‘May your kingdom come’. It requires the willing communal efforts of those who utter this prayer to translate it into deeds. Embodied praxis is a central interpretative lens for a feminist theology in southern Africa (Ackermann 2004: 58–9).

Feminist theologies and difference The issue of cultural difference is an ever-present knotty challenge to women theologians in southern African (Ackermann 2003a: 11–16). Acknowledging difference and stating particularities of historic, cultural, and contextual realities is necessary in order to avoid assumptions of commonality and to honour the integrity of a panoply of experiences in this part of the world. It is also a strategic necessity when tackling the effects of globalization on women’s well-being. Problems can, however, arise when ‘difference’ is

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accepted uncritically and all forms of difference are seen as equivalent. Colonialism was constructed on concepts of difference. It is also true that apartheid used the issue of difference as the cornerstone of its political and social edifice. Given the recent history of South Africa, it would be a grave mistake not to name racism appropriately, so that its specific historical forms and practices of domination can be engaged. South Africa is today struggling to move away from rigid binary oppositions to a more inclusive understanding of citizenship that is comfortable with ambiguity, difference, and hybridity in an exceedingly pluralistic society. Sailing between the Scylla of difference and the Charybdis of essentialism requires a critical consciousness when framing future feminist theological agendas in southern Africa. Uma Narayan (2003: 416) warns that efforts to attend to ‘differences among women’ can result in ‘pictures of cultural differences among women’ that constitute ‘cultural essentialism’. Essentialist notions of ‘cultural differences’ between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ people can reproduce problematic colonialist assumptions that categorize ‘Western culture’ as superior. Then the average ‘Third World woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and her being “Third World” (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, domestic, family-oriented, victimized, etc.)’ (Narayan 2003: 419). Narayan further notes, ‘When essentialist definitions of Third World cultures are cloaked in the virtuous mantle of resistance to Western cultural imperialism, Third World feminists and others who contest prevailing norms and practices are discursively set up in the role of “cultural traitors” and “stooges of Western imperialism” ’ (2003: 419). Furthermore, essentialist cultural assumptions about ‘Western women’, ‘Third World women’, or ‘African women’ deny that these designations represent heterogeneous groups of peoples who do not necessarily share values, interests, and ways of living. How can feminist theologians in southern Africa challenge essentialist notions of culture while at the same time continuing to interrogate cultural differences in an antiessentialist manner? Anti-essentialist feminists can begin by ‘interrupting’ static views of culture and by cultivating a critical stance that insists on an historical understanding of the contexts in which particular cultures are defined and understood (Narayan 2003: 420). By restoring history and politics to the present understanding of a culture, the processes by which particular values and practices have come to be imputed as definitive of a particular ‘culture’ can then be analysed. ‘Instead of seeing the centrality of particular values, traditions, or practices to any particular culture as given, we need to trace the historical and political processes by which these values, traditions, or practices have come to be deemed central constitutive components of a particular culture’ (Narayan 2003: 421). In summary, cultural differences cannot be denied. What can be disputed is that these differences constitute neatly delineated, separate, unchanging cultural universes. Societies in southern Africa are internally pluralistic, pervaded with a great deal of healthy dissention and contestation over values and changes to formerly accepted practices. There is no one ‘southern African culture’. An anti-essentialist stance does not imply a simple-minded acceptance of all generalizations about women. Instead it calls for ‘a commitment to examine both their empirical accuracy and their political utility or risk’ (Narayan 2003: 428).

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Critical analysis Feminist theological attempts to ‘interrupt’ global-speak are dependant on searching, critical analysis of how cultural and religious traditions and practices combine with the present capitalist cultures of globalization to exploit women. This analysis is driven by the quest for social and religious justice in the cause of women’s well-being. The dynamics of globalization impinge on all human life, on the poor and the rich, in rural areas and in cities. HIV and AIDS do not respect class, race, or gender barriers. However, the present feminization of the pandemic, a life-and-death concern for women, requires critical analysis in order to strategize for women’s well-being. Why is it that globalization is such an attractive reality to so many, despite the fact that it has so often excluded women and contributed to gender injustice? How is globalization rooted in the everyday experiences of women of faith? How is globalization exacerbating the HIV and AIDS pandemic? Making the connections between social powerlessness and structural economic dependency, between women’s suffering and traditions of gender inequality that are structurally maintained and reinforced both in society and in institutionalized religion enables women to forge a universal perspective ‘that genuinely reveals how our common humanity in relation to God is being undermined’ (Harrison 1985: 246). Critical analysis is not the prerogative of academic theologians. Those who have been belittled and oppressed possess collective practical wisdom that draws on contextual forms of human experience and transcends academic speak. Through the power of narrative their hopes for a transfigured reality are kept alive.

Narrative in the quest for justice In the search for ethical Christian praxis, narratives offer a valued resource for feminist theologians. Here the woman of faith, telling her story in community, can be both a moral agent and a moral interpreter (Graham 1996: 114). The proliferation of stories that constitute human identity reflects the heterogeneous character of modern societies. Women’s stories tell of women’s experiences of globalization. They become the theological source of women’s struggles for gender justice. Women’s experience, as authoritative for a public feminist theology of praxis, raises the question whether the mechanism of self-criticism can be retained. This is an important question, given the present need for a credible public voice. The communal experience of globalization, reframed in narratives, is a pivotal source for the development of inclusive theological strategies that nonetheless honour women’s particularities. The resources of women’s storytelling for feminist theologies are well-established. The extent to which they can ‘interrupt’ the dominant scientific, economic, and political narratives will depend on whether they are able to engage and interact with different players in the public sphere. Herein lies the task for women theologians in southern Africa—to claim public spaces, to hone our analysis, to speak boldly to those who have

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the power to change oppressive conditions, to honor the untold women’s stories of deprivation of worth and dignity, as well as those of resistance and hope (Ackermann 2003a: 40). We do so because we are called to stand in participatory solidarity by the One who showed us the way. These stories will serve as critiques on gender injustice that is so deeply embedded in globalizing processes. There is no single way of describing justice or one single theory of justice that satisfies everyone (Ackermann 2004: 64–5). From the perspective of a public feminist theology of praxis, the realities of injustice and the commitment to the well-being of women as essential to the common good lead to an understanding of Scripture that holds that to know God is to do justice to our neighbour. The people of God must live under the stringent and unwavering expectation of communal right relationships. When these relationships are skewed through the abuse of civil, political, or economic rights—and suffering ensues—people need to be roused to action. This coming to awareness of injustice is described in Dorothee Sölle’s question: ‘Does the feeling of rage in the pit of your stomach have something to do with God? In every human being is a need for justice, a feeling about justice, and a knowledge of what is unjust and unacceptable. Without justice we wouldn’t be able to live’ (1983: 8). The following elements are integral to a public feminist theological approach to justice: first, justice must be conceived of broadly as participating in the richness of the biblical tradition that regards justice as nothing less than ‘right relationship’ or righteousness. Second, the righteous community—that is, the one rightly related to God— must be a community faithful to God through showing concern for the least privileged persons and groups. Third, responsibilities are balanced with rights. Fourth, the primary injustice is exploitation. Fifth, since injustice is found in exploitation it must be corrected (primarily in rescue/resistance and in rebuke/reparations). Lastly, our concept of justice must be viewed as incomplete and partial. Praxis for justice is seen as directed towards the creation of the common good, something that all who are oppressed and on the margins of society deserve. However, the mere appeal to justice itself is not adequate. Justice as ‘communal right-relationship’ becomes a basic theological hermeneutic for the proper understanding of the Christian faith.

Right relationship Relationship is the most central concept of feminist theological ethics. ‘[A] feminist moral theology insists that relationality is at the heart of all things’, writes ethicist Beverly Harrison (1985: 15). This is so because women have experienced the diminishing and distortion of relationships, both individually and structurally, in a multitude of ways. It is also so because relationship lies at the heart of the Christian understanding of what it means to be a human being in relation to the triune God. The insistence on the centrality of relationship is no mere fad. It is deeply rooted in the reality that no

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living thing is self-contained, that we are all part of a vast cosmic web of life, and that our God is a God who is the eternal and ultimate expression of relationship in the Trinity and desires, through grace transcending our understanding, to be in relationship with us and all creation. The notion of relationship is not new or uniquely feminist, but it is crucial to countering the individualistic acquisitive thrust of globalization. Feminist theological ideas of relationship are not alien to Africa’s long and valued communitarian understanding of the human person, expressed in the concept ubuntu. Desmond Tutu explains: We believe that a person is a person through another person, that my humanity is caught up, bound up and inextricable in yours. When I dehumanize you, I inexorably dehumanize myself. The solitary human being is a contradiction in terms, and therefore you seek to work for the common good because your humanity comes into is own community, in belonging. (Wilkinson 1998: 356)22

South African former president Thabo Mbeki, the leading proponent of the African Renaissance as the source of revival for the African continent, calls for African people to free themselves from the legacy of colonialism and neo-colonialism and to situate themselves on the global stage as equal and respected contributors. In order to accomplish this, he argues, Africa needs to help the world to rediscover the oneness of the human race. For southern African women this is an attractive ideal and highly compatible with the feminist theological ethic of our essential relatedness in a globalized world. While not contesting the spirit of Mbeki’s concept of an African Renaissance, Sisonke Msimang criticizes it for: a vast, numbing silence when it comes to analyses of gender oppression. This silence exists while a national crisis of violence against women rages . . . [and] is indicative of the selective memory of patriarchal nationalism which, once liberation has been achieved, can afford to ‘forget’ what women have done to secure independence or worse yet, restores women to their rightful place as women. (2000: 69)

This absence of the gendered experience in conceptualizing the African Renaissance plays itself out within African struggles to deal with the impact of globalization. Furthermore, as presently articulated, the African Renaissance appears to be blind to the implications of HIV and AIDS for our continent. Despite these serious omissions, an African Renaissance remains an important response to globalization as it makes an ethical demand upon non-Africans to take the well-being of African people seriously on the basis of our shared humanity. Feminism, in a sense, begins with a critique of the ways in which relationship has been expressed: ‘inequality of power, little expectation of mutuality, and unfair patterns of economic sharing have thus characterized sexual relations, parental responsibilities, and political systems’ (Farley 1996: 239). For southern African women, the issue of gender relationships is central to combating AIDS. When relationships are morbid or disordered, women who lack equity and freedom in their relationships risk

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higher rates of HIV infection. Feminist theologians know that the idea of ‘relationship’ is not sufficient and requires further qualification. Thus the concept of mutuality is vital to understanding a relational ethic: mutual respect, mutual love, mutual dignity and worth.

Imaginative praxis There is a trend in post-modern times to predict the demise of imagination (Ackermann 2000b: 598). It is necessary to debunk the more naïve aspects of humanist imagination, such as its belief in the inevitability of historical progress and some of its more messianic claims that emanated from the Enlightenment. Yet history has shown that the courage of people who dare to imagine what a better world would be like and who are prepared to back their ethical imagination with creative actions can shape the course of history (Ackermann 1998: 15–31). (South Africa’s transition to democracy is a case in point.) At the heart of a public feminist theology of praxis lies the belief in the role of human agency in the transforming of God’s world. The hope for a redeemed creation runs through the Jewish and Christian Scriptures; a hope for the feast that the ‘Lord of hosts will make for all people’ (Isaiah 25:6), for the creation of a new order in which ‘the wolf and the lamb shall feed together’ (Isaiah 65:25). Such is our utopianism—the belief that a better world is possible and that we are agents, rather like the hands of God, in bringing it about. Change-making praxis requires Spirit-inspired imagination. The imagination is not a faculty that fabricates images of reality. It is a God-given power that forms images that surpass reality in order to change reality. The gift of imagination is the impelling energy in which the desire for a better world is born and nurtured. In imaginative praxis lies the birth of a restored world. Imaginative public praxis for a better world calls for the convergence of the poetic and the ethical. The ethical issues emerge from critical analysis, based on constant discernment of conditions that prevent human well-being: gender injustice, the degradation of the environment, and the exploitative labour and market conditions that contribute to ill-health and poverty. An ethical reinterpretation of imagination is needed to respond to the challenge of globalization. The poetic does not exist in some abstract realm. It empowers us to identify with the forgotten and discarded persons of history across our differences. ‘The poetical imagination opposes the apartheid logic of black and white’ (Kearney 1988: 369). The essence of what is perceived as real finds expression through poetic images because they are, in themselves, experiences of what is real. This is vividly expressed through the role of art and drama in situations of oppression and suffering. Today, for example, there is a burgeoning body of poetry, literature, and drama devoted to issues raised by the HIV and AIDS pandemic. Through creative imagination, we express and enlarge our experience of reality. This poetic creative activity has both individual and communal dimensions. Conceived in the geist of the subject, once uttered, it takes on a collaborative mantle as it is shared and responded to. Collaborative imaginative

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praxis is flexible and open, and at its best in groups not bogged down by bureaucratic rules or the power ploys of oppressive hierarchies. Imagination is a powerful tool in the hands of those dedicated to transformative praxis.

Risk and hope The processes described here require the willingness to take risks and never to cease hoping (Ackermann 1996: 143–4). Imaginative praxis is often risky, even dangerous, particularly when it is subversive. Accompanying the spontaneity of imagination is its unpredictability. Imagination can become a dangerous yet hope-filled activity. A public feminist theology of praxis is above all else hopeful. South African philosopher Johan Degenaar defines hope ‘in terms of creative expectation with regard to what is desired’ (1992: 4). The idea of expectation points to a future directness, what Søren Kierkegaard called ‘a passion for the possible’. The emphasis on ‘creative expectation’ points to the person who hopes to acquire ‘a disposition to action set on bringing about the desired state of affairs’ (Degenaar 1992: 4). Implicit in this notion is the need for patience when the desired outcome is not immediately apparent and for imagination that feeds our hopeful actions. Hope, unlike wishful thinking or optimism, is directed and more realistic. At the same time, it is open to the unforeseen, because we cannot predict the future with precision. In the Christian faith, the triad of faith, hope, and love encompasses the past, present, and future. Degenaar explains: Faith is trust in the meaning of events in the past related in stories. Love is the compassionate opening up of a person to the needs of the community and a willingness to serve here and now in the present. Hope is the attitude which enables us not to become encapsulated within a particular state of affairs which, by claiming finality over our lives, condemns us to inaction. (1992: 4)

Women in southern Africa face what appear to be insurmountable hurdles in the quest for well-being. But we are not victims; we are agents for transformation. Transforming hope involves action, not stasis; passion, not passivity; risk, not restraint. The inevitable frustration of hopes for better health care and a decent environment risk disappointment, even despair. Our passion for the possible can sink into frustration, even hopelessness. There is an even greater threat to hope: apathy. Apathy speaks of loss of all desire. During the bleak apartheid years, frustration, despair, and even hopelessness were familiar emotions to those struggling to survive the onslaughts of racist rule. Today, as the globalizing processes that are hostile to women’s well-being roll through southern Africa, as HIV and AIDS decimate the fabric of societies, anger can turn to fatalistic apathy. An apathetic citizenry will tolerate manoeuvres that can damage, and even ultimately destroy, the rights for which so many have longed and some have paid a high price. Hope risks disappointment and is never without struggle. Passion is the best antidote to apathy.

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Public feminist theological praxis in the community of faith is vested in the human capacity to hope. The danger inherent in the notion of hope is that it can be embarked on too lightly. Cheap hope is nothing more than foolish optimism. Costly and risky hope faces despair, is unwaveringly realistic while trusting in the One who promises us a healed creation. We have come full circle. Christian hope for liberating justice is ‘hope grounded in the promise that Christ will bring about his just and holy kingdom’ (Wolterstorff 2004: 97). God’s reign has already commenced. Hastening its fullness is our hope, our prayer, and our charge.

Conclusion Abandoning globalization is not feasible. Is globalization therefore simply an inexorable process to which we are captive?Are we helpless in the face of the excesses of our human greed? Can the seductions of global capitalism be resisted? Will political and religious leaders be able to acknowledge our utter dependency on the Earth for our very existence before it is too late? What can turn the devastating tide of HIV and AIDS in southern Africa and give the children in Zelphina Maposela’s home a future? Can the processes of globalization that value profit above people, promote economic inequality, and deny our innate relatedness be resisted so that women and all marginalized people’s well-being is valued, promoted, and upheld? These are tough questions that, if ignored, risk a future that can be beyond remedy. They frame the challenges faced by feminist theologies over the next decades. At heart their answers lie in ‘interrupting’ present globalization discourse with a different set of values, embodied in the praxis of resistance and hope. Today, globalization is challenged around the world by people who are assuming responsibility for their well-being. A Christian feminist understanding of the world is mediated through beliefs about and experiences of the living God. All reality exists in relation to God, a God whose essence is relational. All cultural, economic, political, or religious forces that nullify our sense of God’s justice and mercy are to be ‘interrupted’ by alternative moral sensibilities. By witnessing to the reign of God publicly in our writing, teaching, and praxis, we can exercise our agency for justice and women’s well-being.

Notes 1. I acknowledge conversations with Karin Chubb, Jim Cochrane, Karin Sporre, and Francis Wilson that have contributed to the writing of this chapter. 2. This is in keeping with the way in which the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians functions. The Southern African Development Community includes all these countries and adds Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Seychelles, and Mauritius. 3. At present Christian members are dominant in the Circle, which also has members from, among others, African Traditional Religions, Judaism, and Islam.

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4. To illustrate these different approaches in South Africa, see Mmadipoane Masenya’s bosadi hermeneutic (2001: 147–9), Roxanne Jordaan’s black feminist theology (1991: 126), Sarojini Nadar’s South African Indian womanist hermenutic (2001: 159), and Gloria Kehilwe Plaatjie’s post-apartheid black feminism (2001: 119). See also Christina Landman (1994; 2002:159–80); Beverly Haddad (2001: 5–19, 2002: 101–17); Isabel Apawo Phiri (2002: 119–38); Devakarsham Betty Govinden (2002: 304–26); Annalet Van Schalkwyk (2002: 279–303); and Elna Mouton (2002). 5. For further examples of Circle members’ writings beyond the borders of South Africa, see Musa Dube’s (2001: 50–62) postcolonial hermeneutics and her attention to matters related to the HIV and AIDS pandemic (2002: 31–42; 2003a: 84–100, 2003b: 101–12). See also Isabel Apawo Phiri (1997b: 16); Dora Mbuwayesango (2001: 63–77); and Moji Ruele (2003: 82). 6. Trade liberalization means ‘the removal of government interference in financial markets, capital markets and of barriers to trade’ (Stiglitz 2002: 59). 7. Pressures by activists through internet communications have, for instance, resulted in the international landmines treaty—signed by some 121 countries as of 1997—despite the opposition of powerful governments (Stiglitz 2002: 5). For women, their children and other innocent victims in countries like Angola and Mozambique, this is life-saving news. 8. For the trafficking in children, see the International Labour Organization’s 2002 report, Unbearable to the Human Heart: Child Trafficking and Action to Eliminate it. It is estimated that between 28,000 to 30,000 children in South Africa, with half between the ages of 10 and 14, are in prostitution. 9. At the time of writing (2005) neither the United States of America nor Australia had signed the Kyoto Protocol. 10. See supra-state legal instruments such as the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Suppression of Traffic in Persons and the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, approved by the General Assembly in 1949 and over the years ratified by seventy states (UNDP 1999: 103). It can also be argued that globalization contributed towards the ending of apartheid in South Africa, a fact that has liberated women from patriarchal racial discrimination. 11. The United Nations fund for women in development, launched at the Decade for Women 1976–85 (UNIFEM), could still only rely on a budget of some $11.6 million twenty years later (Scholte 2000: 254). 12. See UNAIDS Report 2004: 41–59 for an assessment of the impact of AIDS on people and societies. 13. The difference between levels of infection among young people aged 15–24 is pronounced. It ranges from twenty women for every ten men in South Africa, to forty-five women for every ten men in Kenya and Mali (UNAIDS 2004: 31). 14. See StatsSA Report 2006 and Sunday Times, November 26, 2006, for the AIDS statistics for 2005. 15. In South Africa, a recent survey found that almost three-quarters of AIDS-affected households are female-headed (UNAIDS 2004: 47). 16. In six southern African countries—Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe—more than 15 million people require emergency food aid due to widespread chronic and acute food shortages (see UNAIDS 2004: 46). A survey of 1,366 women attending antenatal clinics in Soweto, South Africa, found significantly higher rates of HIV infection among women who were physically abused, sexually assaulted, or dominated by their male partners (ibid. 22).

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17. Research has noted that young women in southern Africa tend to have sexual partners who are considerably older than themselves, partners who are likely to be HIV positive themselves (see UNAIDS 2004: 22). See also WCC (1997: 16). . South Africa alone has some 2.2 million (12 per cent of all children in 2003) orphans, a figure which is calculated to rise to 3.1 million (18 per cent of all children) by 2010 (see UNAIDS 2004: 61–6). 19. ‘Fundamentalism’ is a term redolent with definitional problems. For a lucid exposition on this phenomenon, see Ruthven (2005). 20. See Phiri et al. (Eds) (2002). 21. See, for instance, Scots philosopher John Macmurray’s Gifford Lectures contained in Macmurray (1961). 22. Feminist notions of relationship are in concert with the inclusive understanding of ubuntu as found in Ramose (1998: 626–49). Reservations about certain understandings of ubuntu are raised when the balance between the individual and the community is skewed in favour of the community in such a way that the exercise of individual conscience and giftedness is frowned on and suppressed. Any use of ubuntu that smacks of particularism is also problematic. 23. See Mbeki (1998).

Works Cited Ackermann, Denise M. (1996). ‘The Alchemy of Risk, Struggle and Hope’, in M. J. Mananzan et al. (Eds), Women Resisting Violence: Spirituality for Life. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 141–6. (1998). ‘De Zekerheid der Dingen, die Men Hoopt: Verbeelding in Actie’, in M. de Haardt, E. Maeckelberghe, And M. van Dijk (Eds), Geroepen om te Spreken: Over Verbeelding en Creativiteit. Kampen: Uitgeverij Kok, 15–31. (2000a). ‘Claiming our Footprints: Introductory Reflections’, in D. M. Ackermann, E. Getman, H. Kotzé, And J. Tobler (Eds), Claiming our Footprints: South African Women on Context, Identity and Spirituality. Stellenbosch: EFSA Institute for Theological and Interdisciplinary Research, 5–14. (2000b). ‘The Substance of Things Hoped for: Women’s Imaginative Praxis Outside the Church’, Emory International Law Review, 14/2: 593–612. (2003a). After the Locusts: Letters from a Landscape of Faith. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. (2003b). ‘A Gendered Pandemic? HIV/AIDS in South Africa: Problems and Possibilities for Feminist Ethics’, in C.-H. Grenholm, and N. Kamergrauzis (Eds), Feminist Ethics: Perspectives, Problems and Possibilities. Uppsala: Uppsala Studies in Social Ethics, 12–142. (2004). ‘Reconciliation as Embodied Change: A South African Perspective’, CTSA Proceedings, 59, 50–67. (2006). ‘Doers of the Word: Public Theology as a Feminist Theology of Praxis. A South African Perspective’. In Douglas R. McGaughey and Cornelia Cyss Crocker (Eds), From Biblical Interpretation to Human Transformation: Reopening the Past to Actualize New Possibilities for the Future. Essays Honoring Herman C. Waetjen. Salem: Chora Strangers, 185–97. Baumann, Zygmunt (1998). Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia University Press. Bayes, Jane H., and Tohidi, Nayereh (2001). ‘Introduction’, in J. H. Bayes and N. Tohidi (Eds), Globalization, Gender, and Religion: The Politics of Women’s Rights in Catholic and Muslim Contexts. New York: Palgrave, 1–15.

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Berry, Thomas (1999). The Great Work: Our Way to the Future. New York: Bell Tower. Beyer, Peter (1994). Religion and Globalization. London: Sage. Brock, Rita Nakashima, and Thistlethwaite, Susan Brooks (1996). Casting Stones: Prostitution and Liberation in Asia and the United States. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Chopp, Rebecca (1996). ‘Praxis’, in L. M. Russell and J. S. Clarkson (Eds), Dictionary of Feminist Theologies. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 221–2. and Taylor, Mark L. (1994). ‘Introduction: Crisis, Hope and Contemporary Theology’, in R. S. Chopp and M. L. Taylor (Eds), Reconstructing Christian Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1–24. Coetzee, Pieter H., and Roux, Abraham P. J. (Eds) (1998). The African Philosophy Reader, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Degenaar, Johan (1992). ‘Creative Expectation’, in A Book of Hope. Cape Town: David Philip, 3–7. Dube, Musa W. (2001). ‘Fifty Years of Bleeding: A Storytelling Feminist Reading of Mark 5: 24–43’, in M. W. Dube (Ed.), Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the Bible. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 50–62. (2002). ‘Fighting with God: Children and HIV/AIDS in Botswana’, Journal of Theology in Southern Africa, 114: 31–42. (2003a). ‘Culture, Gender and HIV/AIDS: Understanding and Acting on the Issues’, in M. W. Dube (Ed.), HIV/AIDS and the Curriculum: Methods of Integrating HIV/AIDS in Theological Programmes. Geneva: WCC Publications, 84–100. (2003b). ‘Social Location as a Story-telling Method of Teaching in HIV/AIDS Contexts’, in M. W. Dube (Ed.), HIV/AIDS and the Curriculum: Methods of Integrating HIV/AIDS in Theological Programmes. Geneva: WCC Publications, 101–12. Farley, Margaret (1996). ‘Relationships’, in L. M. Russell and J. S. Clarkson (Eds), Dictionary of Feminist Theologies. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 238–9. Forrester, Duncan (2000). Truthful Action: Explorations in Practical Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Gorringe, Timothy (2004). ‘The Principalities and Powers: A Frame work for Thinking about Globalization’, in P. Heslam (Ed.), Globalization and the Good. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 79–94. Gouws, Amanda (1999).‘Beyond Equality and Difference: The Politics of Women’s Citizenship’, Agenda, 40: 55–8. Govinden, Devarakshanam B. (2002). ‘Out of the Purdah Club—The Contribution of Kunwarani Lady Gunwati Maharaj Singh in Colonial Natal’, in I. A. Phiri, D. B. Govinden, and S. Nadar (Eds), Her-Stories: Hidden Histories of Women of Faith in Africa. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 262–78. Graham, Elaine (1996). Transforming Practice: Pastoral Theology in an Age of Uncertainty. London: Mowbray. Grey, Mary (2003). Scared Longings: Ecofeminist Theology and Globalization. London: SCM Press. Guy-Sheftall, Beverly (2003). ‘African Feminist discourse: A Review Essay’, Agenda, 58, 31–6. Haddad, Beverly (2001). ‘Theologising Development: A Gendered Analysis of Poverty, Survival and Faith’, Journal of Theology for Southern Africa, 110: 5–19. (2002). ‘The Mother’s Union in South Africa: Untold Stories of Faith, Survival and Resistance’, in I. A. Phiri, D. B. Govinden, and S. Nadar (Eds), Her-Stories: Hidden Histories of Women of Faith in Africa. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 101–17.

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Halkes, Catharina J. M. (1984). Zoekend naar wat Verloren Ging: Enkele Aanzetten voor een Feministische Theologie. Baarn: Ten Have. Harrison, Beverly W. (1985). Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics. Boston: Beacon Press. Jordaan, Roxanne (1991). ‘The Emergence of Black Feminist Theology in South Africa’, in D. M. Ackermann, J. A. Draper, and E. Mashinini (Eds), Women Hold up Half the Sky: Women in the Church in Southern Africa. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 122–28. Kanyoro, Musimbi (2002). ‘Beads and Strands: Threading More Beads in the Story of the Circle’, in I. A. Phiri, D. B. Govinden, and S. Nadar (Eds), Her-Stories: Hidden Histories of Women of Faith in Africa. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 15–38. Kearney, Richard (1988). The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kolawole, M. E. (1997). Womanism and African Consciousness. Trenton and Asmara: African World Press. Landman, Christina (1994). The Piety of Afrikaner Women. Pretoria: University of South Africa. (2002). ‘Partners in Black and White: White Women Pastors in Coloured Communities’, in I. A. Phiri, D. B. Govinden, and S. Nadar (Eds), Her-Stories: Hidden Histories of Women of Faith in Africa. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 159–80. Liebenberg, Sandra (1999).‘Social Citizenship—A Precondition for Meaningful Democracy’, Agenda, 40: 59–65. Longwe, Sara et al. (1999). A Gender Analysis of Adult Learning = La Place des Femmes dans l’Apprentissage a l’Age Adulte. Montevideo, Uraguay: Gender and Education Office International Council on Adult Education. McDowell, L., and Court, G (1994). ‘Gender divisions of labour in the post-Fordist economy: the maintenance of occupational sex segregation in the financial services sector’, Environment & Planning A, 26: 1397–418. Macmurray, John (1961). Persons in Relation. London: Humanities Press. Mananzan, Mary John et al. (Eds) (1996). Women Resisting Violence: Spirituality for Life. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Masenya, Mmadipoane (Ngwana ‘Mphahlele) (2001). ‘A Bosadi (Womanhood) Reading of Proverbs 31: 10–31’, in M. W. Dube (Ed.), Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the Bible. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 27–49. Mbeki, Thabo (1998). ‘The African Renaissance, South Africa and the World’, speech given at the United Nations University, 6 Apr. 1998, available at http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/ history/mbek/1998/sp980409.html Mbuwayesango, Dora R. (2001). ‘How Local Divine Powers were Suppressed: A Case of Mwari of the Shona’, in M. W. Dube (Ed.), Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the Bible. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 63–77. Moltmann, Jürgen (1998). In J. Moltmann, N. Wolterstorff, and E. T. Charry, A Passion for God’s Reign: Theology, Christian Learning, and the Christian Self. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Mouton, Elna (2002). Reading a New Testament Document Ethically. Academia Biblica. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature. Msimang, Sisonke (2000). ‘African Renaissance: Where are the Women?’, Agenda, 44: 67–83. Nadar, Sarojini (2001). ‘A South African Indian Womanist Reading of the Character of Ruth’, in M. W. Dube (Ed.), Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the Bible. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 159–78.

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Narayan, Uma (2003). ‘Essence of Cultures and a Sense of History: A Feminist Critique of Cultural Essentialism’, in P. H. Coetzee and A. P. J. Roux (Eds), The African Philosophy Reader, 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 416–29. Network of Earthkeeping Christian Communities in South Africa (NECCSA) (2004). Update, November. Orr, Liesl (2001). ‘Women’s Work and Globalisation Trends: The South African Picture’, Agenda, 48: 31–7. Peukert, Helmut (1992). ‘Enlightenment and theology as unfinished projects’, in D. S. Browning and F. Schüssler Fiorenza (Eds), Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology. New York: Crossroad, 43–65. Phiri, Isabel Apawo (1997a). ‘Doing Theology in Community: The Case of African Women Theologians in the 1990s’, Journal of Theology in Southern Africa, 99: 68–76. (1997b). Women, Presbyterianism and Patriarchy: Religious Experience of Chew Women in Central Malawi. Blantyre: CLAIM. (2002). ‘Called at Twenty Seven and Ordained at Seventy Three! The Story of Rev. Victory Nomvete Mbanjwa in the United Congregational Church in Southern Africa’, in I. A. Phiri, D. B. Govinden, and S. Nadar (Eds), Her-Stories: Hidden Histories of Women of Faith in Africa. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 119–38. (2004). ‘African Women’s Theologies in the New Millennium’, Agenda, 61, 16–24. Govinden, D. B., and Nadar, S. (Eds) (2002). Her-Stories: Hidden Histories of Women of Faith in Africa. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications. Plaatjie, Gloria Kehilwe (2001). ‘Toward a Post-apartheid Black Feminist Reading of the Bible: A Case of Luke 2:36–38’, in M. W. Dube (Ed.), Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the Bible. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 114–44. Prozesky, Martin, and de Gruchy, John (Eds) (1995). Living Faiths in South Africa. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Ramose, Mogobe B. (1998). ‘Globalization and Ubuntu’, in P. H. Coetzee and A. J. P. Roux (Eds), The African Philosophy Reader, 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 626–49. Ruele, Moji A. (2003). ‘Facing the Challenges of HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa: Towards a Theology of Life’, in M. W. Dube (Ed.), HIV/AIDS and the Curriculum: Methods of Integrating HIV/AIDS in Theological Programmes. Geneva: WCC Publications, 77–83. Ruether, Rosemary Radford (1995). ‘The Crisis of Liberation Theology: Does God Opt for the Poor?’ in D. J. Hall and R. R. Ruether (Eds), God and the Nations. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 93–104. Ruthven, Malise (2005). Fundamentalism: The Search for Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scholte, Jan A. (2000). Globalization: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Schweiker, William (2000). ‘Responsibility in the World of Mammon: Theology, Justice and Transnational Corporations’, in M. L. Stackhouse and P. J. Paris (Eds), Religion and the Powers of the Common Life, vol. 1. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 105–39. Shorter, Aylward (1991). The Church in the African City. London: Geoffrey Chapman. Smith, Gail (2001). ‘Cutting Threads: Retrenchments and Women and Workers in the Western Cape Clothing Industry’, Agenda, 48: 38–43. Sölle, Dorothee and Steffensky, F. (1983). Not Just Yes and Amen: Christians with a Cause. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Stiglitz, Joseph E. (2002). Globalization and its Discontents. London: Penguin Books. Taylor, Vivienne (1997). ‘Economic Gender Injustice: The Macro Picture’, Agenda, 33: 9–24. (2001). ‘Globalisation, the Disappearing State and Poor Women: A View from the South’, Agenda, 48: 51–60.

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UNaids (2004). Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic. New York: UNaids. United Nations Development Report (UNDP) (1999). Human Development Report. New York: Oxford University Press. Van Schalkwyk, Annalet (2002). ‘The Story of Anne Hope: A White Woman’s Contribution towards South African Liberation’, in I. A. Phiri, D. B. Govinden, and S. Nadar (Eds), Her-Stories: Hidden Histories of Women of Faith in Africa. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications, 279–303. Vásquez, Manuel A., and Marquardt, Marie F. (2003). Globalizing the Sacred: Religion across the Americas. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Whiteside, Alan, and Sunter, Clem (2000). AIDS: The Challenge for South Africa. Cape Town: Human and Rousseau and Tafelberg. Wilkinson, Jennifer R. (1998).‘South African Women and the Ties that Bind’, in P. H. Coetzee and A. P. J. Roux (Eds), The African Philosophy Reader, 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 343–60. Wilson, Francis (2001). ‘Globalization: A View from the South’, in C. V. Hamilton et al. (Eds), Beyond Racism: Race and Inequality in Brazil, South Africa and the United States of America. Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner Publications, 323–50. Wilson, Frances, and Ramphele, Mamphela (1989). Uprooting Poverty: The South African Challenge, Report for the Second Carnegie Inquiry into Poverty and Development in Southern Africa. Cape Town: David Philip. Wolterstorff, Nicholas (2004). ‘Seeking justice in Hope’, in M. Volf and W. Katerberg (Eds), The Future of Hope: Christian Tradition amid Modernity and Postmodernity. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 77–100. World Bank (2000). Global Economic Prospects and the Developing Countries 2000. Washington, DC: World Bank. World Council of Churches (WCC) (1997). Facing AIDS: The Challenge and the Churches’ Response. Geneva: WCC Publications.

Further reading Ackermann, Denise, et al. (Eds) (2000). Claiming our Footprints: South African Women Reflect on Context, Identity and Spirituality. Stellenbosch: Ecumenical Foundation of South Africa. Agenda (2001–4), A feminist media project in Africa devoted to discussing aspects of ‘African Feminisms’. Project Nos. 50, 54, 58, 62. Benyon, John, and Dunkerley, David (Eds) (2000). Globalization: The Reader. New York: Routledge. Brubaker, Pamela K. (2001). Globalization at What Price? Economic Change and Daily Life. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press. Dube, Musa W., and Kanyoro, Musimibi (Eds) (2004). Grant me Justice! HIV/AIDS and Gender Readings of the Bible. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications and Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Kanyoro, Musimbi R. A., and Njoroge, Nyambura J. (Eds) (1996). Groaning in Faith: African Women in the Household of God. Nairobi: Acton Publishers. Murobe, M. F. (1998). ‘Globalization and African Renaissance: An Ethical Reflection’, in Pieter H. Coetzee, and Abraham P. J. Roux (Eds), The African Philosophy Reader, 2nd edn. London: Routledge, 574–88. Wilson, Rob, and Dissanayake, Wimal (Eds) (1996). Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

chapter 10

theologica l per specti v e on m u t ua l solida r it y i n the con text of gl oba liz ation: th e circl e’s ex per ience elizabeth amoah

Given the complexity of the West African sub-region and the fact that there are several theologies by African women, some of whom do not identify themselves as feminists, a contribution to the exploration of feminist theology from a West African perspective is not an easy and simple task. In order to deal with such a problem I will concentrate on the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians (Circle) as I am very much aware that the Circle has become big and complex. With an initial membership of about seventy women, the Circle’s membership has increased to about four hundred women. Therefore, it would be very presumptuous on my part to present a comprehensive picture of the Circle, even when I limit myself to the West African sub-region. Thus, to a large extent, this essay should be seen as the views of one member of the complex Circle; it does not represent the thought of all the members. This chapter is thus a particular view of feminist theology from a West African perspective. Basically, it is a theological reflection on the urgent need to seek ways of networking and working together as people of faith and hope. It is a search through our faith traditions for viable ways of working together for the common good as women from diverse religious, social, and ideological contexts in a world that has been affected by globalization. The underlying assumption here is that if we carefully search through such traditions, we realize that depending on how we re-read and interpret information,

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there are still some good resources that we can tap for our search for viable networking despite our inevitable commonalities and differences. This has been one of the goals of the Circle set in pluralistic contexts.

What is the Circle? Briefly, the Circle is a faith-based movement that is creating various forms of networks and platforms to bring African women from various religious traditions together for theological purposes. It is the brainchild of Dr. Mercy Amba Oduyoye, the pioneering African woman theologian. Since Dr. Oduyoye’s creation and formal inauguration of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians in Accra, Ghana in 1989, it has brought many African women into the field of ‘formal’ theology and the study of religion and culture in the academia and the seminaries (Oduyoye and Kanyoro 1990, 1992; Oduyoye et al. 2006). We emphasize the word ‘formal’ because we are convinced that African women have been reflecting through oral media such as prayers, song texts, and story-telling, which are creatively and poetically formulated, on their various encounters with the Divine. Their reflections are not printed in academic journals and books, but they are, in a way, informally contributing to the theological enterprise through oral media. A classical example of such ‘oral or narrative theology’ is the prayers and praises of Efua Kuma, who was a non-literate member of the Church of Pentecost in Ghana. (Her creative and poetic prayers and praises have now been collected and published into a book called Jesus of the Deep Forest.) Many of the current African women’s formal theologies are inextricably linked with the work of the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians. In fact, the Circle has in many ways served as the springboard for the work of prominent African women professors and scholars in theology in and outside the continent. Some Circle members work in groups or as individual scholars to produce many theological works. Again, by initiating the Circle, Mercy Oduyoye has formalized and institutionalized African women’s theology. The Circle brings many women from the various regions in Africa to mentor, nurture, and support each other, as well as research and publish in the field of theology, religion, and culture. Additionally, they discuss pertinent issues such as poverty, violence, and HIV/AIDS that continue to affect their lives. The Circle gives opportunities to African women, irrespective of their religious background, to share with each other theological issues and concerns typical of their contexts, experiences, and situations. Some of the theological themes they write about are Christology (see Musa Dube and Teresa Okure), ecclesiology (see Oduyoye, Owanikin, and Tapa), and hermeneutics (see Kanyoro). Though African women’s theologies are basically contextual, they can be described as global since they theologically reflect on global issues such as HIV and AIDS, domestic violence, and poverty. Thus, they are able to effectively combine local and global issues in their theologies and, in a way, connect to other women outside Africa.

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Their theologies are set in post-colonial and post-independence settings, as well as the era of the multifaceted globalization process. With some roots in the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, the majority of the members of the Circle are Christians. They are contextual and liberation theologians in the sense that they reflect on Christian experiences set in particular historic moments with their pressing issues and struggles. The Circle’s theologies are not only derived from personal experiences but also from scriptural analysis, and members collect and reinterpret oral materials that reflect the rich varieties of African cultures and rituals. A typical style of some of the Circle theologians is narrative and this, to some extent, lends credibility to the experiences, stories, and wide range of materials at their service. They also write as Christian social ethicists. Mercy Oduyoye’s theological works, for example, demonstrate the formative impact of compilation of history, theoretical tenets, cultural nuances, personal commentary, and a call to action. Though narrative writing seems to be based on non-empirical data, it, in a way, brings concrete issues to the platform and this inspires one consideration of solutions for change. In other words, many of the theologies of African women focus more on concrete and practical issues that call for action rather than for rhetorical and theoretical discourse. However, we need to emphasize strongly that there are some concrete challenges that confront the members of the Circle. One major challenge is the issue of the multireligious dimension of the Circle’s membership. In the Circle, we have women who are Muslims, adherents of the African indigenous religions, Jews, Hindus, etc. Even among the Christians, we have the Roman Catholics evangelicals, Pentecostals, and charismatics, and these may be conservative or liberal. However, we need to be realistic and acknowledge in our assessment of the Circle that some Circle members find it very difficult to be together at times. Consequently, some Circle Christian women have walked out of Circle meetings during prayer sessions when led by Moslems and women from African traditional religions. In other words, within the Circle some members have been influenced by their religious teachings in such a way that they find it difficult to work together with fellow women, especially in the context of spiritual exercises. Within the African context, one of our commonalities is that many women are faced with the daily struggles for survival and, in my opinion, in such situations we should not allow religion to divide us in such ways that will be detrimental to our combined effort to search for life worth living. The challenge, as in other multi-religious situations, is how to pray with or before people of other faiths. The Circle resolved this by insisting that worship sessions during meetings are not a formal part of its conferences. Moslems members, when called upon to lead spiritual exercises, use the period to explain Moslem prayers by enlightening those who wish to learn from other religions. This effort of the Circle is a challenge to all who are serious about inter-religious living. This attitude raises further questions for the Circle. In our theologies how do we build positive relationships that give life to people without compromising the fundamentals of our faith? How do we reclaim our varying religious traditions in such positive ways that we can together give life to the countless numbers of people who are dying in diverse

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ways because of the negative effects of globalization? For instance, how do I, an African and Christian woman, reflect on my faith in such a way that my Muslim colleague in the Circle or elsewhere will feel comfortable working together with me to give hope and comfort to the dying and the marginalized, while affirming our pluralistic contexts?

The general context of the Circle’s theologies Before we theologically reflect on the above questions that face the Circle, we need to briefly discuss the contexts and situations within which African women do their theologies, namely the context of the multifaceted process currently called globalization. For the African women, before the dawn of the current multidimensional type of globalization whose emphasis is on open borders, the vast and complex continent of Africa had already been affected and shaped by an early form of ‘globalization’ when Europeans, Arabs, and other people began exploring and exploiting the continent. Colonization, which was fused with the spread Islam and the different forms of Western Christianity, included other ideological systems and structures. These ideologies are embedded in the new forms of political, economic, and socio-cultural systems brought to the continent. It should, however, be noted that these colonial and religious influences were differently experienced within the continent. Unlike the other sub-regions, West Africa, for instance, is more adapted to religious pluralism. It is therefore not surprising that the Circle, emerging from West Africa, takes seriously the multi-religious factor in its operation. Irrespective of the differences in their implementation in the different parts of the African continent, they have become part of the common history of African people. The recent version of various contacts with Africa, which is currently described as globalization, has equally affected the entire continent. The effect of globalization is as multifaceted as the process itself. It has disproportionately affected the sub-region in cultural, economic, environmental, political, psychological, religious, and social, as well as technological ways. One therefore agrees with Ali A. Mazrui, the renowned African historian, and other scholars who strongly hold the view that the different dimensions of the globalization process have generally affected Africa in different and varying ways. Ali Mazrui, for example, argues that economic globalization is marginalizing many African nations. He argues that Nigeria has, for example, failed to be one of the forces in economic globalization despite the fact that Nigeria is ‘the fifth largest producer of petroleum in the world’. Rather, Nigeria is ‘in the danger of becoming the midget of the world. Africa’s Gulliver was becoming the Lilliput of the world’ (Mazrui 2001). Again, globalization has a telling effect on the daily economic and social lives of many Africans. In order to keep pace with the rapid changes resulting from the different dimensions of globalization, many African nations have had to accept the various social, economic, and political prescriptions seen as universal solutions by the rich

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nations in the West and elsewhere. Countries such as Ghana and Kenya have readily but uncritically accepted loans that the rich nations offer. They have also accepted the Structural Adjustment Programmes and other packages that go with such loans, but without counting the long-term costs and effects on the people. The effects have been as complex and varying as the prescriptions themselves. In the field of politics, some African nations are finding it extremely difficult to make the prescribed universal democracy work without internal deadly conflicts, which are destroying and displacing many people on the continent. Recently, Liberia and Sierra Leone in West Africa have had their share of devastating wars and refugee situations, and the political challenges not only in these two countries but also in Ivory Coast and Togo have created anxieties in the sub-region. Within all these situations, poverty is becoming too complex and vicious to easily deal with. Many Africans, especially women and children, are struggling to survive with dignity and respect, irrespective of their religious affiliations. This daily struggle for survival has placed a severe toll on people and the gap between the rich and the poor is increasingly becoming too deep and wide to easily leap over (Amoah 2003). This sordid picture of poverty cuts across the various faith communities in West Africa. For example, people are living under stressful and unhygienic situations, which affect their health. A recent media report in Ghana has revealed that mental health is becoming one of the major health problems in the country, and that 80% of the patients in psychiatric hospitals are women between the ages of 15 and 40 years. As if this is not enough, the deadly and devastating HIV/AIDS pandemic is taking its toll on the people of Africa, where it is a common presence. In many African homes, health centers, schools, mosques, churches, and shrines, individuals are dealing with and caring for people with HIV/AIDS. This definitely is a drain on the economic, emotional, psychological, and physical, as well as spiritual energies of people. In the struggle for survival, many are resorting to different techniques, including the use or misuse of religion, which seemingly give them the sense of hope. While the current globalization process, with its high level of technology and improved communication systems, has brought people from different walks of life closer to each other than they were before, and thereby to some extent creating positive relationships, it has also had negative effects. For example, because of the fast flow of information due to improved communication systems, Nigerian Christians were at each other’s throats over the claim that a Danish man used the prophet Mohammed in cartoons. Besides economic globalization, cultural globalization has a strong hold on Africa as well. Ali Mazrui gives Christianity as an example of cultural globalization that Africans have embraced. He intimates that: Although Christianity arrived in India eighteen centuries before it arrived in West Africa, the population of Christians in India is still little more than two per cent (2.5) whereas the population of Christians in West Africa is over thirty five per cent (35.). In one century Christianity has made more headway in West Africa than it has in India in nearly two thousand years. (Mazrui 2001)

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Islam and other religions have also affected the lives of many people on the continent. Many African communities have become more religiously pluralistic than they were before due to globalization with its improved communication and technological systems. In any given town or village in Africa, one finds Muslims, Christians of different denominations, and indigenous religious believers, etc., living and interacting together in various ways and in all spheres of life. In any given pluralistic situation interaction between religious groups is inevitable and such a situation has its positive and negative effects, especially when the process of globalization is forging a movement towards one world. However, some people and communities, especially religious communities, do not totally want to lose their identities and have realized that globalization as a movement towards one world is an idealistic and utopian idea. Thus, the current trend of globalization is making people stick to their identities and peculiarities, and creating all forms of fundamentalism, especially religious fundamentalism. Thus, there is a new wave of ideological and religious extremists who will do anything to keep their identities or push forward their religious and other ideologies. Such religious extremism, triggered by cultural, economic, political, and other factors, has resulted in deadly conflicts and practices that disorient and displace people. As a result of such religious conflicts, innocent and precious lives are lost. In Ghana, for example, some Christians would not give in to the demand made by the traditional religious leaders who wanted all residents in the Ga traditional area to observe a few weeks of silence. This has been a long-standing religio-cultural practice of the Ga people in which residents have always complied. The period of silence is traditionally instituted for reflection, meditation, and prayer, and is a major interlude for the Homowo festival (Homowo is a commemorative festival of thanksgiving set within their historical survival context). This period of silence may be interpreted as the desire for peace and tranquility within the community so as to effectively relate to the spirit world. It is important to note that silence is a key component of peace in many traditional communities in Ghana. However, the churches in context refused to observe the silence because ‘noisemaking’ in the form of singing, drumming, and clapping is part of their mode of worshipping. There was also a feeling that compliance meant acceptance of the Ga traditional beliefs and practices. Even so, their decision was challenged since they were new Christian groups in an area where the traditional had a long-standing observance. Similar religious conflicts can be cited all over the sub-region, and such conflicts have become not only national issues but also global. In Nigeria, because of the recent introduction of sharia law in some northern parts of the state, some Muslim women have been condemned to death by stoning because of the ancient Islamic practice of stoning people caught in adultery. This has caused a global furor. The effects of the multifaceted globalization process are so enormous that individuals alone are not able to deal efficiently with them. Issues such as the vicious cycle of poverty, political, social, and religious conflicts, as well as deadly diseases such as HIV and AIDS that are characteristic features of many African countries, are too complex and overwhelming to be dealt with by individuals and specific communities alone.

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Consequently, some nations are coming together to form different types of economic, political, and religious allies for efficient handling of such issues. In West Africa, for instance, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has been formed to help the member states deal with economic and political issues. Similarly, on the continental level, the African Union (AU) has been formed to replace the existing Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and together with the recent New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) will play an effective economic and political role. Faith-based communities are also creating and renewing existing networks to deal with the basic and common human problems confronting them daily because in the struggle for survival, some people, particularly women, are resorting to religion, which seemingly gives them the sense of hope. The Circle is one such faith-based movement, and has joined others such as the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) and the Federation of Muslim Women Association of Ghana (FOMWAG) in searching for ways of dealing with issues affecting African women despite the challenges that working together in the context of religious pluralism poses. For example, the Ghana Circle members, some of whom are Moslems, work closely together on pressing issues such as violence against women and the devastating pandemic of HIV/AIDS. In searching for answers to these and other pressing questions raised earlier in this paper, I shall next examine some of the African indigenous traditions and wisdom, as well as some biblical narratives that have contributed to my hybrid identity to see how they can be positively interpreted for building solidarity with people to work together for the common good. The section below presents theological reflections that can enable us to make useful and collaborative efforts, as well as build partnerships with women and men who experience God’s concern for human wholeness and justice (Russell 1985). For this discussion, I have chosen two New Testament narratives. They are the encounter between Jesus and Greek Syrophoenecian woman (as Mark puts it) or the Canaanite woman (as Matthew puts it), and the encounter between the Samaritan woman and Jesus in the Gospel of John.

Theological reflections In the two versions in Mark and Matthew, the encounter between the Syrophoenecian or Canaanite woman and Jesus is placed between a number of events that illustrate Jesus’ healing ministry: the healing by Jesus of the bleeding woman (who violates the rule of touching a holy person), the bringing to life of a girl declared dead, and Jesus’ reaction to the accusation that his disciples had broken a cultural and traditional rule of failing to clean their hands before meals. By using these events that clearly demonstrate Jesus’ presence in any situation, especially those that involve the saving of human life and the restoring of dignity to a person, we can critique the social, cultural, and even religious traditions that prevent people from obtaining full life. Such a critique thus accords with Jesus’ claim that He came so that all people will have abundant life.

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The passages in Mark and Matthew describing the encounter between a Jewish man and a non-Jewish woman both present the woman without a name. Biblical scholars such as Musa Dube see the Marcan story as an encounter between a powerful and renowned healer from a colonizing context and a helpless, colonized, and nameless woman. From Matthew’s account, the encounter is between Jesus—a man, a Jew, as well as a colonizer— and a Canaanite woman who is colonized and nameless. Both writers identify her as a non-Jewish woman who needed urgent help from a Jewish man, Jesus. In such a setting, the authors prepare the ground for a series of power dynamics. The encounter reflects, for example, an interplay between the powerful and the powerless, between a male and female, and between people who have very little in common with regard to race, religion, class, and nationality, but who find themselves interacting and cooperating with each other to give life to the dying despite their racial, religious, gender, and social differences. In the two versions, Jesus had crossed borders to hide from the crowds, but it seems Jesus was not a total stranger because we are told that he immediately entered a house, where the woman went to ask for help for her ailing daughter. Like the mother, the dying daughter is also nameless. Instead of being named she is stigmatized, as someone possessed by a demon or evil spirit (Oduyoye 2006). The woman urgently requests Jesus to heal her daughter who is in danger of destruction. Her request is followed by Jesus’ reply, which to some people clearly seems racist and demeaning as only a racist person would deny the humanity of another person by identifying her as an animal, namely a dog. In some contexts, especially in my Ghanaian context, it is a great insult and dehumanizing to refer to someone as a dog. Matthew’s Gospel even tells the reader that Jesus at first did not mind the woman and this again in my context is a denial of a person’s dignity and humanity. The Akan will say in such a situation that Jesus does not regard the woman as a human being by refusing to respond to her attempt to communicate with Him. The writers do not tell the readers about the woman’s hurt. This story does not indicate the feelings of the woman when she was, in a way, referred to as a dog. Normally, people will be upset when referred to as dogs. Instead, the story gives the impression that the woman was calm and reflective about Jesus’ comment. In other words, she suppressed her feelings and dignity and insisted that her daughter be saved. Her reaction is very typical of African women, some of whom go through all sorts of emotional abuse and dehumanization for the sake of their children or family as a whole. Her reaction shows that in certain situations, differences arising from race, gender, class, and religion can be positively harnessed to save human life. Again, she makes her point clearly that in critical situations dogs eat the crumbs from the master’s table. Reflecting on this statement as an African woman, I can further state that dogs literally eat the same food prepared for household consumption, and thus by stating known facts, the woman softened the situation for interaction in which the social, racial, and religious blocks were gradually removed. The encounter is an example of an event where breaking rules gives birth to life, and by so doing, the woman’s daughter is finally restored to life. This story with all its nuances can positively be reclaimed for mutual solidarity between men and women from different racial, religious, and ideological backgrounds to give hope and life to people.

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Although the encounter described above may be different from that between the Samaritan woman and Jesus, the two narratives share certain commonalities. In this latter story Jesus again crosses borders to a non-Jewish territory, the territory of Samaria. Here too there is an interplay of the powerful and the marginalized, and between a famous man with a name and a woman without a name. However, this powerful and famous man lacked something. Jesus needed water, an essential commodity that sustains human life, from a marginalized woman who was identified as someone who had lived with several men, some of whom were not considered as formal husbands. In the narrative, the writer seems to portray the woman as having questionable social and cultural habits. Again, Musa Dube interprets the reference to the five men that the Samaritan Woman is believed to have lived with as a symbolic way of saying that the woman and her community have been colonized by several powerful nations. However, Jesus breaks all cultural, religious, and racial rules and talks to a single woman going about her usual chore of collecting water at noon. A simple request for ordinary water leads to a prolonged and profound historical, social, and religious discourse through the use of banter. Though the woman seems to be in a disadvantaged position because she is a Samaritan, she proves to the reader that she is capable of high intellectual and theological reasoning. In this way, she also breaks cultural, racial, gender, and religious rules to assert herself as a worthy person. Her abilities to be articulate and her sense of sharing make her leave her pot with a total stranger and rush to her people because in her opinion the news she was going to share with them was stupendous. It is a story about mutual sharing, trust, and solidarity between people who originally had very little in common, but through sound theological reasoning and mutual respect, a man and a woman were able to synthesize their thoughts for the benefit of themselves and others. In the two encounters a crucial issue stands out: the Messiahship of Jesus is raised from a tribal and ethnic level to a global and universal level. Jesus clearly disappointed those who wanted to localize and nationalize his saving power. In Jesus’ life and work, he constantly demonstrated that for the sake of life and human dignity social, political, cultural, and religious rules might be broken. In life-saving situations there should be no borders or gender barriers. This is in consonance with traditional Akan wisdom for living together in a community of men and women. Such wisdom is scattered in all types of oral materials, such as proverbs that are couched in creative brief and precise statements. One such proverb that encourages networking and solidarity among the members of the community is Wonsom! wonye nipa. This may be literally translated as ‘Come, let’s hold it together’. Of the several interpretations of this saying, one that is relevant to the need for solidarity and networking is that when there is a problem to be dealt with in a community, everybody, irrespective of their religion, race, class, or gender, is useful and needed for dealing with the emerging problem. To be human, in this saying, is to be the one who cares and is concerned with the needs of people despite their differences. This saying is buttressed by another saying: Wo nyonko wuda ne wo wuda. This is translated as ‘the day a friend or a neighbor dies is the day of your death’. A crucial interpretation of this traditional Akan

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saying, which is used to instill a sense of ‘we feeling’ and a strong concern for others, is that human beings are naturally interconnected with and dependent on each other despite their differences. This is because it is believed that humanity has a common source and origin. Thus, the Akan indigenous religious thought-form strongly emphasizes that human beings, wherever they may be, have a divine Source, which further implies that no human being should be marginalized in any form. This is implied in the saying Nnipa nyinaa ye Onyame mma obi nnye asaase ba, which may be translated as ‘all human beings are children of Onyame the creator, no one is the child of the earth’. An interpretation of this is that because all people have a divine source, human dignity and respect for others should be paramount in any human relationship. Thus it is irreligious within the traditional Akan worldview to use any form of power to marginalize other people. These and other similar wise traditional ideals partly form the tools for the theological reflections of some members of the Circle. In this way, such members claim that they are both Africans and Christians who are articulating what is positive in the two traditions that give them hybrid identities, and can forge viable relationships in dealing with the common problems facing them as African women. Our theology is not only one of theorizing and making theological statements, but also one proactively undertaking concrete projects that enhance the lives of the marginalized and the voiceless. For example, the West African, especially Ghanaian Circle, theologians through the Institute of Women in Religion and Culture and in collaboration with Muslim and other women come together to publicly educate people on HIV/AIDS. Again, we work together with traditional rulers with regard to some outmoded traditional practices and rituals that are especially harmful to women. Because of our theological convictions some of us have joined our local governments to ensure that rural women get their fair share of the poverty alleviation grants. Within the context of globalization that has affected many Africans in diverse ways, the Circle is creating various networks in its attempt to be in solidarity with others, and is building harmonious and peaceful relations locally, regionally, and globally. In other words, even though the Circle was initially created to bring African women in theology together so that their voices will be loudly heard, the members of the Circle readily realize that their concerns are linked with the concerns of others around them. As an integral part of the globalization process, they also realize that it is only when there is justice and peace that encourage useful collaboration between people, that women, wherever they are, will have space as capable, full, respectable, and worthy human beings. We are aware that these ideals can be realized in sound economic and political, as well as other structures. We also realize that given our connectedness, these ideals can be fully achieved if people work harmoniously together despite the barriers, especially religious barriers that sometimes further divide us. This implies that as theologians or religious people we need to do our theological reflections in such ways that will build trust and respect for each other. It is in so doing that we can effectively network and work together for the common good, which is urgently needed in the current global systems.

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Works Cited Amoah, Elizabeth (1997). Where God Reigns: Reflections on Women in God’s World. Accra: Sam Woode. (2003). ‘The Concept of Poverty in African Traditional Religion’. Unpublished paper written for the Pan African Research on Religion and Poverty. and Ammah, R. (Eds) (2004). Too Painful to Tell: Women of Faith Against Violence. Accra: Sam Wood. Dube, Musa W. (2000). Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. St. Louis: Chalice Press. Mazuri A. (2001). Pan Africanism and the Globalization of Africa: A Tripple Process (Second Lecture). Dubois Centre, Ghana. Available at http://igcs.binghamton.edu/igcs_site/dirton13. htm accessed 12 Dec. 2008. Mwaura, Philomena N., and Chirairo, Liliane D. (Eds) (2005). Theology in the Context of Globalization: African Women’s Response. Nairobi: EATWOT. Oduyoye, Mercy A. (1990). ‘Introduction’, in Rachel Kanyoro and Mercy A. Oduyoye (Eds), Talitha, Qumi!: The Proceedings of the Convocation of African Women Theologians, Trinity College, Legon-Accra, September 24 – October 2, 1989. Ibadan: Daystar Press. (2001). Introducing African Women’s Theology. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. (2002). Daughters of Anowa: African Women and Patriarchy. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. and Kanyoro, Rachel (Eds) (1992). The Will to Arise: Women, Tradition, and Church in Africa. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. and Amoah, Elizabeth (Eds) (2004). People of Faith and the Challenge of HIV/AIDS. Ibadan: Sefer. and Phiri, I. A., and Nadar, S. (2006). African Women, Religion, and Health: Essays in Honor of Mercy Amba Ewudziwa Oduyoye. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Russell, Letty (1985). Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Vaughan, Olufemi, Wright, M., and Small, C. (Eds) (2005). Globalization and Marginalization: Essays in the Paradoxes of Global and Local Forces. Ibadan: Sefer.

Further Reading Hinga, Teresa M. (1992). ‘Jesus Christ and the Liberation of Women in Africa’, in Mercy A. Oduyoye and Rachel A. Kanyoro (Eds), The Will to Arise: Women, Tradition, and the Church in Africa. New York: Orbis Books, 183–94. Kanyoro, Rachel (2002). Introducing Feminist Cultural Hermeneutics: An African Perspective. London: Sheffield Academic Press. Njoroge, Nyambura J., and Dube, Musa W. (Eds) (2001). Talitha Cum! Theologies of African Women. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications. Oduyoye, Mercy A. (2001). Introducing African Women’s Theology. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press.w (2001).‘The Search for a Two-Winged Theology: Women Participation in the Development of Theology in Africa. The Inaugural Address’, in Mercy A. Oduyoye and Rachel Kanyoro, Talitha Qumi: Proceedings of the Convocation of African Women Theologians in 1989. Ghana: Sam-Woode, 31–56. Omoigui, Mercy Itohan (2001). ‘Tradition, Poverty and the Church: Challenges for the African Woman’, in Dorcas Olu Akintunde (Ed.), African Culture and the Quest for Women’s Rights. Ibadan: Sefer, 113–24.

chapter 11

wom a n l ost i n t h e gl oba l m a ze: women a n d r eligion in east a fr ica u n der gl oba liz ation philomena njeri mwaura

Introduction The last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of globalization unleashing an unprecedented discourse in the realms of academic literature, media circles, global forums, non-governmental bodies, and national and international institutions. Globalization has become a characteristic feature of today’s global community and its significance is manifested in the fact that most languages, even in Africa, have an equivalent term for it. Even though many people would differ on the details of what precisely globalization means, as well as its possible impact on human thought and systems, its basic tenets are fairly clear. Al-Roubaie observes, ‘Globalization means to bring about structural changes within the nation-states by affecting the basic fundamentals governing human relations, social organizations and worldviews’ (2002: 7). Magesa on his part argues that it is ‘a complex process of interaction of economic, political and social forces throughout the world, producing a new way of looking at, and understanding the world’ (1999: 197). Implicit in the philosophy and practice of globalization is the assumption that it is a movement towards the unity of the whole of the human family. It claims to ‘represent the infallible future historical trajectory of humankind, its ultimate unity and universality’ (Wilfred 2001: 34). Global politics replaces the nation-state with transnational political institutions like the United Nations whose political norms—like human rights—thrive. For some, the age of globalization is the end of history manifested in the triumph of

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capitalism and liberal democracy. The new era is characterized by an increase in exchange of goods, services, capital, and technology across national borders. This global regime affects business, sports, politics, fashion, music, the environment, law, cultural identity, religion, and gender. The global economy is characterized by a massive transnational flow of capital and labour and is dominated by multinational corporations. Global patterns of communication are graced with, for example, new electronic technology such as satellite networks, Internet, and wireless telephones. Values, norms, attitudes, and practices are influenced by the mass media and advertising much more than ever before. In a theological evaluation of globalization, Mugambi argues that in Africa ‘ethics and aesthetics today are shaped more by politics and economics than they are influenced by religion and kinship relations’ (2005: 126). The new images of a world order therefore speak of the emergence of the global citizen and a global civil society stimulated by the effects of migration and global communication. Globalization is not, however, as neutral as it has been portrayed, as Mugambi’s comment suggests. It is a double-edged sword with both positive and negative consequences on those it impacts. While on the one hand, it increases integration of nation-states through economic exchanges, technological advances, and cultural influences, on the other hand it creates and accentuates sharp differences between people and societies, and causes identity crises, unbalanced development, and income inequalities. As Kagwanja further observes: globalization has simultaneously undermined the welfare state and eroded social citizenship in Africa and promoted market citizenship which is assumed to be driven by economic interests and civil society. Globalization has substituted struggles along market based identities such as worker and capitalist or landlord and tenant for struggles based on cultural, ethnic or religious identities. (2003: 114)

Globalization has a long history in Africa. Its first stage began with the slave trade by Europeans and Arabs and resulted in the ruthless dislocation of millions of people and the destabilization and destruction of the social political, religious, and economic fabric of the communities. The second stage was the process of colonization, when British, French, Belgium, Italian, German, and Portuguese interests dictated the way map boundaries were drawn, transportation and communication lines were established, agricultural and mineral resources were exploited, foreign religious and cultural patterns introduced, and new political alliances made. Colonialism compounded the sense of inferiority begun by the slave trade, and its dehumanizing character promoted the people’s loss of faith in themselves and in the worth of their cultural heritage, which the colonizers perceived as pagan and without value. The belief was born that nothing good could come out of Africa and that whatever came from the West was intrinsically good. The ideological, theological, and cultural consequences of colonialism continue to influence Africa to this day. The third stage was neo-colonialism, which is an indirect means by powerful states to impose their will on weaker nations through unequal cultural, economic, and political ties. The economic exploitation, environmental degradation, and social political dependencies begun during colonialism continued unabated. Trade patterns,

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investment policies, and debt arrangements all reinforced earlier conditions that were not beneficial to Africans. Concerning this injustice, Gore states: With decolonization came an increased drive for modernization. . . . However, the economies of these new nation states were still structured by their origins as dependent colonies fashioned to extract maximum resources for the benefit of the colonizer. (2001: 206)

One consequence of this has been the continuation of unjust and unequal economic relations in the world market as part of the post-colonial experience. During the cold war African states were especially manipulated with the resulting conflicts, for example, in the Great Lakes region and the Horn of Africa. The fourth stage is globalization as we know it today. Modern globalization thrives on the foundation of its predecessors and adds its own distinctive traits. As already pointed out, globalization promises the end of poverty, human suffering, and misery through free trade, but it has failed to deliver on the promise. There is no doubt that developments linked with globalization have opened up boundless possibilities for human development and enhanced quality of life for some, and ways of thinking and behaving are now challenged beyond traditional patterns. Globalization has also prompted the exchange of ideas and customs between peoples of different countries. However, globalization essentially involves the exercise of power by a ‘superior’: those with scientific and technological knowledge, or access to it, are therefore able to impose and spread their political will and cultural preferences. People and societies with less power inevitably become recipients of this imposition. The patterns and rules of globalization are set by those in power, generally men who head governments and giant corporations. These groups rule the world and those who inhabit it, including women. In its capitalistic orientation, globalization promotes individualism as it champions self-reliance and self-sufficiency and urges one to become a master of one’s destiny. Therefore, the rights of the individuals are regarded as more important than those of the group. Globalization also promotes a materialistic outlook on life, although the benefits of globalization are also only accessible to those with purchasing power. Some 1.2 billion people who live below the poverty line cannot enjoy the promises of globalization (UNDP 2005: 3). The fact remains that the wealth and comfort of a few have further led to the deterioration in the quality of life of the many, among whom women in the Two-Thirds World are the most affected. This essay interrogates the interplay between globalization, religion, and women in the East African context. It seeks to respond to the following questions: What aspects of globalization affect the spaces where women operate? How has globalization affected gender and family relations? How can justice-seeking feminist theological discourse respond to the challenges of globalization? It begins by defining East Africa; analysing the religio-cultural context that has been shaped by the indigenous African worldview, Western Christianity, colonialism, and the current globalizing forces; and examining how women and religion have been impacted by these complexities and changes. Thereafter, the experiences of women under globalization are

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discussed with reference to selected issues such as poverty, economy, employment, environment, health, and education. These issues are chosen because they are critical to women’s well-being. As major victims of globalization, women struggle daily to surmount the challenges it poses. In conclusion, ways of responding to globalization from an African women’s theological perspective will be discussed. Since the author is more familiar with the Kenyan context, the paper will be more focused on Kenya, though illustrations will also be drawn from Tanzania and Uganda where deemed appropriate.

Defining East Africa and Its Religiocultural Context East Africa comprises three countries, namely Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya, all of which were former British colonies and attained political independence in 1961, 1962, and 1963, respectively. The three have close economic ties exercised through the East African Community founded in 1964, dissolved in 1977, and revived again as East African Cooperation in 1996. The countries are inhabited by a variety of ethnic communities, some of which cut across national boundaries. There are numerous inter-regional cultural differences, but most cultural experiences have been generally shaped across community, national, and regional boundaries. The countries have mixed economies with agriculture playing a key role, followed by tourism and manufacturing. Since the end of the nineteenth century, which was characterized by colonial occupation and the modern missionary enterprise, East Africans have experienced the effects of being co-opted into the capitalist economy and the ensuing increase in urbanization and industrialization. Many profound changes have occurred in the social, political, religious, and economic spheres of life. In urban areas, people of different religious, social, and cultural backgrounds mix, while in rural areas, economic life remains largely agrarian, although a desire for cash and increased participation in modern life is a salient dynamic. The modernization process has resulted overall in both cultural persistence and change. Most pre-colonial communities in East Africa were non-state societies where social, economic, and political organization was based on kinship. Among most Bantu and Nilotic communities, the primary political unit was the patrilineal lineage (Kenyatta 1938: 13; Pala 1980: 191). The social structures were characterized by a well-defined kinship pattern governed by family, age, sex, and clan affiliations. The social organization was and still is patriarchal, patrilocal, and patrilineal, and gender asymmetry has been a significant feature. This patrilineal ideology has different and even adverse implications for women and their status as compared to men. This can be well illustrated by examining the social roles of women and men, particularly within the family. While the male child is accorded

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more value as the family’s ‘central pole’ and future lineage head, girls are regarded as outsiders and a potential loss to the lineage in which they are born. Motherhood and maternity represented the essential goal of the adult woman and marriage defined her role and status. Women were, however, regarded as the backbone of the family for the stability of a marriage depended on their reluctance to break away from it, for paradoxically there were no alternatives to the married state. Despite the fact that gender relations were not generally characterized by equality, women often had a degree of autonomy and control over their lives. In agricultural communities like the Agikuyu, Chagga, and Buganda, women derived their status from the key role they played in production. Since division of labour was gendered, women were the main producers and suppliers of welfare services at the household and community levels. Among nomadic communities, they undertook responsibility of caring for the young animals and dairy work. Women did not inherit or own property, but they did have usefactory rights (Mwaura 2000: 80). And despite the fact that women did not have legal rights or qualify to be elders, as wives and mothers, women and their children formed an economic unit that the women headed, especially in polygamous households. Because of the division of women’s and men’s affairs into domestic and public domains, women’s exercise of power and influence in decision-making was done indirectly. However, they had political institutions that were not subjected to general control by men as much as they were autonomous in their own areas of responsibility. While the overt exclusion of women from power due to their gender implied that women could only have power but not authority (legal right to rule), women could transcend the domestic domain in their roles as spiritual leaders, healers, diviners, mediums, herbalists, prophetesses, and medicine persons. In communities that did not have highly developed political structures, women religious authorities could be called upon to arbitrate disputes using their wisdom and spiritual powers. Sometimes such women became leaders of the anti-colonial rebellions, such as Bonairiri among the Abagusii and Mekatilili wa Meza among the Giriama (Wipper 1977; Ndenda 1994). Besides these specialized religious roles women had crucial functions in the religious domain, especially those connected to fertility, rites of passage, reproduction, and production. Writing about the Maasai of Northern Tanzania, Hodgson notes: Maasai women prized their relationship with their divinity, Eng’ai. They were proud of their spiritual practices and powers in cultivating and maintaining this relationship in the interests of their children, families, herds and households. They also believed that their relationship with Eng’ai made them responsible for ensuring the moral order of their daily world and protesting and remedying any transgressions to that order. (2005: x)

Spiritual power in African communities is therefore central to women’s selfunderstanding and it underpins their function in production and reproduction. This may partially explain why women took to Christianity zealously (Hastings 1989: 38).

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How, then, did colonialism and missionary Christianity and their globalizing machinery transform women’s sense of themselves, as well as their roles and status? In order to understand how modern globalization has impacted women, it is important to briefly explore how colonialism shaped and altered womanhood.

Colonialism and the construction of womanhood Despite its brief duration (1895–1963), colonialism resulted in a massive transformation of social, economic, and political lives of the societies of East Africa. Conquest was violent and the colonial regime, once established, was sustained by coercion (Kanogo 2005: 3). However, as elsewhere in Africa, colonial conquest played a contradictory role as both a destructive and regenerative force. It either destroyed the pre-colonial mode of production and social political organization or laid the basis for the emergence of modern societies integrated into world capitalism. Writing about Kenya, Kanogo observes: from a predominantly precapitalist economy of numerous independent pastoralists, cultivators and mixed farmers, the region was transformed into a racially stratified white settler colony where large settler plantations operated alongside peasant holdings. (2005: 3)

Colonialism promoted oppressive patriarchal relations and also laid the basis of honouring women’s agency as well. On one hand, it disrupted the stability of the institutions that supported women and gave them status. Hodgson observes that among the Maasai of Northern Tanzania, modernity unleashed changes that altered gender relations in political, economic, and religious spheres (2005: ix). Women lost their shared rights to cattle and often small stock, while Maasai men consolidated formal political authority. Women’s control of barter trade was replaced with male-dominated cash transactions while development interventions also targeted men as the presumed ‘experts’, ‘household heads’, and ‘livestock owners’. On the economic front, colonialism created its own socioeconomic structure that totally disorganized the traditional economies and system of land tenure. Land alienation to benefit white settlers, taxation, labour migrancy, urbanization, and missionary activities produced extensive social and economic changes. For example, in Kenya, the 1915 Crown Lands Ordinance and the Native Authority Ordinance, created between 1912 and 1922 by the colonial government, authorized alienation of land from Africans, herding them into Native Reserves. The colonial government also legalized forced labour and taxation. By 1921, the Native Registration Ordinance legalized a pass system requiring every male to carry proof of employment signed by his employer (Pala 1980: 195). The effect of taxation was to force Africans to work in European plantations, industries, and government offices and to migrate into cities. However, while young men migrated to find jobs in the growing bureaucracy, young women were often excluded.

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Women and children were thus left to maintain their husband’s share in the patrimonial lands and engage in subsistence agriculture. Labour migration did not result in drastic reversal of sex roles norms in rural communities. While women got additional roles of heading and managing households, this increase in decision-making did not translate into higher status. Men retained their rights in land and livestock and also controlled the cash income derived from sale of their crops and employment. Levine observes that among the Abagusii of Western Kenya, women were adversely affected emotionally and psychologically by the burdens of production and reproduction (1966: 188). Boserup’s seminal work (1970) demonstrates that as a result of colonial development policies—which gave opportunities in the public sphere to males—colonized women experienced a loss of economic and political power. By viewing gender divisions in terms of women in the domestic sphere and men in the public realm, colonial administrators created a gendered political, social, and economic culture in Africa. These policies reinforced male dominance in the economic sphere. The present economic system in Africa reflects the gendered colonial administrative culture passed on at independence in the 1960s. This has in turn impacted women’s and men’s participation in socio-economic institutions today. The juxtaposition of British common law and African customary law that was established in collaboration with African men—chiefs, headmen, village elders, and male heads of households—complicated the day-to-day lives of Africans in a variety of ways. According to Kanogo: the movement of people and ideas created unstable situations that did not lend themselves easily to either pre-colonial or colonial sensibilities. Institutions like marriage, bride wealth, clitoridectomy, maternity and motherhood were subjected to new pressures. Gender sensibilities too were transgressed. Being a woman in the highly gendered colonial space precipitated a plethora of conflicts, contradictions and negations. (2005: 3)

Kanogo further notes that while colonizing the land was a major focus of the colonizing agencies, ‘colonizing women drew together the largest number of relentless power brokers’ (2005: 2, 240). In their efforts to implement their visions for the future of Kenya, the missionaries, colonialists, and indigenous leaders were keen to create a society whose female population passed through life in an acceptable fashion. Women were perceived as the barometer of societal well-being. Women’s lives and bodies thus became contested territories where issues of modernization, tradition, morality, citizenship, cultural identity, and social change were fought. What resulted was a ‘multiplicity of constructions and reworking of gender roles and identities among African women in a period during which such roles and identities became deeply fractured and fluid’ (2). On the other hand, the changes catalysed women’s ability to cross physical, cultural, economic, social, and psychological frontiers that had been closed to them prior to colonial rule. Women were able to exercise individual agency in negotiating development of new identities. Individuals were empowered to redefine themselves by the confluence of a host of dynamics, some of which they could or could not control. Formal education

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provided in mission schools, for example, empowered women to challenge tradition, access employment, be economically independent, and be politically empowered. Globalization today, like colonialism in the past, continues to challenge traditional institutions and culture through its homogenizing ideology. Let us now examine religion in East Africa and the place of women in it.

Women and religion in East Africa As already observed, women were able to exercise moral agency through religion, which in East Africa plays a pivotal role in shaping the actions of many people. The current religious landscape is one of religious pluralism with some major and minor religions, and the growing religious plurality in the region means that the African has multiple identities. There are three dominant religious heritages—African religion, Christianity, and Islam—and these have coexisted, interacted, and influenced one another since the eighth century, though the latter two have conflicted with each other in their proselytizing. Despite the negligible overt adherence, African religion continues to exist in the peoples’ imagination, influencing the way they think and act. African spirituality also impacts people’s values and concept of self-identity, including gender. African religious ideas and practices often coexist, complement, or overlap with an affiliation to either Islam or Christianity. Thus individuals can be characterized as participating in both a world religion and traditional forms of worship, depending on the various particular social contexts. In addition, there is a host of new religious movements, mostly Christian in origin and dating from the moment of encounter between Western Christianity and culture and African religion and culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These are spiritual in orientation, and since the 1970s they have been complemented by newer forms of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity originating mainly from North America. These African churches embrace the modernity expressed in the innovation of Christian religion, while at the same time reject the imperialist ideology implicit in Euro-American churches. They have therefore developed African forms of worship and organization. Other religious movements are the neo-traditional or nativistic movements that find their norm in traditional worldviews often attempting to purge intrusive foreign elements from religion and culture and advocating for the reclamation of traditional spirituality as a marker of identity and an ethic for reordering life and giving it meaning. African religion permeates the whole of life. It embodies a holistic worldview that perceives God, humanity, nature, and the spirit world as concerned with wholeness of life and relationships. It is a religion about connectedness among the human community, all beings, and God, who is the source of life. It is about spirituality, inclusion, daily living, and struggle. Nevertheless, the same can be said of Christianity and Islam despite their tendencies to individualism and Christianity’s stress on personal salvation.

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Gender is a salient organizing principle in African religion and culture (Tarimo 2002: 9). Women’s participation in rituals, as already pointed out, indicates that their potential and status were recognized in private and public life. African religion, like other indigenous religions, is also about positive identities of the self in the context of the universe. This is the religion of women and ordinary people. It mostly involves rituals that mark crucial moments in the life cycle and also provides powerful emotional and meta-social mechanisms for the resolution of psychological and social tensions. Women as healers and guardians of the moral order, as well as their centrality in family rituals, are significant in African indigenous religion. Despite the significance of women in African indigenous religions, all the religions in East Africa, as elsewhere, are patriarchal. Christianity, for example, draws from Jewish, Græco-Roman, and other Western traditions that view women and men differently. Western Christianity reinforced the patriarchal ideology inherent in African religion and culture without recognizing the resources of authority in ritual that women possessed in traditional structures. This subsequently led to the silencing of women and their disempowerment in all spheres of life including the religious. Christianity and Islam are textual religions interpreted by men of power. Shiva’s observation about patriarchal religion aptly applies to Christianity and Islam. She avers: Patriarchal religion is about control over behaviour, especially women’s social and sexual behaviour, it is about exclusion . . . about power and control. This is the religion of patriarchy . . . the religion of negative identity where the self is in opposition to the other. (2004: 49)

This kind of religion propagates an exclusivist philosophy that easily degenerates into fundamentalism of various hues with their detrimental ideologies and practices against women. In its patriarchal form religion, especially in the twenty-first century, has a lot in common with corporate globalization. We shall discuss this point later, after exploring the impact of globalization on women.

Effects of globalization on women Since the 1980s, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) have promoted economic reform programmes—ostensibly to respond to Africa’s debt crises—equipping her to service debts and thereby promoting internal development. These programmes, commonly known as the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) and, the more recent, Economic Recovery Strategy for Wealth Creation and Employment 2003–2007 had important significance for women (Republic of Kenya 2003). The SAPs consisted of a set of policies designed to make economies more efficient and productive. They aimed at shifting the economy from a highly protected strategy to industrial policies that would lead to increased use of local resources, greater employment creation, and the encouragement of exports. State participation was

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considered to be obstructive to efficient management and had to be removed. The main ingredients of SAPs were trade liberalization and devaluation; deregulation of prices, wages, exchange rates, and interest rates; and reduction of the government deficit by cutting down on public expenditure. This involved reduction of public sector employment through retrenching workers, privatizing public enterprises, and reducing government subsidies in the service sectors like education, health, sanitation, agriculture, and housing. SAPs were controversial because their widely felt effects subjected Kenya to political and economic uncertainty. Donor aid was linked to implementation of SAPs, reduction of corruption, and democratization, but Kenya’s slow progress in implementing the economic reforms led to withdrawal of foreign aid. Kenya responded by liberalizing foreign exchange markets in 1993 but later clamped down on the markets, causing considerable confusion (Republic of Kenya 2005a: 14–15). These policies resulted in misery, discomfort, and poverty. SAPs saw prices of basic commodities rise, a reduction of public services, and an increase in the unemployment rate. This situation has been unbearable for most women, who form the majority of the disadvantaged, and who have been affected in several ways, as outlined below.

Women and poverty Poverty, according to the World Summit for Social Development held in Copenhagen in 1995, is manifested through: lack of income and productive resources sufficient to ensure sustainable livelihoods, hunger and malnutrition, ill health, limited or lack of access to education and other basic services, increase in morbidity and mortality from illness, homelessness and inadequate housing; unsafe environment and social discrimination and exclusion. It is also characterized by lack of participation in decision making and in civil, social and human life. (United Nations 1995: 41)

These characteristics of poverty are evident in East Africa, where it is pervasive and growing at an alarming rate. According to the 2004 Economic Survey, 57% of Kenyans live below the poverty line (Republic of Kenya 2004: 6). The poor are mostly rural dwellers, although urban poverty has also been rising due to rural urban migration. Urbanization has become one of the most conspicuous consequences of agricultural decline, fostering an urban culture that is secular, individualistic, and commercially oriented. Coping strategies and traditional cultures are breaking down and family and neighbourhood patterns of solidarity no longer exist. Migration to urban areas has become a coping strategy for the poor. Many women are also forced to eke out a living for themselves and their children in an increasingly hostile social environment of crime, violence, prostitution, and HIV/AIDS. In Kenya, 75% of women live in the rural areas making a livelihood out of agricultural activities. In the urban slums women are concentrated in the informal sectors and sustain themselves by hawking illicit liquor, vending vegetables, operating food kiosks, selling secondhand clothing, and running

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other small enterprises. In Nairobi, for example, over 60% of the population live in makeshift houses in slums, under conditions of abject poverty, and where investments in basic social amenities are limited (Republic of Kenya 2003: 15). The Kenya Human Development Report indicates that there are regional disparities in poverty prevalence ranging from a Human Development Index (HDI) of 0.413 in Nyanza Province to 0.748 in Nairobi (UNDP 2005: 7). Development in Kenya has been hampered since the 1990s by poor economic performance, corruption, drought, escalating foreign debt, declining life expectancy exacerbated by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, mismanagement of resources, failure to identify and support informal and indigenous institutions, and inadequate access to services (1). Nationally, the HDI has declined from 0.533 in 1990 to 0.520 in 2004. The consequences of poverty are traumatic for it creates helplessness and despair, and it also poses a threat to political and social stability. It has also led to crime, violence, and breakup of families. Women as single mothers have borne the brunt of this trauma. The poor lack productive resources including land, credit, vocational training, employment, health, decent shelter, sanitation, and opportunities to participate in decisions that affect their lives. This is particularly so for women who also suffer from the rigidity of socially ascribed gender roles, as well as economic deprivation. Women also suffer malnutrition and ill health. It has been observed that poverty plays a major role in fostering stress-related diseases, thus further increasing the level of depression among the adult population. Women experience emotional difficulties, anxiety, and depression due to the problems they face in their homes as they struggle to survive (James 2001: 21–2). Feminization of poverty is therefore a reality in Kenya and East Africa.

Women and agriculture SAPs in the agricultural sector are designed to strengthen the incentives for the private producers of primary commodities. These primary commodities are coffee, tea, cotton, sugar, and floriculture. Creating incentives through liberalization implies ensuring that the benefits of devaluation are passed on to the producers, by doubling of relevant prices of the commodity, which are all predominantly male preserves. The hidden meaning of this is that Kenyan women farmers cannot benefit from devaluation because while men concentrate on the production of cash crops, women focus on growing food for family consumption. World Bank research on agricultural productivity has shown that even a modest improvement in women’s access to resources would result in a significant increase in yields of up to 20 in some regions and a 3–4 increase in economic growth (Akale 2002: 82). Gender inequality is not only costly to women but to men and children as well. Its costs are evident in reduced development of people’s capacities, less free time, and reduced well-being. If women are economically empowered it would be possible for a country to have more output, more development of human capacities, more leisure, and higher levels of well-being. The National Gender Index (which measures achievements in gender equality) was 0.538 in 2005 (UNDP 2005: 16–17).

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Policy elements in agriculture also include eliminating price controls on agricultural products by removing tariffs, dismantling market boards, and making changes in land laws designed to attract foreign investments. None of these policies cover what women in Africa consider as their primary constraints to production and household security—lack of access to and control of resources such as land, insufficient labour, and unaffordable farm inputs. This is an oversight on the part of the Bretton Wood institutions and African governments in view of the fact that women produce over 70% of Africa’s food. When producer prices of commodities increase due to devaluation, women lack the incentive to produce more. By drawing such crucial resources such as women’s labour from food production and household provision and into export crop production, the policies further weaken women’s food production systems that are already fragile as a result of environmental degradation and poverty. Per capita food production decreased at an average of close to 21% a year in the 1980s while food imports and prices increased, thus threatening food security for women farmers and their families. It is worth noting that when traditional means of survival are devastated, it is women who pick up the pieces, with redoubled work. As Ruether rightfully observes, when water is scarce or polluted, women must go further to fetch it; if firewood is depleted, they must look for alternative sources of energy; when food security is threatened or not there, they sell their bodies to keep their families alive (2005: 32). Women give up comforts for themselves to provide for their families. In East Africa, where agriculture is the main source of livelihood and the arena of women’s operation, policies that interfere with its function destroy not only women’s survival but also that of their families. Since 2002, the government has initiated recovery strategies for the agricultural sector that aim at extending credit, information, land, and markets. It has revived agricultural cooperatives and positive effects have started to be felt (Republic of Kenya 2003: 24).

Women and health Health is a human right that all should enjoy and it is also central to a nation’s well-being. Kenya’s health policies before 1989 were aimed at providing free medical services to all, and the quantity of health services, particularly facilities and personnel, increased. However, the implementation of SAPs in 1989 saw the introduction of direct cost sharing through charging fees for health services in public institutions. Although the objective was to improve the quality of health services, outpatient attendance in most hospitals and health centers declined by about 27–45 (James 2001: 22), and cost sharing hurt the vulnerable and poor, especially women and children. Most women are not engaged in formal employment and are thus excluded from medical insurance. The Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2003 reports that between 1989 and 1999, life expectancy for both sexes declined from 59 to 57 years. Between 1993 and 2003, infancy mortality rates increased from 62 per thousand to 118. Available data on maternal mortality

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ratio showed an increase from 395 per 100,000 live births in 1994 to 590 in 1998, with negligible improvement in 2003 (Republic of Kenya 2004). Women’s access to reproductive health services has also declined, thereby affecting women’s control of their fertility. Although the HIV/AIDS prevalence rate is said to have declined from 13.5 in 2001 to 7 in 2007, HIV/AIDS still maintains a feminine face. All over Kenya, infection levels are extremely high for women and girls (Wanjama et al. 2007: 23–30). Current HIV/AIDS infection rates among adolescent girls are up to five times higher than that among boys in the same age group. Women are also infected at a much younger age than men. Multiple reasons account for the rising number of infections in women and girls; these include inadequate knowledge about the disease, biological vulnerability, gender imbalance of power in social and economic spheres of life, and insufficient or lack of access to sexual and reproductive health and educational services. Women also assume the burden of tending the sick and the 1.8 million AIDS orphans who are under the care of grandmothers. The AIDS epidemic among women is also fueled by gender-based sexual violence. Besides HIV/AIDS, diseases like malaria and typhoid have resurfaced due to breakdown of primary healthcare services, poverty, ecological factors, and inability to access health due to poverty. Although the government of Kenya has since 2003 made efforts to make healthcare affordable, improve healthcare delivery, and provide free anti-retroviral drugs for the management of HIV/AIDS, poverty has frustrated women’s attainment of well-being. However, the benefits of investing in women’s health—better child survival, increased productivity, improved family welfare, and reduction of poverty—clearly can have a widespread impact on women, family, and community.

Women and education Education is also a human right and an essential tool for achieving the goals of equality, development, and peace. Lack of education is known to reduce people’s ability to take advantage of the opportunities around them and has often been linked to increased poverty. In terms of access to education there are glaring gender disparities in different regions. In Kenya, formal education expanded at a tremendous rate between 1963 and 1989 when primary school enrollment reached a peak of 95 in 1989. This declined to 75 nationally by 1998 but it has since then risen to 105.4 with the introduction of free primary education in 2003 by the NARC government (Republic of Kenyab 2005: 6). Secondary school enrollment witnessed a similar trend with enrollment growing at a rate of 9.1 between 1963 and 1982, only to drop to 3.2 between 1982 and 1992. Gross enrollment rate at the public secondary level declined from 30 to 20 between 1992 and 2002. Retention rate at primary school and at secondary level has been as low as 40 and 84%, respectively. The latter is still low considering that gross enrollment rate at secondary is 22%. Gross gender inequalities in access to education, retention of students, and completion of curriculum in primary and secondary schools are evident. Although the gender ratio of 49:51 (girls to boys) nationally still remains unaffected, relatively more boys than

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girls exit from primary and secondary schools. The 1997–2001 Development Plan indicated that 65% of girls and 40% of boys drop out of primary school before the end of standard eight (Republic of Kenya 1997: 45). At the university level, females constitute 32% of the student population and 54% in private universities (Republic of Kenya 2005b: 7). The introduction of cost sharing in education in 1988 had detrimental effects on education. Parents were expected to meet more than 80% of the cost of their children’s education, but many could not afford this due to poverty. The major effect of cost sharing, especially between 1990 and 2002, was reduced enrolment and high dropout rates right from primary schools to the universities. Low enrollment and dropout rates affected girls more than boys due to the cultural attitudes of male sex preferencing, coupled with poverty experienced by most families. Women-headed households, which comprise one-third of all households in Kenya, were worst hit. Considering that 66% of Kenyan women are illiterate, hopes of breaking the poverty cycle among women appears distant. The participation of women in informal education is also poor. Provision of primary health and nutrition education, literacy programmes and agricultural extension services have also been affected by SAPs. Therefore, as farm workers and healthcare providers, women have been adversely affected by SAPs. Thus a lack of education has adverse effects on women. It leads to high illiteracy levels, accentuates gender imbalances, and reduces women’s agency by making them economically poor and dependent due to lack of skills requisite for employment. It also has implications on the types of jobs women perform and their participation and influence in decision-making.

Women and employment Since 1963 the Kenyan government has implemented policies that have enabled women to enter many fields within the formal and informal sectors. There have been upward trends in employment patterns although female participation is low. Women are concentrated in the informal sector as self-employed or unpaid family workers. Although wage employment for women rose in 1994 by 19, education services followed by agricultural activities remained the major female employers. The proportion of females employed in industries traditionally dominated by men—building and construction, and manufacturing—remained low at 5.0 and 12.2, respectively. Manufacturing employs half a million Kenyans (Republic of Kenya 2004: 52). Currently females account for 29.2 of total formal employment and only 6 are in management positions (UNDP 2005: 29). The problem of women’s access to employment is complex because of various factors influencing their decisions to enter the labour market; these include family demands, imbalances in training and access, discrimination by employers, and cultural practices that bar them from entering certain spheres of employment and lack of a supportive legal framework. Women in the informal sector in both rural and urban areas are involved in agricultural labour and production, but these are small-scale enterprises primarily centered on trade activities with small numbers represented in services and manufacturing.

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Market liberalization, which saw Kenya opening her markets to products from other countries, had a major impact on Kenyan industry. Some industries, such as textile and footwear manufacturing, and motor assembly, were hard hit (UNDP 2005: 15), and the privatization of public enterprises (which was geared towards efficiency in delivery of services) led to reduction of employment. Thus the retrenchment of workers in the public sector resulted in loss of income and poverty for many, and given that women had been traditionally found in larger numbers in the social and service sectors, downsizing affected them more. Additionally, women laid off from low-ranked positions had fewer chances than men for formal employment due to their low educational status and stiff competition in the labour market. Although we have indicated that there have been fewer women in industrial employment, some recent trends, also affected by SAPs, would appear to have altered the situation in favour of women. Whereas previous industrialization marginalized women, the current one has brought women to the center. Since the 1980s, an increased emphasis on export-oriented industrialization and production of manufactured goods for the export markets has substantially modified the structure and composition of the industrial labour force in Kenya. The cut flower industry and Export Processing Zones (EPZs) that produce garments are a case in point. In 2003 a total of 34,139 workers were employed in the EPZs, of which 24,764 were women. The cut flower industry, which has exponentially grown since the 1980s, employs approximately 40,000 to 50,000 employees, threequarters of whom are ‘youthful female workers’ (UNDP 2005: 29). Although this sounds like good news, it is ultimately not beneficial to women’s well-being. The policy of employing women is based on unjust premises, namely that women are less militant than male workers, and women provide a more flexible and less protected workforce since industrial employment is located outside the large factories and near the home or in the home. The consequence of this employment is that women are exploited, for they are poorly paid, have no protection because they cannot join a trade union, and are employed on a casual basis and thus more vulnerable to rights abuse. There have been incidents where women workers in these industries have been sexually abused and their employment terminated when they refuse sexual advances by their male bosses (Wanjiru 2006: 3). Poor women are therefore left on the horns of a dilemma: they either become destitute or succumb to rights abuse, and sexual and financial exploitation. Globalization has also led not only to massive layoffs of those in employment but lack of employment for the highly educated. A brain drain of high and middle level educated Kenyans to Europe, North America, and the Middle East has characterized the past twenty years. This has also been influenced by intensification of worldwide finance capital mobility that has created an unprecedented movement of people across geographical boundaries. Commenting on this phenomenon, Dwight Hopkins argues that: The relocation of transnational firms in rural areas tends to displace peasants, rural labour and small farmers, who in turn, travel to cities and quasi urban areas. The intense pressures of a tight and unfavourable job markets in cities push urban

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workers to cross national borders into neighbouring and distant Third World countries. Those who can secure the means to be contracted by international monopolies travel to the United States and other sites in the developed capitalist centers. (2000: 21)

Hence the system of globalization offers a push-and-pull dynamic that feeds the working poor’s economic hardships, as well as dreams of a better life for heads of households and their children. In Kenya, local poverty and scarce job opportunities for both men and women have driven women to migrate for work. Many are employed in the service sectors as house helps, cleaners, nursing attendants, and low cadre industrial workers despite being highly qualified. It is estimated that forty qualified nurses leave Kenya every month for employment in Britain or the United States of America. They migrate due to low wages, dangerous working conditions, and scarce medical supplies. Although there are no available figures yet for other cadres of workers, their numbers are relatively high. It is estimated that Kenyans living abroad repatriate over forty billion Kenya shillings a year, earning the country substantial foreign exchange (Copeland-Carson 2007: 12). In January 2009, the Central Bank of Kenya confirmed that Kenyans in the Diaspora sent home US$611 million, up from $574 in 2007 (Kamau 2009: 18). Although these workers and especially women support their families through those funds, it is at the high cost of family and marital stability. As Gamburd observes in relation to Sri Lankan migrant women, migration has forced men and women to: renegotiate gender roles regarding not only whether a woman can respectably work abroad but also who will take care of a migrant woman’s duties and responsibilities in the home she leaves behind. (2002: 200)

While some men may accept the changed role status, others may feel their masculinity challenged and either marry again or resort to alcohol and other vices. Thus globalization hits at the very heart of humanity. The women are caught in the struggle to negotiate new identities and ensure the well-being of their families.

Women, economy, and the environment Corporate globalization has also affected the definition of what it is to be a producer, what it is to create, and what it is to be a creative agent. The shifts are also linked to means of production, that is, land tenure and commodification of land, and redefinition of the place of the household and home. The household in traditional African societies was women-centered, the heart of creativity and productivity. With the introduction of capitalist patriarchy, the household became unproductive, a place of ignorance, and a place from which to escape. Shiva observes: Before the emergence of modern patriarchal paradigm of economies, it was assumed that a nation’s economic affairs could be conceived as merely extensions of the

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household budget. Similarly, the living organisms of the earth constituted a single economic unit resembling a household or family dwelling intimately together. With the ‘home’ as the metaphor for both ecology and economics there was no hierarchal divide between domestic production and commodity production for exchange and trade, or between nature’s economy, the sustenance economy and the market economy. (2004: 50)

The metaphor of the ‘home’ has been reconstituted by modern economic paradigms and is no longer the model for economic organization. The home became separated from the economy and was made economically invisible. Although indigenous gender arrangements were not ideal, when the economy was an extension of the household, both men and women participated in both the public and domestic domains. The removal of the economy from the household led to gendering of the economy and the household, with men being projected into the economy and women into the household. This is what Maria Mies calls ‘housewification’ of the domestic economy (1986). The construction of production boundaries by capitalist patriarchy also led to a devaluation of women’s work, a removal of the feminine nurturing principle in development enterprises, and ignoring of subsistence economies necessary for human survival. It also ignores value in nature, which is destroyed in the process of technological production (Shiva 1995: 163). We have already discussed how land was appropriated and commodified for white farmers’ settlement and subsequent pauperization of Africans who became sources of cheap labour. Subsequent land policies in Kenya patterned on the colonial structures have also translated into appropriation of land for large-scale farming by multinationals and their African collaborators, thereby not only endangering food security but also reducing forest cover, with the consequent effect of deforestation and desertification. Conflicts between communities have also erupted over grazing and watering points when land has been appropriated for irrigation projects, dams for electricity generation, and tourism development. Kagwanja observes that, in the 1980s the World Bank initiated development projects in Tana River District in Kenya that ended up being ‘white elephants’ (2003: 137). These were the Kiambere Dam for electricity, the Bura Irrigation Scheme, and the US$7.14 million Primate Preservation Project. They had diverse social costs and were a travesty of justice. The dam displaced 6000 people who received insignificant compensation. The projects exposed farmers to worse poverty and increased their vulnerability. These colonial and neo-colonial practices have directly affected women by grossly undermining their access to land. Women have also suffered a double jeopardy because they also bear the burdens of a battered environment. As a United Nations report has lamented: Environmental degradation has already pushed great numbers of women into marginal environs where critically low levels of water supplies, shortages of fuel, over-utilization of grazing and arable land and population densities has deprived them of their livelihood. (Khasiani 1992: 94)

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Traditional economy is an ‘economy of nature’ determined not by incomes and cash flows as measured in gross national product (GNP), but by the level of protection of life of the Earth and human life. Economies of nature, through which environmental regeneration takes place and the sustenance of people through women’s ‘invisible’ unpaid work occurs, are being systematically destroyed to create growth in the global market economy (Shiva 2004: 52). But how is corporate globalization related to religion and how do they impact women?

Convergence of fundamentalisms: corporate and religious We observed earlier that both religion and capitalism (corporate globalization) have roots in patriarchy, and that within the framework of neo-liberal economic policies and asymmetrical globalization, women belong to the most affected sectors. The combination of these policies and patriarchal society (with its patriarchal religions) reinforces the oppression and marginalization of women in all sectors. In discourses on globalization and religion, both have been posited as opposing forces where standardized forms of religion, economies, politics, and culture are rejected through assertion of local religious identities and cultural forms (Lehman 2001: 299). Capitalist patriarchy in the same vein is perceived as ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’, while religious patriarchy is perceived as ‘tradition’ and ‘local’. The creation of a world order spurred by globalization is regarded therefore as destruction of tradition; hence religious patriarchy is often presented as liberating for women. This is evident in Christian, indigenous African, and Islamic religions. However, as Shiva rightfully observes: What we are witnessing in contemporary times is not a conflict, but convergence of religious patriarchy and capitalist patriarchy in the form of religious fundamentalism and market fundamentalism. (2004: 55)

Religion is usually opposed to the market because of its marginalizing ethic. However, when globalization of monopoly finance capitalist culture itself becomes a religion feeding on the most vulnerable peoples (especially women) in the Two-Thirds World, it often converges with religious fundamentalism. This convergence occurs at several levels that Shiva identifies as follows: (a) Both market and religious fundamentalism make women as human beings disappear. Women are reduced to sex objects or reproductive machines, to be controlled by men in power—either through the market or through invoking of religious texts. Women are also victims of consumerism’ (56). One only needs to watch their portrayal in both print and electronic media or visit a shopping center. The law of consumerism is one of the most dangerous weapons that

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wound women’s subjectivity by impeding the deepening of the construction of their identity as free and worthy. Poor women are also excluded by their incapacity to buy. In terms of patriarchal religion, women are controlled through invoking of sacred religious texts. New Testament household codes and unjust gender relations in Old Testament texts are used especially in newer expressions of Christianity all over Africa to control women. This control is portrayed as God’s will. Although women are also subverting such interpretations by exploring more liberating and empowering texts, there is no gainsaying the impact of an oppressive perspective propagated by a patriarchal religion that emphasizes the sovereignty of a male God, authority of Scripture (written by men), and a divinely commanded male leadership both inside and outside the home. (b) As market fundamentalism generates economic insecurity, people move to religious fundamentalism as a source of security reinventing ‘identity’ to deal with a culture of insecurity’ (56). The last twenty years of the twentieth century witnessed a resurgence of religious fundamentalism in all three religions. Although not as aggressive as Hindu nationalism in India or political Islam in Algeria and Pakistan, this fundamentalism threatened and sometimes infringed on women’s rights to self-determination, education, bodily integrity, economic empowerment, and health. This is especially so when neo-traditional movements like Mungiki attempt to reconstruct traditional conceptions of womanhood as defined by clitoridectomy, bride wealth, motherhood, and maternity. Mungiki has been in conflict with the Kenya government and the churches due to their threats to circumcise women. They allege that abandonment of this ritual contributes to the breakdown of moral values and the social fabric (Wamue 2001). Charismatic Christianity also accentuates gender tensions by seeking to reorder society through regulating women’s roles and behaviour. Despite the detrimental impact of patriarchal religion on women, it does have its benefits, signaling that it can be redeemed to promote their well-being. Charismatic Christianity’s emphasis on ‘personal aspiration’ as the true source of power and authority rather than institutional hierarchies, paradoxically provides the means for women and young people to challenge traditional structures (Spinks 2003: 25). Women’s ‘born again’ identity gives them a platform to negotiate for more empowering roles and transcend marginalization, and for the married, to experience stability. This is because their ‘born again’ partners are expected to be transformed and be more responsible in the household due to their subjection to Christ’s authority. Religion in these instances, even in its ambivalent manifestation due to the clash of modernity and tradition, offers women a social identity and a sense of self-worth from which to challenge various forms of oppression and in the process develop new strategies and capacities. (c) ‘Globalization as market fundamentalism erodes the economic content of democracy’ (Shiva 2004: 56).

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It has also relocated sovereignty from the people to corporations. Centralized economic systems erode the democratic base of politics; displaces people from productive employment and livelihoods; and creates a culture of insecurity. Representative democracy becomes empty of economic content. The vacuum is filled with exclusivist ideologies dismembered from people’s real securities but offering an illusion of security through ideologies. Thus as Shiva further argues: Religion, which in its embedded, inclusivist, relational form could be a countervailing value system to the excesses of the market, becomes part of a vicious cycle of violence and exclusion in its disembedded, exclusivist, disconnected form, supporting disembedded, excluding and polarizing economic systems of globalization. (56)

This convergence is also clearly manifested in two main processes evident all over the world including East Africa. Firstly, one process is the use of violence against women and girls through rape and sexual abuse, battering and harmful traditional practices such as female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and widowhood rites. In Kenya, sexual crimes are perpetrated against scores of women, girls, and female children even as young as one year old. Police records in 2005 showed that more women were raped in Kenya than people murdered by gangsters. Muiruri reports that 2,005 women and children were raped in 2002, but the figure rose to 2,308 in 2003, and 2,908 in 2004. The same records show that ‘1,411 people were killed by gangsters in various parts of the country compared to 1,395 in 2003 and 1,661 in 2002’ (2005: 11). Thousands of women are also coerced into forced prostitution or sold through other forms of human trafficking. Domestic workers and migrant women are especially vulnerable to rape and violent attacks by their employers who may withhold not only their wages but access to important personal documents and support. Secondly, there is a negative transformation of development and democracy under the pressures of fundamentalisms. The ethnic clashes of 1992 and 1997 in Kenya are typical examples of intolerance and the highest cost of globalization: its destruction of our capacity to be human. These clashes were occasioned by conflicts over land, diminishing resources, assertion of identity, unfair distribution of economic resources, and political manipulation (Gecaga 2001: 165).

Response to globalization by the church and civil society organizations The myriad challenges posed by globalization has generated a variety of responses from economists, landless peasants, theologians, social movements, and political scientists. The central question has been: ‘Is another world possible?’ Can we create an alternative world system different from that propagated by the World Bank, IMF, WTO, and transnational corporations? Can human beings relate to one another and to the Earth with

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justice and in a sustainable manner? After outlining what some institutions and groups are doing, I will identify some resources in African culture and African women’s theologies that may be helpful in the search for viable alternatives against the death-dealing elements of economic globalization. The churches in Africa have formulated a body of social and ethical teachings on the economy and economic justice in response to the problems that occur due to shifting economic systems. The all African Conferences of Churches has organized several workshops to explore the intersection between the economy, faith, and economic justice; among the many are, for example, ‘The Economic Globalization: Challenges and Hopes for Young People in Africa Today’ held in Nairobi in 2000, ‘Poverty Eradication’ in Lome, Togo in 2004, and ‘Strengthening Theological Thinking for the African Renaissance’, which met in Nairobi in 2006. In these consultations, the churches have challenged principles of neo-liberal economic ideology that promote individualism, greed, competition, consumerism, and the plunder of the Earth without regard for the next generations. They have promoted life-giving and liberating ethical principles of the common good and sharing of resources of the world, and solidarity with the vulnerable, alienated women, and those marginalized by the economy. They have judged greed as sinful and shown that in the Bible, God’s justice and compassion are norms and principles of economic justice. The All Africa Conference of Churches has also developed study booklets on poverty that can be used by the churches to help Christians understand the link between poverty and neo-liberal globalization, corruption, inequitable distribution of wealth, and bad governance, and how they can use Gospel values to promote economic justice at the individual and communal levels (AACC 2006). Another critical response has been that promoted by a Kenyan, Professor Wangare Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, who is a leading feminist and ecological activist. Since the 1970s, Maathai has been educating women on environmental rights (2004). This movement has had tremendous success in mobilizing women at the grassroots level to participate in reforestation programmes. The organization aims at not only reclaiming the quality of the land through planting trees but also reclaiming women’s power by, as Hinga points out, ‘planting afresh the sense of self-confidence and pride in themselves nurtured in pre-colonial times by many African societies’ (1996: 182). Maathai has emphasized the relationship between peace, economic justice, good governance, and viable ecological practices. The Kenya Debt Relief Network (KENDREN) and the Kenya Land Reform Association provide another response to the effects of globalization. Kenya’s external debt is US$10 billion and has contributed to the non-performance of the economy and persistent poverty. KENDREN undertakes public awareness campaigns on Kenya’s public debt, how it was accumulated, and its impact on the economy and people’s lives. They advocate for a total unconditional cancellation of the principal and interest and a possible reimbursement of money already illegally remitted to the creditors. They are opposed to surrender of Kenya’s sovereignty as a price to be paid for the interest payment postponement (KENDREN 2005). The Kenya Land Reform Association fights for the

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rights of the landless who, due to the colonial and post-colonial land policies, are in millions. They agitate for resettlement of the landless and equitable distribution of resources. Social movements within Kenya and beyond have advocated for the ‘free market plus—’, which means a market economy underlined by a compassionate policy framework.

Alternatives to globalization: an East African women’s theological response How can African women’s theology contribute to the quest for viable alternatives to globalization? African women’s theologies have been influenced and shaped by liberation theology, which begins with the broad vista of liberation of the least in society, the oppressed and marginalized people (including women), and the ecology. The theology endeavors to raise consciousness of the issues in the community of women and men, and transform and empower them to be aware of both their own dignity and that of others (Njoroge and Dube 2001; Oduyoye 2001). It also seeks to unmask the cultural bias against women and the systems oppressing them, and to recover the basic, communal, liberative thrust of the Scripture and African Religion. Consequently, it seeks to awaken people to critical reflection so that they do not accept oppressive systems as given. As a theology of praxis it is geared towards engaged action that leads to transformation (Rakoczy 2004: 6). Other characteristics of African women’s theology are its relationality and contexuality, its concern with liberation for all men, women, societies, and the whole of nature. In this sense, the theology is life-affirming, socially and ecologically sensitive, and geared towards dialogue. As a contextual theology, it is attentive to the context in which African women live, a context defined by cultural practices that result in suffering, despair, and death. Having emerged as a response to this context, African women’s theologies point to the tools necessary to create an alternative world. I therefore believe that they can provide an appropriate response to the rapacious appetite of globalization. The values that drive globalization processes and their subsequent detrimental impact on women’s lives require a prophetic response from East African women that would lead to the creation of a just social order. Imagining a new world is a crucial step towards improving our current world. This imagining must be informed by a theology that maintains a critical edge; a theology of the people as well as by the people. This is because people have the capacity to interpret their situations and be agents of their own transformation. For example, through grassroots organizing facilitated by churches, women’s groups, and civil society organizations, women are challenging and resisting the combined fundamentalisms of religion and market economy. The resistance takes the form of political activism and self-determination, drawing from the biblical and indigenous spirituality that is holistic, life affirming, just, and inclusive. The Bible provides numerous images of life, ecological justice, and social interactions that demonstrate that justice is central to the testimony of the Old and New Testaments.

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The exercise and application of justice in the Old Testament, for example, is understood among other things to entail a fundamental equality and indifference to money and power. In this respect Walter Brueggemann observes: God . . . deals with His people ‘face to face’ in the light of a primary equality (liberation from slavery). There is also to be a fundamental compassion: people’s basic needs— their need for warmth at night (Deut. 24: 19), for prompt payment (Deut.24: 14–15), for adequate food (Deut 24: 19–22), for periodic remission of debt (Deut. 15: 12), for rescue from slavery (Deut. 15: 12–14), are to be met. (Sagovsky 2000: 15)

Yahweh is here depicted as embodying justice and the people are expected to engender justice in their daily lives with one another and with God’s creation. The story of the daughters of Zelophehad (Num. 27: 1–11) shows that God gives high priority to distribution of economic resources and recognizes that discriminatory traditional rules may have to be modified to ensure the well-being of individuals and families. These orphaned daughters of a man who died leaving no male heir courageously and in solidarity challenged patriarchal traditions of inheritance and appealed to Yahweh’s justice and graciousness that was extended to all regardless of gender and social status. Proverbs 31: 31, speaking of the ‘virtuous woman’, demands that she be given the reward that is rightfully hers, an indictment against exploitation and oppression of women. The theological task that would be of importance in East Africa is to go back to the biblical text as a point of reference, and employ a liberating hermeneutic to resist marginalization, exploitation, and exclusion. A theology of resistance must come from Scripture and African spirituality, for women are known to invoke the power of religion to subvert oppressive processes and reclaim their dignity. New Testament perspectives on justice can also influence the quest for alternatives against harmful ecological exploitation ventures and intellectual property rights claims on resources and indigenous knowledge held in common; they are also, as we have argued, located in the realms under women’s direct experience and control. The search for justice is possible for those who build communities around Jesus Christ and are empowered to act by his Spirit. God’s intervention to create justice occurs in concrete historical realities and terms, and it is linked inseparably with the gathering of a new humanity among the peoples, a new humanity in Christ. Justice was one of the bases for the reign of God on Earth (Luke 4: 16–20), and it continues to be relevant in attaining the fullness of life that Christ promises to inaugurate on Earth. Justice therefore depends on a shared commitment by people, institutions, and communities to live together without exploiting one another. It demands of us to form communities that are nurturing to humanity and all creation, and which are inspired by Jesus’ Gospel social vision of release from bondage for a new creation, a vision incarnate in the inclusive community of women and men, characterized by a discipleship of equals (Clifford 2001: 34). Another issue central to an African Woman’s theology of liberation and crucial to developing alternatives to globalization is the promotion of gender equality in policy and practice. Equality of men and women is lavishly affirmed in Church and state policy documents, yet it remains to be concretized in reality. Women’s equality with men is

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affirmed in Creation where both are created in God’s image (Gen. 1: 26–7) and are equal in dignity. It is also reinforced in Christ’s identification with women in his inclusive ministry and praxis and in his very being as ‘Sophia made flesh’ (Borg 1995: 108). In the Magnificat (Luke 1: 46–55), Mary sings a song of liberation. This is a ‘revolutionary document of intense conflict and victory, produced by a woman who proclaims the virtues and values of peace, justice, humanness, compassion, and equality of humankind’ (Adeyemo et al. 2006: 1208). It acknowledges God’s liberating actions on behalf of women and other marginalized people whose rights are violated. This powerful text also provides a blueprint for constructing a liberating woman’s theology that seeks justice for East African women. Women ought to be seen in their full humanity as producers and creators, custodians of culture, as spiritual beings, and political decision-makers. This should not only stem from social, political, and economic transformation, but surrender to God’s transformative grace that will enable us to see the humanity of the other. This requires a theology that imbibes, as Sobrino argues, the principle of redemption/salvation for presenting a dynamic capable of overcoming the evils of globalization (redemption) and producing benefits (salvation)’ (2001: 106). Salvation supposes promise and, correlatively, hope. It also springs from the weak and the little. Littleness and weakness are at the heart of the dynamic of salvation and this is captured in Scripture, especially in the figure of the suffering servant of Yahweh (Isa. 53) who is not only ‘poor’ and little but a ‘victim’. The victims of globalization, especially women, must be at the heart of the debate on globalization, not as objects, but as actors in the recovery of their humanity. Without them, quests for alternatives to globalization can only be a mirage. Resources from African spirituality, especially the concept of Ubuntu (humanness) and Urumwe (interconnectedness in Gikuyu language), can also be used to articulate an alternative to globalization and militate against its harmful effects. Ubuntu (a term found in Bantu languages in East, Central, and South Africa) is a concept that encompasses being human, humane, relational, and respectful of the dignity of human beings and other creatures, and awareness of the interconnectedness of humanity, the Earth, and other life forces. This worldview is captured in the expression ‘I am because we are and since we are I am’. The concept is a cultural and ethical/religious worldview and expresses the ontology of a people and their identity. Every person’s humanity is ideally articulated through his or her relationship with other human beings, the Earth, and other creatures of the Earth. This sacred view of nature results in Africans having a relationship that is biocentric rather than anthropocentric. In this worldview, one remains healthy in a holistic sense only by living in harmony with the whole of creation. Ubuntu also expresses respect, empathy, compassion for others, reciprocity, solidarity, justice, accountability, and mutual social responsibility. As Adeola observes, ‘this spirituality gives full value to creation as a dynamic and highly integrated web of life. It exudes life giving values, sacredness of the land, reverence for all creatures, judicious use of the earth’s resources and compassion for the weak, oppressed and marginalized’ (2008: 27). This spiritual and social capital is a critical resource to which African women still resort, despite the challenges posed by poverty and individualism.

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Whether living in rural or urban areas, African women maintain social support networks that not only provide them with safety nets but also serve as sites of resistance against dehumanization. Indigenous religion and spirituality are also a resource insofar as they are women-centered, egalitarian, and gender inclusive. This religion is accessible to women and is interpreted in terms that relate to life. Women’s spirituality focuses on the sanctity of life and its nurturance, promotion, and sustenance, hence the association of women with creation and ‘mother earth’. Shiva argues that ‘the sacred is the ground for resisting the commodification of life by capitalist patriarchy through corporate globalization’ (2004: 71). Threats to women’s religious, social, and political roles all over Africa in colonial and post-colonial times have been met with resistance grounded in indigenous spirituality. Notable examples include the 1929 Aba women’s riots in Eastern Nigeria (Alao 2008: 155) and the protests against forced labour and taxation by women in Kenya during colonialism. Although I have argued that women still access spiritual and social capital to resist various types of oppression, especially global capitalism that presents hegemony that is difficult to challenge, I am also aware that traditional values are increasingly being eroded, firstly by Western Christianity and colonialism, and currently by the globalization enterprise in all its manifestations. Nevertheless, religious and social consciousness and connection to the sacred still underpin the African woman’s apprehension of reality and response to life’s challenges. That is why I argue that recovery of the sacred can be an important source of gender equity by transforming and replacing the values of religious fundamentalism and capitalist patriarchy. Focusing on the sacred as a source for theology helps to bring the feminine back to religion and to create conditions of non-violence, healing, and reconciliation of humanity, including women and creation.

Conclusion This chapter began with a discussion of what globalization entails and its historical antecedents in Africa. It has argued that current economic globalization is a process that began in the sixteenth century with the slave trade and continued in the nineteenth century with colonialism, which initiated the incorporation of Africa into the global economy. The process has had both positive and negative ramifications and has impacted the spaces in which women operate. Access to modernity mediated through Western Christianity, formal education, travel, language, and new moralities and attire altered the traditional perceptions of women, their expected gender roles, and legal and cultural status. Modern economic globalization has eroded people’s sovereignty and relocated it to corporations. Centralized economic systems have eroded the democratic base of politics, displaced people from productive employment and livelihoods, and created a culture of insecurity. Fundamentalism of various hues, including the religious, has emerged as a reaction to threats to cultural identity and as a way of self-preservation. Subsequently, women have become victims of fundamentalist ideologies.

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Globalization will not go away for it also has positive benefits. However, it has been challenged by people’s movements agitating for citizens’ freedoms and liberation from corporate control. Alternatives to globalization are being envisaged and developed. Central to the rebuilding of political, economic, and religious systems is the reclaiming of community solidarity and the commons. Crucial to creating an alternative world is recovering of the sacred, embedded in traditional worldviews that emphasize connectedness of all creation. From a Christian perspective it means commitment to a theology centered on the God of justice, love, and mercy, who is relational, and desires to renew humanity. African women theologians are called to witness to this conception of a new world in their various ways doing theology and by utilizing resources in Scripture, African religion, and their concrete experiences that are shaped by economics, politics, and other social processes. These religious resources, which are inherently life affirming, are inclusionary, and enhance interconnectedness, can be a countervailing force against religious fundamentalisms and the devastating effects of corporate globalization.

Notes 1. The Kiswahili term for globalization is ‘utandawazi’, which literally means vast expansion. 2. Rwanda and Burundi have since 2003 joined the East African Cooperation. 3. Although in Kenya and Uganda all communities are patrilineal and patrilocal, in Tanzania, there is a belt in the southern part of the country that is matrilineal and that extends to Central and West Africa. Such communities are the Wayao and Wamakwai. Some, however, have adopted patrilineality due to colonial policies that favoured patriarchy and also interaction with patrineal communities and Islam. Examples include Wazaramo, Waluguru, Wakwere, and Wanyiramba (see Moser 1987: 316–21). 4. There are no accurate statistics of religious affiliation in East Africa. Christianity is said to be dominant in all the three countries. However, there are slightly more Muslims in Tanzania, about 23 of the population. Kenya claims to be 80 Christian, 15 Muslim, and 5 African traditional religionists. Uganda too is said to have an over 75 Christian affiliation. 5. Along the East African coast there arose a series of trading centers incorporating a mix of Arabian and Indian populations that linked Eastern Africa to the Indian Ocean trading system. Imported iron goods were exchanged with gum, spices, ivory, and horn. The trading centers became a conduit for the spread of Islam. 6. These movements are called in the literature African Independent/Indigenous/Initiated or Instituted churches. Their characteristics include emphasis on pneumatic experiences, a gender ideology, indigenization of Christianity, and communalism. 7. These new religious movements were prevalent in the colonial days, but recent times have also witnessed their resurgence. In Kenya in the 1980s, for example, a group known as Mungiki emerged. This was a period characterized by economic decline and social and political instability. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, and Uganda, Budu dia Congo Afrikania Mission, The Holy Spirit Mobile Forces, and later The Lord’s Resistance Army, respectively, emerged in the mid-1980s with similar ideals (see Dia Wamba 1991; Natukunda-Togboa 1991; Wamue 2001; Gyanfosu 2002). 8. Most mission-founded churches today allow ordination of women, although the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches do not. In the African Instituted Churches and

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Pentecostal/Charismatic churches women have more avenues for exercising leadership as lay or ordained ministers, especially due to the Pentecostal doctrine that engenders democratization of charisma. 9. Human Development Index is measured by longevity, educational attainment, and decent living standards. 10. NARC stands for the National Rainbow Alliance, the political party that came into power in December 2002 and was led by President Mwai Kibaki, who is also the current President. 11. Private universities have relatively few students compared to public universities. This figure has therefore very little impact in terms of women’s access to higher education. 12. African Women’s theologies, which emerged in the 1980s, evolved within the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians and the Women’s Commission of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT).

Works Cited All Africa Conference of Churches (2006). What Can We Do to Overcome Poverty? Nairobi: AACC. Adeola, T. S. (2008). ‘From Anthropocentric Sinfulness to Biocentric Gracefulness: Mission to Creation’, in Tunde Babawale and Akin Alao (Eds), Global African Spirituality, Social Capital and Self-reliance in Africa. Lagos: Malthouse Press, 21–32. Adeyemo, T. et al. (Eds) (2006). Africa Bible Commentary. Nairobi: WorldAlive Publishers. Akale, C. M. (2002). ‘Economic Globalization, Gender and African Women’, in T. K. Adzor (Ed.), The Economic Globalization: Challenges and Hopes for Young People in Africa Today. Nairobi: All Africa Conference of Churches, 76–93. Alao, I. F. (2008). ‘Gender: Spiritual force of African Collectivism and Sustainable Development’, in Tunde Babawale and Akin Alao (Eds), Global African Spirituality, Social Capital and Selfreliance in Africa. Lagos: Malthouse Press, 152–9. Al-Roubaie, Amer (2002). Globalization and the Muslim World. Kuala Lumpur: Malita Jaya. Borg, Marcus J. (1995). Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith. New York: Harper Collins. Boserup, E. (1970). Women’s Role in Economic Development. London: George Allen and Unwin. Clifford, Anne M. (2001). Introducing Feminist Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Copeland-Carson, Jacqueline (2007). ‘Kenyan Diaspora Philanthropy: Key Practices, Trends and Issues’. Paper prepared for The Philanthropy Initiative, Inc., and The Global Equity Initiative, Harvard University, available from http://intra.forum.com/downloads/ pdfs/Kenya_Diaspora_Philanthropy_Final.pdf Gamburd, Michele (2003). ‘Breadwinner No More’, in Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie R. Hochschild (Eds), Global Women: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy. London: Granta Books. Gecaga, M. G. (2001). ‘Ethnic Conflicts and their Impact on Women’, in Mary N. Getui and Matthew M. Theuri (Eds), Quests for Abundant Life in Africa. Nairobi: Acton Publishers, 159–74. Gifford, Paul (1998). African Christianity: Its Public Role. London: Hurst. Gore, Charles (2001). ‘Religion in Africa’, in Linda Woodhead et al. (Eds), Religions in the Modern World. London: Routledge, 204–30.

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Gyafonsu, S. (2002). ‘A Traditional Religion Reformed: Vincent Kwabena Damuah and the Afrikania Movement’, in D. Maxwell and I. Lawrie (Eds), Christianity and the African Imagination: Essays in Honour of Adrian Hastings. Leiden: Brill, 271–94. Hastings, Adrian (1989). African Catholicism: Essays in Discovery. London: SCM Press. Hinga, Teresia (1996). ‘The Gikuyu Theology of Land and Environmental Justice’, in Rosemary Radford Ruether (Ed.), Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 172–84. Hodgson, Dorothy L. (2005). The Church of Women: Gendered Encounters between Maasai and Missionaries. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hopkins, Dwight N. (2001). ‘The Religion of Globalization’, in Dwight N. Hopkins et al. (Eds), Religions/Globalizations: Theories and Cases. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 7–32. Human Rights Watch (2003). Double Standards: Women’s Property Rights Violations in Kenya. New York: Human Rights Watch. Available at http://www.sarpn.org.za/documents/ d0000333/P313_Kenya_Report.pdf James, R. M. (2001). ‘Impact of Cost-sharing in Health and Education on Women’s Welfare’, in Mary N. Getui and Matthew M. Theuri (Eds), Quests for Abundant Life in Africa. Nairobi: Acton Publishers, 18–32. Kagwanja, Peter M. (2003). ‘Globalizing Ethnicity, Localizing Citizenship: Globalization, Identity Politics and Violence in Kenya’s Tana River Region’, Africa Development 28/1–2: 112–52. Kamau, M. (2009). ‘Cash remittances by Kenyans up 7 per cent’, The Standard (Nairobi), 24 Jan. Kanogo, Tabitha (2005). African Womanhood in Colonial Kenya: 1900–50. Nairobi: East African Educational; Athens: Ohio University Press. Kendren (2005). ‘The Kenya Public Debt: The Biggest Scandal’, unpublished paper. Nairobi: KENDREN. Kenyatta, Jomo (1978). Facing Mount Kenya: The Traditional Life of the Gikuyu. Nairobi: Heinemann Educational Books. Khasiani, Shanyisa A. (Ed.) (1992). Groundwork: African Women as Environmental Managers. Nairobi: African Center for Technology Studies. Lehmann, David (2001). ‘Religion and Globalization’, in Linda Woodhead et al. (Eds), Religions in the Modern World. London: Routledge. Levine, Robert A. (1966). ‘Sex Roles and Economy Change in Africa’, Ethnology 5/2: 186–93. Maathai, Wangari (2004). The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach and the Experience. New York: Lantern Books. Machuka, Jesse (2001). ‘Agricultural Biotechnology for Africa: African Scientists and Farmers Must Feed Their Own People’, Plant Physiology 126/1: 16–19. Magesa, L. (1999). ‘The Global and the Local: An African View’, in Michael Amaladoss (Ed.), Globalization and its Victims as Seen by its Victims. Delhi: ISPCK. Mies, Maria (1986). Patriarchy and Accumulation in a World Scale. London: Zed Books. Moser, R. R. (1987). ‘Transformation of Southern Tanzanian Marriages’, in David Parkin and David Nyamwaya (Eds), Transformation of African Marriage. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 316–21. Mugambi, J. N. K. (2005). ‘Applied Ethics and Globalization: An African Perspective’, All Africa Journal of Theology 1: 126–42. Muiruri, S. (2005). ‘Rape Becomes Top Crime in Kenya’, Daily Nation (Kenya), 18 July. Mungai, N. (2005). ‘G. M. Maize Back on Track after Hitch’, The Leader, 2 Dec., 8.

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Mwaura, P. N. (2000). ‘Women in Kenya between Tradition and Modernity’, in Fritz Frei (Ed.), Inkulturation Zwischen Tradition und Modernitat. Freiburg: UniversitatsVerlag Freiburg, 73–107. Natukunda-Togboa, Edith R. S. (1991). ‘The Resurgence of Fundamentalism: A Case Study of the Alice Lakwena Phenomenon, Uganda’, Journal of African Religion and Philosophy 2/1: 76–81. Ndenda, M. (1994). The Women’s Campaign: Mekatilili and the Giriama Resistance of 1913 and 1914. Nairobi: Kaisungu. Njoroge, Nyambura J. and Dube Musa W. (Eds) (2001). Talitha Cum! Theologies of African Women. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster. Oduyoye, Mercy A. (2001). Introducing African Women’s Theology. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Okure, T. (2001). ‘Africa: Globalization and the Loss of Cultural Identity’, in Jon Sobrino and Felix Wilfred (Eds), Globalization and its Victims. London: SCM Press, 67–74. Pala, A. O. (1980). ‘Daughters of the Lake and the Land Rights of Luo Women’, in Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock (Eds), Women and Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Praeger, 188–216. Peters, Rebecca Todd (2004). In Search of the Good Life: The Ethics of Globalization. New York: Continuum. Rakoczy, Susan (2004). In Her Name: Women Doing Theology. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster. Republic of Kenya (1998). Development Plan 1997–2001. Nairobi: Government Printers. (2003). Interim Programme for the Economic Recovery Strategy for Wealth Creation and Employment 2003–2007. Nairobi: Government Printers. (2004). Kenya Demographic and Health Survey 2003. Calverton, MD: Macro International. (2005a). Economic Survey 2004. Nairobi: Government Printers. (2005b). Sessional Paper No 1 of 2005 on Policy Framework for Education, Training and Research. Nairobi: Government Printers. (2005c). Fourth Kenya Human Development Report Linking Industrialization with Human Development. Nairobi: Government Printers. Ruether, Rosemary Radford (Ed.) (1996). Women Healing Earth: Third World Women on Ecology, Feminism, and Religion. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. (2005). Integrating Ecofeminism: Globalization and World Religions. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Sagovsky, N. (2000). ‘God’s Passion for Justice: the Testimony of Deuteronomy in the Marketplace of Ideas’. Oxford Center for Mission Studies, http://www.ocms.ac.uk Shiva, Vandana (1995). ‘Development, Ecology and Women’, in Mary Heather MacKinnon and Moni McIntyre (Eds), Readings in Ecology and Feminist Theology. Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 161–71. (2004). ‘Women and Religion in the Context of Globalization’, in Peace Council and the Center for Health and Social Policy, Women and Religion in a Globalized World: A Conversation of Women and Religious Leaders. San Francisco: International Council for the Peace Council, 49–72. Sobrino, Jon (2001). ‘Redeeming Globalization through its Victims’, in Jon Sobrino and Felix Wilfred (Eds), Globalization and its Victims. London: SCM Press, 104–14. Spinks, Charlotte (2003). ‘Panacea or Killer? The Impact of Pentecostal Christianity on Women in Africa’, Critical Half 1/1: 23–8, http://www.womenforwomen.org/news-womenfor-women/files/crit-half/CHJournalv1.pdf

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Tamez, E. (1997). ‘Globalization and its Effects on the Third World: A Response from Latin America focused on Gender’, Voices from the Third World 20/1: 167–73. Tarimo, Aquiline (2002). ‘Gender and African Traditional Religion’, Africa Tomorrow, 2.1: 5–19. United Nations (1995). Report of the World Summit for Social Development, Copenhagen. New York: United Nations. Available at http://www.un.org/documents/ga/conf166/ aconf166-9.htm Undp (2005). Human Development Report. International Co-operation at a Crossroads: Aid, Trade and Security in an Unequal World. New York: UNDP. Available at http://hdr.undp. org/en/reports/global/hdr2005/ Wamba-Dia-Wamba, E. (1999). ‘Bundu dia Kongo: A Kongoleese Fundamentalist Religious Movement’, in Thomas Spear and Isaria N. Kimambo (Eds), East African Expressions of Christianity. Nairobi: East African Educational; Athens: Ohio University Press, 213–28. Wamue, Grace N. (2001). ‘Revisiting Our Indigenous Shrines Through Mungiki’, African Affairs 100: 453–67. Wanjama, Leah N., Kimani, Elishiba N., and Lodiaga, Mildred J. (2007). HIV and AIDS: The Pandemic. Nairobi: Jomo Kenyatta Foundation. Wanjiru, J. (2006). ‘EPZ Enterprises accused of Human Rights Violation’, The Standard (Nairobi), 7 April. Wilfred, Felix (2001). ‘Religions Face to face with Globalization’, in Jon Sobrino and Felix Wilfred (Eds), Globalization and its Victims. London: SCM Press, 34–41. Wipper, Audrey (1977). The Rural Rebels: A Study of Two Protest Movements in Kenya. Nairobi: Oxford University Press.

Further Reading Njoroge, Nyambura J., and Dube, Musa W. (Eds) (2001). Talitha Cum! Theologies of African Women. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications. Peters, Rebecca Todd (2004). In Search of the Good Life: The Ethics of Globalization. New York: Continuum. Rakoczy, Susan (2004). In Her Name: Women Doing Theology. Pietermaritzburg: Cluster Publications. Reuther, Rosemary Radford (2005). Integrating Ecofeminism: Globalization and World Religions. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

chapter 12

fem i n ist t h eol o gi e s a n d the eu rope a n con text lisa isherwood

This essay is a snapshot and like all photographic or artistic representations it has a perspective that will mean some issues and locations will be more sharply in focus or foregrounded than others. However, this is not so much due to my particular interests but simply because of my own geographical and intellectual position—I simply cannot see far enough or clearly enough into the vast array of issues and starting points across Europe as a whole. The religious, cultural, and historical landscape before me is vast and many of the contextual subtleties are unknown to me not simply because of the macro questions of religious interpretation, race, and culture but also because of the micro complexities of national identity and language, both national and dialect, which add colour to an already richly hued vista. I cannot claim to write for Europe; I can write for only the limited picture that I see. In recent years, the European scene has been scarred by war and conflict in places as diverse as Northern Ireland and Bosnia, and these conflicts have raised very different questions from those of the Second World War, although the issues of concentration camps and genocide have not gone away. The bombings of the IRA and Islamic groups have highlighted issues of security that have struck at the internal fears and insecurities of many people, leading—it would seem—to a reappraisal of self and nation, and in some contexts awakening centuries-old scars of invasion and conflict. At its best it also awakens memories of interfaith theologizing that is also centuries old, times when the rich mix of cultures, philosophies, and religions in some of our European cities led to theological creativity—times that to so many seem lost and even mythical. Although the fall of the Berlin Wall was greeted with elation by many, it did not bring all that was promised in terms of peace, security, and prosperity, and now that we have freer access to voices from behind the Wall, we can also engage with the fears as well as the aspirations. There are some who would still prefer to ignore the fact that not all of those who lived beyond the Wall

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were eager to embrace the capitalism of the West, even if they did wish to live outside the fear of secret police. However, these voices have not generally been heard and the blanket narrative of freedom and free markets has been the order of the day (Henderson 1996). Indeed, the fall of the wall can be seen as giving a major boost to the process of globalization. With no physical barrier in place globalization has been able to bypass national boundaries and undercut political sovereignty in many countries, thereby creating a new network of power: that is, a link between multinationals and financial institutions so strong it enables such corporations to colonize small markets all over the world without passing through any state institutions. Operating through General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) this new alliance seeks to control services, energy sources, health, culture, and education—all outside the jurisdiction of national government (GibsonGraham 1996). Within Europe, and indeed the world, one of the most globalized countries, in recent years, is Ireland. Far from being concerned about this, the Irish government has seen globalization as a way for Ireland to be attractive to foreign investors, which has indeed proved to be the case. However, there has also been a high price to pay: the low tax regime has meant that the gap between rich and poor has increased, social services are stretched to breaking point, and world economic downturns have left the Irish economy particularly vulnerable. Of course, this policy of globalized economic expansion also has implications for foreign policy, as was seen by the Irish reluctance to challenge the war on Iraq, a reluctance based in not wishing to offend the USA where most of the foreign investment lies (Hutchinson et al. 2002). An ongoing issue is that of European Union permissions to work across borders, which has led to continued migrations of the European work force as well as claims and counter claims about the way in which this disadvantages indigenous populations. The recent global recession has hit hard but some countries appear to be surfacing while others are still sinking, a reality that will ultimately place a great deal of strain on European cooperation. It is certainly a sad fact of popular politics in the United Kingdom that when economic recovery is mentioned the topic turns all too readily to migration, which appears to say more about lack of imagination where economic alternatives are concerned than about inherent racism. The easier borders have also led to a huge increase in trafficking of women, with an estimated 50,000 women and children (many from countries in the former Eastern bloc) annually moving through the United Kingdom to service the sex trade worldwide. In addition, the organ trade is also thriving, but once again this too is difficult to inhibit, not simply because of less stringent border control, but also because of the desperate financial situation of many of those who see it as their only alternative. Of course, organ harvesting is not always a voluntary activity, but it is the most marginalized who are most at risk. While the cultural, political, and economic landscape is diverse, so too is the feminist landscape, which can be highlighted by a glimpse at the concerns of some of the theological networks in Europe. The 600-strong European Society of Women in Theological Research holds a biannual conference attended by women scholars involved in research activity, but its gatherings clearly show many divisions. There are those who wish to critique the whole

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religious and theological traditions of Europe, while others simply wish to add women in a more inclusive way to those traditions as they stand. Others question what the role of religion and theology may be in cultures that appear to be entirely secular, while some find themselves in an impossible position of suggesting religion and theology have a place in societies reeling from clerical abuse. It is interesting too that the membership of this organization is predominantly Christian and so multi-faith questions are difficult to navigate. Other fair-sized organizations within Europe include the Britain and Ireland School of Feminist Theology (BISFT), which engages with both academics and practitioners in its biannual summer schools and takes as its basic principle the notion that the personal is political; the Institute for Feminism and Religion based in Eire, which encourages political action at the same time as it engages with reconfiguring the theological landscape through ritual and theological reflection on older traditions; and in Spain, the growing Escuela Feminista de Teologia de Andalucia (EFETA), which has heralded the spread of feminist scholarship through academic courses outside the academy and, as such, presents a challenge to the Roman Catholic church. All these organizations, working as hard as they do for women within the churches and theology, also sit within a globalized world, and thus many wish to imagine a way beyond globalization to greater equity and flourishing for the planet and its people. However, as we have seen, their starting points are often diverse and areas of agreement are at times hard to come by. This, I believe, is not a bad thing, as it testifies to the way in which feminist concerns and feminist theology, however it may be imagined, can provide seeds of hope in diverse situations for women and men. Nevertheless it also means that various engagements with the outcomes of globalization are isolated and reduced in their impact. They are like gnats attempting to disable an elephant with a bite, an elephant that feels slightly annoyed but never considers the attacks a serious threat to its existence. I have been part of and observed the campaigns in Europe that feminists— and other groups—have fought against many areas of injustice. Each in its own way has highlighted an issue and even marked up some success, but still globalization marches on. Governments seem in a real sense immune from actions such as demonstrations in Prague, Seattle, and Genoa and pressures to boycott goods as long as they, together with the media, can dismiss these protests as carried out by marginal groups with particular and questionable agendas. Similarly, while small-scale investors have also attempted to bring pressure to bear on the companies they are involved with, their impact has also been muted. Of course there are some companies, such as the Body Shop, that have themselves attempted to promote social justice, but while this is to be admired, the reality is that the pursuit of profit usually trumps ethical trading. Furthermore, the traditional political means for bringing about change has seemingly weakened as politicians have been silenced by the needs of business and the power of the world banks. So we live in a world where both business and governments seem to be highly unlikely sources for any change in globalization. Globalization may have within it the means to be a positive force in the world, but as it operates at present it simply serves the needs of the few at the expense of the many.

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Nevertheless, there have been a number of attempts at creating spiritualities robust enough to hold back the tide of globalization or at least convert it to more socially just ways of operating, and in the main these attempts have been based on the notion that if we can change the hearts of people then we can in time change the world we live in. Unsurprisingly, these spiritualities have taken root in the parts of the world most exploited by global forces, but where globalization has been viewed as a boon, such creative and liberating spiritualities have been harder to nurture. However, this perhaps is changing. There is a slow dawning of awareness that while the markets may be beneficial, they do not actually care for anyone—even the ostensible beneficiaries—and that the good times also come with a cost (Reed 2010). People in the West are realizing that they work harder in more competitive and demanding workplaces without the benefit of union representation, and while this may not compare to the destitution that globalization inflicts on other parts of the world, it is a wake-up call for some Europeans. Such a desire for a spirituality that addresses the pressures of globalization has led to a variety of responses. While many are attempting to create more justice-seeking practices for workers, others are claiming that spirituality at work will lead to greater productivity and output. However, even if a desire to explore spirituality at work has had tangible positive outcomes, such outcomers may be more in the form of making the workplace a more humane location rather than in addressing the spread of globalization. It seems then that some of the theological reflections that wish to strike at the construction of this narrative of the goods of globalization rather than its consequences may be worth consideration in the next decades. That is not to say that political action needs to fall from the agenda or that spirituality has no place in the attempts to hold back the worst excesses of globalization, but that these be accompanied by large shift in theological thinking. As I have already mentioned, there are many ongoing debates within the European context about how to address globalization, but here I will look at just three of them—one briefly and two in depth indigenous theologies, transcendence through developments in ecotheology and monotheism. A particularly intriguing phenomenon at the moment (and one I will only address in passing) is the rise of interest in indigenous religions across many parts of Europe—a rise of interest that forces us to ask how we are to understand the very concept of indigenous within the European contexts. For me there is strength in the approach such an interest fosters as it roots people in their particularity and gives them a sense of ‘hereness’ that offers some resistance to the globalization of values and products. As we know, globalization is not just an economic entity as it also involves the shaping of culture through the control of media and the way in which information is presented to people (to say nothing of what information is presented). Therefore it may be argued that an opening up of the riches of culture outside the media-driven images of culture may be a good thing, although such an approach should be careful not to adopt new forms of xenophobia instead of paying attention to a sense of self and community that offers an alternative to the selling of centrally branded identity. Thus within a European context where there is political pressure to develop a ‘European’ identity, it is hard to establish a separate national identity that is little more than a tourist attraction.

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Mary Condren (2010) is one of those creating fascinating and challenging work through her focus on Saint Brigit, and it is perhaps not an accident that this work is coming from a rapidly globalized Ireland. What Condren clearly shows is a tradition more ancient and rooted than the meta/global narratives of our time, a tradition that has real links between people and the land, and that understands the responsibility required in relation to the land we live upon and the resources it provides. Further, the traditions we find in the legacy of Brigit enable a worldview based on mercy, not sacrifice, as well as a rejection of the creation of the other through a rootedness that leads to a self-confidence that does not require that we project our insecurities. Such traditions may enable a pushing back of the global agenda through a real connection with place, land, and self that requires that all be given subjectively in the creation of systems and ways of being. Such a move would seriously undermine the very foundations of the globalization agenda, which appears to rely heavily on the objectification of people and lands and is willing to sacrifice all to its pursuit of further capital. While Condren pays attention to this tradition within the Celtic and particularly Irish heritage, Brigit is a figure who has her feet in many traditions throughout Europe and thus there is wide scope and much potential for a resurgence of the ‘mercy-not-sacrifice’ tradition, which, as mentioned, could translate into a strong counter narrative. One important move in the debate on globalization is the rethinking of issues of transcendence and the related problems inherent in the insistence on monotheism as a theistic conception. We are perhaps familiar with the arguments that link capitalism with Protestantism, as well as the work that suggests our economic debt economy has links with our Christian theological debt economy of Jesus dying to pay our ransom and the debt we owe in return (Grau 2004). It may follow then that if we can lessen the hold of such mono-thinking then the metanarratives, those overarching sets of ideals and stories we are encouraged to live by as though they were truths set in stone, that have been argued to follow may crumble too. Although not necessarily linked with this examination of transcendence there are very fascinating pieces of work being done in the area of quantum theology and its links to ecotheology, which of course have profound implications for where we situate God and how powerful and ordered we consider that God to be. I hope it will become obvious over the next few pages how these moves may be understood as related to and challenging of the thinking of globalization and even feminist theology. Of the many European theologians who have addressed the issue of transcendence (and all cannot be mentioned here), Dorothee Soelle always understood theological questions not at the outer reaches of reality but as deeply embedded in the personal sense of identity and always political. Her work was dedicated to creating a new social order, and this she did not only through political action but also through theological creation— a means she understood as crucial to counter dispassionate church dogma and individualistic theology, which she saw as a component of ‘capitalist spirituality’. As her work progressed we see the God of transcendence becoming a spirit of transformation among us, a being who enables us to transcend the places we find ourselves in to move to another way of liberative being. In The Silent Cry, Soelle ‘is planting theological seeds here for a

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Christian life that transcends popular understandings of both spirituality and politics— and that transcends most Christian understandings of both divine and human’ (Heyward 2003). Here we see how a reworking of theology can indeed offer new ways to at once challenge globalization and sustain the individual in that struggle through an empowering understanding of transcendence rather than a system that feeds other metanarratives. Not everyone sees it quite in the same way as Soelle and indeed some would suggest that there is awkwardness in the relationship between feminism and transcendence (Howie and Jobling 2009). This is highlighted in Europe by the emphasis on a psychoanalytic approach in feminist theory whereby the feminine is either unsayable or excessive within any system (ibid. 3). It is within this tightly controlled system that transcendence can play a useful part for the feminine since it allows the moving beyond boundaries that the feminine culturally marks within these bounded systems. This is not a moving above; it is a moving beyond, and this distinction is an important one. Howie and Jobling claim that in this way we avoid the dualisms of transcendence and immanence, infinite and finite, and thus no longer understand these terms as oppositional (4). Further, they claim that the divine is emerging in feminist theology as a category of critical thought and that this too must grapple with the idea of transcendence. However, they also suggest that we see emerging a vertical and horizontal transcendence: the former pointing to another world, and the latter suggesting an experience of an incomplete present that may also remain incomplete in the future. Through shifting between both meanings they claim the notion of the divine is able to act as a catalyst for re-examining ideas of love, truth, grace, and the spiritual without running the risk of reasserting hierarchical and gendered categories (2). It is interesting that they do not mention a re-examination of globalization in these new categories, but it could be usefully viewed through this new shifting notion of transcendence as beyond into an open future. What they are saying does not entirely resonate with Soelle, who would understand the political as inherent in any new world we may imagine, although, as we saw, she too understands something of the notion of transcendence to be in the realm of moving across boundaries in ways of thinking and being in this world. In the approach above there is no direct challenge to monotheism as such, although the location of that divine does change the face of that monotheism significantly. That is to say, if God is between and among us then we must think rather differently than if that God is above, beyond, untouchable, and completely unknowable. It is the argument of Maaike de Haardt (2010) from the Netherlands that monotheism itself is the root cause of many of our ways of thinking and being, and, as such, is a threat to our global relationality. Just as Francis Fukiyama signalled the dead weight of savage capitalism when he declared that history had ended, so with monotheism there is no space for development, only repetition and the spread of one ideology. Thus de Haardt argues that it is the singularity of the creator and creation that has set in place very destructive mono-thinking in the Western world. We become locked into a unilateral relationality where the power is all on one side and does not reside in us as subjects. For de Haardt this is clearly demonstrated in the story of the sacrifice of Isaac, which has become foundational for Western culture through the Judeo-Christian heritage. It is a story that in itself is damaging

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enough in terms of societal underpinnings and the legitimation it offers to acts of violence as offering some greater good, but when we consider that it is still within theology referred to as prefiguring the ‘ultimate’ sacrifice of Christ, we begin to understand where de Haardt’s objections lie. For her the core problem is this unconditional absolute obedience to God as the only authentic way to express faith as it puts in place a psychology of abuse. It is a psychology that does not question the hierarchy of obedience and suffering—one, in short, that can live with the consequences of the worst international excesses of globalization and fail to challenge them. The hierarchy of ‘obedience to’ and ‘suffering for’ inherent in Christianity has been pointed out many times in the history of feminist theology, but, as already stated, has not always led to questioning the ethical implications of continuing with monotheism itself (Korte and de Haardt 2009). Instead, what is more customary is to find the notion of co-creation and co-creativity within a process model of the relation between the divine and humans. However, for de Haardt this also falls short as it is, she claims, a largely male-centred model that fails to move from the inherent problems of mono-generativity. She believes there remains an unequal notion at the heart of even the process model that leads to at the very least a devaluing of the female and at worst a system that actually takes for granted the hierarchy that currently exists and that service and suffering are therefore inevitable. It is in the work of Catherine Keller (2003) that de Haardt sees some way ahead from the mono-generativity of Western monotheism through an engagement with the ‘Deep’ or the multiplicity of difference in relation that God is thought to be. However, de Haardt still remains uncomfortable as she feels even these theologies that she admires are attempting to find models that fit what is expected in terms of theology and society and at the same time as attempting to overcome models that have dominance and power at their heart. It is here that she makes her main point that perhaps we need new practices to change the still dominant imperialistic and abusive unilateral relations, language, and reality under which we live. Practices that move us into new ways of being because she is not sure to what extent ideas, concepts, and theologies impact on social reality but of course she acknowledges that they do. The challenge to monotheism that she offers, then, is to a way of living that stems from deeply rooted notions that are so deep they have largely been forgotten but nevertheless still impact the way society and international relations and economics are shaped. Of course, reflection and thinking will continue, but the way ahead is to ‘live’ ourselves into a new space, a new shape of being that challenges globalization and offers more relational ways of being together on the planet. As de Haardt has suggested, this work has been begun by feminist theologians (such as Halkes (1991) and Grey (2003)), but I will pick up on two related aspects: those of eco or quantum theology and desire, which in my view are related to how we sit in relation to monotheism, and how we may offer a challenge to the mono-thinking of globalization. The former offers us other ways to think about and be in relation to the resources of the world, including that of the labour of others, while engaging with our enfleshed cosmic story moves us away from a desire to transcend our earthly home through spiritual practices of disassociation that are so harmful to both the human and non-human that share the planet. They move us towards embracing a place that grew

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us, that nurtured us, and generously gave and gives us life. We are made of the stars and emanate from Tiamat’s fiery womb—we could not be more embedded in the cosmos. Yet many Christians still tend to build theology around the notion that our home is elsewhere, a place wherein we once dwelt and that has been re-bought for us by the redemptive death of Jesus. If we are thrown back to cosmic beginnings, to void and chaos, and we are asked to make our theology from that ground and to understand who we are and who we might be from tohu vabohu, the depth veiled in darkness, once we give agency to void and chaos there can be no creation out of nothing as our powerladen dualistic origin. As we have already seen, Keller certainly moves us significantly from creation out of nothing to a place where the divine is more humble and elicits ever-unfolding acts of becoming grounded in the chaos at the heart of the cosmos. However, she perhaps still leaves that gap between the divine and material order that the cosmic story itself seems to challenge—there is after all nothing outside the unfolding of the multiverse (Isherwood 2010). It is this gap that secular theorists have no difficulty challenging. Val Plumwood (2002), an eco-philosopher, is amongst those who insist that it is this gap that continues to harm both us and the planet. While we understand ourselves as something other than the rest of the created order we will inevitably see that as ‘better’ or ‘higher’, and this false consciousness leads to alienation and destruction. She is quick to point out to us the logical absurdity of such a position: monological relationships will eventually weaken the provider, the Earth, on which we rely. We need to move to dialogue between mutually recognizing and supporting agents or, as Thomas Berry puts it, we need to realize we live in a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects. Plumwood argues that removing agency from the cosmos, a technique we have so often used in our colonial history in relation to the discovery of ‘new lands’, makes the land and all that live in it an empty space—one that can be used for profit through the maximization of its development potential. She reminds us of the knock-on effect of this way of thinking when nature is no longer viewed as a creator of our environment and when those who depend most directly on it are relegated to the realm of ‘Other’. They are backgrounded, which means that we deny our reliance on both the land and those who toil in it; we live as though they have no impact on our lives and as though we lived outside the biosphere. Plumwood argues for a return to what she calls the ‘heart of stone’ in order to overcome the ‘sado-dispassionate rationalism’ of scientific reduction. This involves a re-enchantment of the realm designated as material and the rematerialization of spirit as speaking matter. By journeying to the heart of stone we must walk a different path, one that moves stone (the material world of nature) from the background to the foreground of consciousness, from silence to speaking, and from the ordinary to the extraordinary, wonderful, and even sacred. This move is needed in order to challenge the false consciousness of the Western world, so rooted in our Christian heritage that tells us we no longer live in nature but in culture. This move Plumwood claims opens the door to a wide range of interspecies dialogues, dramas, and projects that would otherwise be unimaginable and that free us to rewrite the Earth as sacred, Earth exploration as pilgrimage, and Earth knowledge as revelation. The political and economic implications of this I think are quite

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clear. Consider the impact such thinking would have on logging companies, chemical corporations, and the bodies of those who labour to make cheap T-shirts? Understanding the resources of the planet as pure gift of the cosmos is one way to challenge our economic values; by shifting from a story of ransom through sacrificial death to one of nurtured blessings of a generously outpouring universe must surely in time affect the way we live and think. But would such changes necessarily create the challenge to monotheism that de Haardt points us to? And by extension, would it also be a challenge to globalized economics as it places us squarely as people of place and space as well as those gifted resources that we need. Some reflection on this may allow us to reconsider the way that we construct the world we believe we inhabit, which is at odds with the cosmos that holds us. Mary Grey (2003) concentrates less on the generosity of the planet and more on the way in which we as humans have become misdirected by the markets in terms of owning and articulating our desires. She is in agreement with Deleuze, who explains that capitalism does not just exert power by extracting labour and production, but by capturing and distorting the fundamental human power of desire. Grey suggests that once this has happened we have no way to think beyond the mundanely material and so no ability to resist the market. Indeed, we have an almost obsessive need that the market should keep feeding us. Anthony Giddens has reminded us, in a parody of Marx, that we have nothing to lose but our mock Rolex watches. I suggest that we do not even wish to lose them as they proclaim our non-identity, and we are addicted to our oblivion, believing it to signal something of significance about a self we have trouble articulating. Our chains may continue to bind us but we stagger under their weight with joy once we have the tat of dreams adorning our ever indistinguishable bodies. In the light of this, Grey argues for the urgent recovery of desire; she wants us to know what we are for as much as what we are against. Further, she puts forward as a theological task of great significance the reclaiming by theologians of the language of desire from the High Priests of the market. While we continue to long and yearn for the new car, the new house, and all the goods that shine so brightly in them, we silence God. God, too, is turned into a commodity, and salvation becomes, as was mentioned earlier, an exchange economy with the blessed showered with gifts in the super-cathedrals of capitalism. Traditional Christianity, I argue, has a role to play in our present predicament through the great vacuum it leaves when it claims that one has been filled by an external colonizing, yet benevolent God. Here again we see the problems of monotheism as articulated in the Christian tradition with the consequence that, just as people who have been repeatedly abused can find it hard to identify their edges and their own desires, so, too, the Christian who gives herself over to a battering by the ‘three personed God’ (John Donne) in the name of love is offering herself to the world in a very wounded state—a state that can make decisive action through connection with passionate desire very difficult. Grey suggests it is the Spirit that, as she puts it, ‘finds cracks in culture in order to give birth to alternative cultural expressions’ (2003: 110). The Spirit, she argues, finds a home at the edges of the personal and the non-personal from where it reawakens the power of dreaming and imagining; the Spirit is the power of life and space for living. I agree with Grey

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that desire has been misled and that if the market is to be contained it must be confronted by people firmly rooted in other ways of desiring rather than other ways of reasoning. The market after all does not listen to reason but leads and responds to consumer desire. A new Christian self-worth and self-direction is needed to stand unperturbed before that savage beast and pinion it with the passionate spears of unrefined and uncluttered desires—desires that spring from the raw and mutual relationality of all living things. I consider it difficult to transform desire when we have theologies that do not allow for it beyond a rather ethereal and self-indulgent longing after God, a romantic and slightly sadomasochistic notion that we find no rest until we find it outside ourselves in the perfect divine? The time seems right to remove layers of false consciousness and comfort, be they capitalist or theological, and to move more deeply into our own divine/human natures and to stand boldly in our naked vulnerable humanness as the only way to halt the advance of genocidal, savage capitalism (Isherwood 2005). I have provided here a mere snapshot of the large variety of theologies in Europe addressing the question of globalization, but I would argue that what appears to be needed to hold back the advance of globalization is a solid sense of personhood rooted in cultural identity but not so narrowly conceptualized as to be devoid of relational potential and respect for the rootedness of others. This is of course a significant challenge when the populations of the world are in such motion and we are forced to face the question of ‘how shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ How shall we keep our sense of identity when everything is shifting around us? The global market with its global ‘things’ can be a neat and easy answer for so many, but in fact it just adds to the sense of our non-being, our uprootedness, making us citizens of everywhere and nowhere— cheap and disposable like the commodities we so often buy. The importance of the person, the history, the belonging so central to authentic personhood can be so easily dislodged under the force of migration, even voluntary. Further, there is need for a strong and viable conceptual challenge to the monothinking that inevitably underpins much of the globalization agenda. A vain hope, perhaps, but I am convinced that action alone will not dislodge dominant ideologies. If we are asking people to change their way of living, we also need to provide new ways of thinking—ways that allow for more than the monologues of advanced capitalist and globalized culture. We must fill the inevitable gap in their predictable ways of being and thinking that are almost unconscious, and we must fill them with ways of thinking and being that we believe to be life-giving. The mono-God has held sway in Western thought and action for two millennia, and that is a very long time in which to create grooves in the unconscious! If we are to make a real difference then what we offer must be deeply conceptualized and capable of making other connections within the brain as well as within the heart. Globalization has hold of us all not just as a set of expectations but also as a way of thinking, and theology must challenge this hold with viable alternatives. If all we continue to offer is the mono-logic of Western theism then we should not be at all surprised that our moral rhetoric about the dangers, even evils, of globalization are received as sound but actually change very little. Our Christian theological logic of giving ourselves away to something bigger and more powerful then

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ourselves has made people very receptive to the logic of the global market. It is time for a big change the world needs to resist these markets at their worst. We shall wait to see whether Christian theology can bear the change or even lead the way for that change.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

See Moe-Lobeda (2002). See for example Goody (2007). This is well documented in Carrette and Young (2005). There is also a range of other work throughout Europe on the older traditions that to varying degrees offer alternate starting points and places to stand when considering the questions and politics of identity. See, for example, the work of Carol Christ on Goddess traditions in Europe (http://www.goddessariadne.org) and that of the late Nelli Bouday, whose work focused on the Hungarian tradition. There is also the work of Miranda Green in the Welsh tradition (1996). 5. See for example Ruether (1983); Grey (1989); Hampson (1996); and Soelle (1996).

Works Cited Carrette, Jeremy, and Young, Richard (2005). Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. London: Routledge. Condren, Mary (2010). ‘Brigit, Matron of Poetry, Healing, Smithwork, and Mercy: Female Divinity in a European Wisdom Tradition’, in Lisa Isherwood, Elaine Bellchambers, Jenny Daggers, and Christine Gasser (Eds), European Society of Women in Theological Research 2010 Yearbook. Amsterdam: Peeters. de Haardt, Maaike (2010). ‘Monotheism as a Threat to Relationality’, in Lisa Isherwood and Elaine Bellchambers (Eds), Through Us, With Us, In Us: The Challenge of Relational Theologies in the Twenty-first Century. London: SCM Press. Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996). The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Giddens, Anthony (1991). Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Goodchild, Philip (2002). Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety. London: Routledge. Goody, Daniel G. (2007). Globalisation, Spirituality, and Justice: Navigating the Path to Peace. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Grau, Marion (2004). On Divine Economy: Refinancing Redemption. London, T&T Clark. Green, Miranda (1996). Celtic Goddess: Warriors, Virgins and Mothers. London: British Museum. Grey, Mary (1989). Redeeming the Dream: Feminism, Redemption and the Christian Tradition. London: SPCK. (2003). Sacred Longings: Ecofeminist Theology and Globalisation. London: SCM Press. Halkes, Catharina (1991). New Creation: Christian Feminism and the Renewal of the Earth. London: SCM Press. Hampson, Daphne (1996). Swallowing a Fishbone: Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity. London: SPCK.

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Henderson, Hazel (1996). Creating Alternative Futures: The End of Economics. New York: Kumarian Press. Heyward, Carter (2003). ‘Crossing Over: Dorothee Soelle and the Transcendence of God’, in Sarah K. Pinnock (Ed.), The Theology of Dorothee Soelle. London: Trinity Press International, 221–38. Howie, Gillian, and Jobling, J’annine (Eds) (2009). Women and the Divine: Touching Transcendence. London: Palgrave. Hutchinson, Frances, Mellor, Mary, and Olsen, Wendy (2002). The Politics of Money: Toward Sustainability and Economic Democracy. London: Pluto Press. Isherwood, Lisa (2005). ‘Incarnation in Times of Terror: Christian Theology and the Challenge of September 11th’, in Jerome Satterthwaite and Elizabeth Atkinson (Eds), Discourses of Education in the Age of New Imperialism. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books. (2010). ‘Wanderings in the Cosmic Garden’, in Lisa Isherwood and Elaine Bellchambers (Eds), Through Us, With Us, In Us: The Challenge of Relational Theologies in the Twenty-first Century. London: SCM Press. Keller, Catherine (2003). Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming. London: Routledge. Korte, Anne-Marie, and de Haardt, Maaike (Eds) (2009). The Boundaries of Monotheism: Interdisciplinary Explorations into the Foundations of Western Monotheism. Leiden: Brill. Moe-Lobeda, Cynthia D. (2002). Healing a Broken World: Globalisation and God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Plumwood, Val (2002). Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London: Routledge. Reed, Esther D. (2010). Work! For God’s Sake: Christian Ethics in the Workplace. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd. Ruether, Rosemary Radford (1983). Sexism and God-Talk. London: SCM Press. Soelle, Dorothee (1996). Theology for Sceptics: Reflections on God. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

Further Reading Drane, John (2008). After McDonalization: Mission, Ministry, and Christian Discipleship in an Age of Uncertainty. London: Darton, Longman, and Todd. Gorringe, Timothy (1999). Fair Shares: Ethics and the Global Economy. London: Thames and Hudson. Hoogvelt, Ankie (2001). Globalisation and the Postcolonial World. London: Palgrave. Jarl, Ann-Cathrin (2003). In Justice: Women and Global Economic. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Northcott, Michael (1999). Life after Debt: Christianity and Global Justice. London: SPCK.

chapter 13

gl oba liz ation th e secon d wav e of col on iz ation: i m pacts on wa hi n e m āo r i tui cadigan

The context Māori are the first nation people of Aotearoa New Zealand, a group of South West Pacific Islands. Colonized by the British Empire, Aotearoa came into being through an act consolidated by the signing of a controversial treaty between Māori tribes and Queen Victoria of England. A number of factors led Māori to sign the document known as Te Tiriti o Waitangi. The key motivation for signing was the influx of settlers who were increasingly unruly and uncontrolled. Māori Rangatira or chiefs exercised the power of life and death over their own people, but they were unwilling to assume responsibility for the lawless settlers. The British became concerned over this situation as they learned that the recently arrived French were also making overtures to Māori. Having colonized other territories around the globe, the British had already developed a process of colonization they could apply to these new lands. From their earliest encounter, Māori women, or wahine Māori as this paper will refer to them, experienced a dramatic shift in their social position. Traditionally, they occupied leadership roles at all levels of society; however, colonization instigated a societal reassignment that has led them to their current position behind white males, white females, white children, and Māori males, but ahead of Māori children. Key events in history contributed to the invisibility of wahine Māori in their own context and brought them to their present crisis. To assist the reader in understanding this context, it is first necessary to consider some key elements of Māori spirituality. My second section will explore developed and developing relationships, specifically the consequences of the

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differences between values systems of Māori and the British colonizer. The final section will describe the current reality of wahine Māori and draw some conclusions about the influence of globalization in the process.

Spirituality—mana wahine Māori come from an oral tradition, and their stories of origin are numerous and unique to each autonomous tribal nation. However, over time these tribal stories have been reduced to a category of mythology through interpretation by colonizers, missionaries, and colonial historians (a view also found among Māori themselves). All aspects of tribal life were governed by a set of obligations and restrictions articulated through a complex set of rules and guidelines known as tapu lore, which have their origins in the sacred essence of creation. The element of Māori spirituality that is the primary motivator is what Māori know as mana wahine, a powerful entity with a crucial role in tribal life, past and present. Mana is tapu or sacred essence in action. It is a spiritual power or prestige derived from links to Atua or Supernatural Power/Supreme Being/God, by virtue of creation; it comes from tipuna, or ancestors, as well as through an inherited line of descent, and also from whenua, or land, through Hine-ahu-one, the first human formed from the sands of Papatuanuku or the Earth Mother. In short, mana is the ability to cause things to happen and people to act. By its very nature, it is an outgoing force essential for achieving the goals of life. As mana diminishes, it becomes increasingly difficult to perform even routine tasks for oneself or on behalf of others. Mana increases when tapu or sacred essence is acknowledged, enhanced, or restored through the exercise of a complex system of virtues. The three primary virtues are tika, or what is just and right; pono, or adherence to what is just and right; and aroha, the influence of emotional motivation. Mana wahine then is key to defining the power and prestige of women. The sacred essence known as tapu exists for both male and female through their origins in Atua or Creator/Supreme Being. Unlike men, women have a dual capacity: they are both tapu in the sense that they embody sacred essence, and at the same time they are noa or free from tapu restrictions. Although anyone can become noa in a negative sense through the violation of tapu (which causes mana to decrease), only women have intrinsically positive noa, making them free from restriction. This positive noa is exercised through mana wahine at two levels: firstly, te mana i te wahine, that is, her intrinsic mana, which causes her to acknowledge its source—the Supreme Being by virtue of creation and ancestors by virtue of generation. The second level is mana o te wahine, her mana in action, which she exercises in her relationships with the Source of Life, Creator, spiritual powers, people, and land. Women are called to exercise their mana for and on behalf of their people through the performance of roles reserved to them. It is their possession of noa that is the primary motivator in such cases. They have the capacity or mana to be whakanoa, or free from

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restriction, in any situation or area. Though tapu or having sacred essence, men lack positive noa and are therefore bound by tapu or sacred restrictions, rendering them traditionally unable to perform certain roles. Women are called to exercise their mana fully through interdependent relationships essential for the functioning and well-being of family, sub-tribe, and tribe. While these concepts are more complex than the description here given, the basic points articulated should enable the reader to grasp the spiritual framework that underpins a Māori perspective of life (Shirres 1997: 33–42).

Colonization In retrospect, colonization might rightly be considered as the earliest form of globalization. Used by world powers to dominate original inhabitants, alienate land and other resources, and govern through the imposition of their particular system of laws, colonization did all of this in the guise of development, civilization, and education. Indeed, education, as well as legislation, was used to extinguish the use of the local language and replace it with that of the colonizer, for colonizers argued that English was necessary for trade if Māori wished to develop economically. The encounter between colonial power and wahine Māori was one fraught with difficulty from the start. Unlike their British sisters, wahine Māori enjoyed a level of equality with males in their society (Mikaere 1994: 3–4), and some would argue that, in fact, Māori society had many of the hallmarks of a matriarchal society. Traditional living was conducted through a series of complementary roles between women and men; wahine Māori were landowners in their own right; some held the rank of being Rangatira or chiefs. Also, they were largely responsible for the education of the young, and in certain tribal areas reserved the right to speak on the marae, a role now almost exclusively confined to males.

The Waitangi Treaty Māori are the only indigenous people with whom the British colonizers signed a treaty. This is remarkable because it indicates that the British Crown recognized Māori as the resident peoples within the land known as New Zealand. Elsewhere the Crown had not sought to acknowledge indigenous rights in other territories they colonized. For example, they simply declared Australia to be an empty land, literally denying the existence of the Aboriginal peoples. The Waitangi Treaty with Māori was a hastily drafted document with only one Māori version produced.3 However, there were at least five versions in English, though none was absolutely aligned to the Māori version. Under international law, contra proferentum, Māori have since successfully argued that the indigenous version of the Treaty has primacy. Successive governments have, however, refused to give it status as the founding document that literally allowed the British Crown to have any authority in

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the territory. Using language already understood by Māori as biblical or religious, the missionary Henry Williams translated the English draft into Māori. Consequently, Māori identified it as a covenant and a sacred document. As such, it gave governance to the Crown or kawanatanga and retained tino rangatiratanga or absolute authority by the chiefs in the name of the tribes (Orange 1987: 32–59). Almost immediately after the treaty was signed, however, it was broken. Within a short period of time, Māori would join other colonized peoples in the British Empire and begin their struggle for justice.

Missionary influence Christianity was the traveling companion of colonization. Wherever the colonizers went to implant their flag, authority, and cultural norms, missionary activity followed. Missionaries insisted on moral codes of conduct and dress best fitted to European society but quite foreign to Māori. While the chiefs realized the value of learning to read and write and acquiring the new language for communication with the settlers and trade purposes, a question remains as to whether they converted in numbers because of the message the Missionaries preached, or the opportunity to learn to read and write. Colonization may have provided positives for the indigenous people—learning to read and write and, some would argue, reception of the Gospel message—but there were undoubtedly also negatives. One chief is reported to have said of the missionaries: ‘They asked us to bow our heads and pray and when we looked up our land was gone.’ Missionaries were closely involved in land issues, and although some missionaries tried to protect the rights of the indigenous residents and warned Māori not to sign the Treaty of Waitangi, there were also dishonest land agents, and others carried around the Treaty, gathering signatures from Māori. Eventually, churches and missionary societies came into possession of large areas of land. Although some land was specifically given by Māori for the building of promised churches and schools, many of these projects either failed to materialize or, when they did, served mainly settlers and their children. The cultural cost of conversion to the new religion was high, though many Māori appeared prepared to pay it. As the new religion spread and colonial rule increasingly impacted the tribes, Māori religious movements arose from within tribal life. Some were a mixture of traditional Māori and Christian ritual, but others, concerned with cultural losses, returned to traditional practices (Elsmore 1989: 200–52). These movements were highly political organizations—some in quite obvious ways, others more covertly. Those missionaries who engaged in land speculation and farming were on a collision course with Māori from the beginning. In the early encounter with colonization, Māori were secure in the knowledge that they outnumbered the new arrivals. Also, they were in possession of the whole territory, and they had their own language, laws, religious practices, and arts and crafts. Their welcoming of colonial rule to control the settlers would, however, signal the end of their place as the dominant culture in Aotearoa New Zealand. The far-reaching phenomenon that is colonization would see to that.

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Land and identity Land or whenua is critical to identity for Māori.4 The idea of land as a commodity for sale is unacceptable to the Māori psyche, as land is an ancestor and not for sale, and a landless Māori is literally a no-body. The relationship with land is understood through genealogy: the land is named Papatuanuku, the Earth Mother, and is held as an ancestor to all Māori. The first human, a woman, Hine-ahu-one, was shaped from the sands of Papatuanuku, making her an ancient ancestor in the genealogy or whakapapa of every Māori (and as a female ancestor, she holds particular significance and emotional attachment for wahine Māori). Every person of Māori descent has origins that can be traced to specific areas of land in Aotearoa. That link also extends through a series of spiritual deities to the land herself and beyond to Io or the Source of all things. To knowingly sever that link is akin to cultural, spiritual, psychological, and emotional suicide (Cadigan 2002: 123–37). Consequently, the devastation of land through the confiscation and conquest that resulted from colonial rule, together with an application of foreign land development and agriculture, has constituted a violation, the effects of which Māori could not have imagined. During the early years of colonization, numerous laws were passed to aid European settlers (Naumann et al. 1990: 56–7), and the insistence by the colonial government on land titles to aid land purchases further complicated life for Māori because tribal land has multiple owners. The passing of laws such as in 1844 Native Trusts Act, which stated that Māori education was to help civilize the Māori and make them more like Europeans, and the 1852 Constitution Act, which based the right to vote on property title, and thereby disqualified most Māori males because they did not hold individual title, was destructive. Although wahine Māori were land owners like settler women, they were not eligible to vote. The 1863 Suppression of Rebellion Act was passed to punish Māori tribes who rebelled against the government, and the Act worked in conjunction with the 1863 New Zealand Settlement Act, which sanctioned land confiscations where Māori were termed ‘rebellious’ by the Colonial Governor. The scale of loss of land can be seen in the figures over a relatively short period of time: Māori held 66,000,000 acres in 1840, 11,000,000 acres in 1891, and 7,000,000 acres in 1911. Much of the land taken was cleared of native trees to make way for farming and development of small towns on prime land. Māori were forced into areas of Native Reserve Lands, much of which was unproductive. The dispossession that followed colonization was in no way passively accepted by Māori. In pre-European times there had been regular inter-tribal skirmishes resulting from differences, generally over land or women, but in the early years of colonial rule, both Māori men and women entered a united struggle and literally fought side by side to defend their land and their culture, and fierce wars raged in many areas. However, the pace of colonization, intimately entwined with missionary zeal and moralizing, quickly attacked the very fabric of tribal existence, bringing new social problems and diseases,

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undermining the role of the hereditary chiefs, and hastening the demise of a proud people—none more so than wahine Māori. The impact of loss of cultural identity and practices that resulted from colonization cannot be overstated. Because of the role of women in English society as chattels of their husbands, fathers, or other significant male relatives, a conflict arose for wahine Māori whose mana gave them a position of authority in the tribe. Their roles were not limited on the basis of gender, and depending on their lineage, wahine could hold the title of chief in their own right. Initially, there was recognition of mana wahine by some who engaged in business with the tribes, and there are at least thirteen wahine hereditary chiefs identified on the original Waitangi Treaty. (Although because the Māori language does not ascribe gender, however, it is difficult to accurately know how many other women may have signed. Any who did, it should be noted, would have been of chiefly rank.) Thus, while there was defiance and protest in the struggle against the cultural violations of the settler government and people—resistance that happened on a large scale and at many levels—it became increasingly impossible to stand against the colonial philosophy of assimilation being enshrined in legislation. Colonization and Christianity in a relatively short period redefined the societal reality of Māori. Power was dramatically taken from the hereditary chiefs, who had hitherto had total control, and was given to a settler government. However, it should be understood that not everything that came with colonization had a detrimental effect on Māori. Some agricultural technology, means of communication, methods of transport, and education had the capacity to improve the life and health of Māori. One thing that has always worked both for and against Māori has been their ability to adapt to new knowledge, and in the initial encounter this was also true. Nevertheless, there were specific aspects of colonial life, such as speculation, alcohol, diseases like influenza and syphilis, patriarchal dominance in society, organized religion, and the inseparable link between the Crown or governing body and the Church, that worked systematically against Māori tribal lifestyle. Government policy was geared to meet the needs of white settlers—known to the Māori as Pākehā—and legislation played a huge role in diminishing the visibility of Māori in their own land, mostly through the outlawing of various cultural practices and aspects of their lifestyle. Experienced in the process of colonization, the government legislated to civilize the ‘savages’, applying a settler bias in education and creating laws that alienated Māori from their lands. At the same time, as the Missionaries sought to convert these ‘pagans’ with preaching and the insistence on a particular code of moral conduct, they lobbied the government to outlaw traditional religious practices and spirituality (Naumann et al. 1990: 54–5).

The Mā o ri King Movement Māori tried to reassert their authority over the land but without a structure to accomplish the task, they could not make progress. Just seventeen years after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, Māori moved to set up a parallel structure to the British Crown to

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preserve their way of life and exert their political strength and right to govern their territories. A Māori General Assembly was held in 1856, and agreement was reached to establish the Kingitanga, or the Māori King Movement. One of the conditions tribes agreed to was that any financial support of the British Queen would cease, along with further land sales to the government, and the building of roads by the settlers (Vaggioli 2000: 149–67). In a specifically Māori ritual, Te Wherowhero of Waikato was made king at Rangiaowhia in 1857, and later at Ngaruawahia, in a Christian Church ritual, the crowning was reenacted. He took the title King Potatau. Although the impact of colonization had varied with different tribes—some through fighting with British troops, others through the stroke of the pen by legislators and unscrupulous land agents aided by missionaries greedy for land—all had been affected by loss of lands, and in the end, the result was the same: Māori became tribes living in poverty, subject to the will and cultural norms of another people, namely the British. It was hoped that under the King or Kingtanga all tribes would unite and halt the dispossession and diminishment of mana Māori or Māori prestige (Naumann et al. 1990: 54–5). Addressing the first breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi thus occurred almost as soon as it was signed, and Māori have continued to seek redress from the Crown regarding old grievances and have additionally called for the examination of contemporary issues affecting Māori. Initially, an application of policies to assimilate Māori into the civilized Pākehā culture was seen as the answer by the settler government. However, by the time the Waitangi Tribunal was setup in 1975 to hear breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi, these policies had waned and the Māori cultural renaissance had begun. Traditional arts and entertainment forms such as oratory, poetry, song, and dance had somehow managed to survive and retain aspects of Māori culture, language, traditional spirituality, and religion. The tangihanga or funeral rite is one of the key rituals that survived colonization and with it the cultural DNA necessary to re-establish what it means to be Māori.

Wahine Mā o ri and leadership In a context of racial disharmony, poverty, disease, loss of language, land, and mana Māori, there are significant wahine Māori whose contribution in leadership stands as testament to mana wahine and their true place in the tribal structure. Te Puea Herangi (1883–1952) from Waikato was the great-granddaughter of the first King Potatau and granddaughter of Tawhiao, the second King (King 1984: 9–12). Her life was privileged in that she was educated in the ways of Māori by her uncle, the third King, Mahuta, and also attended European schools where she was educated in their ways. In that sense, her education was rounded, and she was equipped to walk in both worlds. As a relatively young woman, she returned to her people and assumed a leadership role, and few people dared question her. What makes her so interesting is that at a time when women in both cultures were either invisible or decorative, she took up the mantle of leadership and exercised her mana. She called meetings where Māori issues were discussed and

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successfully led the fight against the conscription of Māori to fight in the First World War. She instigated building projects for her people, campaigned to elect Māori members to Parliament, composed and taught many songs and laments, and opened an orphanage for children of the smallpox epidemic. Arguably, Te Puea Herangi’s greatest legacy to Māori was to groom her grand-niece, Te Atairangikahu (1931–2006), who succeeded her father Koroki in 1966 as Te Arikinui (a title she took instead of the transliteration of Queen, Kuini). It would fall to her to face the second wave of the global assault on the land and culture of Iwi Māori. During her forty-year reign, Te Arikinui, through the exercise of her mana wahine, made herself accessible to her people and developed relationships at the highest levels of governance at home, with Pacific Island Nations, and indigenous peoples around the world. The estimated 100,000 people who came to pay their respects to her on the day of her burial shocked and amazed the nation. The main route down the country was closed for six hours to enable people to attend the service and accompany her to her final resting place. (The irony of this was not lost on Māori who had previously fought unsuccessfully to stop the road being routed so close to that burial ground.) People from all cultural origins gathered or watched television coverage of the funeral rites that encompassed traditional Māori practices and Christian rituals, and mourned a woman, a leader, a Māori. Many of those who made speeches while she had lain in state commented on how her mana, exercised with dignity and humility, had enabled her to unite Māori and put their relationship with Pākehā on a new positive level. As mentioned previously, there is an intrinsic link between Māori and land (through shared female gender that articulates their kinship and as one source of mana). Māori understand their well-being is linked absolutely to the health of their environment, and the depth of connection to the land felt by women motivates them when land issues arise. Thus in 1975, Whina Cooper, an 80-year-old woman, led a protest to Parliament to demand justice with regard to Māori land grievances. As a response, a tribunal was set up by act of Parliament in 1975 to begin to address land grievances, and it was amended in 1985 to include claims from 1840. The tribunal was stopped from making recommendations involving land in private ownership in 1993. In 2003, land rights were again the issue, and wahine Māori led from the front once more. The protest was over government legislation that vested ownership of the seabed and foreshore in the Crown, extinguishing the tribes’ traditional right of ownership. Such legislation extinguished customary rights guaranteed by the Te Tiriti o Waitangi and opened the way for commercial development without Māori involvement. When the protest reached Parliament, the Māori Members of Parliament from the government and opposition parties came under huge pressure to stand with the people. An estimated 30,000 people gathered that day and wahine Māori Members of Parliament either stood in solidarity with the people or at least faced up to the protestors. The Māori male Members of Parliament opted to side with the Crown against the wishes of their people. One wahine Māori Member of the ruling Labour Party, Tariana Turuia, resigned her seat over the issue and in a bi-election was returned to Parliament as an independent member. From there she dialogued with all the tribes and based on that support, co-founded a new political party, the Māori

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Party. Four of the seven existing Māori seats in Parliament were won in the 2005 election by the new party, which campaigned on a promise to fight to overturn the foreshore and seabed legislation.

The feminist movement and wahine Māori The formal struggle for equality for women in the West acknowledges origins in the 1792 publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; however, the phase of the feminist movement pertinent to this essay is the so-called second wave. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the movement for women’s rights held a philosophical position that men had benefited from women’s oppression politically, socially, economically, and emotionally. From the start, Pākehā women presumed a right to speak for all women on the basis that the gender bias of society disadvantaged all women in similar ways. When wahine Māori challenged that presumption, their position was not well received by Pākehā, because it was one more uncomfortable reminder of the injustices perpetrated by Pākehā on Māori. Pākehā women correctly painted a portrait of white women as victims of male oppression, but struggled to acknowledge that, like Pākehā males, they also had derived advantages at the expense of Māori generally and wahine particularly. The pioneer wahine Māori who sought recognition of the Māori feminist reality were labeled Māori Activists and were excluded from the debate for a considerable period of time. Because of an historic struggle for recognition, wahine Māori persisted, and eventually they gained academic recognition of their position. There remains, however, a mental block for Pākehā when writing descriptively of their experiences. If they refer to themselves as New Zealanders, that descriptor can be interpreted as inclusive of all citizens of Aotearoa New Zealand, irrespective of ethnicity. Simply referring to women in general without explaining which women in particular is equally misleading and presumes a right to speak for women of other racial origins. The dilemma for Pākehā arises over their origins and their desire to identify with the land of Aotearoa New Zealand. In Aotearoa New Zealand, 168 years after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, Pākehā dominate all the institutions of power in the country. Women currently fill the offices of Prime Minister and Chief Justice, and, until recently, the position of Governor General. Over generations, Pākehā cultural preferences and philosophies have been enshrined in legislation that they would argue is for the good of all New Zealanders. Unfortunately, there has been generational failure to recognize the cultural needs of Māori or their unique place in the land as the original inhabitants. While, there are people who argue Aotearoa New Zealand is now post-colonial, it is still intimately linked to England, as Queen Elizabeth is still head of State (represented by the Governor General), and much of what constituted colonial rule remains. Māori have had apologies from Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Ministers for past injustices, but there is little acknowledgement that many of these wrongs continue in legislation, education, and social policy.

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Globalization and changing relationships Colonization, Christianity, and feminism have all contributed to the situation Māori find themselves in today. Each has had its unique impact, but they are also linked in both positive and negative ways. History shows Māori loss of autonomy and self-determination can be directly attributed to engagement with this trinity of social cultural phenomena. Globalization is merely a continuation of these aspects. However, the scale and speed at which globalization has occurred has created new challenges for previously held ideas about Māori issues. Technological and scientific advances have meant the development of a global communication network, improved modes of travel, trade opportunities, and increased longevity. Māori, however, would argue that the subsequent global expansion that has taken place has not viewed seriously the consequences for the environment, the reality of finite resources, and, thus, the threat to life itself. Under the terms of the Treaty of Waitangi, bi-cultural development was envisaged by Māori. Although that has never been achieved, in the past twenty-five years there has been some progress. Māori language is now recognized as one of two official languages, the other being English. However, this bi-cultural development is being challenged by globalization. The rate at which new peoples have arrived due to global expansion has overstretched the cultural infrastructure’s ability to cope. Such diverse cultures are changing the physical face of the country, and the dominant culture has moved from the nominal use of the term bi-cultural to using multicultural to identify the sociological makeup of the nation. From Māori experience, this labeling can be interpreted as an act that results in all cultures being ignored equally, with an unwritten expectation that they will defer to the norms of the dominant or Pākehā culture. New cultures have brought new ways of relating to land and new ideas of resource management. The Department of Conservation is charged with managing natural resources and, together with the Environmental Court, is responsible for the application of the Resource Management Act. However, Māori spirituality is complex, and it has restrictions and obligations that must be observed to retain a safe cultural relationship between humans and their environment (Shirres 1994: 3–11). Any failure to do so will diminish mana, reduce well-being, and, in extreme cases, has been known to result in death. Old and new ways of relating to the land, therefore, can conflict. The financial implications of globalization are also problematic for Māori. As the global ideology has expanded to include Aotearoa New Zealand, the emphasis has shifted away from a welfare state, which viewed people as a priority, to an economy inextricably linked to the economic growth of larger countries through free trade agreements. There is no space in the global market for cultural or spiritual needs to be met, and both are essential aspects for Māori well-being. Globalization in Māori experience is primarily about wealth; the expansion of multinational companies through investment and trade agreements are responsible for the rape and pollution of the environment irrespective of

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the objections of the indigenous people. Foreign investors have been able, at worst, to ignore or, at best, comply with severely watered-down local resource consents through exemption clauses in the free trade agreements with the government. In Aotearoa New Zealand, globalization’s influence on forestry, gold mining, coal mining, border control, imports and exports, and power generation has had damaging effects. Although New Zealand has tried to present itself as a green country (it has a nuclearfree policy and tries to capitalize on its clean, green image to attract tourists and new immigrants, many of whom are eager to leave overpopulated, war-torn, polluted lands in search of safer, cleaner, conflict-free, spacious surroundings in which to live), the philosophical and cultural differences that some trade partners bring with their businesses have strained the clean green image and the nuclear-free policy. These differences have hindered Māori in the exercise of customary rights to access traditional resources. In the new global economy, the New Zealand government would barely qualify as a participant on the basis of size alone, but from a Māori perspective, the impact of ‘big picture’ business practices is huge. There is only one tribe that has successfully invested its Treaty settlement monies and that is Ngai Tahu, which has accumulated an estimated half a billion dollars. From a business perspective, this might say ‘success’, but from the perspective of tribal members, this wealth has not prevented their over-representation as social welfare dependants. The gap between rich and poor is widening in New Zealand, and Māori remain at the bottom of the heap. Social services are overloaded and failing; the health system is collapsing, with patients being struck off waiting lists for hospital treatment because of budget blowouts; and benefits and wages are not keeping pace with the increased cost of living. The level of foreign investment in industry and property has severely reduced the resources available to the Crown to settle Māori claims before the Waitangi Tribunal. The stress on families to cope is enormous, and women bear much of it.

The present reality The redefined societal reality of New Zealand has seen Māori men struggle to retain their identity and mana. This has caused them to align themselves more with the individualistic perspective of the Pākehā to avoid the levels of invisibility their women are suffering. The result of academic study and research show Māori are over-represented in negative statistics, and increasing patterns of anti-social behavior have been identified. Although positive achievements in society do exist, they are often masked, as such achievements are not always acknowledged as specifically Māori, but placed in a broader category as the successes of New Zealanders. However, any antisocial or negative acts, if committed by Māori, will always be identified thus (although rarely naming the specific tribal affiliation). The loss of mana wahine has overwhelmed many wahine Māori and rendered them incapable of communicating or functioning appropriately in relationships. The acts of violent abuse, including torture resulting in deaths perpetrated by wahine of all ages

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against children, are arguably a direct consequence of the erosion of the spiritual power and prestige or mana needed to achieve the goals of life. Such behavior is in stark contradiction to their traditional role as whare tangata, literally meaning the house of people, which refers to their ability to bring forth new life and ensure the future of the tribe, and is also linked to the task of educating future generations in traditional customs and arts suited to their gifts. The cultural ignorance that Māori experience underscores their invisibility in their own land (Cadigan 2002: 66–73). Wahine Māori are disproportionately represented in all negative statistics. They smoke more than any other sector of society; high numbers suffer the effects of alcohol and drug abuse; they are over-represented in recorded incidences of breast cancer. They are less likely to pursue educational opportunities and, as a result, generally work in unskilled jobs or are unemployed. Many suffer from diabetes and show chronic symptoms of high blood pressure and obesity. They are more likely to be involved in domestic violence as victims than any other section of society and are on the increase as the perpetrators of violence. As their mana has diminished, they have slipped into a cycle of violence, addiction, and psychological illness. Wahine Māori have asked little of the society in which the live, and in response, they have received even less. In the face of generational displacement at every level of functioning through colonization, Christianity, feminism, and globalization, wahine Māori have been unable to resource themselves adequately to maintain their mana and perform their traditional roles as tribal leaders, receptacles of knowledge, teachers of children, protectors of the new life of the tribe, and elders who hold the world of the living and the ancestors in tension. The picture articulated above is in the main bleak reading, but, sadly, accurate.

Initiatives to address imbalances There have been efforts made by the dominant culture to address the societal imbalances that exist, particularly in the areas of education and health. It is important to note that initiatives in both areas are the result of the agitation by Māori leaders over generations as they watched the demise of their proud warrior nations. Loss of the native tongue has been catastrophic because it is through its unique imagery that ancient histories, genealogies, and arts and crafts are properly articulated. The teaching of Māori language in preschool, primary school, and college, and at university levels is happening, but unlike the English language, the other official language of the country, it is not compulsory, even for Māori. Māori health initiatives have been set up and are credited with at least moderate success, educating and addressing some of the chronic health issues of Māori. As already stated, the Waitangi Tribunal was set up to handle historic land claims and continues to hear evidence from tribal authorities and recommend settlements, which must be sanctioned by government. Māori had hoped that the return of their tribal lands would allow the development of the social and economic base of the tribe from which to

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engage in political debate affecting them. There is widespread tribal support for Māori autonomy to be recognized and a bi-cultural relationship to be exercised based on the Treaty of Waitangi as the founding document of Aotearoa New Zealand. However, the impact of globalization and immigration has all but stalled any hope of these initiatives being realized. A current of xenophobia is prevalent in New Zealand, where new ethnic arrivals are treated with suspicion, especially those who differ in physical appearance from the dominant Pākehā. In an effort to appease the racial hysteria and under the pretense that there is one law for all, the government has committed itself to remove what it calls ‘race based funding’. As a result, funding to many of the previously generated health and educational initiatives that were intended to close the gaps between the social needs of Māori and other groups in society have been cut. Māori know that the idea of one law for all is a biased law because they have generations of experience of Pākehā power structures interpreting all aspects of life from the context of a Pākehā cultural norm, with many genuinely unable to comprehend the application of a particular bias in their favor. Language developed to articulate this perspective is littered with references to the country’s four million inhabitants as ‘New Zealanders’. Often prefaced with the word ‘all’, such references suggest a level of inclusiveness that simply does not exist. Evidence of this is obvious when examining language usage. The media will refer to Māori activists or activists but never Pākehā activists being involved in demonstrations. Again, the police may be seeking a male Māori wearing particular clothing to help with enquiries, or a male of the same description, but never a Pākehā male. Until the impact of the global movement of peoples, use of an ethnic adjective to describe people in negative situations was identified almost exclusively with Māori and Pacific Islanders. Later the word ‘Asian’ was added, but as yet, not Pākehā. Positive descriptions are associated with the dominant culture, whereas negatives are equated with ethnic minorities, such as Māori. Whether this perspective has a basis in fact or whether its source is the bias of sociological researchers is arguable. However, Māori experience it as reality.

Conclusions Each wave of societal change that has occurred since the first encounter with colonial settlers has permeated Māori society to varying degrees. In each era, there were aspects absolutely antithetical to whanaungatanga, or the practice of right relationship that ordered life in the Māori world. Colonization first introduced a social system based on a three-tier class system, with individual rights that were exclusive to males, and with an understanding of land as a commodity for sale. In the tribal world of the Māori whakapapa, or genealogy, no gender determines who is able to exercise chiefly power. Also, the land, to which people belong, is honored as an ancestor and cannot be sold. Another problematic import occurred with Christian Missionaries who brought Christian Gospels wrapped in organized religion. They offered a chance for individuals to gain either eternal salvation with the Christian God in heaven or eternal damnation in hell

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for those who would not relinquish pagan practices and convert to Christianity. Although some tribes acknowledged a Supreme Being or deity named Io, all tribes related to multiple spiritual beings or atua who assumed responsibility for different aspects of daily life and death; nothing happened unless deference was first paid to the particular deity. And at death the wairua or spirit journeyed to the realm of ultimate reality, the spirit world where the ancestors dwell. Traditional rites and rituals were essential to right relationship with ancestors, spiritual powers, and all aspects of the environment, including people; and such religious practices and belief systems were intrinsically linked to communal living. The issue of women’s rights was a struggle aiming to counter patriarchy as feminism advocated equal rights for women. It is an historical fact (and referred to above) that certain wahine had land in their own right and exercised chiefly roles when the first settlers arrived. However, in traditional Māori tribal society, particular roles in the community attributed to male or female are allocated on the basis of ability, bearing, safety, and the laws of tapu. Roles are complementary, and it is the role that is important for the functioning of the tribe. Each role has a traditional role player; in the absence of a traditional player, a non-traditional player is acceptable. The impact of globalization on Māori can best be understood as the second wave of colonization, although one must keep in mind the effects of the first wave of colonization are still residual in the Māori culture. Globalization has been marked by a government commitment to increasing wealth, securing a name on the world stage, and establishing a stake in the global market. Despite promises of an improved standard of living, statistics show Māori remain at the bottom of the social scale, and the expected wealth and associated benefits have not filtered down beyond the already wealthy and foreign investors. The cultural renaissance continues, but occurs in the changed global context where value is being defined by others. The cost of living in the global village has huge implications for Māori. All that once constituted the fabric of the Māori way of life needs to be redefined within the parameters of what remains of the culture and the context. In order to reassert mana Māori and mana wahine in Aotearoa, a commitment to tribal unity for health and economic development, as well as a decolonization of the mind, must be instigated.

Notes 1. Waitangi was the place where the first formal signings occurred in 1840. 2. The marae is the traditional gathering place where the rituals of life and death occur. See Tauroa (1986: 3–9). 3. Signed 6 February 1840. 4. Whenua is the Māori word for land and placenta. 5. There is an old proverb or whakatuaki that reads: ‘He wahine he whenua, ngaro ai te tangata’, meaning, ‘Men die for women and land’. 6. Māori had numerous tribal-specific stories that were told and retold of their warrior status and how they had overcome adversities of supernatural proportions, as well as how they had triumphed in encounters with other tribes. 7. Sign language has recently become the third to be accorded such status.

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Works Cited Cadigan, Tui (2002). ‘Restoring Mana W āhine’, in Jane Beaglehole Ritchie and James E. Ritchie, et al. (Eds), Overcoming Violence in Aotearoa New Zealand. Wellington: Philip Garside, 123–37. Elsmore, Bronwyn (1989). Mana from Heaven: A Century of Maori Prophets in New Zealand. Tauranga, NZ: Moana Press, 200–52. King, Michael (1984). Te Puea Herangi. Wellington: School Publications Branch, Department of Education, 9–12 Mikaere, A. (1994). ‘Maori Women: Caught in the Contradictions of a Colonised Reality’, Waikato Law Review, 125: 3–4. Nauman, Ruth, Harrison, L., and Winiata, T. K. (1990). Te Mana o te Tiriti = The Leaving Treaty. Auckland: New House, 56–7. Orange, Claudia (1987). The Treaty of Waitangi. Wellington: Allen and Unwin, 32–59. Shirres, Michael P. (1994). Tapu : Te Mana o Nga Aatua : The Mana of the Spiritual Powers : A Maori Theological Understanding of Tapu. Ponsonby, NZ: Te Runanga o te Hahi Katorika ki Aotearoa, 3–11. (1997). Te Tangata = The Human Person. Auckland: Accent Publications, 33–42. Tauroa, Hiwi, and Tauroa, Patricia (1986). Te Marae: A Guide to Customs and Protocol. Auckland: Reed Methuen, 3–9. Vaggioli, Dom Felici (2000). History of New Zealand and its Inhabitants, trans. J. Crockett. Dunedin: University of Otago Press.

chapter 14

first nation, empir e, a n d gl oba liz ation andrea smith

[Theology] is the place from which we are free to raid and return. We are in Indian Territory . . . To dwell within Indian Territory . . . we must necessarily resort to tactics—the tactics of the ‘outlaw’ of the ‘native’. Gavin Hymanm (2001: 148)

In Gavin Hyman’s analysis of postmodern theology, which details the imbrication of theology in discourses of power, he casually, and without irony, evokes the term ‘Indian territory’ to connote the space from which the theologian must resort to the tactics of the ‘outlaw’. In his larger argument, he evokes an Agamban-like state of exception for theology, where theology must be conducted in the realm of radical undecidability, a theology excluded from but belonging to the law, as it were. So, it is significant that to make this argument, he relies on the obvious racist connotation of Natives as ‘outlaws’ who live in a place without a home. Unfortunately, as this essay will argue, this tendency to depict Natives as ‘outlaws’ is not unique to Hyman, but exists even within feminist and liberation theologies. That is, the United States, despite the critiques that many theologians make of it, is still envisaged as a place of law, thereby rending Native peoples, whose genocide is the foundation of the USA, outside the law. Consequently, the theological strategy of engagement with Native peoples does resemble the tactic of ‘raid and return’: that is a selective use of ‘indigenous’ principles without engagement in the fundamental contradiction indigenous peoples expose in the project of liberation. Furthermore, as I will discuss later, this problematic engagement is fundamentally gendered. These problematic engagements with Native theologies and Native struggles in non-Native feminist/liberation theologies emerge not so much from the individual motivations of particular theologians. Rather they reflect the larger colonial discourse of which we are all part that holds that indigenous peoples must disappear. In fact, they

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must always be disappearing, in order to allow non-indigenous peoples rightful claim over this land. Through this logic of genocide, non-Native peoples then become the rightful inheritors of all that was indigenous—land, resources, indigenous spirituality, or culture. As Kate Shanley notes, Native peoples are a permanent ‘present absence’ in the US colonial imagination, an ‘absence’ that reinforces, at every turn, the conviction that Native peoples are indeed vanishing and that the conquest of Native lands is justified. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam describe this absence as an ambivalently repressive mechanism [that] dispels the anxiety in the face of the Indian, whose very presence is a reminder of the initially precarious grounding of the American nation-state itself . . . In a temporal paradox, living Indians were induced to ‘play dead’, as it were, in order to perform a narrative of manifest destiny in which their role, ultimately, was to disappear. (1994: 118–19)

Rayna Green further elaborates that the current Indian ‘wannabee’ phenomenon is based on a logic of genocide: non-Native peoples image themselves as the rightful inheritors of all that previously belonged to ‘vanished’ Indians, thus entitling them to ownership of this land. The living performance of ‘playing Indian’ by non-Indian peoples depends upon the physical and psychological removal, even the death, of real Indians. In that sense, the performance, purportedly often done out of a stated and implicit love for Indians, is really the obverse of another well-known cultural phenomenon, ‘Indian hating’, as most often expressed in another, deadly performance genre called ‘genocide’. (1988: 31)

Because the United States so foundationally rests on the disappearance of indigenous peoples, we can expect that it will be a challenge to make Native peoples significantly appear within theological discourse. And further, can indigenous peoples be made to appear in way that actually challenges the logics of empire? Or will their representation be trapped within the logics of multicultural recognition? These are some the challenges all liberation theologians face if they fundamentally wish to dismantle the logics of empire.

Liberal multiculturalism As the proliferation of Black, womanist, mujerista, Asian, etc., theologies indicate, liberation theologians in the USA have often relied on a politics of representation. That is, these theologies seek to represent the theological concerns of the communities from which theologians emerge. As Pui-lan Kwok argues, this strategy is not without its merits in a context where peoples from oppressed communities are denied a voice within mainstream theological discourse (2005: 36). Unfortunately, however, this representational strategy can in turn lend itself to totalizing and essentializing discourses about the communities theologians seek to represent. As Namsoon Kang argues, this ‘trap of essentialized identity’ (2004: 104) discursively restricts our political imaginary. This politics of recognition does not allow us to look at tensions and oppressive dynamics within communities, particularly,

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homophobia, sexism, ableism, and class oppression. We also often create litmus tests for cultural authenticity that restrict the kinds of intellectual and political creativity we need to challenge the status quo. In Native struggles, this can be exemplified by the oft-stated mantras,‘Traditional Native peoples cannot be Christian’ or ‘Native women can’t be feminists’, both of which I will discuss later in this essay. In addition, the theologian’s position vis-à-vis the communities they attempt to represent often allows theologians to become the self-appointed representatives of their communities regardless of whether they seek this leadership role. As a result, they may find themselves silencing the communities they wish to give voice to. Isasi-Diaz reflects upon some of these issues: The . . . issue to consider when dealing with the subject of presentation is that of ‘speaking for’ others. I have insisted since the very first published writings about mujerista theology that this theology is but one theological elaboration of Hispanic/ Latina women’s liberation theology. I have in no way claimed to speak for all Latinas, nor have I claimed that my elaborations are the only reflections of the beliefs of grassroots Latinas. I have always been concerned not only about speaking ‘for’ all Latinas but even as speaking ‘for’ any Latina. But the fact is that because mujerista theology is about creating a public voice for Latinas and capturing a political space for that voice, there is no other way to proceed but to speak whether ‘as’ or ‘for’. . . . The issue, then, is not whether in elaborating mujerista theology I speak for Latinas or not. Rather it is this: Do I speak so as to control those Latinas or to provide a platform for their voices, which are not totally separated from my own. (1993: 6–7)

This problem is particularly true for Native peoples; since many non-Natives have so little contact with Native peoples, they often have a tendency to presume that the one book that they have read by a Native author tells the truth about all Natives people. It is particularly challenging for Native theologians to write theology without unwittingly encouraging their readers to make broad assumptions regarding what all Native people think about political/theological issues. By not specifically and critically analyzing their positions vis-à-vis the communities they seek to represent, liberation theologians sometimes unconsciously assume the God’s eye position taken by mainstream theologians whom they oppose. As theologian David Batstone argues: How does one talk about the marginalized without . . . producing a reification of the victim, which is as condescending as any fixed concept? We must take care to attend to the multiple and fluid forms that victimization takes rather than reducing the victim to a new Other, and thus finding ourselves again representing others rather than attending to how they are self-represented. (1997: 16)

Many feminist theologians, such as Mary McClintock Fulkerson (1994), Sheila Greeve Davaney (1997), Serene Jones (1997), Sharon Welch (1997), Rachel Chopp (1997), and others (see Kwok 2005) have also noted that this representational politic often assumes an unproblematic relationship between a theologian’s experience in her or his communities and their knowledge about them. As Lata Mani argues: ‘The relationship between experience and knowledge is not one of correspondence but one fraught with history, contingency, and struggle’ (1992).

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Poststructuralist analysis has provided an entry point for critiquing the politics of representation because it points to the fragmentation and discontinuities between self, experience, and identity, thus troubling the politics of representation. On the other hand, many theorists have also adopted a kind of vulgar constructionism, arguing that because axes of identities (race, class, etc.) are socially constructed, they therefore do not ‘really’ exist. However, as Kimberlé Crenshaw states: ‘To say that a category such as race or gender is socially constructed is not to say that category has no significance in our world’ (1996: 375). She notes that social constructionism is helpful in showing how naturalized categories exclude and exercise power against excluded groups. Yet these categories are still performative and help shape those who are defined by these categories. In other words, as long as many members in society define an individual as ‘Indian’, this category will shape her subjectivity, even if she is not comfortable with that identity. Lisa Lowe similarly contests the ‘racial or ethnic’ subject, without dispelling the importance of identity politics. She argues that ‘the cultural productions of racialised women seek to articulate multiple, nonequivalent, but linked determinations without assuming their containment within the horizon of an absolute totality and its presumption of a singular subject’ (1997: 363). As long as the categories of race, gender, and sexuality continue to shape institutional structures and our senses of selfhood, oppositional politics on the basis of these identities is critical. As Crenshaw notes, ‘a strong case can be made that the most critical resistance strategy for disempowered groups is to occupy and defend a politics of social location rather than to vacate it and destroy it’ (1996: 375). Pui-lan Kwok, in her defense of many feminist theologians who have been accused of essentialism, argues that evocations of ‘Asian’ or ‘Black’ in these respective theologies are not necessarily essentialist moves—rather they are meant to be ‘suggestive’, not ‘definitive or exhaustive’ (2005: 36). Of course, the dynamics between suggestive and prescriptive interventions are not completely separate. That is, as ‘suggestive’ models for feminist theology (including postmodern analyses), begin to sediment, the radical interventions of today become the static orthodoxies of tomorrow. And as Gavin Hyman notes, even radical deconstructionist theologies are always in the contradiction of challenging metanarratives with their own metanarratives of the end of metanarratives (2001: 68). Regardless of the problems with essentialism, there is the critical problem of ‘recognition’ within the politics of representation. That is, assertions of difference unwittingly recapitulate capitalist and colonial imperatives. As Elizabeth Povinelli has so aptly demonstrated, the liberal state depends on a politics of multicultural recognition that includes ‘social difference without social consequence’ (2002: 16). She further argues: These state, public, and capital multicultural discourses, apparatuses, and imaginaries defuse struggles for liberation waged against the modern liberal state and recuperate these struggles as moments in which the future of the nation and its core institutions and values are ensured rather than shaken. (29)

Pui-lan Kwok similarly notes that multiculturalist rhetoric is used to erase the structures of domination within US society (2005: 42). Fumitaka Matsuoaka sheds further light onto this problem. He notes that the important struggle to be fought is not cultural validation.

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The dominant culture is prepared to accommodate a little ‘multiculturalism’—a pow wow here, a pipe ceremony there—as long as the structures of power are not challenged. Matsuoka states: ‘The central problems . . . have to do, ultimately, not with ethnic groupings or the distinctness of our cultural heritages as such, but with racism and its manifestations in American economic policy, social rule and class relations’ (1995: 18). Thus, we can be entrapped into the project of doing theological work primarily for academic recognition rather than through the praxis of actual liberation struggles. In our efforts to have our theological contributions recognized within the context of the academy, we often do not question the political effects of this recognition. Native scholar Glenn Coulthard explains that this politics of recognition also entraps colonized peoples in a death dance with their colonizers: [The] key problem with the politics of recognition when applied to the colonial context . . . [is that it] rests on the problematic assumption that the flourishing of Indigenous Peoples as distinct and self-determining agents is somehow dependent on their being granted recognition and institutional accommodation from the surrounding settler-state and society . . . Not only will the terms of recognition tend to remain the property of those in power to grant to their inferiors in ways that they deem appropriate, but also under these conditions, the Indigenous population will often come to see their limited and structurally constrained terms of recognition granted to them as their own. In effect, the colonized come to identify with ‘white liberty and white justice’. (2007)

Within the context of the academy, in what way have feminists, Native scholars, and scholars of color come to identify with the ideological state apparatus of the academy that retrenches white supremacy and colonialism? It is necessary to question the presence of Native peoples, feminists, or people of color in the academy as an unquestioned good. Does tenuring more feminist, Native, or ethnic studies scholars necessarily contribute to a ‘liberated’ academy, or does it serve to further retrench a colonial academic system by multiculturalizing it? Does our position in the academy help our communities or does it enable us to engage in what Cathy Cohen describes as a process of secondary marginalization (1999) that creates an elite class that can oppress and police the rest of the members of our communities? Have we fallen into the trap that Elizabeth Povinelli describes as simply adding social difference to the multicultural academy without social consequence? Does our presence help challenge the political and economic status quo, or does our presence serve as an alibi for the status quo? In asking these questions, I do not suggest that there is politically pure space from which to work outside the academic industrial complex. As Dorinne Kondo notes, ‘Opposition can be both contestatory and complicit, and yet still constitute a subversion that matters’ (1997: 11). However, it is imperative to ensure our opposition within the academy is more contestatory and less complicit. To foster oppositional work, it is important to examine to whom are we structurally accountable. ‘Liberation’ is a political practice rooted in building mass-based movements for social change. The implications of liberation projects, then, are that those in the academy interested in ‘liberation’ would actually need to be part of or develop relationships of

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accountability to movement-building work. By movement-building work, I mean organizing that is focused on organizing people who are not already activists for the purpose of building a sufficient mass-base of resistance that can challenge the status quo. If we see the need for such global movements for social justice, what should be the relationship of liberation theologians in the academy to these movements? Are good intentions on the part of scholars good enough, or do we need formal relationships of accountability to these movements? Can we further social change when currently our only formal relationships of accountability are to tenure committees and other groups that represent those in power with no corresponding relationship of accountability to those we claim to represent? To create people power, we then need to develop formal relationships of accountability to movement-building groups. How that accountability can be structured will differ—whether it is formally joining a group or it is developing a formal relationship where an academic provides expertise that supports movement-work—the idea is that if we are going to challenge the individualistic system we have, we need to engage in collective action through relationships built on mutual responsibility and accountability. The system can handle thousands of ‘oppositional’ academics who do work on their own; it is not until these thousands begin to act collectively that the system can be challenged. Several excuses are given by academics as to why they cannot engage in collective engagement. All of these excuses are indicative of the extent to which academics become unconsciously (or consciously) loyal to the current capitalist system. Academics will often say, for instance, that they are ‘too busy’ to do activist work. The reality, however, is that everyone is ‘too busy’ for organizing. If we were to build mass movements around those who are not busy, we would have three people to do the work. So, the assumption behind this excuse is that academics should have some kind of special dispensation from activist work. But why should academics be any less responsible for taking part in activist work than florists, garbage collectors, or beekeepers? The assumption that academics should have some special dispensation suggests an investment in social elitism that would hold academics in a special category from other workers of the world. Thus, the engagement within Native feminist theologies suggests that we can focus less on a politics of representation and more on a praxis-based reflection on the material conditions Native women face as they are situated within the nexus of patriarchy, colonialism, and white supremacy. In this essay, my goal is not to represent Native women’s or Native communities’ voices. Rather it is to ask the question: What theological questions emerge from the material conditions under which indigenous women live?

Native feminisms I think one of the reasons Indian women don’t call themselves feminists is because they don’t want to make enemies of men, and I just say, go forth and offend without inhibition. That’s generally why I see women hold back, who don’t want to be seen as strident. I don’t want to be seen as a man-hater, but I think if we have enough

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man-haters, we might actually have the men change for once. I guess I’m just not into kowtowing that way. I think that fundamentally puts the argument in the field of the dominant, in this case, of men. I think men, in this particular case, are very, very good at avoiding responsibility and avoiding accountability and avoiding justice. And not calling yourself a feminist, that’s one way they do that. Well, feminism, that’s for white women. Oh feminists, they’re not Indian. They’re counter-revolutionary. They’re all man-haters. They’re all ball-busters. They’ve gotten out of order. No, first of all that presumes that Native women weren’t active in shaping our identity before white women came along. And that abusive male behavior is somehow traditional, and it’s absolutely not. So I reject that. That’s a claim against sovereignty. I think that’s a claim against Native peoples. I think it’s an utter act of racism and white supremacy . . . And I do think it’s important that we say we’re feminists without apology. (Smith 2008: 115)

In developing a Native feminist theological analysis, however, it is first necessary to challenge prevailing essentialist claims that Native women cannot be feminists (see Jaimes and Halsey 1992; Monture-Angus 1995; Grande 2004), which negatively impact the development of indigenous feminist theory by erasing the diversity of thought that exists within both scholarly and activist circles (Smith 2002). To the extent that Native women’s writings on feminism are cited, their use is often limited to demonstrating the racism of white feminism. Such rhetorical strategies limit Native women to a politics of inclusion—let us include Native women in feminist theory (or if we do not think that they can be included, let us reject feminist theory completely). This politics of inclusion inevitably presumes that feminism is in fact defined by white women to which indigenous women should or should not respond. Often white women will, in the spirit of antiracism, make similar arguments, without questioning the presumption that white women own the term ‘feminist’. For instance, Catherine Keller critiques Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza for upholding a feminist politic as normative for all women, she makes the normative claim that women of color do not like term ‘feminist’ (1997: 70). However, terminology is strategic, and hence shifting and contingent. Different women of color communities may use or reject terms at different moments. But what gets erased in this discussion is the large number of women of color and indigenous women who do call themselves feminists for strategic purposes. In fact, while Native ‘feminists’ may be accused of selling out to white feminists, their re-appropriation of the term ‘feminist’ may signal just the opposite. Many Native women argue that rejecting the term ‘feminist’ for its connotations of whiteness allows white women to determine the meaning of the word ‘feminist’, rather than allow Native women to define it. Such a move allows white women to define feminism and to define how gender politics should/could be addressed, rather than more directly challenge the politics they carry on in the name of feminism. One Native activist puts it this way in response to the question: Is feminism white? I think that’s giving that concept to someone else, which I think is ridiculous. It’s something that there has to be more discussion about what that means. I always considered, they took that from us, in a way. That’s the way I’ve seen it. So I can’t see it as a bad thing, because I think the origins are from people who had empowered women a long time ago. (Smith 2002: 311)

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Thus essentially, many Native women activists argue that feminism, far from being white, is actually an indigenous concept appropriated by white women! Native femininist theorist Lee Maracle writes that it is important for all women, including Native women, to develop a more global perspective on the women’s movement—that white women from North America are only one small part of this movement: A good number of non-white women have addressed the women’s movement and decried the fact that we are outside the women’s movement. I have never felt outside of that movement . . . I have never felt that the women’s movement was centered or defined by women here in North America. That the white women of North America are racist and that they define the movement in accordance with their own narrow perspective should not surprise us . . . We are part of a global movement of women in the world, struggling for emancipation. The world will define the movement. We are part of the women who will define it . . . I represent the future of the women in North America, just as any other woman does. That white women only want to hear from me as a Native and not as a voice in the women’s movement is their loss. (1982: 49)

These theoretical insights fundamentally challenge how feminism has been both theorized and historicized in scholarly and activist circles. For instance, the feminist movement is generally periodized into the so-called first, second, and third waves of feminism. The first wave is characterized by the suffragette movement; the second wave is characterized by the formation of the National Organization for Women, abortion rights politics, and the fight for the Equal Rights Amendments. Suddenly, during the third wave of feminism, women of color make an appearance to transform feminism into a multicultural movement (see Heywood and Drake 1997; Nicholson 1997; Kesselman et al. 1999; Kaschak 2001). This periodization necessarily centers the histories of white middle-class women to which women of color attach themselves. So it is not a surprise that many women of color and Native women resist identifying with this movement. However, if we re-centered Native women in an account of feminist history, we might begin with 1492 when Native women collectively resisted colonization. In this new history, the importance of anti-colonial struggle would be central in our articulation of feminism. We might understand that there are multiple feminist histories emerging from multiple communities of color that intersect at points and diverge in others. Such a re-periodization would not minimize the contributions made by white feminists, but would de-center them from our historicizing and analysis.

Beyond the nation-state In the context of empire and globalization, I would argue that the critical question Native feminist analysis puts on the table is the presumptiveness of the nation-state. That is, social justice activists, as well as the US-based liberation theologians, often criticize US policies, but they do not critically interrogate the contradictions between the USA

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articulating itself as a democratic country, on one hand, and simultaneously founding itself on the past and current genocide of Native peoples, on the other hand. Sharon Welch’s After Empire demonstrates this problematic. I use her work as an example, not because she does a poor job of engaging Native scholars and theologians. Rather, her work is illustrative precisely because she engages Native thinkers so thoroughly. In an effort to theorize theological resources to challenge empire, her work, in a very praiseworthy fashion, centralizes the question of Native genocide and thoroughly engages Native theologians and scholars from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds. Her engagement is careful to contextualize all of these thinkers within the political history of Native colonization and resists the temptation to appropriate Native cultural or spiritual writings or ceremonies outside of this larger political context. Because Welch does such a careful job in her engagement with Native scholars, it is noteworthy that she stops short of situating the United States as a settler colonial state. Rather, while she names the genocide Native peoples have faced, she places that squarely within the ‘past actions of our ancestors’ (2004: 103). She further contrasts the ‘nobility of our ideas’ from the ‘brutality of our actions’ (103). Thus genocide, while pervasive in US history, is limited to unfortunate actions that contradict US democratic ideals. Therefore, under this rubric it is certainly possible for the USA to exist in rightful relationship with indigenous peoples through different actions. In Welch’s cases, it appears that this relationship can be remedied through ‘restoring significant amounts of land, and of protecting and honoring what has already been restored’ (45). In short, Native people’s salvation rests again on a politics of recognition. Our land rights must be recognized by the settler colonial state, but there is nothing to suggest that we should question the existence of the settler colonial state itself. Welch’s analysis is predicated on what David Kazanjian refers to as the ‘colonizing trick’—the liberal myth of the USA, as founded on democratic principles that have been eroded through the practices of slavery and genocide, rather than as a state fundamentally constituted by capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy (2003). Certainly, Native American studies should provide a critical intervention in this discourse because the USA could not exist without the genocide of Native peoples—genocide is not a mistake or aberration of US democracy, it is foundational to it (Smith 2005). As Sandy Grande states: The United States is a nation defined by its original sin: the genocide of American Indians . . . American Indian tribes are viewed as an inherent threat to the nation, poised to expose the great lies of U.S. democracy: that we are a nation of laws and not random power; that we are guided by reason and not faith; that we are governed by representation and not executive order; and finally, that we stand as a selfdetermined citizenry and not a kingdom of blood or aristocracy . . . From the perspective of American Indians, ‘democracy’ has been wielded with impunity as the first and most virulent weapon of mass destruction. (2004: 21–2)

The analyses of Native feminists question this idea that what we need is basically a ‘kinder, gentler’ USA. By extension, they question the idea that nation-states in general are either necessary or beneficial forms of governmentality. Such a political project is particularly important for colonized peoples seeking national liberation because it

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allows us to differentiate ‘nation’ from ‘nation-state’. Helpful in this project of imagination is the work of Native women activists who have begun articulating notions of nation and sovereignty that are separate from those of nation-states. Whereas nation-states are governed through domination and coercion, indigenous sovereignty and nationhood is predicated on interrelatedness and responsibility. As Ingrid Washinawatok states: Our spirituality and our responsibilities define our duties. We understand the concept of sovereignty as woven through a fabric that encompasses our spirituality and responsibility. This is a cyclical view of sovereignty, incorporating it into our traditional philosophy and view of our responsibilities. There it differs greatly from the concept of western sovereignty which is based upon absolute power. For us absolute power is in the Creator and the natural order of all living things; not only in human beings . . . Our sovereignty is related to our connections to the earth and is inherent. The idea of a nation did not simply apply to human beings. We call the buffalo or, the wolves, the fish, the trees, and+0.823 pt all are nations. Each is sovereign, and equal part of the creation, interdependent, interwoven, and all related. (1995: 12)

These models of sovereignty are not based on a narrow definition of nation that would entail a closely bounded community and ethnic cleansing. For example, one activist distinguishes between a chauvinistic notion of ‘nationalism’ versus a flexible notion of ‘sovereignty’: Nationalism is saying, our way is the only right way . . . I think a real true sovereignty is a real, true acceptance of who and what’s around you. And the nationalist doesn’t accept all that . . . Sovereignty is what you do and what you are to your own people within your own confines, but there is a realization and acceptance that there are others who are around you. And that happened even before the Europeans came, we knew about the Indians. We had alliances with some, and fights with some. Part of that sovereignty was that acceptance that they were there. (Smith 2002: 329)

It is interesting to me, for instance, how often non-Indians presume that if Native people regained their landbases, that they would necessarily call for the expulsion of nonIndians from those landbases. Yet, it is striking that a much more inclusive vision of sovereignty is articulated by Native women activists. For instance, this activist describes how indigenous sovereignty is based on freedom for all peoples: if it doesn’t work for one of us, it doesn’t work for any of us. Th e definition of sovereignty [means that] . . . none of us are free unless all of us are free. We can’t, we won’t turn anyone away. We’ve been there. I would hear stories about the Japanese internment camps . . . and I could relate to it because it happened to us. Or with Africans with the violence and rape, we’ve been there too. So how could we ever leave anyone behind. (2002: 333)

That is why simply restoring ‘significant’ amounts of land is a limited strategy for justice. First, why shouldn’t all land be restored if it was all stolen? But more significantly, this concept of restoration does not question the presumed normative relationship between peoples and lands, which is land as property to be controlled by peoples. As Mishuana Goeman and Patricia Monture-Angus argue, indigenous nationhood is not based on control of territory or land, but is based on relationship and responsibility for land:

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Although Aboriginal Peoples maintain a close relationship with the land . . . it is not about control of the land . . . Earth is mother and she nurtures us all . . . it is the human race that is dependent on the earth and not vice versa . . . Sovereignty, when defined as my right to be responsible . . . requires a relationship with territory (and not a relationship based on control of that territory) . . . What must be understood then is that Aboriginal request to have our sovereignty respected is really a request to be responsible. I do not know of anywhere else in history where a group of people have had to fight so hard just to be responsible. (1999: 36)

It is within the realm of recognition in legal and cultural battles that Native peoples are forced to argue for their right to control and to be recognized by the settler colonial state. While such short-term strategies may be necessary at times, it would be a mistake to presume that this is the most beneficial long-term political goal for Native peoples. As described previously by Glen Coulthard, this battle for recognition can make even Native peoples forget that they have alternative genealogies for their relationship to land, relationships based on respect for land rather than control over territory, genealogies that fundamentally question nation-state forms of governance that are premised on control, exclusivity, domination, and violence.

Heteropatriarchy and the nation-state These critiques of the nation-state are simultaneously critiques of heteropatriarchy both within the structure of colonialism and white supremacy and within the structures of liberation movements designed to dismantle colonialism and white supremacy. Even within progressive political and theological fora, such as the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, discussions on gender and sexuality are often reduced to discussions on the status of women or LGBT communities. What liberation theologians pay less attention to is how the logic of heteropatriarchy fundamentally structures colonialism, white supremacy, and capitalism. To look at how heteropatriarchy is the building block of US empire, we can turn to the writings of the Christian Right. For example, Christian Right activist and founder of Prison Fellowship Charles Colson makes the connection between homosexuality and the nation-state in his analysis of the war on terror, explaining that one of the cause of terrorism is same-sex marriage: Marriage is the traditional building block of human society, intended both to unite couples and bring children into the world . . . There is a natural moral order for the family . . . The family, led by a married mother and father, is the best available structure for both child-rearing and cultural health. Marriage is not a private institution designed solely for the individual gratification of its participants. If we fail to enact a Federal Marriage Amendment, we can expect, not just more family breakdown, but also more criminals behind bars and more chaos in our streets. It’s like handing moral weapons of mass destruction to those who would use America’s depravity to recruit more snipers, more highjackers, and more suicide bombers. (2004)

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When radical Islamists see American women abusing Muslim men, as they did in the Abu Ghraib prison, and when they see news coverage of same-sex couples being ‘married’ in U.S. towns, we make our kind of freedom abhorrent—the kind they see as a blot on Allah’s creation. [We must preserve traditional marriage in order to] protect the United States from those who would use our depravity to destroy us. (Colson and Morse 2004)

Colson is linking the well-being of US empire to the well-being of the heteropatriarchal family. Heteropatriarchy is the logic that makes social hierarchy seem natural. Just as the patriarchs rule the family, the elites of the nation-state rule their citizens. Consequently, when colonists first came to this land they saw the necessity of instilling patriarchy in Native communities because they realized that indigenous peoples would not accept colonial domination if their own indigenous societies were not structured on the basis of social hierarchy. Patriarchy in turns rests on a gender-binary system; hence it is not a coincidence that colonizers also targeted indigenous peoples who did not fit within this binary model. In addition, gender violence is a primary tool of colonialism and white supremacy. Colonizers did not just kill off indigenous peoples in this land, but Native massacres were always accompanied by sexual mutilation and rape. As I have argued elsewhere, the goal of colonialism is not just to kill colonized peoples, but to destroy their sense of being people (2005). It is through sexual violence that a colonizing group attempts to render a colonized peoples as inherently rapable, their lands inherently invadable, and their resources inherently extractable. Unfortunately, it is not only the Christian Right, but our own progressive movements that often fail to critique heteropatriarchy. The issue is not simply how women are treated in the movement; rather heteropatriarchy fundamentally shapes how we think to resist and organize in countless ways. First, because we have not challenged heteropatriarchy, we have deeply internalized the notion that social hierarchy is natural and inevitable, thus undermining our ability to create movements for social change that do not replicate the structures of domination that we seek to eradicate. Whether it is the neo-colonial middle managers of the nonprofit industrial complex (Incite! 2006) or the revolutionary vanguard elite, the assumption is that patriarchs of any gender are required to manage and police the revolutionary family. Any liberation struggle that does not challenge heteronormativity cannot substantially challenge colonialism or white supremacy. Rather, as Cathy Cohen contends, such struggles will maintain colonialism based on a politics of secondary marginalization where the most elite class of these groups will further their aspiration on the backs of those most marginalized within the community (1999). Second, our sense of social hierarchy as natural then limits our revolutionary imagination. For instance, the theme of the US Social Forum is ‘Another World is Possible: Another U.S. is Necessary’. But the critical question we must ask ourselves is, if another world is possible, then is the USA itself necessary? If we put all our revolutionary imaginations together, is the best thing we can come up with a kinder, gentler settler colonial nation-state based on slavery and genocide? As I have just argued, we should be informed by indigenous peoples’ (particularly indigenous women’s) struggles to re-imagine nationhood without nation-states. The indigenous models of nationhood

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are based on nations as inclusive rather than exclusive, based on respect and responsibility for land rather than control over territory, and are governed on principles of mutual respect, interrelatedness, and responsibility for a larger world, rather than governed through violence, domination, and social hierarchy. Third, our organizing often follows a gendered model that is based on a split between private and public spheres. That is, in the public sphere of social protest, we are supposed to be completely together people who have no problems. However, when it turns out we do have problems, we are supposed to address those problems in the private sphere—at home, or through social services. Because we cannot bring our whole selves to the movement, we then end up undermining our work through personal dysfunctionality that cannot be publicly addressed. In addition, when we think to work collectively, our collective action is confined to the public spheres of protests and other actions. However, our movements do not think to collectivize the work that is seen as part of the private sphere, such as daycare, cooking and tending to our basic needs. Consequently, we build movements that are accessible to very few people and that are particularly burdensome for women who often are responsible for caretaking in the private sphere. Finally, because we lack an intersectional analysis of how heteropatriarchy structures white supremacy and colonialism, we end up developing organizing strategies that are, to say the least, problematic. To name but a few examples: We have anti-violence groups supporting the bombing of Afghanistan in order save women from the Taliban, and we have these same groups supporting the build-up of the prison industrial complex by relying on criminalization as the primary strategy for ending domestic and sexual violence. These groups fail to see how the state itself is the primary perpetrator of violence against women, particularly women of color, and that state violence in the form of either the military or prison industrial complex is not going to liberate anyone. We have racial and anti-war groups meanwhile organizing against state violence in Iraq and elsewhere, but they cannot seem to do anything about ending violence against women in their own organizations. These groups fail to see that it is primarily through sexual violence that colonialism and white supremacy work. And then we have mainstream reproductive rights and environmental groups supporting population control policies in order to save the world from poverty and environmental destruction, thus blaming women of color for the policies wrought by corporate and government elites, and thus letting these elites off the hook (see Smith 2005; and Incite! 2006, 2007). In all these cases and many more, activists fail to recognize that if we do not address heteropatriarchy, we do not just undermine the status of women, but we fundamentally undermine our struggles for social justice for everyone.

Theological resources Given the fundamental challenges to the nation-state that Native feminist analyses offer, what then can be the theological reflection that emerges from this challenge? Obviously, there is a contradiction between arguing for alternative governmentalities that are

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non-hierarchical and then articulating a systematic liberation theology emerging from one individual theologian. Within the constraints of the academic industrial complex, we thus find ourselves in a bit of tension. On the one hand, the theological imagination should be free to imagine new worlds that currently do not exist. On the other hand, even liberation theologians such as Michelle Gonzalez feel sufficiently constrained by the academy to argue that liberation theology is mere identity politics unless it is recognized and legitimated by academically based theologians (2006). Again, because we can get trapped into the quest for ‘recognition’ by other academically based theologians, we do not often strive for recognition by the social movements themselves that are part of the liberation process. If we did so, we would have to reconstruct the liberation theological project as fundamentally communal rather than individual. And as Mary McClintock Fulkerson argues, ‘the production of the expertise of the academic theologian is a process that invites normalization and standardization’, which in turn disciplines our political imaginary within the confines of the political status quo (1994: 391). Of course, as Marcella Althaus-Reid points out, communal liberation theological projects also run the risk of relegating ‘the poor’ or the ‘oppressed’ to the category of what Gayatri Spivak terms ‘the Native informant’. In her broad-ranging literary, historical, and philosophical analysis in Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak contends that the ‘third world woman’ consistently serves as the silent Native informant that buttresses Western imperialist discourse. The Native informant becomes the empty signifier used to legitimate political positions while simultaneously rendering that informant into a ‘subaltern’ status that cannot speak for itself. In the case of liberation theology specifically, Althaus-Reid argues that poor communities in Latin America often become the subaltern that cannot speak within liberation theology. She argues that as liberation theology was popularized in the West, a market for ‘the poor’ emerged among progressive Christian communities in the West. ‘The demand was so high’, complains Althaus-Reid, ‘that at times we needed to produce Christian communities on demand for the foreigners’ (2001: 26). She also claims that liberationist communities began to perform their role demanded of them, that of the Native informant. In turn, the transgressiveness of liberation theological projects lost their force because only a certain type of ‘poor’ person, particularly a desexualized one, was acceptable to play the role of the Native informant. What happens then is that if the shanty townspeople go in procession carrying a statue of the Virgin Mary and demanding jobs, they seem to become God’s option for the poor. However, when the same shanty townspeople mount a carnival centered on a transvestite Christ accompanied by a Drag Queen Mary Magdalene kissing his wounds, singing songs of political criticism, they are not anymore God’s option for the poor.

Althaus-Reid concludes,‘too much clapping and admiration was as bad as the criticism’ (52). In many respects, the ‘Native informant’ is based on the same hierarchical principles of revolution as the revolutionary vanguard elite. In this case, there is imagined a pure victim of oppression who holds the answers to liberation. When this informant turns out to be imperfect, complicit in oppression, or lacking in all the answers we desire, the Native

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informant transforms into the disappointing Native. In my experience, many social justice organizations, particularly those that are women of color, have shifted to the culture of organizing through ‘trial and error’. Or, to borrow from Stuart Hall, they seek a liberation without guarantees (1996). That is, these groups, rather than presume a vanguard position, seek to build a conversation with other movements in which we share our failures as well as our successes. The project of creating a new world governed by an alternative system not based on domination, coercion, and control does not depend on an unrealistic goal of being able to fully describe a utopian society for all at this point in time. From our position of growing up in a patriarchal, colonial, and white supremacist world, we cannot even fully imagine how a world not based on structures of oppression could operate. Nevertheless, we can be part of a collective, creative process that can bring us closer to a society not based on domination. Part of this process involves beginning to model the world we would like to live in now through an integrated mind–body–spirit framework. As Ruthie Gilmore states, our organizing processes should not focus on creating ‘safe spaces’ as an escape from the ‘real’, but on creating places that practice the real we hope to bring about (2006). Rather than attempt to police the boundaries of what is ‘theology’, as Michelle Gonzalez’s analysis suggests, Fulkerson calls on theologians to resist discursive closure. ‘Theological grammars allow us to think of the way Christians order practices, but the theoretical distinctiveness of that ordering cannot be made to depend on its nonintersection with other (potentially dissonant) discourses’ (1994: 363). Putting her analysis in conversation with Native feminist conceptions of nationhood, the task of liberation theology then becomes founded on political and intellectual openness rather than boundary-setting. Thus, it makes sense to identify liberation theologizing wherever it may be happening, particularly within the context of collective struggle. While, as Spivak notes, there is no way to escape the problematics of representation in discussing grassroots organizing projects (Spivak 1999), it is also true that much theorizing and theological reflection are happening in a variety of spaces around the world. Below are some of the groups that are working on what could be seen as spiritually grounded projects of liberation. These are not definitive accounts of their work, but some reflections on the work they are trying to do, the difficulties they face doing the work, and some of the lessons that can be gleaned from their struggles. I will also present some disparate and unsystematic themes that are emerging from these sites that speak to how we can build communities of resistance that are life-giving, internally accountable, and base-building. These sites do not hold ‘the answer’ for us, but they can be conversation partners within the global struggle for social justice.

Taking power, making power Adjoa Jones de Almeida’s and Paula Rojas’ contributions to The Revolution Will Not Be Funded detail the organizing model of ‘Taking Power, Making Power’ that is influential in social movements both in Latin America and within many women of color

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organizing groups in the United States. While, on one hand, it is necessary to engage in oppositional politics to corporate and state power (taking power), on the other hand, if we only engage in the politics of taking power, we will have a tendency to replicate the hierarchical structures in our movements. Consequently, it is also important to ‘make power’ by creating those structures within our organizations, movements, and communities that model the world we are trying to create. These ‘autonomous zones’ can be differentiated from many alternative community projects in the USA in that people in these ‘making power’ movements do not just create autonomous zones, but they proliferate them. These movements developed in reaction to the revolutionary vanguard model of organizing in Latin America that became criticized as ‘machismoleninismo’ models—models so hierarchical that in the effort to combat systems of oppression, they inadvertently re-created the same systems they were trying to replace. In addition, this model of organizing was inherently exclusivist because not everyone could take up guns and go the mountains to become revolutionaries. Women (who must care for families) could particularly be excluded from such revolutionary movements. So movements began to develop organizing models based on integrating the organizing into one’s everyday life so that all people could participate. For instance, a group might organize through communal cooking, but during the cooking process, which everyone needs to do in order to eat, they might educate themselves on the nature of agribusiness. At the 2005 World Social Forum in Brazil, activists from Chiapas reported that their movement had begun to realize that one cannot combat militarism with more militarism because the state always has more guns. However, if movements began to build their own autonomous zones and proliferated them until they reached a mass scale, eventually there would be nothing the state’s military could do. If the mass-based peoples’ movements began to live life using alternative governmental structures and stopped relying on the state, then what could the state do? Of course, during the process, there might be skirmishes with the state, but conflict was not the primary work of these movements. And as we have now seen, when these movements literally take over entire countries in Latin America, it is clear that it is possible to do revolutionary work on a mass-scale in a manner based on radical participatory rather than representational democracy or through a revolutionary vanguard model. Many leftists will argue that nation-states are necessary to check the power of multinational corporations or will argue that nation-states essentially are no longer important units of analysis (see Hardt and Negri 2000; Mohanty 2003). These groups, by contrast, recognize the importance of creating alternative governmentalities outside of a nation-state model based on principles of horizontalism. In addition, these groups are taking on multinational corporations directly. An example would be the factory movement in Argentina where workers have appropriated factories and have seized the means of production themselves. They have also developed cooperative relationships with other appropriated factories. In addition, in many factories all of the work is collectivized. For instance, one friend who was breastfeeding at the time reported on her visit to one of these factories. She tried to sign up for one of the

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collectively organized tasks of the factory and was told that breastfeeding was her task. The factory recognized breastfeeding as work on par with all the other work going on in the factory. As De Almeida notes, liberation theology has been a foundation to all these movements, even those that would not necessarily articulate themselves specifically as Christian. She notes that liberation theology, for instance, has enabled the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil to go ‘beyond the question of land to address the most fundamental question of how to structure the societies that are being created within the settlements and encampments in a manner that reflects their vision of justice’ (2007: 190). This model is particularly informative for those focused on gender justice because it has made central the issue of violence against women. This movement is based in networks of families that claim territory that is owned privately, but is not being used. The families set up tents and fences and defend the land, which is called an ‘occupation’. If they manage to gain control of the land, then they form a settlement in which they build houses and more permanent structures. Over the past 20 years, 300,000 families have been involved in these occupations. (Families rather than individuals take part in this resistance.) About 20 families form a nucleus, which is coordinated by one man and one woman. The nuclei are then organized into the following sectors: (1) production/cooperation/employment; (2) education/trading; (3) education; (4) gender; (5) communication; (6) human rights; (7) health; and (8) culture. The gender sector, in which both men and women participate, is responsible for ensuring women are involved in all decision-making positions and are equally represented in public life. Security teams are mixed gender. The gender team trains security to deal with domestic violence. Obviously, since this movement is not a legal organization and, thus, cannot utilize the state to address domestic violence, it must develop accountability structures from within. All issues are discussed communally. As time progresses, participants report that domestic violence decreases because interpersonal relationships are communal and transparent. Also, because women engage in ‘physical’ roles, such as being involved in security, they become less likely to be seen as ‘easy targets’ for violence; and the women also think of themselves differently. In addition, sectors and leadership roles rotate so that there is less of a fixed, hierarchical leadership. Hierarchical leadership tends to promote power differentials and hence abuse, while this leadership model helps prevent the conditions of abuse from happening in the first place. Thus, while many US social organizing models, particularly those that are white-led, often equate spirituality with conservativism, in other countries very powerful movements that have a spiritual base as foundational to their work are being built and are attracting millions of people. States de Almeida: Faith and spirituality can provide us with a new foundation for our work, by shifting our perspective of what is possible. Spirituality provides people with an alternative lens to the deterministic vision of reality which equates power to money and which constantly tries to tell us that there is no alternative to the oppressive reality we live in. (2007: 188)

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Building a fun revolution In order to build power, indigenous feminists and feminists of color are learning the importance of creating sustainable movements that are life-giving and nurturing. For example, I was a co-founder of Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, a national organization of feminists of color who organize around the intersections of interpersonal gender violence and state violence through direct action, grassroots organizing, and critical dialogue. Organized in 2000, it currently has approximately fifteen chapters and affiliates in the United States. When we began to develop our structure, we looked to a variety of organizing models for inspiration. We looked not only to groups on the Left, but also to Christian Right groups to see why they seemed to be so effective. An Incite! member attended a Promise Keepers rally with me as part of my academic research, and one thing we concluded was that Christian Right events were much more fun (scary politics aside) than were events we typically attended on the Left. At the Promise Keepers rally, there was singing, comedy, sharing, and joy. Whereas on the Left, we attended long, boring meetings with bad food and where everyone yells at each other for being counter-revolutionary (and then we wonder why no one wants to join!). Also, we noticed a different culture of accountability. If someone in a leftist group did not fulfill their responsibilities, either people did not know how to address the situation and so resentment festered or people yelled at the person for being irresponsible. Meanwhile, at Promise Keepers, if a person had a problem with, say, ‘pornography’, he was joined by a community of men who encouragingly helped him be the person he wanted to be. So, the lesson learned from these experiences is that we need to create movements that are so much fun, people won’t be able to wait to join. In that spirit, one year, instead of holding a conference, we organized a multi-media tour throughout the USA that featured performance artists, singers, dancers, filmmakers, etc., who not only gave performances but helped community groups use arts and media as tools for organizing. The events featured not only education, but massage therapists, daycare, good food, etc., to make this work an act of celebration. Our philosophy was to build movements that engage our whole selves, and in which we get back as much as we give.

Community accountability One of the barriers to building life-giving, fun, and nurturing movements is that they often disintegrate under their own internal contradictions. In particular, heteropatriarchy and gender violence within movements tear apart communities when unaddressed. One major reason violence within movements goes unaddressed, particularly within the US context, is that movements have ceded accountability for gender violence to the state.

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As Beth Richie notes, the co-optation of the anti-violence movement can be traced in part to when the anti-violence movement chose to argue that domestic violence was a ‘crime’. The State, rather than be recognized for its complicity in gender violence, became the institution promising to protect women from domestic and sexual violence (2000). As I have argued in my other work, the State is largely responsible for introducing gender violence into indigenous communities as part of a colonial strategy that follows a logic of sexual violence. Gender violence becomes the mechanism by which US colonialism is effectively and pervasively exerted upon Native nations (Smith 2005). The complicity of the State in perpetrating gender violence in other communities of color through slavery, prisons, and border patrol is also well documented (see Davis 1981 and 2003; Bhattacharjee 2001; Smith 2005; and Incite! 2006). However, rather than target the State as a perpetrator of gender violence, for many years activists in the rape crisis and domestic violence movements have promoted strengthening the criminal justice system as the primary means to reduce sexual and domestic violence. Particularly since the passage of the Violence Against Women Act in 1994, anti-violence centers have been able to receive a considerable amount of funding from the State to the point where most agencies have become dependent on the State for their continued existence. Consequently, their strategies tend to be State-friendly: hire more police, give longer sentences to rapists, pass mandatory arrests laws, etc. However, there is an inherent contradiction in relying upon the State to solve problems it is responsible for creating. In addition, reliance on the criminal justice system to address gender violence would make sense if the threat were only a few crazed men whom we can lock up. But the prison system is not equipped to address a violent culture in which an overwhelming number of people batter their partners unless we are prepared to imprison hundreds of millions of people. Consequently, criminalization has not actually led to a decrease in violence against women. As a number of studies have demonstrated, more prisons and more police do not lead to lower crime rates (see Donziger 1996; Currie 1998; and Walker 1998). Anti-violence activists and scholars have also widely critiqued the supposed efficacy of criminalization (see Strang and Braithwaite 2002; Sokoloff 2005; and Incite! 2006). Consequently, Incite! began working to develop community accountability models in conjunction with local organizing efforts. Through workshops and activist institutes, women of color have strategized about such models. Incite! has compiled these models and distributed them to other local groups to help them develop their own models. As groups try these models and provide feedback to what does and does not work for them, Incite! then shares this information to other women of color organizers. On Incite!’s website can be found its document on principles of community accountability (http://www.incite-national.org). A theological lesson learned from this process is how much the anti-violence movement has internalized an evangelical Christian worldview in which humanity is dichotomized into the unredeemed and the redeemed. In the anti-violence movement, this dichotomy becomes termed ‘batterers/abusers’ and ‘victims’. It is no wonder then that the movement adopted the ineffectual approach of working with the

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apparatus of state violence to solve the problem of domestic/sexual violence by imagining certain peoples to be unredeemable batterers who can be excluded from society. However, when violence is endemic to a society, it becomes clear that this worldview is not likely to assist us in creating a less violent world. Consequently, groups involved in this process have learned the critical importance of recognizing the humanity involved, because it allows us to see that abuse is something we can also engage in, and hence we all need to be accountable for. Paula Cooey notes that the inability to escape the paradigm of women as victims limits ‘how we conceive what it means to be human’ (1997: 141). When being human is equated with being ‘good’, we cannot build a movement that involves the way people are with all their faults. Part of building a new world involves not only challenging structures of oppression, but transforming the way all of us have been shaped by these structures. Rita Nakashima Brock further explores how the ‘myth of innocence’ hinders movements for social justice. That is, when we divide the world into perpetrators and innocents, we perpetuate the idea that suffering is only bad when it is inflicted upon those who are innocent. Those who are viewed as ‘less innocent’ then somehow deserve oppression. For instance, a woman who wears slinky clothing, who is promiscuous, who goes out late at night, etc., is often seen as deserving rape because she is not completely ‘innocent’. Similarly, many white people often flock to reservations to help ‘poor Indians’ whom they romanticize as perfect victims. When they discover the amount of violence and dysfunctionality that exists in Indian communities, they become disenchanted, no longer want to work with Indian people, and decide Indians are getting what they deserve. Rita Nakashima Brock explores some of the problems with innocence: Moral high ground goes to innocent victims. There is danger, however, in this structure of morality and victims. If a victimized group can be proven to lack innocence, the implication is that the group no longer deserves justice. Any hint of moral ambiguity, or the possession of power and agency, throws a shadow across one’s moral spotlight. Maintaining one’s status as victim becomes crucial for being acknowledged and given credibility . . . This tendency to identify with innocent victims, and to avoid discussions of the moral ambiguities of life continues to place responsibility for abuse on the victims of the system. Abuse is wrong not because victims are innocent, but because abuse, even by good people for a good cause, dehumanizes the abuser and abused. Hence, we need to focus not on innocence, but on what is wrong with abusive behavior. (1995: 80–1)

The fact that there are no innocents does not justify oppression; rather it means that oppression is unacceptable regardless of the innocence of its victims. Furthermore, when oppressed groups are liberated from constantly having to maintain the image that they are innocent and perfect victims, they can take responsibility for the oppression that exists within their communities. We can be finally viewed as moral agents who will often make mistakes, but who do not deserve oppression regardless of the mistakes we make.

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Tradition as radical critique of the present Within Native communities in particular, an obstacle to developing greater community accountability around gender violence is that Native scholars and activists will routinely argue that the issue of gender violence is irrelevant because Native communities were traditionally not patriarchal. Thus, increasingly, Native feminist scholars and activists are arguing that central to the development of real community accountability in Native nations is a critical interrogation of how tradition unwittingly mobilizes neo-colonial and patriarchal ideologies within such communities. Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble provides a helpful starting point for this interrogation. She critiques theorists such as Lacan, Irigaray, and Wittig, who posit a naturalized prediscursive sexed body as the foundation by which to critique contemporary heteropatriarchal practices, and argues that theorizing a prediscursive body necessarily means that the body cannot be prediscursive, and hence its account cannot be made outside of prevailing power relations within its discursive economy. However, positing it as prediscursive allows the theorist to disavow her or his political investments because the theorist is supposedly rendering an account of the body prior to power relations. Butler’s critique could then be more broadly applied to a critique of ‘origin stories’. That is, when we critique a contemporary context through an appeal to a prior state before ‘the fall’, we are necessarily masking power relations through the evocation of lost origins. Within the context of theology, Fulkerson notes how feminist appeals to a feminist origins within Christianity (i.e. Jesus was a feminist) rests on a ‘natural, prediscursive reality’ that becomes the basis for a feminist politic that cannot be interrogated for its complicity in prevailing power relations (1994: 303). Within Native feminist theologies, this analysis is helpful in interrogating how ‘tradition’ often serves as the origin story that buttresses heteropatriarchy and other forms of oppression within Native communities while disavowing its political investments. That is, Native women are often told (even by other Native women) that Native feminism is not ‘traditional’. Jennifer Denetdale deconstructs tradition as origin story, going so far as to argue that Native communities reproduce a heteronormative, Christian Right agenda in the name of ‘tradition’. She also critically interrogates the gendered politics of remembering ‘tradition’ in her germinal analysis of the office of Miss Navajo Nation—an office that is strictly monitored by the Navajo nation to ensure Miss Navajo models ‘ “traditional” Navajo women’s purity, mothering and nurturing qualities, and morality [which] are evoked by the Navajo Nation to extol Navajo honor and are claimed on behalf of the modernizing project of nationalism’. Denetdale notes than ‘when Miss Navajo Nation does not conform to the dictates of ideal Navajo womanhood, she is subjected to harsh criticism that is intended to reinforce cultural boundaries. Her body literally becomes a site of surveillance that symbolically conveys notions about racial purity, morality, and chastity’. Meanwhile, male leaders, who may be guilty of everything from domestic violence to

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embezzlement, are rarely brought before any tribal committees. She argues that the ideals that Navajo women are supposed to represent are not simply ‘traditional’ Navajo values, but also unacknowledged European Victorian ideals of womanhood: ‘Navajo leaders, who are primarily men, reproduce Navajo nationalist ideology to re-inscribe gender roles based on Western concepts even as they claim that they operate under traditional Navajo philosophy’ (2006). At the same time, as Katherine Tanner notes, ‘tradition’ can also be a weapon against oppression. At the 2005 World Liberation Theology Forum held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, indigenous peoples from Bolivia stated they knew another world is possible because they see that world whenever they did their ceremonies. Native ceremonies can be a place where the present, past, and future coexist, thereby allowing us to engage in what Native Hawaiian scholar Manu Meyer calls a racial remembering of the future. Native communities prior to colonization were not structured on the basis of hierarchy, oppression, or patriarchy. We will not recreate these communities as they existed prior to colonization because Native nations are and always have been nations that change and adapt to the surrounding circumstances. However, our understanding that it was possible to order society without structures of oppression in the past tells us that our current political and economic system is anything but natural and inevitable. If we lived differently before, we can live differently in the future. Thus, the past can serve as a radical critique of the present. Thus, armed with a feminist analysis, many indigenous groups are using the past in a critical way to de-naturalize the present, to show that different ways of living are possible.

Conclusion The inclusion of Native feminist analysis within feminist theology rests not on a liberal multicultural politic of ‘giving voice to the voiceless’; rather, indigenous critiques of settler colonialism must be central to any theological project that claims to support liberation. Indigenous women do not hold a simple ‘answer’ to today’s problems, but the material conditions of heteropatriarchy and settler colonialism under which they live are a vantage point from which to better understand the analytics of empire. Furthermore, because Native feminism fundamentally questions the presumptousness of the United States in particular and the nation-state form of governance in general, organizing projects generated from this critique point to new models of organizing not just for indigenous peoples, but for all social justice movements. In this un-systematic account of liberation theological practices emerging from grassroots organizing practices, it is apparent that there are no clear pathways to liberation. As the saying goes, there is no way; we make the way as we walk. Yet, at the same time, when some poststructural accounts call for the end of liberation as a metanarrative, these organizing formations described previously use their spiritual foundations to unleash their political imaginaries as they struggle for a liberation without

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guarantees. In large part, these political imaginaries are based on indigenous feminist critiques of nation-state and articulations of alternative governmentalities based on mutual respect, consensus-decision making, and inclusivity. They provide an alternative vision of globalization that is not structured through empire but through principles of mutual cooperation and social justice. The strategies for this kind of revolution are contextual, flexible, every-changing, and open to all possible alliances. To quote one Native woman activist, ‘You can’t win a revolution on your own, and we’re about nothing short of a revolution. Anything else is simply not worth our time.’

Note 1. The first part of the epigram is a citation of Carl Rashke. He says, ‘To dwell within Indian Territory is to dwell in a condition of suspension, as we find ourselves suspended in and between opposites—between theology and nihilism, between theism and atheism, between radical orthodoxy and nihilist textualism. Faced with these opposites, we are confronted with a decision that must necessarily be left unmade. Deprived of a place where this undecidability may be problematically expressed, we must necessarily resort to tactics—the tactics of the “outlaw”, of the “native”, tactics that are enacted through the movement of fictional nihilism.’

Works Cited Althaus-Reid, Marcella (2001). Indecent Theology. London: Routledge. Batstone, David et al. (Eds) (1997). Liberation Theologies, Postmodernity, and the Americas. London: Routledge. Bhattacharjee, Anannya (2001). In Whose Safety? Women of Color and the Violence of Law Enforcement. Philadelphia: American Friends Service Committee. Brock, Rita Nakashima (1995). ‘Ending Innocence and Nurturing Willfulness’, in Carol Adams and Marie Fortune (Eds), Violence Against Women and Children: A Christian Theological Sourcebook. New York: Continuum, 80–1. Chopp, Rebecca (1997). ‘Theorizing Feminist Theology’, in Rebecca Chopp and Sheila Greeve Davaney (Eds), Horizons in Feminist Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 215–31. Cohen, Cathy (1999). The Boundaries of Blackness. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Colson, Charles (2004). ‘Societal Suicide’, Christianity Today, 48, June. and Morse, Anne (2004). ‘The Moral Home Front’, Christianity Today, 48, Oct. Cooey, Paula (1997). ‘Bad Women: The Limits of Theory and Theology’, in Rebecca Chopp and Sheila Greeve Davaney (Eds), Horizons in Feminist Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 137–53. Coulthard, Glen (2007). ‘Indigenous Peoples and the “Politics of Recognition” in Colonial Contexts’, paper presented at the Cultural Studies Now Conference, University of East London, London, 22 July. Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams (1996). ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color’, in Kimberlé Crenshaw et al. (Eds), Critical Race Theory. New York: New Press, 357–83. Currie, Elliott (1998). Crime and Punishment in America. New York: Metropolitan Books.

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Davaney, Sheila Greeve (1997). ‘Continuing the Storm, but Departing the Text’, in Rebecca Chopp and Sheila Greeve Davaney (Eds), Horizons in Feminist Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 198–214. Davis, Angela (1981). Women, Race and Class. New York: Vintage. (2003). Are Prisons Obsolete? New York: Seven Stories Press. de Almeida, Adjoa Florencia Jones (2007). ‘Radical Social Change’, in Incite! Women of Color Against Violence (Ed.), The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 184–96. Denetdale, Jennifer (2006). ‘Chairmen, Presidents, and Princesses: The Navajo Nation, Gender, and the Politics of Tradition’, Wicazo Sa Review, 20/1: 9–28. Donziger, Steven (1996). The Real War on Crime. New York: HarperCollins. Fulkerson, Mary McClintock (1994). Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and Feminist Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Gilmore, Ruthie (2006). Comment made at the Crossing Borders Ethnic Studies Conference, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA. Gonzalez, Michelle (2006). ‘Response: Roundtable Discussion: Native/First Nation Theology’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 22/2: 107–12. Grande, Sandy (2004). Red Pedagogy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Green, Rayna (1988). ‘The Tribe Called Wannabee’, Folklore, 99/1: 30–55. Hall, Stuart (1996). ‘The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees’, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (Eds), Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 22–45. Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Heywood, Leslie, and Drake, Jennifer (Eds) (1997). Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hyman, Gavin (2001). The Predicament of Postmodern Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Incite! Women of Color Against Violence (Ed.) (2006). Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. (Ed.) (2007). The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Isasi-Diaz, Ada-Maria (1993). En La Lucha. Minneapolis: Augsburg Press. Jaimes, M. Annette, and Halsey, Theresa (1992). ‘American Indian Women: At the Center of Indigenous Resistance in North America’, in M. Annette Jaimes (Ed.), The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Jones, Serene (1997). ‘Women’s Experience between a Rock and a Hard Place’, in Rebecca Chopp and Sheila Greeve Davaney (Eds), Horizons in Feminist Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 33–53. Kang, Namsoon (2004). ‘Who/What Is Asian?’, in Catherine Keller, Michael Nausner, and Mayra Rivera (Eds), Postcolonial Theologies. St. Louis: Chalice. Kaschak, Ellen (Ed.) (2001). The Next Generation: The Third Wave of Feminist Psychotherapy. New York: Haworth Press. Kazanjian, David (2003). The Colonizing Trick. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Keller, Catherine (1997). ‘Seeking and Sucking: On Religion and Essence in Feminist Theology’, in Rebecca Chopp and Sheila Greeve Davaney (Eds), Horizons in Feminist Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 54–78.

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Kesselman, Amy V., McNair, L. D., and Schneidwind, N. (Eds) (1999). Women: Images and Realities. Mountain View: Mayfield. Kwok, Pui-lan (2005). Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Kondo, Dorinne (1997). About Face. New York: Routledge. Lowe, Lisa (1997). ‘Work, Immigration, Gender: New Subjects of Cultural Politics’, in Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Eds), The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 354–74. Mani, Lata (1992). ‘Cultural Theory, Colonial Texts: Reading Eyewitness Accounts of Widow Burning’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (Eds), Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 392–404. Maracle, Lee (1982). I Am Woman. North Vancouver: Write-On Press. Matsuoka, Fumitaka (1995). Out of Silence. Cleveland: United Church Press. Mohanty, Chandra (2003). Feminism without Borders. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Monture-Angus, Patricia (1995). Thunder in My Soul. Halifax, NS: Fernwood. (1999). Journeying Forward. Halifax, NS: Fernwood. Nicholson, Linda (ed.) (1997). The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory. New York: Routledge. Povinelli, Elizabeth (2002). The Cunning of Recognition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Richie, Beth E. (2000). ‘Plenary Presentation’, paper presented at the ‘The Color of Violence: Violence Against Women of Color’, University of California, Santa Cruz. Sokoloff, Natalie J., and Pratt, Christine (Eds) (2005). Domestic Violence at the Margins. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Shohat, Ella, and Stam, Robert (1994). Unthinking Eurocentricism. London: Routledge. Smith, Andrea (2008). Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances. Durham: Duke University Press. (2005). Conquest, Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Strang, Heather, and Braithwaite, John (Eds) (2002). Restorative Justice and Family Violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walker, Samuel (1998). Sense and Nonsense about Crime. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Washinawatok, Ingrid (1995). ‘Sovereignty as a Birthright’, in Indigenous Women’s Network (Ed.), Indigenous Women Address the World. Austin: Indigenous Women’s Network. Welch, Sharon (1997). ‘Dancing with Chaos: Reflections on Power, Contingency, and Social Change’, in David Batstone et al. (Eds), Liberation, Postmodernity, and the Americas. London: Routledge, 125–7. (2004). After Empire: The Art and Ethos of Enduring Peace. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

chapter 15

fem i n ism, i nc. : gl oba liz ation a n d north a m er ica n fem i n ist t h eol o gi e s thandeka

When Jennine Rexton took a maternity leave as a management consultant for the multinational corporation PricewaterhouseCoopers, she left her office but not her job. Thanks to her firm’s flexibility program, Rexton could do her eleven-hour daily stint at home. She needed the benefits and income and she loved the work, so the work-at-home option was ideal (Pellet 2005). Rexton also used her maternity leave to start her own Internet business. When it began to thrive, her husband left his job and became a full-time partner in this new venture. Acknowledging the risks of tying both their benefits and salaries to this new business, Rexton nevertheless concluded, ‘It’s a risk we’re willing to take’ because of the ‘work-life balance’. Rexton’s maternity leave as well as her decision not to return to her job with a US multinational corporation are typical of a growing trend among women executives. Today, 58 of women executives voluntarily choose flexible work options or a variety of other nontraditional career paths that take them far afield from the traditional, male, linear ascent to corporate power and success. Moreover, 37 of these ‘highly qualified women voluntarily leave their careers for some period of time’ (Hewlett et al. 2005: 2). They leave to have babies, to take care of aging parents, or for other such gender-based roles. One-fourth of these women do not return to their previous jobs. One survey found that ‘zero percent’ of the businesswomen interviewed wanted to return to the companies they left (Hewlett and Luce 2005: 3, 9). The collective impact of these individual, gender-based decisions made by women such as Rexton has created a near panic among US corporations. The price tag for refilling a job slot is typically 150 of the former employee’s salary (Hewlett et al. 2005: 63). For high-level executives, the price tag is almost three times the job’s annual salary (Hewlett 2002: 274).

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Accordingly, as women executives leave the corporate world, their individual actions create a collective, leaderless social movement that looks, statistically and financially, like a contemporary women’s revolt against big-time corporate American enterprise. To stop the disruptions to business interests brought on by this leaderless women’s movement, global corporations have turned for advice to Women’s Studies scholars and other advocates for women’s gender-based interests and rights. As a result, corporate America now hires these advocates to develop gender-based company policies and procedures to keep women executives in the corporate fold. I call this new effort Feminism, Inc., which is the for-profit hiring of women’s advocates to facilitate a business process designed to economically exploit the women the advocates help. Part I of this chapter delineates the problem. It shows how the transformation of Women’s Studies scholarship and professional advocacy for women’s rights into an antifeminist, market-driven, business agenda for corporate America occurred. Part II proffers solutions.

Part I Three words summarize the business world’s motive for keeping women executives such as Jennine Rexton on the corporate payroll: the wage gap. The wage gap between male and female managers and executives in the United States is explained in a report entitled The Status of Women in the States, Women’s Economic Status in the States: Wide Disparities by Race, Ethnicity, and Region, written by Amy Caiazza, April Shaw, and Misha Werschkul, and published by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, DC (2004). After reviewing an extensive array of federal and corporate business statistics and data on women’s salaries through the year 2002, the researchers discovered ‘the wage gap’. As the three writers noted in their final report, ‘Throughout the United States, and among all racial and ethnic groups, women lack economic equity with men’ (2004: 4). Overall, ‘women earned about 76 cents for every dollar earned by men’ (2004: 9). Moreover, once the differences in education, job-related skills, job training, and workforce experience were eliminated, there remained a ‘45 percent wage gap’ that could not be explained in any other way than as sex discrimination (2004: 10). These findings, among others (Larson et al. 2005), led Martha Burk, chair of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, to accurately conclude that women simply, because they are women, lack equal access to jobs at the top and throughout the workforce, and lack pay parity with men for equal work (Burk 2005: 165; 2006: 4). Based on the statistics and patterning principles delineated in the Women’s Economic Status national report, Jeannine Rexton probably received $17,786 less as a management consultant than her male counterparts (Larson et al. 2005). To replace her with another woman would make the new woman, statistically, cost more than she’s worth. Corporations thus face two labor issues with their women employees: the labor they pay for (albeit poorly or unequally) and the unpaid labor that is the lot of most women

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in the United States and around the world, unpaid labor that these same corporations now must take into account in order to bring order, stability, and predictability to their female executive labor pool. Feminism, Inc. came of age through this twofold women’s labor issue. Feminism, Inc. is born of corporate interest in women’s classic dual burden: their paid and unpaid labor, and the (seemingly inexorable) conflicts between the two. Major corporations, on the one hand, increasingly rely upon local women workers to depress wages. This financial strategy, on the other hand, requires employers to take account of the women employee’s unpaid labor, gender-defined roles (Scott 1984: x). Corporations coordinate this complex activity through the use of hired hands from Feminism, Inc. To explain the advent of Feminism, Inc., however, further analysis is required. This analysis entails a twofold exploration of the link between the rising success of Second Wave feminism and the late-twentieth-century global search for cheap labor as, among other things, an employment campaign for women in the United States. The successes of Second Wave, predominately white feminist movements came to the fore as a fundamental shift in the American economy began in the early 1970s. Martha Burk, in her book Cult of Power: Sex Discrimination in Corporate America and What Can Be Done About It (2005), describes the new world of work that middle-class European-American women discovered as they entered a workplace increasingly defined by the flight of capital and jobs abroad. Writes Burk, ‘While working-class women’s jobs had been crucial to their families’ financial well-being for years, Ward Cleaver now needed June to get a job. The women’s movement just made it possible for her to work at something other than teaching or nursing’ (118–19). Burk’s larger point is that, collectively, the various white women’s liberation movements were made the fall guy (or girl) for a ‘fundamental shift’ in the global economy, which occurred during this same period (118). ‘Women’s libbers’, as they were derisively called, simply took the hit for a shift in the labor market they did not create: the economic demise of middle-class jobs for middle-class American white men. This shift in the American economy came about, in part, because American capitalism entered a new stage of development, as Manuel Castells skillfully demonstrates in his groundbreaking book The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring and the Urban–Regional Process (1989). This new stage of capitalism broke the ‘social pact between labor and capital’ established after the 1930s’ Great Depression and the ‘dislocation of World War II’ (21–2). This older order, Castells notes, ‘recognized the rights of organized labor, assured steadily rising wages for the unionized labor force, and extended the realm of entitlements to social benefits, creating an ever-increasing welfare state’. Moreover, during this period, there was ‘regulation and intervention by the state in the economic sphere’ and ‘control of the international economic order [organized] under the hegemony of the United States’ (22). Unlike its pre-Depression laissez-faire model, which Castells refers to as the first stage of American capitalism, the post-Depression form (stage two) emerged as a state-regulated capitalism. However, ‘structural elements’ within this second type of capitalism were self-contradictory. Businesses were expected, as Castells notes, to

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increase profits and wages at the same time. This contradiction brought with it a fiscal crisis within state governments that had to decrease their tax revenue from corporate profits in order to preserve corporate profits and keep businesses from relocating. ‘A new form of capitalism’ designed to resolve these internal contradictions, which Castells calls stage three, left the social contract with organized labor in the dust. Using technological innovation and venture capitalism freed from government regulation and supervision, businesses were able to increase productivity and, at the same time, lower wages, reduce social benefits, and create ‘less protective working conditions’. This third stage of capitalism decentralized ‘production to regions or countries characterized by lower wages and more relaxed regulation of business activities’, and, as political and social theorist Saskia Sassen notes in her groundbreaking book The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (2001), also brought with it an increased concentration of corporate power and support services in ‘global cities’ such as New York, London, and Tokyo. These densely concentrated corporate enterprises developed to coordinate, manage, and order data from the decentralized activities of the corporation’s global enterprises and empires. In sum, global capitalism, during the last two decades of the twentieth century mastered the ability to increase productivity by, among other things, increasing labor exploitation (Castells 1989: 23). Corporate wealth and labor poverty were linked as part of the same business enterprise to increase profits by finding ever-new sources and resources for cheaper and cheaper labor. Studies of the overseas labor practices of major multinational electronics corporations by the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD), for example, make this link between corporate wealth and worker poverty vividly evident. CAFOD found systematic and exploitative use of desperately poor laborers by employment agencies, labor contractors, and subcontractors overseas. Not surprisingly, CAFOD found the use of women as central to this enterprise. According to CAFOD’s report, ‘Electronics workers’, for example, ‘tend to be vulnerable [workers]. The majority are young women aged between 18 and 25, with few economic resources. Many are single mothers. They are prepared to accept poor conditions in the workplace because they must provide for their children’ (CAFOD 2004a). Juan Carlos Paez, human rights coordinator of the Centre for Reflection and Action on Labour Issues (CEREAL), says that companies ‘exploit workers’ vulnerability’, knowing that ‘they can push the conditions further and further down, progressively lowering pay, benefits, safety precautions, and yet the women will hang on because they have to’. As abroad, so, too, at home. The corporate drive for cheap exploitable labor made the entrance into the US labor market of all women, and, for executive positions, most especially white women, a corporate dream come true. The link between the global search for cheap labor and Second Wave feminism, the restructuring of American capitalism (commonly called globalization), and the use of female labor to depress labor costs combined to produce a cadre of women workers who achieved the economic right to work as a women’s liberation strategy that became in fact a corporate labor abuse policy for the economic exploitation of women.

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A case in point: Dell Inc., the third wealthiest business in the United States and the largest manufacturer of personal computers in the world, is a trailblazer, an undisputed leader in perfecting the global search for cheap, female labor to manufacture and assemble computer parts and products. Not surprisingly, the majority of Dell’s employees in the United States are women and minorities (Woodard 2005: 2–3). Dell, like other multinational corporations, depresses wages by hiring desperately poor women who must work so that their families will survive. Dell thus has a vested interest in figuring out how to work with women, who are not only an ever-increasing majority of its low-end labor pool, but now are also becoming an ever-increasing percentage of its managerial and executive pool (Woodard 2005: 3). So, in 2004, Dell hired Harris Interactive, the fifteenth largest market research firm in the world, to conduct a global study on the subjective sentiments, feelings, and gender concerns of women managers and executives in the multinational corporation workforce. Accordingly, Harris Interactive, in January and February 2005, gathered data electronically from 248 respondents working for multinational corporations. The women surveyed lived in thirty-five countries; two-thirds lived outside the United States. The findings were presented in March 2005 at Dell’s first Global Women’s Summit. Dell’s summit on women brought together more than thirty chief diversity officers from multinational corporations around the world. When asked to comment on the link between gender issues and the financial bottom line, Thurman Woodward, vice president of diversity at Dell, said, ‘Anything we do in business needs . . . to be connected to the bottom line for it to be sustained and also for it to be effective’ (Woodard 2005: 10). Thus Dell’s Global Women’s Summit, which Thurman helped organize, had two end goals: ‘Keeping Female Workers in the Professional Fold’ (Woodard 2005) (which was the name of the conference) and surveillance, surveying the gender-based needs of female executives in order to increase profits. I do not use the term surveillance loosely in this context of Dell practices and procedures. Dell’s ‘fanatical determination to save every penny it can’ (2004: 4), as New York Times reporter Gary Rivlin noted in a report on Dell’s labor practices, described one of the corporation’s surveillance tactics. Here is what Rivlin found. First, Dell installed video cameras in its Texas manufacturing plant. Next, every movement of the individual worker was recorded. These movements were then analyzed and every excess movement not pertinent to assembling a computer was eliminated (4). Finally, workers were taught not to twist or move except in prescribed patterns. Workers who excelled were rewarded; those who could not conform were dismissed (4). The threat of dismissal combined with the promise of reward (job retention and promotion), so it seems, created within workers the motivation that turned their physical motions into human robotic movements. The result: ‘Five years ago, it took two workers 14 minutes to build a PC; it now takes a single worker roughly five minutes to do the same’ (4). In sum, Dell’s labor policy includes scrutiny and analysis of workers’ bodies and movements in order to decrease labor costs in order to increase corporate profits.

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When Dell led 2,000 tours of its plants for 10,000 customers in 2004, executives from other multinational global corporations stood in line to learn from ‘the master’ as they glimpsed the new face of globalization’s labor practices in the United States and abroad. One corporate executive described his sensations after he toured Dell’s Austin, Texas, plant as ‘shock and awe’ (4). The New York Times reporter characterized Dell’s plant as a place of ‘reverence’ for business persons ‘who take philosophical pleasure in the elimination of wasted [human] movements, or at least the extraneous ones of others’ (1). It is safe to assume from such labor surveillance tactics that Dell’s interest in women’s subjective, gender-defined lives was anything but benign. For help in interpreting the data gathered by Harris, Dell turned to Sharmila Rudrappa (2005), an assistant professor in the Women’s Studies Center at the University of Texas at Austin. In her white paper report, ‘Women in a Global Workforce’, Rudrappa first summarized the major findings from the Harris poll, taking up, as she put it, two ‘common key findings across cultures’. 1. Women managers and executives in multinational corporations bear more family responsibilities for children, home, and aging parents than their male workplace counterparts. 2. This social condition led 79 of the women polled to conclude that the major reason women executives leave the workforce is personal/family obligations. From these data, Rudrappa reached her first major conclusion: ‘Universally, the women felt that the high value they placed on personal and family responsibilities were obstacles to their advancement’ (2005: 5). Collectively, Rudrappa noted, women around the globe carry an inordinate responsibility for the welfare of children, families, and their aging parents, in-laws, and relatives. Rudrappa next noted the top factors these women listed as crucial to them for job retention, all of them structures in the workplace that support their gender-determined, off-site needs and responsibilities: supportive managers (63), supportive networks for home commitments (54), and flexible work hours (50). Rudrappa now laid out the criteria needed to create ‘supportive managers’: they should make employees feel valued and respected, and affirm that their presence makes a difference in the workplace. They should express genuine interest in their employees and be good listeners. ‘They need some ability to be inspirational, have a sense of humor, be an advocate for their supervisees, and most important—be a risk taker’ (2005: 9). These managers must have ‘empathy, passion, and drive’. And they should have adequate financial compensation. These are high expectations for Dell, which to lower labor costs had previously used prison labor until it was publicized (Cullen 2002), and ‘was one of the first industries in which stages of the production process were diffused to developing countries’ in order to find cheap labor. Dell is run by its founder, Michael Dell, who in 2001 was the ‘third highest-paid US CEO and the 24th richest person in the world, with an estimated wealth

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of US$16.49 billion’ (CAFOD 2004a: 2). A major factor in Dell’s success is its early lead in ‘outsourcing much of its manufacturing process: that is, they buy parts or services from external suppliers’ (3). The guiding principle behind this strategy is the ongoing search for cheaper labor. Rudrappa’s role in this conference on women executives is an example of what I am calling Feminism, Inc. because it is the use of a Women’s Studies scholar to advocate for women’s interest in a system designed to find and exploit women’s paid and unpaid labor vulnerabilities in order to increase profit. Let me be very clear here. Rudrappa is not the villain in this global scheme, which is too vast and impersonally bureaucratic and rationalized in Max Weber’s sense of the term to be reduced to a scheme of individualized good guys and bad guys. This scheme is not the result of a conspiracy of a group of men in a smoke-filled room. The schemata are too vast and widespread for such a reductionistic approach. Rather, this complex scheme of economic and personal engagement constitutes a culture, a norm that sanctions the exploitation of people who work. As a cultural phenomenon, everyone involved has a vested interest in this culture that discriminates by design (Weisman 1992). Rudrappa was trying to help women not only survive but flourish in this cultural system fostered by the global market. Attention to the struggle of the leading advocate for women’s rights in corporate America emboldens this point. Sylvia Ann Hewlett is quite articulate about the complex nature of advocacy for working women and their families. Hewlett is an economist and former director of the Economic Policy Council. She is also the founder and chair of the National Parenting Association, as well as a wife and mother. Hewlett is clear about her major goal: she wants her work to give ‘women . . . ammunition that might help spur government action—something that is long overdue in the United States’ (Hewlett 2002: 307). Perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to say that Hewlett is a founder of Feminism, Inc., or at least, chairwoman of the board. Working women and their families, Hewlett insists, were abandoned by the Right and the Left in the 1970s. During this era, Hewlett argues in her book When the Bough Breaks: The Cost of Neglecting Our Children (1991), the Right believed families should fend for themselves without the intrusive policies of government regulation. The Left, in contrast, believed families and their values were too compromised to be maintained in their present state. As part of her critique of the Left, Hewlett takes particular aim at the modern women’s liberation movement, which she claims ‘began as a critique of the family’ (Hewlett 1991: 234). Families, for feminists, Hewlett argues, became ‘part of the problem, rather than part of the solution’. The result: feminists [and most ‘of the progressive social and cultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s’] ‘display a lack of enthusiasm for families and children’ (234). Behind the resistance from both the Right and the Left, Hewlett concluded in Creating a Life, is ‘America’s rampant individualism’ (2002: 159). So Hewlett went it alone as an advocate for women and their families abandoned by their more radical sisters. She became an advocate within corporate America for the rights of women and their children. Her efforts took a decided turn for the better, Hewlett explains, as the new world of globalization gained a firmer hold on the downgrading of

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wages and the exporting of jobs in 1988. Writes Hewlett, ‘Looming skill shortages and a prospective heavy reliance on women and minorities did wonders to concentrate the corporate mind. The number of companies interested in family supports quintupled overnight.’ So, too, did the results from her ‘push and prod’ of political leaders. In the 1990s, Hewlett declared, ‘conscience and convenience’ would finally come together (1991: x). She had every right to feel confident, saying, after one meeting with the corporate world, ‘I know how to inspire and cajole even an audience of recalcitrant businessmen. I used powerful local examples, emphasized a cost–benefit logic, and commended the companies that had made some headway on the work/family front. Soon the crowd was eating out of my hand’ (2002: 299–300). As a result of her own tireless advocacy work, by 1991 Hewlett could announce with pride of authorship her role in redirecting business interests to attend to their female employees’ gender-defined needs. This is why, Hewlett concludes, ‘The only decent policies in the United States are to be found in larger corporations as part of their employee benefits package.’ Moreover, Hewlett notes, ‘70 percent of the 500 largest companies now offer some type of maternity or parenting leave.’ As Hewlett is the first to acknowledge, these policies benefit only the women who work for those companies, and thus only 20 of working women in this country. The rest, Hewlett observes, ‘must suffer the consequences of our failure to mandate national standards’ (1991: 26–7). Because of the success of her work in the corporate world, Hewlett was in a perfect position to advise corporate executives not to panic as their women employees began to leave their jobs or alter their career trajectories to accommodate their lives as moms (Hewlett and Luce 2005). Accordingly, Hewlett and her co-worker, Carolyn Burk Luce, as two of the most skilled, seasoned, and sophisticated members of Feminism, Inc., laid out a blueprint for the treatment of women by corporate America in their essay ‘Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success’ (2005). In this article, the two women tried to teach corporations how to ‘harness’ and redirect back to the interests of corporate enterprises the expanding commitments and concerns of women who have spent extended periods of time caring about something other than the corporate bottom line. Hewlett and Luce laid out three strategies that corporations must now embrace to stem the flow of their female brain drain: 1. Recognize women’s gender-defined family responsibilities and requirements that cause them to choose nonlinear career trajectories; 2. Understand ‘the workplace wish list’ of women: The ability to associate with people they respect (82); the freedom to ‘be themselves’ at work (79); and the opportunity to be flexible with their work schedules (64). Fully 61 of women consider it extremely important to have the opportunity to collaborate with others and work as part of a team. A majority (56) believes it is very important to have the opportunity to give back to the community through their work. And 51 find ‘recognition from my company’ either extremely or very important. (Hewlett and Luce 2005: 5)

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3. Support rather than punish women who choose a nontraditional rather than a traditional (i.e., male) linear route to success. The authors went on to suggest ways corporations can use these principles to develop new personnel policies for women employees: 1. Allow women to work part-time. Why is this good for business? According to Hewlett and Luce, women will push themselves ‘to deliver at the same level they had achieved before switching to part-time’. In other words, women will work just as hard for half the pay. 2. Sweeten the deal. Give women the same benefits and training they had before, but reduce work hours by 60 with a concomitant depression of base pay. 3. Take advantage of the 68 of women who feel that ‘earning a lot of money’ is not ‘an important motivator’. In other words, take advantage of the fact that these women employees need work and will feel grateful for the best of the alternatives that exploit them. Implicit or explicit in these strategies is the accepted cultural norm of the global market for women workers: depressed wages. Hewlett and Luce are masters at this enterprise of yoking benefits for women who want alternative career paths to genderdetermined exploitive policies and practices that fatten the corporate bottom line. The agenda proposed by Hewlett and Luce allows corporations to continue to increase the percentage of women in the top echelons while continuing to exploit them through unequal pay for increased work. Feminism, Inc. will continue to flourish until women advocates like Hewlett, Luce, and Rudrappa no longer have to act as hired hands for multinational corporations.

Part II Feminism, Inc. cannot be dismantled: it is a cultural phenomenon within the global market. Feminism, Inc. can, however, be transformed, by shifting the cultural context in which it operates so that the source of its power is not multinational corporations, but the women who have emerged (or will do so) from this global market with a new ethic of care. As North American feminist theologians and Women’s Studies scholars pay increasing attention to the emotional and economic interests and needs of these women who were originally vested in the cultural system of the global market but now, for traditional gender-based reasons, have become divested, Feminism, Inc. will become part of a women’s liberation movement for humanity in the workplace and at home. Such a project to shift the ground of the work of Feminism, Inc. entails the coordination of three basic steps, each of which has already begun in the United States.

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First, train ministers to see the burgeoning women’s liberation movement within the global workplace. Study Feminism, Inc. To this end, the work of Saskia Sassen on the global city, the role of women in the global market, and the new political space emerging from these economic structures that rely on women’s work can become part of the core curriculum for courses in Women and Religion programs, theological ethics courses, Religious Studies curricula, and Religion and Society programs for seminary students and Women’s Studies majors. Further texts for such programs can be found in the endnotes in Part I of this chapter. Moreover, feminist theologians and Women’s Studies scholars can prepare their ministerial students and Religious Studies majors to identify and work with women executives who have experienced a change of heart after they left the corporate world. Theologians and scholars can help the next generation of ministers and scholars find these women in the heartlands of America, women who are now ready for something new and progressive. Remember, 24 of the women interviewed by Hewlett and Luce were now ‘motivated by “a desire to give something back to society” and sought jobs that would allow them to contribute to their communities in some way’. These women are talking about a desire for paid employment that can also be a source of meaning and purpose in their lives. The next generation of ministers and religious scholars can help these women achieve and sustain a new state of consciousness or motivation for lifesustaining work that heals and transforms by design. Feminist theologians, for example, can train a cadre of ministers capable of recognizing these women and helping them to sustain and extend their ‘work of care’. This work in theological ethics can build upon the work of Womanist theologian and Christian ethicist Emilie M. Townes. Townes uses the term ‘an ethic of care’ to describe the kinds of liberative feelings that produce the work of care and she shows her readers how to link the practices and principles theologically through praxis. To this end, Townes affirms the importance of social context for this work in her book Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health Issues and a Womanist Ethic of Care (2001). ‘The attempt to understand gender-based distinctions, while helpful, is much too narrow a focus for analyzing the dynamics of care and developing an interstructured moral theology of care to address an increasingly complex and distressed social order’ (1). Models of care for persons and families, Townes insists, must be grounded in a person’s sociopolitical context. Without this wider context, as Townes rightly notes, the model ‘devalues and dismisses the dynamic nature of who we are as individuals and the vital role communal cultural values play within any health condition’ (154). A sociopolitical context for new work in theological ethics is Feminism, Inc. Attention must be paid to these women. Second, create a new space within religious institutions for this work. Feminist theologians and Women’s Studies scholars can help this emerging women’s liberation movement prompted within the global market and created beyond it by developing experiences of religious grounding within a new shared space. Womanist theology (and other feminisms), as Townes wisely points out, is a context-driven process. Women’s Studies scholar Benita Roth emboldens this point in her fine analysis of the rise of white, African American, and Chicana post-World War II feminisms in the 1960s

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and 1970s (2004). Each of these feminisms emerged out of a wider social protest movement. White feminism emerged from the New Left and the Anti-War Movement, African American feminism emerged from the Black Power Liberation Movement in northern, urban America, and the Chicana movement emerged from the Chicano movement. All of these movements, Roth points out, also had an ‘elective affinity’ as ‘intermovement relationships’ among liberal and progressive women who had their minds and hearts set on liberation (216). This ‘elective affinity’ is foundational for a new religious space for the work of care because it produces a culture of care and thus an ethic of care. To reiterate, the economic context for today’s women executives is globalization. In each of the nongendered, designated categories—class, race, ethnicity, age, religion, and immigrant status—used as guidelines in the worldwide search for cheap labor, women came to the fore. Throughout the world, women collectively became part of what Sassen calls a ‘new political space’ (Sassen 2000), where market-induced economic similarities cut across ethnological differences. Whether women work as laborers in a sweatshop or managers in corporate headquarters, in the global workplace women, Sassen observes, are pushed beyond their local gender identities. Women’s paid work, in other words, is not defined by their local traditional values and authority figures. This new political space, Sassen argues, has the potential to create a political, liberative movement that transcends without canceling the local culturally defined differences of its participants. This ‘push’ referred to by Sassen becomes ‘an elective affinity’ as feminist theologians and Women’s Studies scholars take note of this space and develop a theological ethics of care within it. This means that new attention must be paid to race— rather than racism—as a cultural factor within a wider economic and needs-based scheme. And thus, the third step: race. Women’s Studies scholars and feminist theologians who work with white women who inadvertently rebelled against the culture of the global market when they went ‘off-ramp’ help foster a new ‘culture of resistance’ among these women. A case in point: the vast majority of women executives in the United States who leave their corporate jobs are white. Moreover, they are, for the most part, white women who do not rock the boat. Feminist scholars and Women’s Studies scholars can rock this boat. This work begins with the acknowledgement of a certain race-defined social fact within the executive workforce. Ella L. J. Edmondson Bell and Stella M. Nkomo discovered this social fact when they interviewed women executives and managers for their book Our Separate Ways: Black and White Women and the Struggle for Professional Identity (2001: 103). They were ‘surprised’, as they put it, to discover that ‘few of the white women . . . interviewed identified the women’s movement as a significant influence in their lives. Thus, the white women in our study group’, the authors suggested, ‘may be part of a group of women who did not embrace or identify with the values of the feminist movement of the late ’60s.’ The authors suggested that these women ‘have come to believe that issues of women and discrimination are no longer salient’. However, the authors note, ‘In contrast, the African-American women we interviewed talked a great deal about the influence and impact of the civil rights movement on their lives.’

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More to the point, as the authors note, ‘The white women as a group entered corporations with a certain amount of ingenuousness. Most admitted not being prepared for the corporate cultures they entered and most did not expect to have a difficult time fitting in’ (129). But their attitude changed quickly. As Bell and Nkomo note, ‘It did not take the white women in our study long to feel intimidated by the male-dominated environments they entered. Consequently, they had to learn to overcome the uncertainty they felt’ (129–31). Rarely did these white women, Bell and Nkomo said, ‘speak about trying to change their companies’ (181). Unlike their black counterparts, these white women did not strive to be change agents (‘radicals’) either within or outside of the system. More to the point, these women did not express outrage when they began to realize that they were the target of sexual discrimination. As one white woman said, ‘It took me a long time in the workforce before I realized there was discrimination and before I realized that’s just the way it was. I wasn’t going to fight the system’ (131). In contrast, the black women executives interviewed by Bell and Nkomo were raised in a ‘culture of resistance that had its beginning in the subordinate states of the African American community brought on by racism, classism, and sexism’. Bell and Nkomo note that ‘black women have historically been encouraged and prepared to resist, wherever possible. . . . So, the root of black women’s tempered radicalism is a sense of injustice that black women do not deny or try to soften’ (182). Further investigation is needed to determine the implications of the findings of Bell and Nkomo regarding black women who stay in (the corporate world) and resist, and white women who leave the corporate world and are transformed into resistance fighters against corporate power. As noted in Part I of this chapter, something quite interesting is taking place as many of the white women leave the corporate fold. Their mass (albeit individual) exodus from their jobs is rocking the boat. As Lisa Belkin notes in her 2003 New York Times Magazine article ‘The Opt-Out Revolution’, this exodus is now a staging area for an incipient women’s revolution. When women leave corporate America to have children, Belkin argues, they are not opting out of the modern feminist revolution; it simply looks that way. Their decision to leave the workplace for gender-defined caregiving responsibilities is ‘not the failure of a [feminist] revolution, but the start of a new one.’ This new revolution, Belkin insists, ‘is about a door opened but a crack by women that could usher in a new environment for us all’. Thousands upon thousands of white women are forming this incipient rebellion in the heartland of the global market: white middle-class America. These women need a new setting to see what they have wrought. Foremost among the requirements for this new vision, as psychiatrist Anna Fels notes in her 2003 Harvard Business Review article ‘Do Women Lack Ambition?’, is personal recognition (56). Fels interviewed women executives, entrepreneurs, and white-collar professionals in order to study the nature and structure of ambition in the lives of these women, most of whom are white. Fels concluded that these women, just like their male counterparts, needed two things to succeed: the opportunity to master skills and the social encouragement to not only achieve mastery but also to sustain it. Thanks to the modern women’s liberation

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movement, Fels observed, women (usually white and/or middle class) ‘have greater opportunities for forming and pursuing their own goals now than at any time in history’ (8). However, Fels found that these women are not given the social approval needed to sustain them and thus lack the emotional context needed to complete their advance. These women, in short, are not given personal recognition. The emotional context of these women’s lives, Fels discovered, did not permit them to continue to excel until they had fulfilled their gender-defined obligations as caregivers for their children and elders. Without this, Fels observed, the success of these women is not ‘socially condoned’ and their ‘ambition as well as their femininity will be called into question’. These highly successful women, Fels concluded, were leaving their jobs to attend to their caregiving responsibilities because their gender-defined social context prohibited anything else. Fels suggests five ways to create positive recognition for these women’s professional ambitions. Such women, Fels suggests, must (1) see themselves as a political constituency, (2) actively imagine themselves into their future, both as a political constituency and in the trajectories of their individual lives, (3) establish structures in which they can find sustained recognition for their achievements, (4) pursue advantageous connections, and finally (5) know that it is never to late to begin. Fels, in effect, calls for the creation of an alternative social reality that would challenge the dominant social reality that inhibits the advancement of women in terms of both group liberation and personal growth. This new way of being begins for many white women who leave the corporate fold for gender-based, traditional reasons when they discover something more to their lives than the bottom line—and feel transformed. When feminist theologians and Women’s Studies scholars take up and sustain this feeling of transformation, the psychological space is created for the transformative personal and collective power of women’s work to thrive as a spiritual movement. I call the constructive and practical theological work in this realm of human experience Affect Theology (Thandeka 2005a, b). Affect Theology studies the human emotions and affective states that guide, direct, and prioritize religious beliefs, creedal claims, liturgical structures, religious education programs, and pastoral practices by members and leaders of a religious community. As an affective analysis of religious experience, theological reflection, and leadership practices in a religious community, Affect Theology functions as a complement to Rational Theology, the systematic study of the belief systems and doctrines that define a faith community. Affect Theology’s nineteenth-century antecedent is Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Affekt Theology, the attempt by the father of modern liberal theology to give balance to the rational theology of Kant (among others) by making human affections and feelings the foundational reference for religious experience and belief. Here, feelings are resurrected and the ability to form and sustain religious community begins ever anew (2005a). Here we find, as Schleiermacher has said, the natal hour of everything living in religion. Here we find the wellsprings of lived religion, embodied religion, enlivened religion as the everyday feelings of transformed lives.

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Church communities and other religious-centered institutions are ideal settings for this work. Feminist theologians help focus attention to such settings for the emerging racially characterized, gender-defined retreat from market-defined work for the sake of the work of care using an affectively theological approach (2005b). As feminist theologian Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore suggests in her book Also a Mother (1994), churches can become places for ‘listening, brainstorming, and holding’ and for exploring new ways to think about [congregants’] commitment to work. Congregations have a crucial prophetic role to play in confronting the values of a materialistic “Protestant” work ethic that puts profits before people. . . . On this score, the needs of children must no longer be our lowest priority, the jobs related to children our lowest status, worst paid positions or caring for children something of little value. (188)

Miller-McLemore’s work is particularly pertinent here because she focuses pointed attention on the needs of white, middle-class women like herself who work. To bring home this point, Miller-McLemore begins her book with the following confession, observation, and series of questions about white women like herself. In the following citation I have added the repeated use of the term ‘white’ after Miller-McLemore’s first use of it to keep attention focused on Miller-McLemore’s targeted audience: the white professional woman who is also a mother: As a ‘working mother,’ I read the blurb on the back of Anita Shreve’s Remaking Motherhood eagerly: ‘Working mothers are enhancing their children’s lives in many ways that nonworking mothers are not.’ These are fighting words. Why doesn’t most of white middle-class North America believe this? Why do some of us [white women] want so strongly to believe it? Why do women, from Phyllis Schlafly to Mrs. Dan Quayle, want as desperately to prove otherwise? Who set up this opposition anyway? Aren’t [white] women being divided and conquered precisely at a moment in history when we really need one another’s support? And why must [white] women worry so much about enhancing their children’s lives? Can you imagine an alternative marketing blurb: ‘Working [white] fathers are enhancing their children’s lives’? (1994: 29–30)

New structures can be created for small group work within congregations for these women and their families. As Miller-McLemore notes: Congregations initiated through study groups, workshops, retreats, growth groups, house-gatherings, and sermons must include the voices of both women and men of different ages and must listen to people’s concerns about the many changes in postmodern life-styles. They must look at present problems and at conventional answers, as well as the assumed religious doctrines. (186)

Part of the objective social reality that frames the dawning of this new cultural consciousness for many white women executives today is globalization. As noted earlier, most white businesswomen who leave their corporate jobs and subsequently experience a change of heart are not consciously part of a collective liberation movement—yet.

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Feminist theologians and Women’s Studies scholars can help midwife this new creation through focused attention on this burgeoning women’s movement within white America. Conferences, colloquia, and summits with women from Feminism, Inc. work with businesswomen who are developing and professionally pursuing an ethic of care, the training of ministers who can create a new space for women’s liberation through small group work in churches and other religious institutions—these can help such women become part of a ‘culture of resistance’ that can help create an awareness of a transcultural space for new political power that will liberate us all. As I have demonstrated in the second section of this chapter, feminist theologians and Women’s Studies scholars have already begun work in various aspects of this threefold task in North American work on globalization. The next step is basic. We must increase our collective awareness of the work already begun so that a stronger and more sustained level of coordinated activity can commence. My essay is offered as a step forward toward this new day.

Author’s Note I thank the Revd Constance L. Grant and Dr. Cathy Silber for their numerous critiques, commentaries, and editorial suggestions and recommendations as I worked on various stages and drafts of this chapter. They have my deepest gratitude and appreciation. And special thanks to Sheila Briggs for her wonderful support throughout this project.

Notes 1. To order copies of the report, visit http://www.womenscareersreport.hbr.org 2. If this system were put into words, Burk notes, it would say: ‘Women can have all the lower-level jobs we can fill, but we have an 89 percent quota for men in management and a 99 percent quota for men in CEO positions’. The problem, Burk concludes, is one of equal opportunity (2006: 4). 3. The unpaid labor issue now faced by American corporations was taken up more than two decades ago by Hilda Scott in her book, Working Your Way to the Bottom (1984). ‘What all women have in common’, Scott trenchantly noted, ‘is that they share most of the unpaid work of the world.’ As Scott notes, ‘Woman’s unpaid work, her productive and reproductive labor for which she receives no remuneration, underpins the world’s economy, yet is peripheral to the world’s economy as men define it, and therefore has no value’ (x). As Scott notes, the business model of so-called progress ‘places increasing economic responsibilities on women without redefining their role as the mainstay of family life in the home’ (viii). 4. According to Thurman Woodard (2005: 2–3), more than a third of Dell’s 55,000 employees globally are women ‘and more than one half of [Dell’s] U.S. employees are women and [minorities]’. 5. As Hewlett and Luce note (2005: 10), ‘Fifty-eight percent of college graduates are now women, and nearly half of all professional and graduate degrees are earned by women.

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6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

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Even more importantly, the incremental additions to the talent pool will be disproportionately female, according to figures released by the U.S. Department of Education. The number of women with graduate and professional degrees is projected to grow by 16% over the next decade, while the number of men with these degrees is projected to grow by a mere 1.3%’. For details, see Dell (2005a: 1). For a summary of this conference, which was co-hosted by Dell and Best Practices at Dell’s headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, in March 2005, see Dell (2005b) and also see Dell’s website (2005c) for photos and more details. See also Dell (2005d). Special thanks to Professor Cathy Silber, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, for this insight. This is how Dell created ‘one of the fastest, most hyperefficient organizations on the planet’, concluded research analyst Jonathan Eunice. Hilda Scott makes this point powerfully when stating, ‘What all women have in common is that they share most of the unpaid work of the world’ (1984: x). Cited by Bonnie J. MillerMcLemore (1994: 33–4), who, picking up on another of Scott’s points, notes that ‘[t]he vast majority of women, whether mothers or not, are’, and here Miller-McLemore quotes Scott, ‘poor in the absolute sense that they carry out an enormous amount of the indispensable work without any remuneration whatsoever’ (Scott: 10). For details, see the CAFOD extraordinary report (2004a: 4). As the report notes, in its section entitled ‘Outsourcing and developing countries’, ‘IBM, Hewlett Packard and Dell outsource much of their manufacturing outside the United States, and particularly in developing countries. Electronics was one of the first industries in which stages of the production process were diffused to developing countries. This was facilitated by the commoditisation of computer production: the computer’s component parts can be traded like commodities, because they are increasingly standardised, easily replicable and cheap. Commoditisation allows components to be manufactured at different locations, making it easy to outsource production. ‘The electronics sector has been in the vanguard of the globalisation of production processes and is now “the most globalised of all industries” [UNCTAD (2002) Trade and Development Report 2002, Geneva: UNCTAD]. More than one-third of all electronics exports now come from developing countries [ibid.]. According to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), electronics are the fastest growing of all developing country exports [ibid.]. Between 1980 and 1998, the share of electronic products in developing country exports increased fourfold, from 5.3 per cent to 22 per cent [ibid.] . . . . ‘This process started during the 1980s when Japanese companies, faced with appreciation of the yen and increased labour costs at home, moved production to Taiwan and Singapore. US companies followed suit and developed partnerships with Asian-based suppliers. The past two decades have seen this process increase in speed and volume. Japanese, US, Singaporean and Taiwanese companies have moved parts of their production process to lower-cost countries such as the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand. Since then even lowercost countries (notably China) have emerged, precipitating another wave of relocation.’ Hewlett and Luce provide the complete statistical findings from this research project, as well as additional commentary and company examples, in The Hidden Brain Drain (2005).

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14. This suggestion is based on the ‘increased loyalty and productivity’ the Johnson and Johnson family of companies experienced when they developed such arrangements (Hewlett and Luce 2005: 7). 15. The Vista RX division of Pfizer uses this strategy (Hewlett and Luce 2005: 7). 16. Hewlett and Luce (2005) began with a summary of the debate prompted by Lisa Belkin’s article: ‘Throughout the past year, a noisy debate has erupted in the media over the meaning of what Lisa Belkin of the New York Times has called the “opt-out revolution”. ’ 17. Katha Pollitt (2005: 14) missed this affirmation of a women’s rebellion in her critical review of Belkin’s essay. 18. See Sandra Lee Bartky (1990) for an analysis of an alternative social reality fostered by liberated women. 19. For details on setting up small groups also referred to as ‘covenant groups’ in the United States and ‘encounter groups’ in England, see The Center for Community Values website (http://www.the-ccv.org) and click on ‘Developing a Roadmap to Covenant Group Ministry, A Seven-Hour workshop’. I am a foundation member of this not-for-profit institute and its co-president. My Essex Hall Lecture, which I presented as a Unitarian Universalist minister and theologian at the Annual British Unitarian Association in April 2002, introduced encounter groups to England, where they are presently flourishing, can also be found on this website by clicking on ‘Engagement Groups, Bringing Forth the Future from the Past’.

Works Cited Bartky, Sandra Lee (1990). Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Consciousness. New York: Routledge. Belkin, Lisa (2003). ‘The Opt-Out Revolution’, New York Times Magazine, 26 Oct., 42 ff. Bell, Ella L. J. E., and Nkomo, Stella M. (2001). Our Separate Ways: Black and White Women and the Struggle for Professional Identity. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Burk, Martha (2005). Cult of Power: Sex Discrimination in Corporate America and What Can Be Done about It. New York: Scribner. (2006). ‘40 Years after Pay Equity Act, Women Still Earn Less Than Men’, Coalition of Labor Union Women, CLUW.org, ‘The new online frontline for working women’, available at http://www.cluw.org/programs-payequity.html Cafod (2004a). ‘Clean Up Your Computer—Working Conditions in Electronics Industry’, Part I: ‘The Personal Computer Supply Chain’, available at http://www.cafod.org.uk/policy_ and_analysis/policy_papers/private_sector/clean_up_your_computer_report/ part_i#supply (2004b). ‘Clean Up Your Computer—Working Conditions in Electronics Industry’, Part III: ‘Working Conditions in PC Supply Chains: Mexico and China’, available at http://www. cafod.org.uk/policy_and_analysis/policy_papers/private_sector/clean_up_your_ computer/clean_up_your_computer/part_iii Caiazza, Amy, Shaw, April, and Werschkul, Misha (2004). The Status of Women in the States, Women’s Economic Status in the States: Wide Disparities by Race, Ethnicity, and Region. Washington, DC: Institute for Women’s Policy Research, available at http://www.iwpr.org/ pdf/R260.pdf

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Castells, Manuel (1989). The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring and the Urban–Regional Process. Oxford: Blackwell. Center for Community Values (2003). ‘Developing a Roadmap to Covenant Group Ministry: A Seven-Hour Workshop’, available at http://www.the-ccv.org Cullen, Drew (2002). ‘Prisoners Go to Work for Dell’, The Register, 19 May, available at http:// www.theregister.co.uk/2002/05/19/prisoners_go_to_work/ Dell Inc. (2005a). ‘Global Summit: Women in the Workforce Research Study: Global Survey Fact Sheet’, available at http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/corporate/press/20050419_ summit.pdf (2005b). ‘Dell Communication News: Values in Action—Dell Holds Global Diversity Summit on Women’s Advancement in the Workplace’, available at http://www.dell.com/ downloads/global/corporate/vision_national/index_full.htm (2005c). ‘Conversations with Dell: Global Women’s Strategy’, available at http://www1. us.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/conversations/en/2005_04_15?c=us&l=en&s=corp (2005d). ‘Supportive Managers Are Top Factor in Keeping Workers in Professional Fold: Global Survey of Female Managers Gauges Recruitment, Advancement, Retention, available at http://www1.us.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/pressoffice/en/2004/2005_04_19_r… Fels, Anna (2003). ‘Do Women Lack Ambition?’ Harvard Business Review, 82/4: 50–60. Hewlett, Sylvia Ann (1991). When the Bough Breaks: The Cost of Neglecting Our Children. New York: HarperPerennial. (2002). Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children. New York: Talk Miramax. and Luce, Carolyn Buck (2005). ‘Off-Ramps and On-Ramps: Keeping Talented Women on the Road to Success’, Harvard Business Review Research Report, Reprint RO503B, available at http://www.hbr.org Luce, Carolyn Buck, Shiller, Peggy, and Southwell, Sandra (2005). The Hidden Brain Drain: Off-Ramps and On-Ramps in Women’s Careers. Survey research sponsored by Ernst and Young, Goldman Sachs, and Lehman Brothers, Product no. 9491. Harvard Business Review Research Report, available at http://www.hbr.org Larson, Jennifer, Osborn, Christine, and Lee, Katherine (2005). National Association of Female Executives (NAFE) 2004 Salary Survey, available at http://nafe.com/mag4thQuarterSalary.shtml Miller-McLemore, Bonnie J. (1994). Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma. Nashville, TN: Abingdon. Pellet, Jennifer (2005). ‘Five Success Stories’. National Association of Female Executives, available at http://www.nafe.com/mag_3rdqtr05_success.shtml Pollitt, Katha (2005). ‘Desperate Housewives of the Ivy League’, The Nation, 17 Oct. Rivlin, Gary (2004). ‘Who’s Afraid of China? How Dell Became the World’s Most Efficient Computer Maker’, The New York Times, Sect. 3, 19 Dec. Roth, Benita (2004). Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s Second Wave. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rudrappa, Sharmila (2005). ‘Women in a Global Workforce’, available at http://www.dell. com/downloads/global/corporate/press/20050419_ut_whitepaper.pdf Sassen, Saskia (2000). ‘Women in the Global City; Exploitation and Empowerment’, No. 25942538. Database Producer Gale Group Inc. Berlin: Lolapress. (2001). The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, 2nd edn. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Scott, Hilda (1984). Working Your Way to the Bottom: The Feminization of Poverty. London: Pandora. Thandeka (2002). ‘Engagement Groups: Bringing Forth the Future from the Past’. Center for Community Values, available at http://www.the-ccv.org (2005a). ‘Schleiermacher, Feminisms, and Liberation Theologies: A Key’, in Jacqueline Mariña (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schleiermacher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2005b). ‘Schleiermacher’s Affekt Theology’, International Journal of Practical Theology, 9/2 (Dec.). Townes, Emilie M. (2001). Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health Issues and a Womanist Ethic of Care. New York: Continuum. Weisman, Leslie Kanes (1992). Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the ManMade Environment. Urbana, IL/Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Woodard, Thurmond (2005). ‘Dell Women’s Strategy Conference Call: April 19, 2005’, available at http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/corporate/press/20050419_transcript.pdf

Further Reading Chua, Amy (2003). World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. New York: Doubleday. Fraser, Jill Andresky (2001). White-Collar Sweat Shops: The Deterioration of Work and its Rewards in Corporate America. New York: Norton. Gutman, Herbert G. (1977). Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America. New York: Vintage Books. Lind, Michael (2003). Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics. New York: New America Books. Napoleoni, Loretta (2005). Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks. New York: Seven Stories Press. Rubenstein, Richard L. (1975). The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future. New York: Harper Colophon Books. Shiva, Vandana (2000). Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Thandeka (2005). ‘Ministering to Anxiety: Take Abortion, for Example . . . Tikkun Magazine: A Bimonthly Jewish and Interfaith Critique of Politics, Culture & Society (May/June), 20/3. (2009). ‘Future Designs for American Liberal Theology’, The American Journal of Theology and Philosophy (January), 30: 1.

section iii

CH A NGI NG CON T E N TS

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chapter 16

beyon d th eol ogy of r eligions: th e epistemol ogica l a n d ethica l ch a l lenges of i n ter-r eligious engagem en t sharon d. welch

It is virtually impossible to ‘join’ a tribal religion by agreeing to its doctrines. People couldn’t care less whether an outsider believes anything. Deloria (1992: 95) Religion is, in reality, ‘living’. Our ‘religion’ is not what we profess, or what we say, or what we proclaim; our ‘religion’ is what we do, what we desire, what we seek, what we dream about, what we fantasize, what we think—all of these things—twenty-four hours a day. One’s religion, then, is one’s life, not merely the ideal life but life as it is actually lived. Religion is not prayer, it is not a church, it is not ‘theistic’, it is not ‘atheistic’, it has little to do with what white people call ‘religion’. It is our every act. If we tromp on a bug, that is our religion; if we experiment on living animals, that is our religion; if we cheat at cards, that is our religion; if we dream of being famous, that is our religion; if we gossip maliciously, that is our religion; if we are rude and aggressive, that is our religion. All that we do and are is our religion. Forbes (1979: 26–7)

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The first mindfulness training: openness Aware of the suffering created by fanaticism and intolerance, we are determined not to be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones. Buddhist teachings are guiding means to help us learn to look deeply and to develop our understanding and compassion. They are not doctrines to fight, kill, or die for. Nhat Hanh et al. (2000: 74)

‘The Majjhima-Nikaya: Questions which lend not to edification’ Thus I have heard: [A]ny one who would say, ‘I will not lead the religious life under The Blessed One until The Blessed One shall elucidate to me either that the world is eternal, or that the world is not eternal . . . or that the saint neither exists nor does not exist after death; that person would die, Malunkyaputta, before the Tathagata [the Buddha] ever elucidated this to him . . . ‘And what, Malunkyaputta, have I elucidated? Misery, Malunkyaputta, have I elucidated; the origin of misery have I elucidated; the cessation of misery have I elucidated; and the path leading to the cessation of misery I have elucidated. And why, Malunkyaputta, have I elucidated this? Because, Malunkyaputta, this does profit, has to do with the fundamentals of religion, and tends to aversion, absence of passion, cessation, quiescence, knowledge, supreme wisdom, and Nirvana; therefore I have elucidated it. Accordingly, Malunkyaputta, bear in mind what it is that I have not elucidated, and what it is that I have elucidated’. Warren (1996: 117–22)

Context: Globalization, religious pluralism, postcolonialism In 1983 Gayatri Spivak raised the provocative question ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ and answered with an anguished, ‘No!’ As her groundbreaking analysis fifteen years later demonstrated, the problem is not that the subaltern cannot speak. The problem is that the dominant cannot, or will not, hear (1999: 269–311).

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How can we as Western feminists learn to hear the voices of people from other religious and ethical traditions and from other social locations? Can we engage other traditions without appropriation? Can we work together for equity, justice, and beauty? Let us begin this momentous work by examining the power dynamics of our current world—the forces that connect us, shape us, and challenge us to accountability, vision, and courage. The political, ecological, and economic problems posed by globalization and religious pluralism are well known to many activists and scholars (Sen 1999; Shiva 2002). With the close ties of economic and cultural globalization come a growing disparity in wealth between the poor and the rich and social instability in both the centers and the margins of economic and political power. The ecological costs of economic development affect the entire globe, although the immediate costs are often borne in poor areas that serve as sites for environmentally damaging industry and reservoirs for toxic waste (Merchant 1992; Roberts et al. 1998; Hardt and Negri 2000; Stiglitz 2003). Many scholars and activists describe these problems in stark terms. E. O. Wilson, for example, declares that if every person consumed at the rate of those in the United States, given present technology, we would need four more planets to meet those demands for natural resources (2002: 23). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri offer a challenge to activists and to public intellectuals. They argue that there are ‘two faces to globalization’. Acknowledging that this is a large simplification, they nonetheless ask that we pay attention to disparate and contending contemporary developments. On the one hand, ‘Empire spreads globally its network of hierarchies and divisions that maintain order through new mechanisms of control and constant conflict.’ These forces that amplify existing social disparities and create new ones are, however, being challenged by a second factor, ‘new circuits of cooperation and collaboration that stretch across nations and continents’ (2004: xiv). Hardt and Negri’s description does seem appropriate for many forms of transnational cooperation such as environmental activism, conflict prevention and mediation programs, and human rights campaigns, including work within those campaigns to end violence against women and the sexual trafficking of women and children. Hardt and Negri claim that this ‘second face of globalization’ is often energized by a vital interplay of commonality and difference: ‘[T]he challenge posed by the concept of multitude is for a social multiplicity to manage to communicate and act in common while remaining internally different’ (2004: xiv). Hardt and Negri claim that we are in a time of immense political upheaval, one in which economic and political practices that foster inequality and alienation are being challenged by a ‘multitude’, networks of peoples and organizations ‘working through Empire to create an alternative global society’ (2004: xvii). These networks are developing, at least in part, through the work of many academic disciplines, including those of religious studies and theological education. The ‘open and expansive network in which all differences can be expressed freely and equally’ is at times fostered by religious organizations and communities, but is quite often thwarted by religiously based identity conflict (2004: xiv). In order to ‘communicate and act in common’, we need an understanding of

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conflicting religious identities, their gifts, challenges, and dangers. Such understanding is essential for peacemaking, and essential for survival. Religion is often the source of division and hate; religion is also often the source of rigorous self-critique and radical openness and inclusion. In her study of religious pluralism in the United States, Diana Eck brings to our attention the specific challenges that religious diversity poses for one country. It is not just a matter of becoming responsible citizens in a religiously diverse global community, but also the immediate question of discerning what it means to be United States citizens in an increasingly diverse nation (2001). According to the United States Census Bureau, by the year 2050, if current population growth patterns continue, non-Hispanic whites will comprise 50.8 of the US population, and Hispanic whites, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans will comprise 49 of the population (US Census Bureau 2004). In addition to the growing racial diversity in the United States, there is also increasing religious diversity. Between 1917 and 1965, immigration to the USA was restricted on the basis of the 1890 census, and employed national quotas that heavily favored Protestant northern and western Europe. The Immigration Act of 1965 abolished those national quotas, and opened immigration to people with technical and professional skills from throughout the world. As a result, Asians became the largest immigrant group, and the USA is now home to more forms of Buddhism than any other country in the world. While there were very few immigrants from India prior to 1965, approximately one million people have immigrated to the USA from India in the past thirty years (Eck 2001: 6). Christians are still the majority, representing 76.5 of the US population (American Religious Identity Survey (ARIS) 2001). Throughout the country, however, other religious groups are making their presence known. There is increasing awareness of the continued vitality of Native American communities. Jace Weaver reminds us of their diversity—‘six hundred different tribal traditions, eight major language families, and probably three distinct racial strains’—a complex reality that cannot be collapsed into a static Native American or American Indian identity (1998: x). Eck claims that in the 1950s, a long overdue recognition began to be made of the history of Judaism within the USA, and the contributions of Jews to American public life. ‘[I]n 1955 the sociologist Will Herberg published a book about the new American religious status quo bearing the simple title Protestant, Catholic, Jew. In his view Catholics and Jews now took their place along with Protestants as the bearers of the American experiment’ (Eck 2001: 61, 112, 214). Such inclusion did not occur quickly or easily. It took sustained effort to counter the discrimination against, and marginalization of, Catholic and Jewish people in the United States. Now the rapid growth of Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu populations is challenging us once more to expand the parameters of who is included in shaping the American way of life. People identifying as Jews declined by 10 between 1990 and 2000. During that same period, the numbers of self-identified Christians grew by 5, Muslims by 109, nonreligious or secular by 110, Native Americans by 119, Buddhists by 170, and Hindus by

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237 (ARIS 2001). While the combined numbers of these groups is still far below that of the Christian population, we find a growing presence of diverse religious communities in American public life—for example, the building of temples and mosques as well as people running for public office and asking for recognition and accommodation in public schools and in the workplace. Through her Pluralism Project, Eck charts areas of successful coexistence, yet warns of obstacles to living in common: ‘the fear of the foreign and the denigration of the different, whether we speak of race, ethnicity, or religion’ (2001: 29). She claims, ‘[T]he United States is in the process of understanding and negotiating the meaning of its pluralism anew.’ As we shape a new understanding of who ‘we’ are as citizens of the United States, ‘[I]it is clearly critical to hear the voices of America’s many religions, new and old, in shaping a distinctively and boldly multi-religious society.’ Eck claims that we may be enriched by a ‘culture of pluralism’. However, she also warns us, ‘We may not succeed. We may find ourselves fragmented and divided, with too much pluribus and not enough unum. But if we can succeed, this is the greatest form of lasting leadership we can offer the world’ (2001: 77). What is required to offer such ‘lasting leadership’, and what is the role of feminist theology and ethics in helping foster such leadership? At the core of a culture of pluralism is seeing and respecting religious difference. Even seeing differences is not a simple task. It is often difficult for people to grasp different ways of being religious, and much more difficult to grant the full dignity and integrity of those who are religiously ‘Other’. Our Western understandings of religion and rationality have played no small part in that lack of perception and recognition. Charles Long claims, ‘[O]ur rational Western intellectual tradition, rooted in a citied tradition, has blinded us to an adequate perception of the diversity of the human’ (1986: 65). In a postcolonial world, the West is being challenged by peoples who have been marginalized, colonized, and exploited to recognize diverse forms of humanity. By postcolonial, scholars refer to a political situation in which the processes of colonization (economic, cultural, and political conquest) are both contested and relatively visible. The term does not mean that colonial domination has ended or been decisively defeated. Although it is extremely significant that colonial powers in Africa and the Americas have been defeated, the processes of domination continue in other forms. Postcolonial theory emerges from an acknowledgement of the complex forms of resistance to colonial and neocolonial domination and exploitation. In his introduction to postcolonial theory, Robert Young states that such theory entails ‘a conceptual reorientation towards the perspectives of knowledges, as well as needs, developed outside the west’ (2003: 11). He later continues: ‘Postcolonialism, or tricontinentalism, is a general name for these insurgent knowledges that come from the subaltern, the dispossessed, and seek to change the terms and values under which we all live. You can learn it anywhere if you want to. The only qualification you need to start is to make sure that you are looking at the world not from above, but from below’ (2003: 24). Postcolonialism is intrinsically linked with political action. According to Young, ‘It is concerned with developing the driving ideas of a political practice morally committed

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to transforming the conditions of exploitation and poverty in which large sections of the world’s population live out their daily lives’ (2003: 6). Keller, Nausner, and Rivera also highlight the intrinsic relationship between postcolonial theory and political struggle: ‘[W]e use postcolonial theory in ways that commit us to something more than theory— that is, to an engaged and engaging theology, a work of resistance to the layered, ongoing, and novel colonizations of the planet’ (2004: xi). In this work of resistance, religious traditions play a crucial role. In order to understand this role, we are being challenged to reframe not only our understanding of global orders but our understanding of the very nature of religion itself. We live in a world in which Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Native American, humanist, and Buddhist voices are defining the nature of ‘religion’, and the relationship between ‘religion’ and civil society. In response to these voices, the field of comparative religion has changed dramatically within the past twenty years—its basic categories and methods of analysis being redefined by this ongoing interaction and exchange. It is now widely acknowledged that the discipline of comparative religions emerged within the colonial enterprise of conquest and cultural and political genocide. The discovery and analysis by Western peoples of other traditions is not innocent, but occurred within a historical matrix of the expansion of an imperialist Enlightenment reason and humanism, and a triumphalist Christianity (Long 1986; Chidester 1996). Within the past century, Christians have approached other religious traditions from one of three perspectives: an exclusivist view, in which Christianity is seen as the ultimate and sole source of truth and salvation; an inclusivist view, in which other traditions are seen to include elements of the truth borne most clearly and decisively by Christianity; and a pluralist perspective, in which all traditions are given equal weight, and are engaged in respectful dialogue (Kwok 2005: 198–201). As Pui-lan Kwok so clearly states, the problem with even the pluralist paradigm is that the notion of what is being compared, or what is the subject of dialogue, is taken from Western Christianity. She urges feminist theologians to avoid this ‘uncritical use of the category of “religion” and the problematic construction of “world religions” ’. Following Richard King and Wilfred Cantwell Smith, she asks us to learn from the work of scholars in religious studies who are learning to critically evaluate all our categories of comparison and analysis: ‘[A] postcolonial theology of religious difference goes beyond asking the usual questions, such as: Is there only one transcendental reality? Do human beings, have common, universal religious experience? Do different religions have the same ultimate goal, or are there different salvations?’ (2005: 204). As we participate in inter-religious engagement, we can expect that different kinds of questions will emerge. We cannot predict in advance what those questions might be. We can, however, note the types of engagement from which such productive questions emerge: work together for areas of common concern. Postcolonial comparative religious engagement is fundamentally political. It is the work of people from various humanistic and religious traditions creating the institutions, relationships, and cultures necessary for equitable survival and thriving. Kwok gives as one example women who ‘work for peace across racial division and religious differences’. She highlights the work of Israeli

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Jewish women who are working with Palestinian women for justice in the Middle East, Sri Lankan women, and the call for such ongoing work by Shirin Ebadi of Iran upon receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 (2005: 208). Another example is the work of people who are secular and religious in organizations such as Amnesty International, working on human rights for all people, and highlighting the ways in which violence against women is also a violation of human rights. Postcolonial comparative religious engagement leads us even further than openness to new questions in the light of political work. Not only are we challenged to critically evaluate what is being engaged but to reconsider how that engagement occurs. For the past one hundred years, the primary form of scholarly inter-religious encounter has been inter-religious dialogue (Patton and Ray 2000). While fruitful, such an approach is also severely limited, reflecting as it does Western assumptions about the nature of religious knowledge itself, assumptions about the bearer of religious knowledge, and assumptions about the nature of the self. Dialogue is suited for an interaction in which rational individuals discuss different concepts about the nature of ultimacy, the nature of human existence and its dilemmas, and the varying means of recognizing and redressing those dilemmas. Many scholars of non-Western religious traditions, however, point to the inevitable distortions that follow from inter-religious dialogue about religious beliefs. Stephen Batchelor, for example, argues that operating from the assumption of religion as a system of belief, and inter-religious dialogue as a comparison of beliefs, has led to a fundamental misunderstanding of a core aspect of the Buddhist tradition. What exists within Buddhism, or more properly, Dharma practice (Buddhism is a term applied to this tradition by Western scholars), as the Four Ennobling Truths, are misunderstood by Western scholars as Four Noble Truths, as ‘propositions to be believed, rather than challenges to act’ (1997: 11). The problem now being examined in the postcolonial comparative study of religion is quite straightforward: the categories for defining religion were taken from Western traditions and then applied to other traditions, a process in which the other traditions were often found wanting, or, even if seen as complex and worthy of appreciation, were still misunderstood by Western scholars. Richard King describes a significant shift in Western understanding of the term ‘religion’. In Roman society, religio was seen as having its roots in the term ‘relegere—to retrace or re-read. Thus, religio involves the retracing of “the lore of the ritual” of one’s ancestors’ (1999: 34). This definition is intrinsically pluralistic. There are many religious traditions, yet King claims that they were seen as largely unchanging. King demonstrates that with Christianity we have a redefinition of religion, basing it now in ‘re-ligare, meaning to bind together or link. Thus for [the third century writer] Lactantius, religio “is a worship of the true; superstition of the false”’. King claims that Lactantius’s definition reflects the emerging Christian understanding of religion as exclusive, focused on belief, and presuming a ‘fundamental dualism between the human world and the transcendent world of the divine to which one “binds” (religare) oneself ’ (1999: 35). Both of these Western understandings of religion are challenged by contemporary scholars who acknowledge not only the primacy of practice entailed in the former

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definition, but highlight the ways in which traditions are not only diverse, but are vital forms of world construction (not merely world interpretation) that continue to change and grow. David Chidester, for example, poses ‘an open, multiple, or polythetic definition of religion’. He focuses on ‘family resemblances’ that can be found within processes of ‘discursive, practical, and social strategies of symbolic and material negotiation’ (1996: 36). This leads him to analyze symbols, not as ‘a sign with a fixed referent’ but as ‘always available for new appropriations and new interpretations’. In a similar vein, he examines myths as ‘always open to retelling, reinterpretation and redeployment in the context of intercultural relations’. Rituals are seen to have power not as ‘reenactment of an authenticating original’ but as ‘a dynamic, embodied practice . . . a new performance’ (1996: 37). While acknowledging the dynamic role of multiplicity and transformation within religious traditions, it would be a mistake to see postcolonial theory as an uncritical celebration of difference and change. Not all forms of dynamic change are self-generated. As Keller et al. remind us, there is an intrinsic ‘ambiguity’ within postcolonial hybridity, a recognition of changes produced by violation and conquest, that may yet serve as possible sources of positive transformation (2004: 38). Young also focuses on the subject of postcolonial theory as the refugee, people whose identities are compelled to change by forces outside their control. Refugee: you are unsettled, uprooted. You have been translated. Who translated you? Who broke your links with the land? You have been forcibly moved off, or you have fled war or famine. . . . In moving, your life has come to a halt. Your life has been fractured, your family fragmented. The lovely dull familiar stabilities of ordinary everyday life and local social existence that you have known have passed. Compressed into a brief moment, you have experienced the violent disruptions of capitalism, the end of the comforts of the commonplace. You have become an emblem of everything that people are experiencing in cold modernity across different times. . . . Who is interested in your experiences now, in what you think or feel? (2003: 12).

Challenges of identity in a pluralistic world Let us return to the basic question: in a postcolonial world, how do we see and value differences, those that are forced, those that are self-generated, and those that are an ambiguous combination of both coercion and creativity? Jonathan Sacks argues that the genuine recognition of difference requires nothing less than a paradigm shift in Western epistemology, the ‘exorcism of Plato’s ghost’. The Platonic ideal, embodied in Western science, philosophy, political systems, and religion is the claim ‘that truth—reality, the essence of things, is universal. … What is true is true for everyone at all times, and so the more universal a culture is, the closer to truth it comes.’ Within this paradigm, commonalities are more important than differences, and ‘our differences are distractions to be overcome’ (2002: 49).

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Sacks claims that this idea is challenged by a core insight of Judaism, as expressed in the Book of Genesis: ‘The essential message of the Book of Genesis is that universality—the covenant with Noah—is only the context of and prelude to the irreducible multiplicity of cultures, those systems of meaning by which human beings have sought to understand their relationship to one another, the world and the source of being’ (2002: 49). He faults universalism, therefore, as ‘the attempt to impose a man-made unity on divinely created diversity’. Sacks poses a clear question, from his religious faith, to all religious traditions, and to all philosophical and political systems: ‘The critical test of any order is: does it make space for otherness? Does it acknowledge the dignity of difference?’(2002: 49, 52, 61). While Sacks finds resources for acknowledging the dignity of difference within Judaism, can we find similar resources in other philosophical and religious traditions? In addition to the work being done by scholars in religious studies, increasing numbers of scholars in theological ethics and in feminist, political, and ecological theology are asking these questions. Pui-lan Kwok, for example, in her most recent work, claims, ‘[W]e have to go beyond the comfort zone of pluralism to articulate a postcolonial theology of religious difference’ (2005: 25). She highlights one of the central difficulties of taking up this task. A hybridity generated by violence and conquest may well lead to a longing for closure, universality, exclusivity, and control: As a postcolonial subject who has been thrown into situations not of her choosing and who has to negotiate different cultural worlds constantly, I have to admit that the drive to ‘imagine the whole’—a unified country, an undefiled nation, an intact cultural tradition—is strong and often irresistible . . . [despite the] danger of reification of the past and the collapse of differences from within. (2005: 39)

Keller et al. describe the ways in which the Christian tradition has exacerbated these tendencies: With its imperial success, the church . . . absorbed an idolatry of identity: a metaphysical Babel of unity, an identity that homogenizes the multiplicities it absorbs, that either excludes or subordinates every creaturely other, alter, subaltern. God was cast in the image of this ontological identity, infused with a power that could only be—lacking all receptivity and reciprocity—all-controlling. (2004: 223)

While claiming that ‘there is no precolonial Christianity’, Keller et al. yet ask if there can be a ‘postcolonial Christianity’, a Christianity propelled by a ‘counterimperial ecology of love, a ‘theopolitics of planetary love—a divining love, and, after all, a love divine’ (2004: 224). Like Jonathan Sacks, they turn to biblical resources that enable us to embrace differences: It [the church] hears again the ancient, unfulfilled common—corrective of any idolatry of identity—to love the alien/stranger/immigrant as yourself. Even in its relatively homogenous rural and suburban forms, the church—hears this voice and faces a choice: to form a fortress against the chaotic uncertainties of postmodern life, providing familiarity and refuge but risking the asphyxiation of the Spirit; or to embrace a new democratic cosmopolitanism in which the Spirit connects rather than separates our differences. (Keller et al. 2004: 15)

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Unlike those who are dispossessed or those who are refugees, my location is with those who, despite the complexity of our identities, have felt at home, have known ourselves firmly as Americans, and now see and feel this home changing. We now feel at risk ourselves, as we see others claiming space within our home. Can we welcome our transformation as a people and a nation? There is a very real risk that large numbers of people will actively resist such unpredictable change and turn to the seeming security of racial and religious division, isolation and stratification.

Invitation How do we address these challenges? It is important to recognize that we are not alone in this work of inter-religious exchange in general and in the critique of religious exclusivism and domination in particular. The impetus to postcolonial comparative work and postcolonial critique of religious traditions has been initiated by those who have born the costs of colonization and domination, who criticize its legacy, and who call for new forms of critique and interaction. This essay began, therefore, in a way that is familiar, but profoundly inaccurate. The impetus for new forms of interaction and fundamental critique is not primarily the West’s deconstruction of its own forms of domination, but is a response to the work of those, who albeit colonized, resisted colonization from its beginning, and have continuously asserted their subjectivity and agency. This work is in response to the interest expressed by contemporary Native American activists and scholars, for example, in ‘developing nonsectarian approaches to interreligous dialogue’. James Treat points to an overlooked resource, ‘the dialogical significance of the religious traditions maintained by tribal communities’. He claims that we find here insights about the ‘practice of interreligious relations’ that can help us address the central questions of globalization: ‘Is peaceful coexistence possible in a world of divergent truth claims and fierce competition over material resources?’ (2003: 4). Pui-lan Kwok also reminds us, ‘[I]ndigenous women and women of color still hope to work in solidarity with white people, although the latter have exploited them and even stolen their religious symbols’ (2005: 228–9). R. S. Sugirtharajah also holds out hope for such work, drawing on the practices of nineteenth-century Indian converts to Christianity such as K. M. Banerjea, Upadhayay, Krishna Pillai, and Vedanayaga Sastriar. He finds here an example of what Homi Bhaba calls ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’. This is ‘not blending into someone else’s culture, but the blending into one’s own culture some of the liberative elements of someone else’s’ (Sugirtharaja 2004: 37). Citing Bhabha, he reminds us that this practice is ‘not simply appropriation or adaptation; it is a process through which cultures are required to revise their own systems of reference, norms and values, by departing from their habitual or “inbred” rules of transformation’ (Bhabha 2000: 141). Andrea Smith clearly describes the dangers of appropriation and warns against the ‘ “wanting to become Indian” ’ syndrome, in which white people want to learn Native

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secrets and ceremonies without accountability and responsibility for white racism’ (1993: 169). We are right to remain alert to the dangers of appropriation: examining other traditions without attention to the unjust political and economic interactions between those cultures and our own; ignoring the critiques of our culture found in those traditions; taking resources that address our needs, but do not address the need to work together for justice. A postcolonial process of engagement begins from a different point. According to Pui-lan Kwok, ‘[F]rom a postcolonial perspective, the primacy of the whole Western tradition is contested, and indigenous resources should be used on an equal footing and interpreted intertextually with Western sources’ (2005: 68). Furthermore, as postcolonial theorists we address the critiques of the West found in these traditions. An example of the enlivening critique that can come from inter-religious engagement is found in Rosemary Radford Ruether’s discussion of religious traditions, ecofeminism, and globalization. She describes, for example, the Daoist critique of ‘Western environmental rhetoric and practice’ that assumes ‘a fallen world that must then be “saved” by coercive methods’. Lu Ming, Rene Navarro, Linda Varone, Vincent Chu, Dainel Seitz, Weidong Lu, and Liu Xiaogan see this way of being—humans ‘imagining that they can conquer and control nature’ continued in illusions that we now can ‘save the planet’ (Ruether 2005: 67). Rather than controlling the world, these Daoist scholars and activists urge humans to ‘resituate themselves in the harmony of each being with the others’ (2005: 67). As we work together on specific issues, such as ecologically sustainable economic development, we may find traditions that have insights that we lack, and that may offer thought-provoking critiques of assumed patterns of action and response (2005: 80). Our response to these critiques is not only conceptual but practical, working together to redress the injustices so exposed. The insights that we gain—practices that heal, transform, and enliven—are employed in the interest of justice for all, not merely for our own meaning and spiritual well-being. In the work of social ethicist Linda Holler we find a clear example of a thorough engagement of Western ethical thought with Buddhist traditions. Holler sees one of the basic problems in Western ethics as being that of the failure of empathy—the inability of those who are relatively comfortable to take seriously the sufferings of others, the lack of awareness of the deleterious consequences of our actions, and the failure of courage and imagination in response to those consequences and that suffering. She sees this not primarily as a failure of reason, but of, quite literally, touch—of being in touch with the complex bodily realities of our own experiences, and being able to be touched by the realities of others (2002: 1–13). Holler does not limit her work to a comparison of Kantian and Buddhist ideas about the self and moral agency. She makes, rather, a strong case that ‘practices of mindfulness such as vipassana or tonglen forms of Buddhist meditation represent ways for us to come to our senses and live fully aware in the present’ (2002: 13). Through these practices, we experience the challenge and gift of our interconnection with a wider world that sustains us, and that we affect, for good and for ill, through our daily activities. Vipassana meditation ‘cultivates detailed awareness of sensory, emotional and mental processes’ (2002: 168). Tonglen meditation, as described by Pema Chodren, is a ‘meditation for difficult times’ (2002: 178). Holler states that Chodron

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teaches us to ‘ “lean into the edge”, allowing our most intense sensations and emotions . . . to guide and transform us’ (2002: 178). Rather than turn away from fear, sadness, irritation, anger, and repulsion, we feel them fully and calmly. According to Holler, each of these disciplines enhances ‘mindful touch’ and moral agency, bringing us to examine anew basic issues of economic and political exploitation and injustice: ‘Mindful touch means that we can no longer shield ourselves from pain or suffering—either our own or that of others—and that we must face the consequences of our larger patterns of consumption for the sake of the networks of life that support and compose us’ (2002: 13). Mindful touch also brings us into connection with sources of compassion and creativity: ‘If tactile consciousness can allow us to feel kinship with the myriad of things that create, sustain, and nourish us, then that feeling of being comforted may provide us with the moral strength to give that care back’ (2002: 172). What then are alternative forms of inter-religious engagement that may foster such political and ecological awareness and action? In the context of the United States, it is fitting to include the interaction between Western and American Indian traditions, the ‘intercultural meeting ground’ upon which Indians and non-Indians have created new identities (Deloria 1998: 191). For non-Indians, there has been a two hundred-year process of oscillation between ‘assimilation and destruction’ of Indian peoples and culture. Philip Deloria examines what this process has meant to Indians and what it has meant to non-Indians who have appropriated aspects of Indian identity, ‘simultaneously wielding political power against Indians while drawing power from them’ (1998: 191). In seeking to escape this destructive oscillation, we may learn from models of interreligious and intercultural exchange found within American Indian traditions, such as the Indian Ecumenical Conference. Treat states that the Conference is rooted in a larger history, early attempts by indigenous peoples to engage in equal relationship with other nonnative Americans. He describes, for example, the attempts by Hopi leaders to initiate such interaction in 1946 after the use of atomic weapons. Hopi elders tried to meet with governmental leaders in Washington in order to establish a ‘relationship grounded in mutuality and cooperation’. Treat summarizes the core of their invitation as follows: ‘ “Hopi” means “peaceful”. That is our religion’; and ‘We believe that through an understanding, if you come and sit with us in council, we may save the Hopi way of life. We may help save others from destruction by sharing our way of peace. We know certain things will take place if we do not’ (2003: 19). The US government was not responsive, and the Hopi elders turned their efforts to intertribal gatherings. This concern reached fruition in the Indian Ecumenical Conference, an intertribal gathering held from 1970 to 1983 and 1987 to 1988, and revived for one year in 1992. Treat states that the impetus for the Conference was addressing the destructive antagonism between Christian and tribal factions within many tribes: ‘Conference founders believed the survival of native communities would hinge on transcending the antagonisms between tribal and Christian traditions—a problem as old as the European colonization of the Americas—and they hoped to cultivate religious self-determination among native people by facilitating dialogue, understanding, and cooperation between diverse tribal nations and spiritual persuasions’ (2003: 304–5).

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Treat describes the range of activities that came to characterize each of the Conferences: Respected elders, ceremonial leaders, medicine people and ordained clergy met for four days to discuss the religious conflicts ravaging their communities throughout Canada and the U.S. They also joined in daily sunrise ceremonies, traded stories over shared meals, and socialized during the evenings. . . . They formed an inclusive fellowship of native leaders committed to religious revival through toleration and respect. (2003: 2)

Treat finds in the Conference ‘an elegantly simple strategy’ that enabled it to succeed for many years: ‘transcend[ing] the boundaries of religious tradition by cultivating interpersonal relationships’ (2003: 112). The Conference was not, however, without significant limitations. Women were not included until late, and the decisions about their involvement were made solely by men. Furthermore, significant tensions developed over the best way of organizing and maintaining the community that emerged through the intertribal gatherings. Although the Conference effectively ended in 1987, Treat claims that it did much to redress the internal divisions between Christian and anti-Christian voices in native communities. He also claims that we can learn from these lessons in our efforts to learn from each other and work together: ‘Bureaucratic elites—spiritual leaders as well as scholars of religion—can learn a great deal from those who gave life to the Conference: effective interreligous dialogue has less to do with theologies and liturgies and policies than with a shared commitment to meaningful coexistence’ (2003: 304).

Pedagogy James Treat’s account of the Indian Ecumenical Conference is both encouraging and sobering. He describes the difficulties that emerged within the Conference because of different understandings of how one learns tribal traditions. Many young people, without tribal affiliations or backgrounds, attended the Conference in order to ‘learn the tribal traditions they missed while growing up in the city’ (2003: 304). Although their interest in learning was genuine, they did not know the protocols of engagement that are part of tribal traditions. They complained that the elders were avoiding them, and did not realize that education within tribal traditions cannot be obtained in four or five days of intense instruction. Rather, learning emerges through ‘the establishment of personal relationships with knowledgeable people in an environment where they could experience things together’ (2003: 304). Bob Thomas, one of the leaders of the Conference, reiterated the importance of learning through observation, not through didactic instructions. He believed that the native youth would ‘learn a lot more if, at least in our formal sessions, they could listen to elders talk to each other about common concerns’ (Treat 2003: 304). Much of the knowledge carried within tribal traditions is conveyed through doing, and is only perceived over a period of time. Tribal elders carefully observe young people,

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and share, through example and stories, knowledge that they believe the person is ready to receive. Similarly, traditions such as Buddhism focus on learning through years of disciplined practices. As Batchelor reminds us, the Four Noble Truths are not propositions that can be explained conceptually; they are injunctions to act in a particular way: ‘understanding anguish leads to letting go of craving, which leads to realizing its cessation, which leads to cultivating the path’ (1997: 11). To know the ennobling truths, therefore, requires practicing them, in many different situations, and over the course of a series of life events. We find another example of the importance of doing as a way of knowing in Thich Nhat Hanh’s transformation of the core precepts of the Order of Interbeing. What were originally described as the Fourteen Precepts were recast as the Fourteen Mindfulness trainings. No longer cast in the imperative form of forbidding certain kinds of behavior, they are now expressed as commitments that follow the achievement of particular forms of awareness. According to Thich Nhat Hanh, the imperative form ‘conveyed obedience to external authority, a dynamic of rules and of shame if the rules were broken’ (1998: 17–18). The precepts that forbid certain behaviors are recast as mindfulness trainings that reflect a change in perception, and the commitments that follow that shift. For example, the first precept, ‘Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology’, becomes, ‘Aware of the suffering caused by fanaticism and intolerance, we are determined not to be idolatrous about, or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones’ (1991: 127). The pedagogical and theoretical ramifications of such postcolonial engagement can be overwhelming. Not only are we asked to relinquish customary terms of comparison, but we are being challenged to reexamine the very modes of inter-religious engagement.

Postcolonial comparative religious engagement What are appropriate names for postcolonial comparative religious engagement? The term ‘theology of religions’ is inadequate to describe work in which other religious and humanist traditions play a genuinely equal role in providing insight and critique. Such a term is too focused on the logic of belief and unbelief, and the dynamics of rational justification. Keller et al., for example, claim that what theology ‘always needs’ are ‘timely theories that can better attune our faith to the new problems and potentialities of its context’ (2004: 6). I would argue that we find a different claim in the work of contemporary Native American activists and scholars, and in the practitioners and scholars of Engaged Buddhism. Here we see a call, not for theory, but for timely practices, disciplines, and aesthetics that can enable us to perceive the world, and our place in it, differently. We need practices that can enable us to bear rage, pain, and loss, and that open our minds to that which is fitting, beautiful, and audacious.

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As we are actively engaged with people from other traditions, we find communities in which debate is not seen as the best means to engage and understand. For example, James Treat reminds us that the Native American elders attending the Indian Ecumenical Conference did not want to even teach their traditions directly. Debate, then, would hardly be the means of understanding insights that can only emerge through relationship and through close observations over time. Furthermore, in this critical and comparative work, critique is not enough. From the overtures of the Hopi people in the 1940s to contemporary interfaith work for nonviolent conflict resolution and the prevention of war, people from other traditions invite us to participate in transformative practices and joint political efforts to redress fundamental threats to the integrity of life. As we engage in comparative work, we are offering more than worldviews and debates. We are exploring and constructing practices that enable new forms of perception and action. This work takes the task of constructive theology and social ethics a step further. Not only do we interpret the world in new and creative ways, we are engaged in analyzing processes of world-making, and in our analyses, actually participating in processes of world-making. Although our engagement in this enterprise as Western feminists has its roots in Western theology and ethics, the tenor of what we are doing is more adequately grasped in terms central to other traditions. Theophus Smith, scholar of African American religions, Episcopal priest, and activist engaged in healing identity-based conflicts, utilizes a category drawn from African religions, ‘conjure’, to name the complex religious, political, material, spiritual, and aesthetic dimensions of social transformation in African American life. Conjure encompasses activities that elicit spiritual power, that heal internalized oppression, that evoke and sustain acts of political transformation. Conjure involves the healing of individuals, and the healing of a whole people. It includes ‘socialhistorical transformation as well as folklore practices’ (1994: 6). Smith finds three elements within African American practices of ‘conjuring culture’: ‘(1) ritually patterned behaviors and performative uses of language and symbols (2) conveying a pharmacopeic or healing/harming intent and (3) employing biblical figures and issuing in biblical configurations of cultural experience’ (1994: 6). Conjure is a human mode of world responsiveness and construction, a skill honed in many African traditions and expressed in African American religious life. Theophus Smith limits his use of the term to African American spiritual/political transformation. He argues that Euro-American religion lacks ‘clearly articulated pharmacopeic, ritual and magical orientations’ (1994: 56). What Smith describes as a lack, I see as a challenge for postcolonial comparative engagement. Can we, in our work for justice and the integrity of all life, develop such orientations out of our own histories, philosophies, and religious resources? We cannot address this complex range of activities alone. We need to work with people who are firmly grounded in the complexity and depth of the Christian tradition—its conceptual, artistic, aesthetic, ministerial, and narrative legacy—and with people from other religious and ethical traditions—Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, humanist, Muslim, Vodou, and the indigenous religions of North America. If we do work together, we may

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find that we are engaged in a process of transformation and insight, conjuring, as equal partners with a multiplicity of religious and secular traditions, a postcolonial culture of respect, freedom, integrity, accountability, and reconciliation.

Notes 1. The terms ‘American Indian or Native American’ are problematic, and contested. Weaver argues that they reflect the denials and erasures of American history, denying the diversity and complexity of the nations that existed for tens of thousands of years before the European invasion, denying the ongoing struggles to maintain national identity and integrity (1998: x–xiii). The term ‘Native American’, used primarily by well-meaning whites, is quite likely only a temporary solution. Most native peoples prefer referring to a particular nation, or, in much of Canada, the preferred terminology is First Nations. When a collective term is required, many scholars use the terms American Indian, Indian, and Native American interchangeably (Weaver 2001: xii); Gerald Vizenor also describes the inaccuracy of ‘Indian’. ‘Manifestly, the indian is an occidental misnomer, an overseas enactment that has no referent to real native cultures or communities’. He coins another term, ‘post-Indian’, to refer to contemporary Native peoples, the ‘new storiers of convergence and survivance’ (1999: vii–viii). 2. Ania Loomba provides a thorough discussion of the complexities of postcolonial studies, analyzing the difficulties with the term ‘postcolonial’ itself. Not only may it imply that domination has ceased, but we run the danger of missing the different forms of colonialism and of resistance to colonialism; we also run the danger of missing the different ways aspects of ‘pre-colonial’ culture continued to exist even during colonization. She argues, however, ‘that the word “postcolonial” is useful in indicating a general process with some shared features across the globe. But if it is uprooted from specific locations, “postcoloniality” cannot be meaningfully investigated, and instead, the term begins to obscure the very relations of domination that it seeks to uncover’ (1998: 19). Loomba agrees with Jorge de Alva who defines postcolonialism ‘not just as coming literally after colonialism and signifying its demise, but more flexibly as the contestation of colonial domination and the legacies of colonialism. Such a position would allow us to include people geographically displaced by colonialism such as African-Americans or people of Asian or Caribbean origin in Britain as “postcolonial subjects” although they live within metropolitan cultures. It also allows us to incorporate the history of anti-colonial resistance with contemporary resistances to imperialism and to dominant Western culture’ (Loomba 1998: 12). For a careful definition of the tensions and permutations of colonialism/imperialism, decolonization/recolonization, neocolonialism/imperialism, postcolonialism, diasporic tricontinentalism, and neocolonizing anticolonialism, see Taylor (2004). 3. ‘What is deconstruction a deconstruction of? The answer would be, of the concept, the authority, and assumed primacy of, the category of “the West”. Postmodernism can best be defined as European culture’s awareness that it is no longer the unquestioned and dominant center of the world’ (Young 1990: 19).

Works Cited American Religious Identity Survey (ARIS) (2001). Conducted by Barry A. Kosmin, Egon Mayer, and Ariela Keysar, available at http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_briefs/ studies/aris_index.htm Also available at http://www.adherents.com

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Batchelor, Stephen (1997). Buddhism without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening. New York: Riverhead Books. Bhabha, Homi K. (2000). ‘The Vernacular Cosmopolitan’, in Naseem Kan (Ed.), Voices of the Crossing: The Impact of Britain on Writers from Asia, the Caribbean and Africa. London: Serpent’s Tail, 141. Chidester, David (1996). Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Deloria, Philip J. (1998). Playing Indian. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Deloria, Vine Jr. (1992). God is Red: A Native View of Religion. Golden, CO: Fulcrum. Eck, Diana (2001). A New Religious America: How a ‘Christian Country’ Has Become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. Forbes, Jack (1979). Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Exploitation, Imperialism, and Terrorism. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (2004). Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin. Holler, Linda (2002). Erotic Morality: The Role of Touch in Moral Agency. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Keller, Catherine, Nausner, Michael, and Rivera, Mayra (Eds) (2004). Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire. St. Louis: Chalice Press. King, Richard (1999). Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘the Mystic East’. London/New York: Routledge. Kwok, Pui-lan (2005). Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. Long, Charles (1986). Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Religion. Philadelphia: Fortress. Loomba, Ania (1998). Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routlege. Merchant, Carolyn (1992). Radical Ecology: The Search for a Livable World. New York: Routledge. Nhat Hanh, Thich (1991). Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life. New York: Bantam. (1998). Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism, 3rd edn. Berkeley, CA: Parallax. and the Monks and Nuns of Plum Village (2000). Plum Village Chanting and Recitation Book. Berkeley, CA: Parallax. Patton, Kimberley, and Ray, Benjamin (Eds) (2000). A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Roberts, Leslie (Ed.) (1998). World Resources 1998–1999: A Guide to the Global Environment. New York: Oxford University Press. Ruether, Rosemary Radford (2005). Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization, and World Religions. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Sacks, Jonathan (2002). The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations. London/New York: Continuum. Sen, Amartya (1999). Development as Freedom. New York: Anchor. Shiva, Vandana (2002). Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Smith, Andrea (1993). ‘For Those Who Were Indian in a Former Life’, in Carol J. Adams (Ed.), Ecofeminism and the Sacred. New York: Continuum.

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Smith, Theophus (1994). Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1999). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stiglitz, Joseph E. (2003). Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: Norton. Sugirtharajah, R. S. (2004). ‘Complacencies and Cul-de-sacs: Christian Theologies and Colonialism’, in C. Keller, M. Nausner, and M. Rivera (Eds), Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 22–38. Taylor, Mark Lewis (2004). ‘Spirit and Liberation: Achieving Postcolonial Theology in the United States’, in C. Keller, M. Nausner, and M. Rivera (Eds), Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 42–7. Treat, James (2003). Around the Sacred Fire: Native Religious Activism in the Red Power Era: A Narrative Map of the Indian Ecumenical Conference. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. U.S. Census Bureau (2004). ‘U.S. Interim Projections by Age, Sex, Race and Hispanic Origin’, available at http://www.census.gov/lpc/www/usinterimproj/ Internet release date: March 18, 2004. Vizenor, Gerald (1999). Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Warren, Henry Clarke (1996). ‘The Majjhima-Nikaya: Questions which Tend Not to Edification’, in Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism in Translations. New York: Atheneum. Weaver, Jace (Ed.) (1998). Native American Religious Identity: Unforgotten Gods. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. (2001). Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Wilson, Edward O. (2002). The Future of Life. New York: Vintage. Young, Robert J. C. (1990). White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London/New York: Routledge, 19. Young, Robert J. C. (2003). Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Further Reading For further analyses of globalization, see: Harcourt, Wendy (Ed.) (1994). Feminist Perspectives on Sustainable Development. London: Zed. Sachs, Wolfgang (Ed.) (1993). Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict. London: Zed. For examples of comparative theology and ethics by Western thinkers, see: Heim, Mark S. (1995). Salvations: Truth and Difference in Religion. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Schweiker, William (2004). Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell. Wallace, Mark (2005). Finding God in the Singing River: Christianity, Spirit, Nature. Minneapolis: Fortress. Welch, Sharon D. (2005). After Empire: The Art and Ethos of Enduring Peace. Minneapolis: Fortress.

chapter 17

beyon d t h e g od/m a n duo: gl oba liz ation, fem i n ist t h eol o gy, a n d r eligious su bj ecti v it y ellen t. armour

Like ‘postmodernism’, ‘globalization’ is ubiquitous in academic and popular discourse. ‘Everyone knows’ what it is, though we greet its arrival in different ways: some with glee, others with despair, still others with resignation. Like postmodernism, globalization’s reach extends everywhere and, in the eyes of many, threatens what we hold most valuable: autonomy, democracy, and freedom are no match for globalization’s insatiable appetite for more, more, more. Others acknowledge the threat but see also the promise of new ways of being and doing that will open up new human possibilities. Globalization can be viewed as postmodernism in material form. Understood as a movement of cultural and economic capital, globalization names that into which modern capitalism and colonialism have morphed. The degree to which it differs from its forebears is a matter of debate. If in modernity, capital flowed around the globe primarily from west to east and north to south (broadly speaking) and back, the global economy is less unidirectional. While nation-states (especially the European colonial powers) were the major actors on the modern world stage, entities that transcend such boundaries (transnational corporations, stateless political movements) have emerged as movers and shakers in the global economy. Globalization, then, is a more diffuse and decentralized network of relations than colonialist capitalism. When we inquire after its effects, however, greater similarities emerge. As in colonialist capitalism, one’s status within the global economy depends on one’s position within it. Those who possess capital (financial and/or intellectual) benefit most while those who offer only raw material (I would include here unskilled labor) suffer most. To a large degree, the major beneficiaries of the global circulation of capital remain in the West and the North while the larger share of its victims are found in

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the East and South. And yet that map, too, is overly simple since the haves, if not so much the have-nots, are distributed more widely (if still unevenly) across the globe now than in the past. Thus, the boundaries of micro- and macro-economies do not follow with those of nation-states. In the United States, for example, globalization gives with one hand while it takes away with the other. Whole US industries have moved to the global South and East to take advantage of cheaper labor costs, thus wreaking havoc on entire communities in the United States. Americans across the country benefit from cheaper goods and services even as local economies and families suffer from the loss of jobs. Given this description, I trust I am not alone in feeling rather daunted by the challenge of reflecting theologically on globalization. Like many, I find myself mostly enervated and overwhelmed by much of what goes on under its banner. It does not help that theology offers no refuge from the stresses and strains of globalization. Religious traditions are hardly immune from globalization’s effects since they are among the forms of cultural capital that circulate throughout the globe. Moreover, the movement of human capital has made religious pluralism a local as well as a global phenomenon. In addition to the church on every corner, the so-called Bible Belt is now also home to mosques and Hindu and Buddhist temples. Boundaries between religious traditions are blurring and shifting as, for example, Christians incorporate Buddhist meditational practices into their devotional lives. Indeed, the turn away from ‘religion’ to ‘spirituality’ may itself be a hallmark of globalization—and not necessarily in a good way. In the USA, at least, religion seems to have become a consumer good. Pick and choose what you want from what you see often with little regard to its origin or history. The global religious economy is itself inextricably intertwined with the colonial religious economy of which it is the heir. As early as 1977, Walter Buhlmann anticipated Christianity’s shift (at least in numbers if not in theological clout) to a ‘third world’ religion (Buhlmann 1977). Christianity continues to grow in the global South (e.g., Africa, Latin America, and South America) even as it declines in the global North and West (Europe and North America). More recently, Philip Jenkins has predicted an increasingly conservative church on the horizon as the weight of theological influence shifts ultimately southward (Jenkins 2002). At the same time, the unholy alliance between conservative Christianity and the Bush administration affected the distribution of medical goods and knowledge related to sexual and reproductive health across the globe, matters of life and death for many in this age of HIV/AIDS (Dube 2002: 535–49). For these reasons, then, the relationship between religious traditions—especially Christianity—and the global economy calls for thoughtful theological response. It might seem as though a jeremiad is the only adequate response. While many aspects of globalization call for strong theological critique, it also offers opportunities for theological innovation. As a feminist theologian, I try to be especially alert to the particular problems and dangers women face in a global economy. At the same time, I see potential promise for feminist theology offered by more sustained encounters with diverse forms of religiosity that globalization offers. I want to explore some of that promise in this essay by focusing on the question of religious subjectivity from within a pluralistic, global context.

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‘If God is male, then the male is God.’ —Mary Daly (1973: 19)

This insight forms the bedrock of feminist theology and has set much of its agenda since Mary Daly wrote these words almost forty years ago. Feminist theologians such as Sallie McFague and Elisabeth Johnson have focused their work on redressing that problem within Christianity. Early on, a number of feminist thealogians (Carol Christ, for example) abandoned Christianity and Judaism in favor of a retrieval and reinvention of goddess traditions—arguably part of the emergence of ‘spirituality’ on the American scene. As I have argued elsewhere (Armour 2006), Daly’s claim rests on Ludwig Feuerbach’s claim that theology is anthropology; that is, our statements about God are really statements about ourselves. We attribute to God idealized versions of our best characteristics. Rather than projecting those characteristics onto an empty screen, Feuerbach urges us to embrace them as human ideals and work toward realizing them as a species. This, he argues, is truly the essence of the Christian claim that God has become incarnate in human flesh (Feuerbach 1989). Feminist theology understandably embraced Feuerbach’s exposure of the god/man duo that, as (so-called) French feminist Luce Irigaray argued a decade or so later, lies at the heart of our linguistic, sexual, and financial economies. A Feuerbachian approach legitimizes feminist theology’s place within the broader feminist project. To harness Christianity to support social change realizes rather than violates its essence. However, that embrace leaves feminist theology beholden to a rather limited and limiting understanding of religion and religious subjectivity. Getting at the truth of religion involves emptying it of its ostensible content and exposing its subject as a victim of false consciousness. Like the benighted souls in Plato’s cave, the religious subject treats shadows as though they are real. At bottom, Feuerbachian religion is nothing more (though also nothing less) than a mechanism for meeting the psychosocial needs of the human subject. While Feuerbach has provided feminist theology with a critical lever useful for dislodging patriarchal Christian traditions, reconstructing our understanding of religion and of religious subjectivity requires turning to other resources. Pui-lan Kwok has noted that a successful feminist theological response to globalization requires some housecleaning on our part. We need to investigate and eradicate the effects of colonialist ideology on our own presuppositions. It is incumbent upon feminist theologians, then, to take advantage of the opportunities that globalization provides us to familiarize ourselves with the forms religion takes in women’s lives in different contexts—perhaps especially examples that do not seem to fit feminist aims. In addition to correcting misapprehensions about colonized and postcolonized others, attending to the work religion does in a variety of settings and traditions should be useful in helping feminist theology expand its understanding of religious subjectivity. In what follows, I will consider analyses offered by three important feminist scholars working in different religious traditions who attend to specific forms of women’s religiosity. In Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and Feminist Theology, Mary McClintock Fulkerson attempts to carve out a place within feminist theology for Christian women

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who do not consider themselves feminist (1994). In The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power and Spirit Possession, Mary Keller’s analysis of the phenomenon of spirit possession, which affects many more women than men, becomes a site to reflect anew on questions of gender and religious subjectivity (2005). In Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, anthropologist Saba Mahmood finds that the issues raised by her study of Egyptian women involved in an Islamic renewal movement challenge certain feminist orthodoxies (2004). Taking each author in turn, I will first trace the particular contours of the religious phenomenon each analyzes and show how each reframes religious subjectivity. In the final section of the chapter, I will bring the three essays together and describe what avenues they open up for constructive feminist theology in a global context.

Pentecostal women: submission and empowerment In Changing the Subject, feminist theologian Mary McClintock Fulkerson takes up the vexed question of feminist theology’s claim to grounding in women’s experience. The specific content given to that experience by most feminist theologians renders women who do not identify as feminist as victims of false consciousness. This is problematic insofar as feminist theology desires to speak to and for Christian women. How might a close analysis of what women in specific Christian communities actually do and say transform and/or enrich feminist theology? She focuses her attention on three groups of women: Presbyterian laywomen, Pentecostal women, and academic feminist theologians. Of particular interest to me is her analysis of Pentecostal women who become preachers. Their call narratives and personal testimonies, examined through a theoretical apparatus Fulkerson constructs for this kind of work, outline a fascinating and complex process of identity (re)creation within a theological tradition that demands their submission even as it enables and empowers them. On the one hand, claiming their own authority to preach requires what seems from a feminist perspective capitulation (in principle if not always in practice) to Pentecostal theology’s claim that men are to exercise authority over women, a reflection of God the Father’s authority. Yet it is by appealing to that very same divine authority that these women justify their own ministry. Their narratives of call, which serve to authorize them in the eyes of other Pentecostals, describe the process of taking up their ministerial gifts in terms of a theology of submission. All describe an initial resistance to the divine call specifically because of its apparent challenge to the divinely ordered gender hierarchy. However, God’s desires eventually overcome each woman’s resistance. Taking up preaching is an act of submission, not self-assertion. After all, no human authority supersedes divine authority. Paradoxically, then, the same divine authority grounds both submission and empowerment.

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The variety of forms that women’s religiosity can take within Christianity requires, in Fulkerson’s view, that feminist theology change not only the content but the concept of its subject. The roots of feminist theology’s reductive treatment of nonfeminist Christian women lie in its indebtedness to modern liberal humanist notions of subjectivity. Such notions understand the subject as fully autonomous (at least ideally) and existing prior to and outside of language and social convention. Instead, Fulkerson puts forward a concept of subjectivity as discursively produced through complex negotiations with authoritative texts and traditions, church and community expectations, and gender/class conventions. She calls attention to the varieties of desires and pleasures that motivate the particular shape subjectivity may take in any given context.

Possession: subjectivity overcome In The Hammer and the Flute, Mary Keller takes up the questions posed by the study of spirit possession, a phenomenon more frequently involving women than men that occurs across cultures, continents, and traditions. This phenomenon, in which one’s body is ripped from one’s conscious control and taken over allegedly by a divine force has proved vexing for scholars of religion over the past century. Although scholarship has advanced considerably beyond the days when possession was equated with psychopathology, contemporary accounts of possession—including feminist accounts—remain limited in their ability to take the phenomenon on its own terms, Keller argues. Reluctant to attribute such activity to forces that cannot be empirically verified, scholars find it difficult to account for a form of agency that isn’t consciously under the subject’s control. In general, scholars treat possession as a cipher: though it presents as the overcoming of one’s consciousness by a deity of some sort, it is really a response to or expression of psychological and/or social needs. The predominance of women among the possessed makes sense according to this schema. Because their secondary social status deprives women of the opportunity to exercise agency directly, possessions enable them to register protest against social injustice and indirectly, at least, assert a claim to agency. That such scholarship takes this route is symptomatic of the deep hold modern Western notions of subjectivity (and concomitant notions of religion) have on Western scholars, Keller argues. Under the influence of post-Enlightenment thought imbibed over the years, scholars of possession—like most of us—conflate subjectivity and agency via a mind/body dualism. Absent some sort of pathology, bodies are the vehicles of the agential consciousness that resides within them. Since we equate consciousness with subjectivity, we understand agency as rooted in consciousness. We may not always be aware of the true causes of our behavior, but they lie ultimately in our minds. The possessed (and their co-religionists) may believe that a divine agent causes the unusual behavior, but scholars assert that the true cause lies within the individual psyche of the possessed.

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A modernist view of religion also holds sway here, Keller argues. Religion’s essence lies not in what its practitioners do but in what they believe, in the ideas they hold to be true. The truth of religion, however, lies ultimately not in those ideas, but in the psychosocial realities to which those beliefs refer, if only indirectly and in disguise. The shadow of Feuerbach looms large. Recall that Feuerbach advised Christians to take responsibility for realizing the ideals they were projecting onto an empty screen. Something similar occurs in scholars’ accounts of possession. Scholars consider them efficacious and significant when they result in either an increase in personal autonomy or some sort of transformation of the social reality that the possessed was (unconsciously) protesting. Religion’s truth lies in the empirically observable changes it promotes. Rather than collapsing agency and subjectivity, Keller argues that the two can and should be distinguished. Following Talal Asad, Catherine Bell, and Janaki Nair, she writes, ‘Agency does not reside in individual subjectivities; it resides in the interrelationships of bodies with systems of power’ (Keller 2005: 73). Possessed and nonpossessed, alike, achieve and exercise agency through a process of negotiation. To the degree that individual human beings exercise power, they do so always in a context of some degree of give and take with realities beyond themselves. Deities may or may not be among those realities, but the possibility need not be dismissed out of hand. This concept of agency can better accommodate the paradoxical way possession is described by the possessed and their co-religionists. In possession, some other entity is wielding the body of the possessed toward its own ends. The possessed person’s subjectivity is overcome but not erased. Co-religionists sometimes suggest, for example, that possession results from the possessed’s failure to exercise appropriate vigilance. Having once been possessed empowers the possessed to negotiate with the possessing entity, co-religionists also claim. How might we theorize agency and subjectivity to do justice to this experience? Keller proposes what she calls ‘instrumental agency’ as an answer. The possessed person is, under the conditions of possession, akin to a flute or a hammer. Playing a flute or wielding a hammer is a process of negotiation, if you will, between the flautist or carpenter and the instrument or tool. The flautist must know and, to a certain degree, respect the specific attributes of the particular flute; the difference in quality of sound between a novice and a virtuoso is in part a reflection of that knowledge. The same is true for wielding a hammer. While most of us can manage to hammer in the occasional nail to hang a picture, for example, we lack the precision necessary for woodworking. But there is more: just as instruments are tempered and shaped to become adequate vehicles for musical expression, so, too, the possessed are tempered and shaped by their social and religious context. Although Keller speaks of tempering as occurring to the bodies-tobe-possessed, the force of her argument suggests that the mind and body together are subtly yet profoundly formed into appropriate vehicles for possession by participation in religious traditions and practices and experiences of justice and injustice at work within families and among the larger community. Agency, then, is located where flautist and flute, carpenter, and hammer, possessed and possessor, and the communities and forces that shape them meet.

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Islamic revival: subjectivity remade In Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, anthropologist Saba Mahmood undertakes a study of Egyptian women involved in the mosque movement, one form of the larger Islamic Revival movement. The mosque movement involves women helping other women cultivate the specific virtues associated with Islamic piety. Women known as d a–’ iyat whose own devotional practices and study of Islamic thought and tradition through various means endow them as religious adepts lead weekly lecture/discussion sessions at local mosques. Other Islamic women looking to deepen their own religiosity attend these sessions, participate actively in discussions, and attempt to put into practice what they learn. A feminist analysis will tend to seek out signs of liberatory desire and, ideally, evidence of corresponding social change. Such an approach assumes that the desire for increased autonomy and freedom is universal and theorizes agency in those terms, Mahmood notes. From that perspective, participation in the mosque movement, while it looks illiberal (insofar as it inculcates women’s subordination), must be respected insofar as it’s the free choice of an autonomous agent. However, seeking to understand at a deeper level this phenomenon and its social and political effects (which don’t easily fit on a simplistic map of gender subordination) requires another approach, one that is attentive to other forms of desire and other forms of the exercise of power. An adequate approach requires decoupling feminist analysis from a prescriptive political program, Mahmood argues. That decoupling produces, in Mahmood’s skillful and theoretically sophisticated hands, a compelling portrait of subject (re)formation undertaken out of religious devotion that exposes and challenges several ingrained assumptions in feminist thought. First and foremost is the connection between ideas, morality, and agency. We tend, after Kant, to think of morality or ethics as the application of an idea or principle (an internal state of affairs) to a particular situation resulting in an external action. Yet Mahmood’s analysis suggests otherwise: external actions such as the wearing of the veil, for example, are not mere signs of an internal state (religious belief), but are critical to the cultivation of the desired internal state (the Muslim virtue of modesty). Moreover, pursuing piety puts some women at odds with male kinfolk (including husbands) and, in some cases, with state authorities. However, the pursuit is not undertaken as a direct or indirect challenge to the patriarchal kinship structure or the state apparatus. Indeed, the virtues cultivated are quite in keeping with normative views of femininity in Islam. Among the most frequent topics of discussion when the women gather are the difficulties they face living in households with husbands who inhibit their pursuit of their goals. Mahmood describes the paradoxical case of a lower class woman whose husband finds his wife’s changes in demeanor, dress, and action a barrier to his aspirations to rise above their station. The strategies this woman employs (successfully) to try to change his mind take as given his status as her superior and do not challenge that order; indeed, she puts it to use on her behalf.

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Beyond the god/man duo If the god/man duo has been so foundational for feminist theology, how do these three scholars take us beyond it—and with what payoff? At first glance, the three may seem only to reinforce an insight that has long been a tenet of feminist theology: religious subjectivities are situated subjectivities. That is, they are affected by various features of social context including gender, sex, race, nationality/ethnicity, and religion. However, taken together, these three scholars challenge feminist theology to think more deeply and in more complex ways about this claim. Specifically, each calls for a move beyond modern notions of religious subjectivity and the modes of relation—especially reflection and resistance—that accompany it. Their analyses highlight the religious subject as project and product formed through processes of negotiation with various powers that be, in light of various desires, pleasures, and dangers, and to various ends. Moreover, they suggest that bodily practices and disciplines are at least as important as theological ideas in the formation of religious subjectivity. Of particular import is the challenge these analyses pose to concepts of agency on which feminist theologians have tended to rely. Taking account of the work religion does in women’s lives reframes our understanding of what it takes to ‘do’, who ‘does’, and what effects ‘doing’ can have. Neither autonomy nor independence is a prerequisite for agency, these scholars suggest. Rather, agency is acquired, developed, and exercised in and through negotiations with forces and realities that transcend any particular individual. Many originate in and are maintained by society and family (gendered expectations within one’s religious community, for example). Moreover, the goals of the exercise of agency are not always or simply increasing autonomy and independence. Concepts of religious agency must accommodate the fact that religious subjects understand themselves to be obligated to a reality that transcends themselves and the social forces that surround them. Feminist theology, then, may need to disassociate agency and mastery, especially when it comes to assessing the political effects of a particular exercise of religious agency. All three of these scholars have demonstrated that the political effects of religious subjectivities can exceed the subjects’ intentions and standard feminist expectations. I have, to this point, bracketed feminist theology’s critical and normative tasks to reorient its descriptive foundation. In closing, let me say a few words about what the approach I have outlined here offers to these aspects of the feminist theological project, especially in a globalized context. I suggested earlier that the emergence of interest in ‘spirituality’ may be an effect of globalization—or is at least affected by it. Following the route that I have just laid out for feminist theology should enable it critically to engage what goes on under this banner. Embedded in that pursuit are no doubt a number of desires, aims, and projects. Some spiritual seekers seem in search of the right looking glass to secure the self—one that reassures them that they are indeed, if not the fairest of them all, at least okay as they are. However, also present in the pursuit of spirituality, I

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suspect, is a desire for deeper connections to community and more meaningful and complex connections to transcendence than many find available through traditional routes. Of course, both aims are vulnerable to co-optation by any number of cultural forces, including capitalism (as Jeremy Carrette and Richard King argue). The kind of approach I have outlined would enable critical feminist theological reflection on both aspects of spirituality’s pursuit. Fulkerson, Keller, and Mahmood highlight the interplay of innovation and tradition in the cultivation of religious subjectivity, insights that could ground a critique of smorgasbord spirituality and hidebound traditionalism. All three also point to the importance of obligation to community (and the conflicts that can arise) in the formation of religious subjectivity. That recognition could enable a critical evaluation of pursuits of spirituality that lack a communal grounding, one that would be attentive to the role of communal labor and conflict in the production of religious subjects. Keller and Mahmood call attention not only to textual interpretive practices (comfortable and familiar terrain for feminist theology) but to corporate and corporeal practices and disciplines as well. These are areas ripe for feminist theological assessment. At the same time, all three sound at least two cautionary notes: first, we’d best not assume that the pathway from any given form of spirituality to its political effects is a straight line. Evaluating the impact of any given spiritual pursuit on the quality of women’s lives may require a more complex analysis. And, second, feminist theologians should not jump too quickly into prescriptive mode. If our analyses and constructions are to find fertile soil in women’s lives, then we need to attend to a fuller range of what women need and want from religious traditions. Moving beyond the god/man duo also has implications for how feminist theologians construe the divine. We have put a good deal of faith in projection as a mechanism for social change. If the image of God the Father sustains patriarchy, then seizing the projector and replacing that slide with something else should undermine patriarchy. But we also know that things are not really that simple. What really does motivate religious subjects to engage in individual and social transformation? What would we learn were we to look more deeply at what women do in the name of their gods—even their masculine gods? Minimally, if we are going to propose effective alternatives to God the Father, we need to make sure that those alternatives can speak to the pluriform desires and pleasures that attract and sustain religious devotion. Among those desires and pleasures are some that seem to run counter to the feminist project of increasing autonomy and freedom. Sarah Coakley (2002) has pointed to the tension between the Christian demand for submission to God (conceived of in very traditional form) and the feminist pursuit of autonomy. Yet submission is not only an obligation, but a desire intrinsic to certain forms of religious subjectivity—one that brings with it certain pleasures and rewards. How well can feminist reconstructions of divinity respond to such desires and pleasures? In Beyond God the Father, Mary Daly went on to claim that the feminist revolution was not just a political revolution, but also a spiritual one. In hearing one another into speech, women were participating in divine becoming. Perhaps it is time for us once again to put our ears to the ground and attend more carefully and closely to what is going on in theology as it is lived by women. We may be surprised by what we find.

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Notes 1. The literature is growing by leaps and bounds within Christian theology and ethics. To cite a few sources, see the multivolume Stackhouse et al. (Eds), God and Globalization series (2000–2), which, while critical of certain aspects of globalization, also sees some value in it. For a more exclusively critical perspective on the damaging effects of globalization, see Cynthia D. Moe-Lobeda (2002). See also Rebecca Todd Peters (2004). Several journals have run special issues on the topic, including Theological Studies (2002). 2. Note, though, that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) argue that globalization feeds a new form of sovereignty, which they call ‘Empire’. Distinct from previous (and current) imperialisms in both its scope and organization (headless, de-centralized, constituted by networks of power and exchange), it (and the pronoun here is apt) nonetheless has come to dominate the world scene. 3. And the discrepancy worldwide between the wealthy and the poor continues to grow. For some specific statistics, see Bloomquist (2001: 100–8). 4. Theologians in the global South and East are taking on the challenges of globalization explicitly. See Mothlabi (2001: 118–37) and Yang (2005: 38–48). 5. On this, see Carrette and King (2005). 6. See also Sanneh and Carpenter (2005). 7. Pui-lan Kwok notes a number of specific economic issues women face in the global economy, including increase in scope of the sex-trade industry, the destruction of local sustenance economies, and the effects of globalization on migration, trade, and labor (2001: 9). Heather Eaton does the same for women and the environment from an ecofeminist perspective (2000: 41–55). 8. In the American context, the ‘French feminists’ include a handful of thinkers of high theory (Luce Irigaray, Catherine Clément, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva). Their relationship to feminism in France, however, is highly contested and complicated—by their own accounts. On this, see Joy et al. (2002). 9. She makes this point in several places including the essay cited above (Kwok 2001: 10) and in Kwok (2002 and 2005). 10. Though I will not be able to do justice to this dimension of their work here, the fact that all three critically engage feminist and poststructuralist theory affirms turns in those directions by some feminist theologians. That Keller and Mahmood draw on theorists like Talal Asad, Catherine Bell, and Pierre Bourdieu point feminist theology in new and fruitful directions. 11. Wendy Farley’s most recent book The Wounding and Healing of Desire: Weaving Heaven and Earth (2005) demonstrates the profound theological insights that can emerge from experiences of powerlessness and pain in the context of submission to religious disciplines (in her case, those of Tibetan Buddhist practice).

Works Cited Armour, Ellen T. (2006). ‘Toward an Elemental Theology: A Constructive Proposal’, in Darby Kathleen Ray (Ed.), Theology that Matters: Ecology, Economy, and God. Philadelphia: Fortress. Bloomquist, Karen (2001). ‘The Disparities of Class as an Ethical Challenge’, Currents in Theology and Mission, 28/2: 100–8.

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Buhlmann, Walter (1977). The Coming of the Third Church: An Analysis of the Present and Future of the Church. New York: Orbis. Carrette, Jeremy, and King, Richard (2005). Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion. New York: Routledge. Coakley, Sarah (2002). Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Gender, and Philosophy. New York: Blackwell. Daly, Mary (1973). Beyond God the Father. Boston: Beacon Press. Dube, Musa (2002). ‘Theological Challenges: Proclaiming the Fullness of Life in the HIV/ AIDS and Global Economic Era’, International Review of Mission, 91/363: 535–49. Eaton, Heather (2000). ‘Ecofeminism and Globalization’, Feminist Theology, 24: 41–55. Feuerbach, Ludwig (1989). The Essence of Christianity. New York: Prometheus. Fulkerson, Mary McClintock (1994). Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourses and Feminist Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress. Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jenkins, Philip (2002). The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. New York: Oxford University Press. Joy, Morny, O’Grady, Kathleen, and Poxon, Judith L. (2002). ‘Introduction: French Feminisms and Religion’, in French Feminists on Religion: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1–12. Keller, Mary (2005). The Hammer and the Flute: Women, Power and Spirit Possession. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kwok, Pui-lan (2001). ‘Feminist Theology at the Dawn of the Millennium: Remembering the Past, Dreaming the Future’, Feminist Theology, 27: 6–20. (2002). ‘Unbinding Our Feet: Saving Brown Women and Feminist Religious Discourse’, in Pui-lan Kwok and Laura Donaldson (Eds), Postcolonialism, Feminism and Religious Discourse. New York: Routledge, 62–81. (2005). Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. London: SCM. Mahmood, Saba (2004). Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Moe-Lobeda, Cynthia D. (2002). Healing a Broken World: Globalization and God. Minneapolis: Fortress. Mothlabi, Mokgheti B. G. (2001). ‘The Ethical Implications of Globalisation for Church, Religion, and Society’, Religion and Theology, 8/1–2: 118–37. Stackhouse, Max, Paris, Peter, Browning, Don S., and Obenchain, Diane B. (Eds) (2000–2). God and Globalization. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity. Yang, Geun-Soek (2005). ‘Globalization and Christian Responses: Korea’, Theology Today, 62: 38–48.

Further Reading Farley, Wendy (2005). The Wounding and Healing of Desire: Weaving Heaven and Earth. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. Peters, Rebecca Todd (2004). In Search of the Good Life: The Ethics of Globalization. New York: Continuum. Sanneh, Lamin, and Carpenter, Joel A. (eds.) (2005). The Changing Face of Christianity: Africa, the West, and the World. New York: Oxford University Press.

chapter 18

fem i n ist t h eol o gi e s of a wor ld scr iptu r e ( s ) i n t h e gl oba liz ation er a musa w. dube

Introduction In the globalization era, justice-seeking feminist theologies are challenged to sharpen and reposition themselves to speak to the issues of the time by adopting new methods, topics, and frameworks. Consequently, one of the challenges of this handbook is that ‘the boundaries of theology need to be redrawn in the light of the creation of new global cultures’ and that ‘crucial to the task of rewriting the story of feminist theology in the light of globalization is reflecting on the nature of a theological perspective it makes’. I have been invited to contribute to this conversation by addressing the topic of a ‘Theology of a World Scripture’. Since the context and framework of this project is globalization and feminist theologies, I have rephrased my given topic to ‘Feminist Theologies of a World Scripture in the Globalization Era’. The main focus of my chapter, therefore, is to explore the interrelations of globalization, a world scripture (the Bible), and the vision of feminist theologies.

Globalization confronted A very important step towards sharpening the role and vision of feminist theologies in this era is to understand globalization—its meaning, its ethics, its power relations, and its effects on the earth and people, especially women of different classes, nations,

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races, ethnicities, dis/abilities, religions, and international status. It is therefore important for feminist theologies to ask: What is globalization? How should feminist theologies position themselves within globalization such that they remain a justiceseeking discourse, with a prophetic voice? These, I believe, are some of the key questions that should be wrestled with by feminist theologies in the globalization context. According to Yassine Fall, globalization: refers to trade as well as financial capital, their global mobility, their speed of growth and their volume. Globalization also implies the weakening of national and regional policies as well as the increasing role played by technological innovations and value added information. Globalization refers as well to knowledge generation and accumulation, and above all to a central drive for the conquest of markets and a greater commodification of a greater variety of products and services. Finally globalization also implies cultural imperialism and the homogenization of US pop culture and the English language as universal mileposts for cultural exchange. (2000: 76–7; emphasis added)

According to R. Robertson, ‘globalization may be defined simply as the compression of the world. This notion compression refers both to increasing socio-cultural density and to rapidly expanding consciousness. Globalization itself has been a long-term process extending over many centuries, although only in recent centuries has it, with increasing rapidity, assumed a particular discernible form’ (Robertson 2000: 53–4; Hall 1997). Christopher Lind describes globalization as a ‘process which has led to the creation of a single, international (global) financial or capital market. It happened in stages over the last twenty or thirty years and its effects are nothing short of revolutionary’ (1995: 31). Peter Tolloch, on the other hand, says it is ‘the absorption of all countries and systems into one . . . a larger increase in the volume, speed and complexity of financial and direct investment flows and a multiplication of financial markets, again involving greater integration of developing countries’ (1998: 101; emphasis added). From the above definitions, we get a picture of globalization: it has been a long process that finally reached its defining picture in the past few decades. With the above characteristics, many names such as Global Village, New World Order, global capitalism, and Globalization have been used to describe the same phenomenon. I tend to classify globalization within the family of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism (Dube 2001: 58), for the socalled ‘compression of the world’, ‘the creation of a single market’, or ‘the global village’ is largely a creation of former colonizers, benefiting them and their collaborators more than most of the Two-Thirds World. While modern colonization was often characterized by God, gold, and glory, how are these aspects reflected in globalization? First, the God factor. While the latter may be not immediately evident in the above definitions of globalization it is covered under the umbrella of ‘cultural imperialism’. Because of its central role, ‘Religion has been called the “original globalizer” ’, since it has been ‘a natural accompaniment of conquest and colonization’ (Kwok 2005: 207–8). For example, Sheila Briggs holds that ‘Christianity as a global network is integrated into the flows of capital and labor’ (2005: 80). Likewise, in

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her exploration of the relationship between feminism, globalization, Christianity, and the Bible, Elizabeth Castelli highlights the role of religion in globalization by discussing how Christianity has been described as the hidden dowry of globalization (2005: 63–70). This gendered image does not only underline the God factor in globalization, it also underlines the inherent inequality of globalization. The characterization of Christianity as a globalization dowry evokes other critiques such as religion/Christianity as the opium of the people and the active role of Christianity in colonizing the minds of the people (Dube 2000: 1–21). In the globalization era, Christianity may well become the dowry offered to those who are being globalized, to pacify them and to assist them in coping with its devastating impact. Perhaps this is best captured by the Christian charismatic movements and their use of the media through televangelists. Consequently, fundamentalist Christian charismatic movements, which have been found to have a ‘world-dominating agenda’ (Asamoah-Gyadu 2004: 1), are supposedly a response to globalization as well. Religious fundamentalism is, seemingly, both a ‘globalizer’ and a consequence of globalization (see Dempster et al. 1999). Fundamentalism is defined as ‘modern political movements which use religion as a basis for their attempt to win or consolidate power and extend social control’ (Sahgal and Yuval-Davis 2003: 43). In the globalization context, fundamentalism supposedly rises due to the social insecurities created by liberalization and privatization, which hike living expenses and lead more people to find security in religion, especially in the TwoThirds World. This form of religion is also a response to the global mass culture that seemingly threatens local cultures, leading to nativist and fundamentalist practices. For example, finding themselves increasingly marginalized as they enter the Western metropolis, Two-Thirds World populations also resort to building rigid religious communities that help them cope with their new setting. Fundamentalist religious movements are, more often than not, patriarchal. It is therefore crucial for feminist theologies in the globalization context to understand fundamentalist and nativist theologies and their impact on gender relations, especially on women’s lives in all areas including the economic side. This brings us to the gold factor in globalization. From the above definitions, it is clear that the gold factor is glaringly central to the creation and maintenance of globalization. All of the definitions point to ‘trade’, ‘financial capital’, ‘capital market’, ‘direct investment’, and ‘accumulation’. Stuart Hall notes it’s the ‘drive to commodify everything’ (1997: 180) while Yassine Fall underlines that ‘globalization refers . . . above all, to a central drive for the conquest of markets and a greater commodification of a greater variety of products and services’ (2000: 76–7). Undeniably, the gold factor is a result of seeking power or glory through accumulation and control—in this case, by seemingly demolishing all boundaries in order to have access to all markets, and weakening governments, nations, and social-welfare services through privatization (Pheko 2000: 89–102). The link between former imperialist and colonialist history and practices are thus evident. Most globalizers are former colonizers with new friends and plenty of collaborators from Two-Thirds World elites. Those who are ‘being globalized’ are largely still the former colonized subjects.

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Boundaries are central to both modern colonialism and contemporary globalization. While the phrase ‘global village’ underlines the disappearing boundaries, the singleness or compression of the world, one must not lose sight of the fact that for many parts of the world, national geographical boundaries, language boundaries, religion boundaries, economic boundaries, and cultural boundaries were established by colonizers for purposes of benefiting the colonizer and exploiting the colonized. Modern colonialism was thus characterized by ‘the scramble for’ a place, a people, a culture to be colonized and exploited to serve the interests of (God, gold, and glory) the colonizer.‘The scramble’ was the art of drawing boundaries to mark one’s own territory of expansion and exploitation. Yet the scramble did not exclude cooperation as the colonizers met at such places as the Berlin Conference of 1884 to agree how they should share the cake without trampling on each other’s toes. In globalization, the approach toward boundaries is best described as one side of the same coin. That is, while boundaries in global capitalism seemingly do not matter; the fact remains that in what seems to be a single market, the compressed world or the so-called global village of collapsed boundaries, the same purpose of God, gold, and glory is served. The colonizing chameleon just happens to be wearing different colors in the globalization era, but it is the same imperial chameleon. Thus, while Rene Maunier described modern imperialism as ‘to know no bounds’, this description perfectly fits globalization’s proclamation and practice of compressing the world to create one single market or global village (1949: 19). Globalization, in other words, seeks ‘to know no bounds’ so that it can possess all the geographical spaces for its agenda. Globalization is, therefore, a different or another form of ‘scramble for’: it is a scramble to extend the boundaries to claim all Two-Thirds World trade spaces for the globalizers, without giving the same for the former. Justice-seeking feminist theologies, in their various forms, should, therefore, not lose sight of the fact that colonialism, imperialism, and globalization are not, and never were, justice loving or intending to create equal subjects. While I have made attempts to highlight the phenomena of globalization (Dube 2002: 41–64; 2006: 178–93), I am one of those who view globalization from the negative side (Dube 2001: 58; 2002: 46–8). I do not deny that many benefits/profits of globalization can be and will always be persuasively foregrounded by its creators, cheerleaders, and beneficiaries; nonetheless, the terms and overall impact of globalization on the lives of billions of people who are not only left out, but whose lives are actually rubbished, makes its negative impact far outweigh its benefits. I also find the ethics of globalization too troubling to be accepted unproblematically. As Christopher Lind puts it, with globalization’s ethic of competition, domination, and indifference, we are no longer asking, ‘what is the most economic efficient means of establishing a just society’; rather, we are now asking, ‘how much social injustice are we prepared to tolerate to establish an efficient economy’ (1995: 40; emphasis added). In short, ‘social injustice’ is central to the issue of globalization. Since feminist theologies are justiceseeking social visions, they stand (or should) in a stark contrast to globalization’s goals and ethics.

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On these grounds, feminist theological approaches to globalization will do well to avoid joining the praise choruses that often elevate globalization to an amazing miracle that has promoted flow of information, diversities, and eradicated national boundaries and inequalities. Feminist theologies should interrogate how these diversities are created and how they coexist. Feminist theological practices should ask who has been creating, eradicating, and recreating boundaries in the past and present, how these creations and recreations affect different people across the world, and for whose benefit. For example, Hisako Kinukawa reminds us that ‘though it is said that the globe has become borderless in many ways, it is also true that higher borders have been produced’ (2005: 138). Indeed, each time I travel across the boundaries of the United Kingdom and the United States and experience close interrogation (and how I hardly ever escape the hand of random picking and interrogation!), I know that boundaries are not actually opening up for all of us everywhere; rather, higher borders are being erected for many others. The collapse of boundaries and the creation of global village, therefore, is best seen as operating within an ideological ‘one-way traffic’, a one-way boulevard. That is, the crowds coming from Two-Thirds Worlds are, most of the time, entering by exceptional high academic credentials, skipping illegally, breaking traffic rules, jumping boundaries under police gun shots, boarding goods ships, and arriving as frozen, dead, or bartered bodies. But as Leticia Guardiola-Saenz maintains, ‘No matter how many laws and patrols are enforced to stop the immigration, the influx of boundary-crossers never stops’ (1997: 73). The one-way traffic model of collapsed boundaries is what constitutes boundaries as sites of struggle against past and present unjust international relations. It is also what constitutes the ideological marginalization of the Other even in their presence. A good example about the one-way traffic global village is captured in Peolwane: The Inflight Magazine of Air Botswana. It states that ‘visitors from the European Union . . . and the USA do not require visas’ to enter Botswana (2005: 9; see also http://www. botswana-tourism.gov.bw/entry_req/entry.html). Yet any Motswana who must visit (or even transit) the EU and USA is subjected to intense visa application requirements. Even after acquiring a legitimate visa before traveling, one must carry all sorts of evidence to explain his or her arrival, for there is always a possibility of being returned from the first entry port. Underlying the Botswana visa policy is the concept that former colonizers still have the right to enter all countries and have access to markets and cheaper labor, services, and goods from former colonies, while their subjects, of course, do not enjoy the same. The global village, therefore, is by design not for all, but for some selected few to enter freely and as they will. It is not for all goods and markets, rather it is for some select few to have access to all markets, where they can sell their goods and ideas, exploit cheap labor to maximize their profit, and acquire goods and services at cheap rate. Consequently, while ‘First World’ populations, goods, and ideas have free access to our countries, markets, and jobs, for many Two-Thirds World populations to travel to, live in, and have access to markets of the First World is a thorough struggle. The worst part is that the avalanche of Western goods and ideas, often state-subsidized, drown national and local goods and ideas, turning self-sustaining communities into dependent and poverty-stricken communities. The majority of Two-Thirds World populations (and

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their ideas and goods) end up skipping fences and entering as so-called ‘illegal immigrants’. This mode of entrance allows for the exploitation of their skills in the market, as well as the prevention of access of their goods and ideas to First World markets at their own determination. Globalization operates within these ideological boundaries of power and inequality. The challenge for justice-seeking feminist theologies is how to avoid occupying the unequal and oppressive boundaries and power relations of globalization un-problematically. Since one of the tasks of this volume is to recognize that in the globalization context, ‘the boundaries of theology need to be redrawn in the light of the creation of new global cultures’, it is important for such ‘redrawing’ to critically engage the power relations, the ethics, and the context of globalization, and to grapple with imagining a different globalization—one characterized by justice to, with, and for all people and the Earth and to create relations, at all levels, of liberating interdependence. I believe that the following are some of the questions that beg the attention of feminist theologies as they seek to redraw the boundaries of doing theology in this context: Does globalization improve race, religious, ethnic, gender, class, national, international, and environmental relations or does it maintain and intensify the existing oppressions? Do most people of the world find the international boundaries as permeable and trade liberalized so much so that they can enjoy business opportunities in the so-called global village? Has the geographic, economic, and cultural space shrunk for all people? What language(s) does globalization speak? Does globalization improve on world justice? How do theological departments and programs, and feminist courses too, reproduce and maintain the globalization power relations? These questions will assist justice-seeking feminist theologies to occupy the global village suspiciously, realizing that while globalization is a new phenomenon, it nonetheless has continuity with the past forms of imperialism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. Feminist theologies will, therefore, do well to occupy a prophetic space than to fall easily into romantic views of globalization. One way of doing this is to interrogate the gendered impact of globalization.

The gendered face of globalization Coming to globalization and gender relations, especially in religion, this remains an area that needs further research. Some feminist scholars who maintain that globalization is about ‘maximization of profit’ (Fall 2000: 86) argue that the ethics of globalization, which are characterized by ‘competition, domination and indifference’ (Lind 1995), cannot empower women. Apparently, with the Transnational Companies (henceforth TNC) moving to Two-Thirds World in search of both cheaper labor and resources, women sometimes find themselves employed in the new industries, but at what cost/prize? Research indicates that with globalization more women find themselves thrown into low-paid jobs that demand long hours and do not protect them; families are separated, leaving women to raise children alone; sex, work, and human trafficking increases; fewer

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women are found in decision-making boardrooms; more women lose their subsistence land to commercial farmers or industries; some women’s small businesses are outrun by the ruthless wheel of TNCs (Garba and Garba 2000: 24–7). Even more seriously, TNCs from metropolitan centers come with policies that lead to the privatization of public services of health, education, electricity, and water supplies. Women, who in many countries constitute the poorest section of society, are the hardest hit and their quality of life is not improved when water, land, health, and education are privatized and their prices are driven by profit-making rather than social welfare agendas (Kirmani and Munyakho 1997: 160–75). In her article, ‘Poverty and Motherhood’, Mercy Oduyoye points to the gendered impact of globalization on women’s lives, holding that: As World Bank and International Monetary Fund prescriptions bite harder into the economy of Third World, so the face of poverty becomes clearer and clearer. When a poor country has to export more to already rich countries, it takes land from the poor, especially women, to grow what the North needs, not what mothers in the South need to feed children. When governments cut spending, schooling and health-care fall on families and all work triple-time just to be able to feed children. (2004: 63)

In their essay ‘The Impact of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPS) on Women and AIDS’, M. H. Kirmani and D. Munyakho name SAPS as part of the globalization processes of deregulation and privatization. They also point out that ‘SAPS hurt more women than men’ (1997: 163) since privatization of social welfare services, which lead to ‘the removal of subsidies for health, education, and welfare . . . results in diminished support for services previously available to women in their reproductive roles, while SAPS increase their reproductive roles and demands on their time’ (165). What is instructive in this article is that Kirmani and Munyako document the impact of SAPS on women’s well-being, showing how the introduction of SAPS leads to loss of jobs, higher fees for social welfare services, breakdown of family due to unemployment, engagement in sex work due to desperation, and finally HIV/AIDS infection (160–78). Kirmani and Munyako thus hold that SAPS: have adverse effects on African women—be they farmers, traders, or consumers, or live in rural or urban areas. SAP policies that increase food prices and reduce job opportunities may increase malnutrition and reduce immunity levels, making family members more susceptible to diseases. In addition, the need for female head of household to provide food for their families’ survival . . . may force these women into risky sexual behavior. Gendered differences in access to resources, including land, labor, and capital, contribute to the spread of AIDS. (1997: 169)

The above observations from African context are echoed by women from Asia. Thus Pui-lan Kwok points out that: Because of globalization, women across the Third World face similar socio-economic challenges: women’s subsistence economy crushed by large-scale industries and multinational corporations, the social and economic consequences of large national debts, and in some cases constant threats of instability and war. The realignment of world

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powers according to their geopolitical interests and economic structural adjustments imposed on poorer countries both lead to less political autonomy and less participation. (2005: 153)

Similarly, in her essay ‘Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts: Ideologies of Domination, Common Interests, and Politics of Solidarity’, Chandra T. Mohanty holds that ‘[t]he material, cultural, and political effects of the processes of domination and exploitation which sustain what is called the New World Order (NWO) are devastating for the vast majority of people in the world—and most especially for impoverished and Third-World women’ (1997: 10). To highlight the impact of globalization on women’s lives, Mohanty studies Two-Thirds World women workers (mostly the immigrants) in Western metropolitan centers and those who are in their own nations, but also producing goods for the consumption of the West. The study shows how women’s labor in the globalization era is exploited through collaboration with local patriarchal cultures. Thus immigrant women who work in the Silicon Valley of California and Indian women lace-makers in Narsapur are both incorporated and exploited in the global economy (1997: 11). Moreover, it is not only people who are seemingly run over by the ruthless wheel of globalization, but also the environment, for ‘women in the Third World witness their subsistence and role as managers of water and forest eroded and changed by the arrival of multinational corporations. Deforestation, pollution, environmental racism, and other ecological disasters have wreaked havoc on the livelihood of poor women who simply dream of sufficient fuel and clean drinking water’ (Kwok 2005: 162–3). In these descriptions we realize that like modern colonization, globalization does not only have the three G’s of God, gold, and glory, but also the forth G for gender. It is for the above reasons that Yassine Fall, who defines globalization as the highest stage of imperialism, is adamant that globalization cannot target gender equality as an objective, because it is solely concerned with competition and profit maximization (Fall 2000: 86). It is therefore not an exaggeration to say globalization is a globalization of poverty and of feminization of poverty, in particular. Feminist theologies of liberation in the globalization context should, therefore, wrestle with the problematic terms, ethics, and impact of globalization on the environment and people, in particular women. The gender-oppressive aspect of globalization is also linked to its cultural face and impact. As an earlier quote of Yassine Fall points out, ‘globalization also implies cultural imperialism and the homogenization of US pop culture and the English language as universal mileposts for cultural exchange’ (2000: 76–7). Similarly Stuart Hall holds that ‘Global mass culture . . . remains centered in the West’, and its ‘most important feature of this form of global mass culture is its peculiar form of homogenization. It is enormously absorptive’ (1997: 179). The competitive economic face of globalization, in other worlds, has a cultural side, which often drives gender power relations towards the negative side. That is, globalization is noted for creating cultural insecurity in communities who find themselves invaded by value systems of super powers. Communities that are invaded by increasing poverty and social insecurity will have a rise in nativist, racist, and fundamentalist movements (Hall 1997: 177–85). The latter intensifies patriarchy, putting a

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tighter hold on women’s lives. Given that fundamentalisms are movements that use religion to seek to gain political control, feminist theologies need to reflect how fundamentalism is both part and a consequence of globalization, and what happens to women in the political discourse of fundamentalisms (Sahgal and Yuval-Davis 2003: 43–8).

Feminist Christian theologies of a world scripture Since my task in this chapter is to contribute to the conversation of doing feminist theology in the globalization context by addressing the topic ‘a theology of a world scripture’, I will also briefly, discuss the concepts of world and scripture and the power relations that go with them, before I highlight some models that I believe should characterize justice-seeking feminist theologies in the globalization era, under performing new models.

World: which world? To start with the term ‘world’, it is important that the feminist theological discourse should be able to ask which world is speaking and what position of power does it hold in relation to the phenomenon of globalization and in relation to ‘the Christian world scriptures’. Is it ‘the media world’, which is often tossed in front of our screens as a perfect globe with green vegetation and blue waters (one that is likely to make us feel like ‘all is well’, all is at perfect peace and balance)? Or is it the kind of world in my village, and many other places, that is always rimmed by the skies in an igloo shape (save for those who live in skyscrapers who struggle to see the horizons of their skies), but, which while small, constantly changes its boundaries as we move? Or is it the world of the BBC, the red-eyed ball that is supposedly watching for us or being watched by us or both? ‘World’ can also refer to the Christian dichotomous thinking that relegates everything that is unchristian to the category of ‘worldly’ or ‘flesh’. This perspective is classically expressed in the song, ‘this world is not my home, I am just passing by’. It is a perspective that is often environmentally oppressive, for by de-sacralizing the Earth, it sanctions its domination and exploitation. Another common usage of the word ‘world’ is in reference to the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Worlds. We are all aware that we are supposedly occupying different worlds of different classes, races, ethnicities, and religions. More often than not, power is associated with the First World, while the rest tend to be lumped under the so-called Third World, which in fact refers to two-thirds of the world spaces and populations. How does the Bible as a ‘world scripture’ travel and tabernacle in these different worlds? Do men and women in these various worlds experience globalization the same way? Which of

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these worlds defines the terms of globalization and which of them is likely to accrue more benefits? Among and between these worlds, how many people get left behind by the ideological one-way traffic of globalization? And how is the environment affected by global capitalism? It is important that feminist Christian theologies of a world scripture should understand the world that it currently occupies and the one it wishes to occupy in the globalization context. Feminist theologies of liberation, therefore, should be sure to investigate the power relations of globalization in different worlds and how they should inform their practice. Given that globalization lies within the long list of other structural forms of oppressions, such as imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism, feminist theologies of Christian scriptures need to continue to investigate how Christian scriptures have functioned and continue to legitimize relations of oppression and how the populations have responded to this experience. They also need to continue to occupy a prophetic position of resisting all forms of oppression and articulating visions of a liberating and liberated world(s): visions of liberating interdependence.

Scripture and scriptures: A world scripture Turning to the concept of scripture, which in this project refers to Christian scriptures/ Bible, six points are worth noting when doing feminist theologies in the global context: First, scripture is often used to refer to authoritative sacred writings of a particular community. The latter definition is problematic, since in many world contexts scriptures are oral and cultural; in some cases, there are no defining boundaries between the sacred and the secular; and others have very different ways of reading, interpreting the scriptures in the community of believers. Second, women remain problematically related to Christian scriptures (and many other world scriptures) due to the patriarchal ideology of exclusion, domination, and silencing. Women’s scriptures, like history, remain largely oral scriptures. Third, the Christian scriptures’ long history of patriarchal contents, interpretation, translations, institutions, and canonization remain a factor to reckon with. Feminist interpretations have thus rightfully asserted ‘the starting point of feminist criticism of the Bible is not the biblical texts in their own right but the concerns of feminism as a world view and as a political enterprise’ (Exum 1995: 63). The latter underlines feminist resistance given the problematic relationship. Scriptures in feminist thinking and practice therefore go beyond the accepted scriptures and scriptoratures (oral scriptures), canonized and uncanonized, cultures and rituals. It includes reading stories of women’s lives of the past and present in search for the empowerment of women and justice by and for all and the Earth. Fourth, as I have argued elsewhere (Dube 2000: 23–46) the history of Christian/ biblical text functioning as a colonial tool should be a factor in feminist theological thinking. It is, in fact, the history of colonialism that makes the Bible a world scripture. As I have argued elsewhere, the Bible, as a world scripture, co-habits with many scriptures

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of various worlds and under various power relations (Dube 2005: 192). As a world scripture it has participated and still participates in the unequal power relations of First, Second, and Third Worlds of today. In other words, it is also important to note that as a world scripture, it is quite worldly. It is not as sacred as it tends to be defined by some; rather history shows that it is quite unholy insofar as it participates in legitimating various oppressive relations in the world. As a world scripture it has functioned as a tool for legitimizing the colonizers’ model of the world (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1986: 91). As a world scripture the Bible also operates within the current globalization’s double standards of boundaries that are collapsed and freely opened for the former colonizers, while the formerly colonized increasingly find higher boundaries that debar their entrance—together with their goods and ideas. The latter is a context of globalization where former colonized people come in by acquiring extremely high academic credentials, skipping fences, and getting admitted under the tokenist paradigm—where they occupy a insignificant space that will not threaten the status quo in the First World. This is evident in that while in many Two-Thirds World departments, Western icons of theology such as Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, and Rudolf Bultmann are required, one hardly finds Two-Thirds World theological thinkers such Kwesi Dickson, Mercy A. Oduyoye, Elsa Tamez, Gustavo Gutierrez, and Stanley F. Samartha a central part of Western religion and theological departments. This also applies to philosophies, theories, methods, and Christian histories—yes, they are admitted in theological departments, but under ‘a tokenist paradigm’. As long as this one-way traffic model of globalization is promoted, under whatever name is given at different times (just as we currently use global village/ compression of the world/single capital market/new world order), boundaries will continue to be resisted and to be sites of vibrant struggles. Fifth, feminist theologies need to interrogate how the Christian scriptures function(ed) within the First–Fourth, Second, Two-Thirds Worlds to legitimate unequal international relationships. This is vital given the historical function of Christian scriptures, and that in the globalization era, Christianity is identified as the dowry of the latter. Contemporary feminist theologies need to investigate how those relationships of the past are either continued, discontinued, reshaped, or resisted in the globalization era— and how they impact the lives of women and men. Feminist theologies of a world scripture as liberation theologies should highlight the ideological perspectives within the texts and the external uses of the Bible which legitimate the domination of other worlds and other scriptures, especially those in Fourth and Two-Thirds Worlds. Feminist theologies of a world scripture should constantly evaluate which worlds are occupied by the biblical scriptures they engage—is it the ‘world’ of media houses; world as secular/ unholy; or First, Second, or Two-Thirds worlds? The model of the ‘world as secular’ or the ‘unholy other’ reveals that the Bible as a world scripture theological source is fully involved in many unholy power relations of the past and present times. The Bible as a world scripture is worldly. The latter perspective should assist feminist theologians to remain suspicions toward Christian scriptures’ journeys into the world. Accordingly, it is important that feminist theologies of liberation should acknowledge the function of the Two-Thirds World counter-narratives that place the Christian

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scriptures among other scriptures and oratures (oral literature/cultures), thus undermining its colonial urge of domination, exclusion, and silencing of both women and men in Other worlds and Other scriptures. Proposed feminist counter-narratives are numerous. They include stories of women’s lives as sacred texts (Tamez 1998: 57–64); foundational histories of oppression and resistance of certain communities as scripture (Martin 1998: 65–73); human rights charters (Dube 2002: 60–3; 2005: 193–9); rituals and orally spoken words (Parratt 1998: 74–80); South African post-apartheid liberating constitution (Plaatjie 2001: 114–44); earth veneration (Oduyoye 2003: 12–17; Kwok 2005: 162–3); and Oral-Spirit space for generating femiscriptures (Dube 1998: 52–3). (As used here, the word ‘femiscriptures’ refers to texts, oral or written, articulated by women and women-identified men that seek to empower the Earth community as a whole.) I believe that models of feminist theologies of a world scripture that redraw boundaries of traditional theology have been performed for us from Two-Thirds Worlds contexts. Because the arrival of the Christian/biblical world scripture in many parts of Two-Thirds World was linked to the arrival of modern imperialism and colonialism, postcolonial Two-Thirds World feminist theologies thus tend to interrogate all scriptures that inhabit their worlds for justice, for the survival and empowerment of women, and for the whole Earth community. They are often unable to ignore the exploitative and oppressive international relations and how they impact the lives of individuals, families, communities, and nations, as well as how they globalize poverty and environmental degradation, and intensify nativist and fundamentalist discourses-factors that worsen women’s subjugation and disempowerement. Two-Thirds World theologies thus place the Christian scriptures within their scriptures, be they oral or written. The counter-narrative of Two-Thirds World postcolonial subjects therefore constructs liberationist feminist theologies of a world scripture, which are multi-faith, inculturatist, hybrid, diasporic, and from popular religiosity. In so doing, they have begun to chart the path of redrawing the boundaries of traditional theology. As feminist theologies struggle with how to shape their practice in the context of globalization, it is important to recognize the emerging models offered by Two-Thirds World feminist visionaries in the academic halls.

Performing new models: globalization and justice-seeking feminist theologies The goals of this section of The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theology encourage the contributors to abandon ‘the structure and language of traditional systematic theology’ and ‘to perform new models of theological distinctiveness’ in the globalization context. I believe I have already made several suggestions in the body of this chapter toward this end. Therefore, I wish to close the essay by reiterating some of them and highlighting the implications for feminist theological practices in the globalization context. I believe that the following are some of the emerging new models:

 • • • • • •

musa w. dube Villagizing the globe and problematizing the power relations of globalization; Doing feminist theologies that are activist and academically informed; Locating femiscriptures in women’s stories of struggle for justice and survival; Doing feminist theologies of border-crossing; Doing feminist diasporic theologies; and Doing feminist Earth-centered theologies.

I will now briefly elaborate on each of them in their given order.

Villagizing the globe: Problematizing the power relations The first section of this chapter has already underlined that feminist theologies of a world scripture need to understand and to problematize the globalization agenda, practice, ethics, and impact. Whatever shape feminist theologies take in the globalization context, this task remains central to its justice-seeking agenda. One way of doing this is through using the lens of villagizing the globe instead of just globalizing the globe (Dube 2002: 46–8). This approach to globalization is from the view of the village—those who are being globalized by powers that are beyond them. In the latter model, I propose that a justiceseeking feminist theological discourse must problematize the terms of reference and power relations of globalization. One way that feminist theologies can villagize the globe is to interrogate the contents, paradigms, structure, and staff of their theological departments, courses, and pedagogy (Spencer Miller 2005: 17–40). This investigation should seek to establish whether the contents and structures of theological programs reproduce and maintain the globalization practices of one-way traffic and tokenist paradigms that maintain Eurocentricism. In the latter paradigm, theological programs admit Two-Thirds World staff, theological perspectives, theories, and methods in the non-threatening margins and ignore the ever-changing faces, accents, and foods of its neighborhood. By villagizing the globe, feminist theologies will seek to challenge the structures of globalization so that the oneway traffic boundaries of current globalization is discarded. I have thus proposed that in the globalization era, each scholar will do well to ask critical questions that assist us to assess how theological programs and frames of thinking are related to global power relations (Dube 2002: 48). Hearing the voices of the village will also require feminist theological practices that are deliberately globally engaged.

Academic-activist feminist theological practices Under the section of the gendered face of globalization, it became clear that women as traders, farmers, mothers, and wives in rural and urban areas come face to face with the powers of globalization, which often leave them impoverished. The feminization of poverty is intensified. To hear the voices of the village women who are being globalized will thus require feminist academic theologies that are working with and informed by activist women movements on the ground (Dube 2005: 186–91). So far, theology in general is less engaged with globalization ‘because the analysis of the religion-cultural dimension is often separated from the rapidly changing socioeconomic conditions’

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(Kwok 2005: 41). Staying in touch and working with women’s activist movements and listening to women’s stories and experience of globalization is likely to fill this gap. It is within such spaces that femiscriptures will be heard and read.

Femiscripture-based theologies Femiscriptures are texts that tell stories of women and women-identified men’s visions of seeking to birth justice for the Earth community as a whole. Femiscriptures remain largely oral stories, even in cultures of written scriptures, given that most scriptures and scriptoratures are patriarchal and leave out women’s voices. In oral cultures, such as that of African and many other countries, it is largely the male perspectives that constitute the official, hence dominant culture. With globalization, the Bible as a world scripture becomes a femiscripture through feminist interpretations that place it in diasporic and hybrid contexts and Earth communities, seeking for life-affirming paradigms of relating. In the latter, it coexists more closely with all other scriptures, making hybridity a must paradigm for feminist theologies of liberation in the globalization context (Guardiola-Saenz 2002: 129–52; Sugirtharajah 2004: 37–8; Wicker 2005: 6–7). Since globalization promotes feminized poverty, nativism, Christianity as dowry, and fundamentalism, feminist theologies of liberation need to locate femiscriptures in women’s stories of their struggle for justice and survival (Tamez 1998: 57–64). Listening, writing, reflecting, and speaking of women’s journeys and struggles for justice and survival in various worlds, classes, races, ethnicities, and religions should be the space where feminist theologies of liberation are worked out in the globalization era. With border-crossing and diasporic contexts as central features of globalization, feminist theologies of hybridity must reflect this redrawing of boundaries (Brah 2003; Wicker 2005: 6–7).

Border-crossing feminist theologies One certain feature of globalization is border-crossing in all directions. Although the powers that be consistently block and illegalize the movements of the Other, through applying a a one-way traffic globalization, the Other cannot be stopped from bordercrossing (Guardiola-Saenz 1998: 73). The powers that be get back to the Other by applying the tokenist paradigm of admission. The latter functions as a control button—one that ensures Eurocentricism is maintained in theological programs, and all other academic departments, even in the face of diversity. Consequently, Two-Thirds Worlds populations and discourses then structurally exist more as tourist artifacts. Feminist theologies, which also dwell in the margins of power, should seek to dismantle the tokenist paradigm that testifies to a structural ideology of one-way traffic of globalization. Feminist theologies should redraw the boundaries of globalization by becoming a border-crossing discourse that challenges the current exclusive powers of race, ethnicity, religions, class, age, culture, and world scriptures that characterize the making of the so-called global village. Instead it should be a discourse that seeks to build relationships of liberating interdependence by occupying a space where the boundaries are drawn and redrawn with, by, and for all members of the Earth.

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Diasporic feminist theologies With border-crossing as a feature of globalization, the Diaspora becomes the experience of those who have moved and those who have remained in their localities. The word diaspora means dispersion, the scattering or the alienation of certain populations from their homelands and cultures. In the globalization era diaspora has become a central part of our experience (Brah 2003: 613–34). As Edward Said holds, ‘Exile, far from being the fate of nearly forgotten unfortunates who are dispossessed and expatriated, becomes something closer to a norm, an experience of crossing boundaries and charting new territories in defiance of the classic canonical enclosures’ (1993: 317). Those who cross geographic borders, for one reason or another, find themselves living in the diaspora and those who have remained in the local areas are not spared as their neighborhoods increasingly become multicultural, hence in some sense diasporic. Recognizing the diasporic context of globalization and doing diasporic feminist theology are two ways of transgressing the ethics and control mechanism of ‘tokenist admission and one-way traffic model of globalization, which exclude millions and admits few to have unlimited access to world markets, ideas, and goods. Operating as diasporic communities and from a diasporic point of view becomes a way of constantly seeing the strangeness of home (Bhabha 1994: 9–18). A diasporic feminist theological paradigm challenges its practitioners to remain in constant search for the ever-eluding horizon of home. This eschatological urge/edge is the prophetic eye, the birth-pangs of a justice seeking feminist vision that refuses to settle for injustice.

Earth-centered feminist theologies Much work has been done to develop eco-feminist theology in the past three decades. However, with profit-driven globalization, which is characterized by ethics of domination, indifference, and competition, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Earth, like women, is subject to further exploitation and abuse (Hall 1997: 176–7). As Kwok points out: With neocolonialism and globalization, national boundaries are less significant, and the whole earth becomes ‘fair game’ for unbridled profiteering . . . These life-and-death concerns necessitate theological reflections that take seriously considerations of ecological, feminist and liberationist perspectives. (2005: 162–3)

Undoubtedly, the justice-seeking feminist theological vision needs to move from being anthropocentric to an Earth-community approach (Habel 2000: 25–53; Oduyoye 2004: 12–17). By using anthropocentric theological frameworks, feminists subvert their own liberation discourse by subscribing to the exploitation and oppression of the Earth. The exploitation of the Earth clearly is intertwined with the exploitation and oppression of women. The profit-driven globalization and its impact on the Earth thus demand a more wholesome feminist theological paradigm that foregrounds the whole Earth community than anthropocentricity. Arguing that ‘the earth is willy-nilly our common neighborhood’ (2004: 47), Oduyoye draws from her mother-centered scriptoratures of the Akan and the biblical scriptures

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to point us toward some new models of doing an Earth-community-centered feminist theology by suggesting a mother and God-centered economy. She holds that: In planning how the earth’s resources could be managed to sustain all creation God was generous from the beginning. In the beginning all was good, for all was of God. The interdependence of all creation was built into the beginning and there were no ‘trespasses’ and trespassers, for all appropriated what was necessary for survival . . . Exploitation among human beings is matched only by human exploitation of the rest of nature . . . what we need to turn our attention to, therefore, is the poverty of the human spirit that ignores the humanity of women as persons in God’s image and the mothers as co-creators with God and imitators of God’s management of creation. In a mother’s economy, abundant life and comfort for others precedes her own. (62)

In conclusion, justice-seeking feminist theological frameworks need to constantly ask about the color, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, internationality, environmental sensitiveness, and ethics of contemporary globalization. They should ask how globalization constructs the above categories. In the quest to redraw the boundaries of doing theology in the current context, feminist discourses need to investigate how globalization works with gender to affect the lives of women and men and their environments in various parts of the world. Propounding feminist theologies of a world scripture means interrogating the function and impact of ‘biblical/Christian scripture’ in the globalization context. It also means seeking to occupy a space of liberating interdependence by working with activists to articulate border-crossing ways, and which counteracts border-keeper paradigms, for the latter promote a one-way traffic globalization and their tokenist model of admitting the Other. The feminist quest to redraw the boundaries of doing theology, therefore, calls for feminist practices that inhabit hybrid and diasporic spaces of the Earth community. It is a quest that seeks to interpret and mold Earth community-centered globalization drawn from women’s life-stories of the struggle for justice and survival as sacred and prophetic femiscriptures.

Notes 1. The idea was drawn from my paper, ‘Rahab is Hanging Out a Red Ribbon: One African Woman’s Perspective on the Future of Feminist New Testament Scholarship’ (Dube 2005: 177–202), where I argued that the ‘the global future of FNTS need not just undertake a project of ‘Searching the Scriptures but also that of searching the world scriptures . . . The New Testament as a Christian text now exists with many other world scriptures and cultures as a direct consequence of modern imperialism’ (192). See also Dube (2000: 38–9), where I first discussed this idea. 2. For my earlier discussion of these G’s, see Dube (2000: 47–9; 117–18). 3. See Asamoah-Gyadu (2004) for a detailed analysis of these movements in the South. 4. Latin American theologians have engaged globalization in their work due to the impact of transnational companies on their economies.

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5. Wicker et al. (2005) represents one such attempt to link feminism, the Bible, and New Testament studies. 6. Similarly, Stuart Hall argues that ‘Capital has always been quite able to work in and through sexual division of labor in order to accomplish the commodification of labor’ (1997: 180). 7. Stuart Hall also points out that ‘when nation-states begin to decline in the era of globalization, they regress to a very defensive and highly dangerous form of national identity that is driven by a very regressive form of racism’ (1997: 178). 8. Some of the earliest feminist articles to deal with the question of scripture and biblical authority are found in Russell (1985) and Schüssler Fiorenza (1995). 9. Good examples are Christologies from Two-Thirds World that read the Christ figure within various cultural figures and concepts. The following volumes capture the multiscriptural constructions of Christological: Schrieter (1991); Sugirtharajah (1993); Sugirtharajah and Hargreaves (1993). For African and Asian feminist perspectives, see Dube (2005: 191–3), where I suggest a feminist strategy of ‘searching the world scriptures’, while Kinukawa (2005: 142–9), speaking from her context, suggests ‘multi-logues’. 10. See Kyung (1994); Fabella and Oduyoye (1999); Oduyoye (2004).

Works Cited Alexander, Jacqui M., and Mohanty, Chandra T. (Eds) (1997). Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York: Routledge. Asamoah-Gyadu, Kwabena J. (2004). African Charismatics: Current Developments within Independent Indigenous Pentecostalism in Ghana. Accra: ACP. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Blaut, James M. (1993). The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusion and Eurocentric History. New York: Guildford Press. Brah, Avtar (2003). ‘Diaspora, Border and Transnational Identities’, in Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (Eds), Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 613–34. Briggs, Sheila (2005). ‘Response: Globalization, Transnational Feminisms and the Future of Biblical Critique’, in Katheen O’ Brien Wicker, Althea Spencer Miller, and Musa W. Dube (Eds), Feminist New Testament Studies: Global and Future Perspectives. New York: Palgrave, 79–84. Castelli, E. (2005). ‘Globalization, Transnational Feminisms, and the Future of Biblical Critique’, in Katheen O’ Brien Wicker, Althea Spencer Miller, and Musa W. Dube (Eds), Feminist New Testament Studies: Global and Future Perspectives. New York: Palgrave, 63–78. Dempster, Murray W, Klaus, Bryon D., and Petersen, Douglas (Eds) (1999). The Globalization of Pentecostalism: A Religion Made to Travel. Irvine: Regnum. Dube, Musa W. (1998). ‘Scripture, Feminism and Post-colonial Contexts’, in Pui-lan Kwok and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Eds), Women’s Sacred Scriptures. London: SCM Press, 45–52. (2000). Postcolonial Feminist Interpretations of the Bible. St Louis: Chalice Press. (Ed.) (2001). Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the Bible. Atlanta: SBL. (2002). ‘Globalizing, Villagizing and Biblical Studies’, in Justin S. Ukpong et al. (Eds), Reading the Bible in the Global Village: Cape Town. Atlanta: SBL, 41–63. (2005). ‘Rahab is Hanging out a Red Ribbon: One African Woman’s Perspective on the Future of Feminist New Testament Scholarship’, in Katheen O’ Brien Wicker, Althea Spencer Miller, and Musa W. Dube (Eds), Feminist New Testament Studies: Global and Future Perspectives. New York: Palgrave, 177–202.

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(2006). ‘Looking Back and Forward: Postcolonialism, Globalization, God, and Gender’, Scriptura 92: 178–93. Exum, Cheryl (1995). ‘Feminist Criticism: Whose Interests Are Served?’, in Gale Yee (Ed.), Judges and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 65–90. Fabella, Virginia, and Oduyoye, Mercy A. (Eds) (1988). With Passion and Compassion: Third World Women Doing Theology. Marynoll, NY: Orbis Books. Garba, Abdul-Ganiyu, and Garba, P. Kassey (1999). ‘Trade Liberalization, Gender Equality and Adjustment Policies in Sub-Saharan Africa’, in Yassine Fall (Ed.), Africa: Gender, Globalization and Resistance. Dakar: AAWORD. Guardiola-Saenz, L. (2002). ‘Border-crossing and its Redemptive Power’, in Musa W. Dube and Jeffrey Staley (Eds), John and Postcolonialism: Travel, Space and Power. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 129–51. (1997). ‘Borderless Women and Borderless Texts: A Cultural Reading of Matthew 15: 21–28’, Semeia, 78: 69–81. Habel, Norman C. (Ed.) (2000). Readings from the Perspective of the Earth. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Hall, Stuart (1997). ‘The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity’, in Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Eds), Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nations, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 173–87. Kinukawa, Hisako (2005). ‘Biblical Studies in the Twenty-First Century: A Japanese/Asian Feminist Glimpse’, in Katheen O’ Brien Wicker, Althea Spencer Miller, and Musa W. Dube (Eds), Feminist New Testament Studies: Global and Future Perspectives. New York: Palgrave, 137–50. Kirmani, M. H., and Munyako, D. (1996). ‘The Impact of Structural Adjustment on Women and AIDS’, in D. Lynellyn Long and E. Maxine Ankrah (Eds), Women’s Experiences: International Perspectives on HIV/AIDS. New York: Columbia Press, 160–80. Kunukawa, Hisako (2005). ‘Biblical Studies in the Twenty-First Century: A Japanese/Asian Feminist Glimpse’, in Katheen O’ Brien Wicker, Althea Spencer Miller, and Musa W. Dube (Eds), Feminist New Testament Studies: Global and Future Perspectives. New York: Palgrave, 137–58. Kwok, Pui-lan (2005). Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville: Westminster and John Knox. and Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth (Eds) (1998). Women’s Sacred Scriptures. London: SCM Press. Kyung, Chung Hyun (1991). Struggle to be the Sun Again: Introducing Asian Women’s Theology. New York: Orbis Books. Lewis, Reina and Mills, Sara (Eds) (2003). Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Routledge. Lind, Christopher (1995). Something is Wrong Somewhere: Globalization, Community and the Moral Economy of the Farm Crisis. Halifax: Fernwood. Martin, Joan M. (1998). ‘The Slave Narratives and Womanist Ethics’, in Pui-lan Kwok and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Eds), Women’s Sacred Scriptures. London: SCM Press, 65–73. Maunier, Rene (1949). The Sociology of Colonies: An Introduction to the Study of Race Contact, Vol. 1. London: Routledge. Mohanty, Chandra. T. (1997). ‘Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts: Ideologies of Domination, Common Interests, and the Politics of Solidarity’, in M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra T. Mohanty (Eds), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York: Routledge, 3–29.

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Mugambi, J. N. K. (1995). From Liberation to Reconstruction: African Christian Theology after the Cold War. Nairobi: Acton Press. Ngg wa Thiong’o (1986). Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: James Curry. Oduyoye, M. A. (2004). Beads and Strands: Reflections of an African Woman on Christianity in Africa. New York: Orbis Books. Parratt, Saroj. N. (1998).‘Women as Originators of Oral Scripture in an Asian Society’, in Pui-lan Kwok and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Eds), Women’s Sacred Scriptures. London: SCM Press, 74–80. Pheko, Mohau (2000). ‘Privatization, Trade Liberalization and Women’s Socio-Economic Rights: Exploring Policy Alternatives’, in Yassine Fall (Ed.), Africa: Gender, Globalization and Resistance. Dakar: AAWORD, 89–102. Plaatjie, Gloria K. (2002). ‘Toward a Post-Aparthied Black Feminist Reading of the Bible: A Case of Luke 2: 36–38’, in Musa W. Dube (Ed.), Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the Bible. Atlanta: SBL Books, 114–44. Robertson, Roland (2000). ‘Globalization and the Future of “Traditional Religion” ’, in Max L. Stackhouse and Peter J. Paris (Eds), God and Globalization , vol. 1: Religion and the Powers of Common Life . Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 53–68. Russell, Letty M. (Ed.) (1985). Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Sahgal, Gita, and Yuval-Davis, Nira (2003). ‘The Uses of Fundamentalism’, in Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (Eds), Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 43–8. Said, Edward (1993). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf. Schrieter, Robert J. (Ed.) (1991). Faces of Jesus in Africa. New York: Orbis Press. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth (Ed.) (1995). Searching the Scriptures, Vol. 2: A Feminist Commentary. Boston: Crossroad. Spencer Miller, Althea (2005). ‘Feminist Pedagogies: Implications of a Liberative Praxis’, in Katheen O’ Brien Wicker, Althea Spencer Miller, and Musa W. Dube (Eds), Feminist New Testament Studies: Global and Future Perspectives. New York: Palgrave, 17–40. Stackhouse, Max L., and Paris, Peter (Eds) (2000). God and Globalization, Vol. 1: Religion and the Powers of Common Life. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International. Sugirtharajah, R. S. (1993). Asian Faces of Jesus. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. —— (2004). ‘Complacencies and Cul-de-sacs’, in Catherine Keller, Michael Nauser, and Mayra Rivera (Eds), Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 22–38. —— and Hargreaves, Cecil (Eds) (1993). Readings in Indian Christian Theology. London: SPCK. Tamez, Elsa (1998). ‘Women’s Lives as Sacred Text’, in Pui-lan Kwok and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Eds), Women’s Sacred Scriptures. London: SCM Press, 57–64. Tulloch, P. (1995). ‘Globalization: Blessing or Curse? Buzz-word or Swear-word’, in Julio de Santa Ana (Ed.), Sustainability and Globalization. Geneva: WCC, 99–106. Wicker, Kathleen O’ Brien (2005).‘Introduction’, in Katheen O’ Brien Wicker, Althea Spencer Miller, and Musa W. Dube (Eds), Feminist New Testament Studies: Global and Future Perspectives. New York: Palgrave, 1–16.

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Further Reading Keller, Catherine, Nausner, Michael, and Rivera, Mayra (Eds) (2005). Postcolonial Theologies: Divinity and Empire. St Louis: Chalice Press. Lewis, Reina, and Mills, Sara (Eds) (2003). Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Routledge. Ukpong, Justin S., et al. (2002). Reading the Bible in the Global Village: Cape Town. Atlanta: SBL. Wicker, Katheen O’ Brien, Spencer Miller, Althea, and Dube, Musa W. (Eds) (2005). Feminist New Testament Studies: Global and Future Perspectives. New York: Palgrave.

chapter 19

the ch a l lenges of gl oba liz ation for m usli m wom e n zayn kassam

Introduction Globalization is most succinctly understood as ‘the flow of goods and services, capital, and people, across national borders’ (Anderson and Cavanaugh 2000: 5). In this respect, globalization is nothing new, for such flows have existed earlier in history, most notably along trade routes such as the Silk Road(s), already operational in the second century bce, linking places as far flung as Chang’an (contemporary Xi’an) in China to Rome in Italy. What is new, however, is the strategy, scale, and scope of contemporary globalization. According to Roland Roberson, a key British theorist on globalization, the usage of the term derives from the work of Japanese economists in the 1980s, in which they described globalization as dochakuka. Robertson understands dochakuka as ‘glocalization’, which ‘means the simultaneity—the co-presence—of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies’ (2001). The term, as used by the Japanese, referred to the making of products for particular markets, thereby universalizing while at the same time indigenizing. That globalization is a multifaceted phenomenon is captured by Valentine M. Moghadam’s definition of globalization as ‘a complex economic, political, cultural, and geographic process in which the mobility of capital, organizations, ideas, discourses, and peoples has taken on an increasingly global or transnational form’ (2005: 35). Joseph E. Stiglitz, a former World Bank chief economist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, identifies the economic aspect of globalization as ‘the removal of barriers to free trade and the closer integration of national economies’ (2003: ix). Pamela K. Brubaker, a Christian ethicist, sees presentday globalization as capitalist, whose distinctive feature is to utilize the means of production to produce goods that will generate profit, which in turn is reinvested to

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generate more production to produce more profit, resulting in the accumulation of capital (2001: 18). In her book Globalization at What Price?, she details how the Bretton Woods institutions, which are currently constituted by bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and which developed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, were originally set up in 1944 to globalize the world’s economies. To these Bretton Woods institutions, another was added in 1995 called the World Trade Organization, which was made responsible for setting and enforcing the rules of trade. These institutions adopted the economic policy of neo-liberalism and a free market, and its key principles are, as she pithily summarizes, as follows: ‘The market is to make major social and political decisions. The state should voluntarily reduce its role in the economy. Corporations are to have complete freedom. Unions are to be restrained and citizens given much less rather than more social protection’ (27). As Brubaker explains it, three policies followed from the adoption of neo-liberalism: deregulation, privatization, and liberalization, which were packaged together with structural adjustment programs and an emphasis on export-led growth as conditions for International Monetary Fund and World Bank loans. What this means is that deregulation eliminates the control of the state over economic and financial transactions, allowing the market to function freely. Doing so would allow the forces of supply and demand to regulate production and increase economic prosperity, and thereby, in the words of Adam Smith, ‘lift all boats’, that is, raise the fortunes of the rich and the poor alike. Privatization shifts the control of public enterprises to the private sector, sometimes to ill effect, as witnessed in California when Enron was allowed to take over the energy sector. Liberalization calls for countries to dismantle protective tariffs, giving up domestic control over trade and finance, and allowing foreign banks to own key economic institutions such as national banks, thus taking away any barriers to foreign investment. It should also be noted, in Stiglitz’s words, that Western countries ‘pushed poorer countries to eliminate trade barriers, but kept up their own barriers, preventing developing countries from exporting their agricultural products and so depriving them of desperately needed export income’ (2003: 6). Countries that resist such policies are simply disciplined through the removal of aid and foreign investment and the refusal to trade with them, in other words, economic ostracism. The alternative to such ostracization is, to put it somewhat crudely, economic exploitation of the poorer countries by the richer countries. Although the Bretton Woods institutions were meant to eradicate poverty through their systems of loans and their policies on trade, the effects on non-First World nations have been somewhat mixed. Industrial and corporate elites have accumulated capital while the middle class has been handicapped through a shrinking economy, and the poor have grown exponentially poorer through dispossession and labor exploitation. This holds for countries as well as peoples. A study released in 2006 based on incomes for the year 2000 asserts that the richest 1% of the 3.7 billion adults in the world owned 40% of global wealth; the richest 2% owned 51%; and the richest 10% owned 85% of global wealth—and these rich are to be found primarily in the United States, Europe, and high-income Asian countries such as Japan (and now, the rapidly growing economies of

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China and India). The bottom half of adults in the world owned barely 1% (UNUWIDER 2006). To put this another way: 3 billion people live on less than $2 a day, and the GDP of the 48 poorest countries is less than the wealth of the three richest people in the world. Not surprisingly, 51% of the world’s 100 wealthiest bodies are corporations (Shah 1998–2008). Moreover, countries that apply for loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are often subjected to structural adjustment programs (SAPs) whose stated aims are to enhance a country’s economic security by increasing the privatization of key governmental sectors including social services, and increasing foreign investment by reducing trade barriers and providing a more malleable workforce, while reducing public expenditures, leading to a decline in the kinds of statesupported services associated with a welfarist state. In this respect, a form of political globalization is in rapid progress as the state’s autonomy is undermined by the ideologies underpinning economic globalization. Cultural globalization, aptly termed McDonalization (one might even say Starbucksization), accompanies both economic and political globalization as homogenous goods become identified internationally as objects of consumption, and move into becoming symbols of power, while simultaneously offering a cosmopolitan, pluralistic, and hybridized cultural diversity as cultural exchanges are made (the glocalization or dochakuka mentioned earlier).

Globalization and gender So how does economic globalization affect women, and how does globalization in its multiple facets—economic, political, and cultural—connect to religion? Valentine M. Moghadam, a sociologist who is also Chief of the Gender Equality and Development Section at UNESCO, observes that economic globalization has generated jobs for women in production arenas, enabling ‘women in many developing countries to earn and control income and to break away from the hold of patriarchal structures, including traditional household and familial relations’ (2005: 37). However, these benefits are far outweighed by the disadvantages that accrue to women. Apart from the low wages, poor working conditions, and the lack of security and benefits that accompany many of the production-sector jobs opened up for women, especially in export processing zones, unemployment figures for women are still higher than those of men, and women’s participation in informal sectors is increasing, as is trafficking in women and the feminization of poverty. In addition, countries that face SAPs are forced to cut government expenditure on social, health, and educational programs as these are privatized, leaving such programs to the mercy of the market and out of reach of the poor. Such SAPs have been shown to have an adverse effect on women as both men and women lose jobs in a declining economy, leaving women to bear most of the responsibility of coping with increased prices and shrinking incomes, as women [are] the ones largely responsible for household budgeting and maintenance . . . [thus] the policies [of SAPs contain] an implicit and unspoken

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assumption of the elasticity of women’s labor time, or the idea that women would always fill the gap created by public expenditure cuts in health and social services. (39)

Arguably, SAPs have increased unequal gender relations between men and women, as they tend to favor men and income-earning adults. The effects of economic globalization are further compounded by cultural globalization that, homogenizing even as it hybridizes, elicits nativist resistance to what is often perceived as the powerful onslaught of Westernization that threatens to destroy indigenous culture and identity. As Bayes and Tohidi observe, thanks in part to globalization, women’s movements for equal rights and feminists from different parts of the world have brought their forces together through international and global forums like the UN conferences and growing transnational NGO networking. At the same time, the various conservative religious forces have formed united blocks against the implementation of equal rights. . . . Women, whether feminist or not, face neopatriarchal conservative forces that operate through religious states or new religiopolitical movements known as communalism, fundamentalism, and Islamism. (2001: 7–8)

Fundamentalism is on the rise in every religious tradition despite the global perception that it is solely an Islamic issue. However, religious fundamentalism is not alone in simultaneously mounting a resistance to globalization while re-inscribing patriarchal control over women. In his book Jihad vs. McWorld, Benjamin Barber ‘uses the term jihad as shorthand to describe religious fundamentalism, disintegrative tribalism, ethnic nationalisms, and similar kinds of identity politics carried out by local peoples “to sustain solidarity and tradition against the nation-state’s legalistic and pluralistic abstractions as well as against the new commercial imperialism of McWorld” ’ (2001: 232). Unfortunately, rather than formulating alternative economic policies that would address the inequities brought about by free-market capitalism and transnational corporations’ assault on labor, or seeking to uphold and facilitate genuine democratic principles and practices, nativist resistance movements such as Islamic fundamentalism, more accurately described as Islamist movements, tend to focus their energies on providing social safety net services and on undermining their local governments by campaigning on a platform that asserts that ‘Islam is the solution’ (that is, governance according to Islamic law, popularly known as shari’a, or more accurately, fiqh). Such governance seems to be heavily weighted in favor of concern with identity, morality, and the family. This preoccupation places a heavy burden on women, who are seen as the bearers of tradition, religiosity, and morality, and as the reproducers of the faithful. Such views have profound effects on women’s legal status and social positions, especially when fundamentalist views are successfully inscribed in constitutions, family laws, penal codes, and other public policies. (Moghadam 2005: 47)

However, a positive result for women of the privations brought about by neo-liberal economic policies and structural adjustment programs has been the formation of feminist or women’s organizations that have increasingly become transnational in their concerns, collaboration, and resulting strategies aimed at achieving social, including gender, and

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environmental justice. Aptly termed ‘globalization from below’, Moghadam points to social movement organizations created by labor, feminists, and environmentalists as the key agents of anti-capitalist protest, resistance, and opposition to the ‘globalization from above’ brought about by neo-liberal market policies and the programs of the Bretton Woods institutions (30–2). Such organizations have also sought to critique the ‘patriarchal nationalistic’ or the ‘patriarchal religious’ ideologies and practices of their politicians (102). The foregoing brief remarks on globalization and its impact on women are offered by way of contextualizing the effects of globalization on women, including Muslim women and their responses to such effects, whether these responses are expressed in religious terms or not. It is clear that globalization has brought with it many benefits ‘from above’ with respect to opening up employment and trade opportunities on a massive scale, and has facilitated, in some cases, a generation of wealth that has trickled down to ordinary citizens, thereby enabling greater freedom of choice with respect to raising the standard of living. However, by and large, such small gains have come at a tremendous cost to those who do not constitute the elite, especially in developing countries (often termed countries at the periphery). For such countries, their increasing indebtedness and inability to compete in a global economy, especially once their trade barriers are dismantled, leads to increased borrowing from global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the imposition of structural adjustment programs that have resulted in cutbacks in public social services such as education and health care, as well as rising unemployment, thereby increasing the burden on women as managers of their households. Globalization and its concomitant industrial and business practices have also contributed greatly to environmental degradation and its deleterious effects on women, as will be explored below. At the same time, globalization has facilitated, ‘from below’, nativist resistance movements, often couched and presented in religious terms, that turn to identity politics and greater control over women’s morality, comportment, and role in society ostensibly to address broader social inequities, but that concomitantly exercise a restrictive effect on the attainment of gender justice. Countering both such impulses is the role of global institutions such as the United Nations and its many programs for ameliorating inequity in its many forms, including gender injustice ‘from above’ and the growth of non-governmental organizations and feminist and transnational feminist organizations ‘from below’ that seek to challenge and address the economic, political, and cultural aspects of globalization in their local and transnational forms.

Muslim hermeneutics on gender In order to understand how nativist resistance movements have been able to draw upon women’s comportment and dress as symbols for the authenticity and integrity of the Islamic tradition in an attempt to withstand what they perceive as Western hegemonic practices, a brief examination of Muslim hermeneutics on gender is necessary. Scholars such as Leila Ahmed have argued that the Qur’an is not a woman-unfriendly document;

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indeed, she suggests that women hear a different Qur’an from men, because to women the Qur’an’s message of full spiritual and moral equality with men is clearly articulated (1992: 239). However, men hear the verses that suggest to our contemporary sensibilities that the Qur’an does not treat women as equal to men in the social and legal spheres. The Qur’an views women as human beings who are creations of God, and many verses in the Qur’an are addressed to both men and women. Within the Qur’an, considered divine revelation by Muslims, female life is considered to be intrinsically valuable (Q. 81: 9). The creation of the female is attributed, along with that of the male, to a single soul (Q.4: 1) from which the other is created as its mate (Q. 4: 1). There is no mention of the rib of the male from which the female is thought to have been generated. Thus, in the Qur’an, males and females are equal before God from the perspective of origin and spiritual status, and with respect to morality and spirituality. Men and women are also equally accountable to God for their actions and for their religious beliefs and responsibilities (Q. 33: 35). Indeed, men and women are to be distinguished from each other, regardless of their sex, on the basis of their righteousness and piety (taqwa, also understood as being God-fearing, that is, mindful of moral accountability to God). In the social sphere, the Qur’an moves to protect and safeguard women’s right to life (Q. 81: 8–9), to inheritance, regardless of the proportions (Q. 4: 7), to recognition as legal persons (2: 282), to alimony and child support after divorce (Q. 65: 4–6), to freedom from the public male gaze, and to safety while outdoors. These considerations are laudable given the seventh-century context in which the Qur’an was revealed, a time when women had few rights, not only in Arabia but also in other contemporary societies of that time. However, to our twenty-first-century consciousness, the Qur’an suggests social inequality when it places restrictions on the percentage that women may inherit (Q. 4:11), which is usually half that of their brothers, and on the weight of their legal testimony, where two women’s testimony is counted as equivalent to one male’s testimony. In matters of dress and comportment, both men and women are asked ‘to lower their gaze and be modest’ (Q. 24: 30–1); however, women are additionally asked to draw their khumur over their bosoms. There is nothing explicit in the Qur’an about head coverings, as the meaning of the word khumur, if taken from the context of the verse, simply indicates a piece of cloth that could be used to cover women’s bosoms. Muslims commonly translate khumur as veil, but the verse does not specifically say so; it could just as easily have been a scarf thrown around one’s shoulders that could be extended to cover the head or face or neck or bosom as desired, depending on circumstances such as weather, for instance. There do not appear to be any specific Qur’anic guidelines for male dress, although both men and women are called to observe modesty, a term that could include dress as well as behavior. The Qur’an asks the Prophet to ‘Tell thy wives and thy daughters and women of the believers to draw their cloaks (jilbāb) close around them [when they go out]. That will be better, that they may be recognized and not annoyed’ (Q. 34: 59). According to traditional sources, the Qur’an’s injunction here was aimed at protecting women from a group of men known as the ‘hypocrites’ who harassed women on the pretext that they didn’t know the women were Muslims. The Qur’an also allows women

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past childbearing age with no hope of marriage to discard such outer clothing, even though it recommends that it is better for them to retain such clothing (Q. 24: 60). The word hijāb, which today is understood as a covering for the head, is only mentioned in the Qur’an in connection with the Prophet’s wives (Q. 33: 53), and specifies that conversation with the wives of the Prophet is to be conducted from behind a curtain (hijāb). Again, traditional sources suggest that this revelation came about as a result of the inappropriate behavior of some of the male guests invited to the Prophet’s house for a wedding, during which time they were forward with his wives. Since the Prophet’s quarters were attached to the mosque in Medina, and open to the general public, this measure of addressing the Prophet’s wives from behind a curtain was aimed at both preserving their privacy and restricting access to the Prophet’s wives, who were now vulnerable to being used as intermediaries between the Prophet and the public. So then how did Qur’anic verses assuring better treatment for women result in what is largely perceived as Islam’s poor treatment of women, especially when Islamist regimes come to power? Various factors come into play in addressing this question. Barbara Stowasser, an eminent scholar who has studied the representation of women in Islamic texts, has advanced the view that some of the earliest commentators on the Qur’an, men like the famous Muslim historian and scholar al-Tabari (d. 923 ce), relied upon biblical accounts to understand references to biblical figures in the Qur’an (1994: 22–3). While Muslims did not invent patriarchy or a male-centered view of the world and of social relations, they very quickly took on the patriarchal lens already in existence in the Byzantine and Persian territories conquered by Muslims in the seventh and eighth centuries. It was through this lens that the Qur’an would be understood, and through this lens that the various schools of fiqh (law), commonly and collectively known as the shari’ah, the Islamic legal system, would be created. As a case in point, the Qur’anic account of the creation of male and female says that that both men and women were created from a single soul, making the creation of both perfectly equal in ontological status. The Qur’an also does not blame the woman solely for disobedience to God in eating from the forbidden tree; indeed, as Stowasser points out, in what are considered the earliest accounts, the Qur’an lays the responsibility for this action squarely on Adam (Q. 20: 115–24), or in the latest accounts, on both of them (Q. 7: 11–27); in either case, God forgives them both and tells them that they only need to turn to God in difficulty and God will help them. Unlike the second account found in Genesis 2: 20–2, in which the female is created from the rib of the male, and in order to be his helpmate, the Qur’an says nothing about Adam’s rib. Nonetheless, when in the tenth century the renowned Muslim scholar al-Tabari wrote his commentary on the Qur’an, he added in from biblical sources that the woman was created from the rib of Adam, thereby making her creation secondary to the creation of Adam, stating further that she was created to serve Adam. In addition, he blames the woman for tempting Adam into eating from the forbidden tree, and goes on to suggest that women are morally weak, incapable of rationality, given to emotions and to treachery, and so forth, and will pay for their sins in the pangs of childbirth, all of which are ideas he gets from his biblical counterparts. In so doing, he set the tone for interpreting gender-related verses of the Qur’an

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in ways consistent with the existing social norms in Byzantine and Persian territories in the tenth century. Medieval Muslim theologians and jurists followed his lead when they wrote commentaries on the Qur’an and created the Islamic legal systems that we commonly call shari’a law (23). Indeed, the practice of covering the head, which was a practice followed by upper class Jewish, Christian, and Persian women during the centuries when shari’a was being formulated, was made mandatory for all Muslim women, instead of simply just covering the bosom as was stipulated in the Qur’an. The hijab, or curtain, behind which the Prophet Muhammad’s wives were to be addressed, instead became a portable hijāb or head covering, in emulation of Byzantine Jewish and Christian, and Persian upper class female custom. As Stowasser observes, ‘the lawyer-theologians of Islam grew into a religious establishment who were entrusted with the formulation of Islamic law and morality, and it was they who interpreted the Qur’anic rules on women’s dress and space in increasingly absolute and categorical fashion, reflecting the real practices and cultural assumptions of their place and age’ (93). Once the veil, which is not explicitly present in the Qur’an, became mandated in Islamic law—and here the midwife is Jewish, Christian, and Persian custom, while the birthing room is patriarchy common to all medieval cultures of the time—then it became the public sign of a woman’s piety in Muslim culture. So far we have considered the first factor affecting how women, and veiling, came to be understood in ways perhaps not intended by the Qur’an, that is, the ways in which the Qur’an was interpreted through a socially patriarchal and also a somewhat selectively understood biblical lens. A second key factor that bears on the status of women is the legacy of colonization. Leila Ahmed, a noted historian at Harvard, whose book Women and Gender in Islam is among the standard textbooks used to teach courses on women in Islam, has aptly and rightly observed that the colonial narrative of women and Islam was constructed to justify the colonial project of ‘eradicating the cultures of colonized peoples’ (1992: 151). For example, Evelyn Baring, British consul-general to Egypt, later known as Lord Cromer, stated in the early 1900s during the British occupation of Egypt, that Egyptians ‘be persuaded or forced into imbibing the true spirit of Western civilization’ (2: 538), and, therefore, ‘it was essential to change the position of women in Islam, for it was Islam’s degradation of women, expressed in the practices of veiling and seclusion, that was ‘the fatal obstacle’ to the Egyptian’s ‘attainment of that elevation of thought and character which should accompany the introduction of Western civilization’ (2: 538-9); only by abandoning those practices might they attain ‘the mental and moral development that he (Cromer) desired for them’ (153). Cromer advanced these views at the same time that he cut back on schooling for both boys and girls, thereby curtailing the very advance of civilization he stated that he desired for both Egyptian men and women. Ironically, while he held Islam to blame for degrading women, he also was the founding member and one-time president of the Men’s League for Opposing the Suffrage of Women back home in England, suggesting that the advancement of women was not on his list of priorities. It is interesting that Lord Cromer nonetheless wanted women to have symbolic power as the angels of the hearth, but not political power as the suffragette movement desired. While abroad, he wanted to point to the important role of women as civilizers of

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men, yet used Muslim women as the prime example of uncivilized Muslim culture because they did not have the ‘freedoms’ the women in England had, even though he himself wanted to deny English women access to political power. What should be even more alarming to us as we read such narratives is that in his day, as in ours, feminism was used or co-opted in a larger governmental move to justify interfering in the cultures and politics of other countries, while the real reason for involvement remains now as much as then the economic and material gains to be made in such interference. The strategy utilized in both cases is that of suggesting that Western nations are, as Gayatri Spivak has famously quipped in her landmark essay, ‘white men are saving brown women from brown men’ (Spivak 1994: 92). Neither then nor now has intervention resulted in a better deal for Muslim women. How does the intervention of colonization relate to the subject at hand, that is, the reinscription of patriarchal attitudes and mores as constituent of Islamist nativist resistance to globalization? As Leila Ahmed has observed, the colonial view that the veil epitomized Islamic inferiority generated an opposition from the subject peoples, which led to: the emergence of an Arabic narrative [that] developed in resistance to the colonial narrative. This narrative of resistance appropriated, in order to negate them, the symbolic terms of the colonial narrative. The veil came to symbolize in the resistance narrative, not the inferiority of the culture and the need to cast aside its customs in favor of those of the West, but, on the contrary, the dignity and validity of all native customs, and in particular those customs coming under fiercest colonial attack—the customs relating to women—and the need to tenaciously affirm them as a means of resistance to Western domination. . . . Standing in the relation of antithesis to thesis, the resistance narrative thus reversed—but thereby also accepted—the terms set in the first place by the colonizers. And therefore, ironically, it is Western discourse that in the first place determined the new meanings of the veil and gave rise to its emergence as a symbol of resistance. (Ahmed 1992: 163–4)

Thus, Islamist, or what we call fundamentalist ideologies, can be counted among the resistance narratives constructed to ward off Westernization and the new form of colonization called globalization. Such movements insist on the correct outward observance of Islamic shari’a laws relating to piety, naturalize the heterosexual family, stipulate the different social roles men and women must occupy, and call for Islamic law to govern all matters public and private, as have been noted in at least four instances: the introduction of the Hudood Ordinances in Pakistan under General Zia ul-Haq (1969–71), the Iranian revolution (1978–9), the Islamist takeover of the Sudan (1983), and the reign of the Taliban in Afghanistan (1996). As a result, many Muslim women are today caught in a bind: on the one hand, while many Muslim majority nations during the twentieth century moved to liberalize women’s access to education, more equitable treatment under the law, and women’s entrance into the national economy, the rising tide of Islamist movements, supported in large part by the Saudi oil-revenue-funded exportation of its own purist Wahhabi form of Islam, has meant that women must look the part of showing that they are Muslim publicly in order to continue having the credibility they need in order to further women’s access to

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the public sphere. And indeed, some studies are showing that veiling among Muslim women is on the rise in Muslim majority countries, but interestingly, they are also carving out a public space for themselves, as we see in Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. On the other hand, the public identification of women as Muslim has caused anxiety in Western nations. Thus, we see the barring of the veil in schools as in France and parts of Germany, because the specificity and expression of individual difference from the cultural norm is seen as threatening, rather than what it is in many cases, an attempt at acculturation to the host culture. Muslim women struggle to negotiate their own cultural mores, often by wearing the veil to signify their bona fide identity as Muslims in order to show both their communities and their fellow citizens that they do not have to give up being Muslim in order to become productive citizens of their new homelands by entering public space. At the same time, the Western fascination with the veil as the source and symbol of women’s oppression means that in addition to often misreading such public gestures of negotiation and accommodation, the much more critical issues facing Muslim women in different parts of the globe do not get the attention they deserve. Among such issues are the negative impact of a globalized economy on women’s work and health, the curtailment of their rights under increasingly autocratic Islamist regimes and the reassertion of the patriarchal norms institutionalized through masculinist applications of shari’a law, and the social and economic ravages caused by political and military developments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, Muslim majority nations that are not oil-bearing continue their march towards poverty in a liberalized world economic system mandated by Western powers, thereby giving further fuel to Islamist movements (promising that Islam is the solution), which in turn come to exercise greater control over women’s mobility and options. While Muslim feminists cannot take on the larger issues that fuel Islamist movements, and the Western role in enabling these movements to come into being, they can address the issue of whether the oft-misogynist manner in which Islamists view the role of women is indeed Islamic.

Muslim feminist hermeneutics At the present moment, significant leadership is being shown by Muslim feminist scholars, activists, and public figures. Attention might be drawn to the work of scholars such as Amina Wadud and Asma Barlas, who examine whether the Qur’an might be read differently from the male-privileged manner in which it has been understood so far. This move finds its parallels in all the world’s major religious traditions as women, regardless of faith, seek to combat and revisit patriarchal interpretations and the inscriptions of such interpretations on social institutions and their bodies. Amina Wadud, in her short but important book Qur’an and Woman, draws a distinction between those statements in the Qur’an that were specific to the time and place and culture in which it was revealed, and those verses that are applicable to Muslims at all times and in all places. Thus, for instance, she would argue that the principle of women

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being allowed to inherit is a principle valid for all time, while the specific statement that a woman should inherit half the portion received by her brother was a detail relevant to the time and place in which the verse was revealed, but perhaps not now. Asma Barlas goes a step further and says we must look at the character of God and ask ourselves the question, was God a misogynist? If we say that God is generous, merciful, and compassionate toward all of creation, then clearly, verses in the Qur’an that were interpreted in woman-unfriendly ways by male commentators and legal scholars, because they were working within the confines of a patriarchal culture, must be revisited and reinterpreted to ensure that the kind of social justice and equality that God intended for all creation, and for both genders, is upheld. To address issues of gender equality in Islamic law, Morocco has now called for the training of female legal specialists. In Iran, an active women’s press engages thorny issues—such as whether women may occupy political office—in women’s magazines, so much so, that a couple of male jurists have been found writing under female pseudonyms in order to argue for gender equity in their reading of the law. However, one of the most active magazines, Zanan, on the pages of which there has been much open and critical discussion of issues pertaining to women, has finally decided to close its operations as a result of having its license withdrawn, hence barring it from publication, early in 2008.

Economic privation and gender violence Muslim feminist activists have also had to address another problematic arena in which Muslim women can be said to feel the effects of globalization in the form of violence such as honor killings carried out in the name of honor and Islam, but which mask an underlying economic reality. The notion that women are the keepers of family honor and by extension, the guardians of tradition and religion, is a feature that characterizes classic patriarchy, and is found in many parts of the world, including China and Latin America, and also including Muslim regions (Moghadam 2003). Women are socialized from a very young age to bear this honor, expressed most saliently in placing their sexuality under male control, usually the family patriarch and, by extension, her male relatives. As Abu-Odeh (1996) has argued, the construction of female honor through her sexual comportment acts to construct male identity, and is much less about the woman than it is about male conceptions of their role in society and as guardians of familial, traditional, and religious honor. The tragic consequences of male honor that are seen to be compromised by female behavior, sexual or otherwise, have been noted throughout Asia in Muslim regions, as well as in largely Hindu regions such as India and Buddhist/Confucian regions such as China. Falling under the rubric of violence against women globally, killing a woman for her perceived dalliances with men other than the one to whom she is formally contracted takes the name of honor killings in regions such as Jordan and Pakistan, and dowry deaths in regions such as India, both nomenclatures suggesting that there is something

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within the cultural and religious heritage of these regions that facilitates and indeed legitimizes the practice. However, Amnesty International reports on honor killings in Pakistan suggest that economic motives may underlie in large part the cruel elimination of women through the use of acid or kitchen fires, or other forms of battery through the use of weapons, as the removal of the woman allows for another marriage to take place that will bring with it further bride-wealth. Using women to settle scores with other men is also a feature of such killings, also termed karo-kari. In this form of vigilante or tribal justice, the Islamic legal prescription to bring forward four witnesses who can testify to the woman’s sexual misdemeanor in a court of law is rarely observed. Just because Muslims engage in honor killings, and justify to themselves that they are licensed to do so by the Qur’an, does not in fact mean that Islam or Islamic law propagates the practice. Rather, a cursory comparison of statistics, ever difficult to gather, suggests that the percentage of women in Pakistan subject to honor crimes is half the percentage of women in the United States battered to death in domestic violence (see Human Rights Commission of Pakistan; US Department of Justice). The report also cited the inadequacy of the police and judiciary system to deal with the issue, including poor police reception and response, widespread judicial apathy, and sometimes support of such crimes, thereby making the justice system entirely ineffective in addressing the practice. Moreover, the existence of legal loopholes that allow any perpetrators brought to court to receive minimal sentencing by claiming that unfair provocation guided the killing has further reduced the chances of such killings being taken seriously and addressed in ways that would signal the legal establishment’s commitment to protecting women. The responses to such honor killings cover a range of issues. For instance, Asma Jehangir, a noted human rights lawyer in Pakistan, whose office was the stage for the honor killing of one of her clients, Samia Sarwar, criticizes the state for failing to protect the lives of Pakistani women, observing that the practice has nothing to do with Islam. Riffat Hassan, a Muslim theologian and academic who concurs with that view, argues further that until social mores are changed with regard to the perception of women in Islamic discourse and legal institutions, the issue of women suffering the consequences of second-class treatment will remain an endemic feature of Muslim societies. Her approach has been to engage in academic activism through examining the genesis of commonly held views of women as created from the male for the purposes of the male, and to show instead that the Qur’an suggests no such fiction. Such work can be carefully buttressed by Stowasser’s study in which she shows how the notion of the female as created from the rib of Adam was imported into Islamic discourse; further, that commentarial literature on the Qur’an, while retaining women’s moral responsibility and agency, made women responsible for social chaos (fitna) and constructed an essentialized woman modeled on Eve as sexually insatiable, responsible for Adam’s disobedience of God, morally weak, and condemned to suffer the toils of childbirth, despite the fact that the Qur’an itself does not essentialize women (Stowasser 1994: 23). As an activist, Riffat Hassan has created an institution, the International Network for the Rights of Female Victims of Violence in Pakistan (INRFVVP), to raise awareness of incidents of violence

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against women, to raise funds to establish burn units, and to provide health care and medicine for burn victims, and shelters for survivors of attempted honor killings. Politically, she worked with Gen. Pervez Musharraf to convince him that there is nothing Islamic about the practice, and rather, that such practices could be dealt with better by the justice system, through criminalizing the activity. General Musharraf did indeed strike an independent judicial committee to review the Hudood Ordinances as a result of calls from women’s organizations (such as Women’s Action Forum and Shirkat Gah), the National Commission for the Status of Women and, somewhat surprisingly, the Council of Islamic Ideology (Lau 2007: 1300–2). More recently, in January 2005, Musharraf moved to criminalize honor crimes, although not removing the legal option of retribution (qisas) and blood money (diyat) that could allow the perpetrator to go unpunished (Tohid 2005). In December 2006, the Protection of Women (Criminal Laws Amendment) Act, 2006, was passed, which disappointed human rights organizations and activists in its failure to repeal the Zina (Adultery) Ordinance (one of the more egregious of the Hudood Ordinances), but which, nonetheless, did address several of the injustices caused by the Zina Ordinance (Lau 2007: 1307). The heated debate that surrounded the passing of this Act, far more weakened than originally proposed, revealed the careful and sensitive manner in which proponents of the law had to argue. What was being called into question was not God’s ordinances (hudood) as proclaimed in the Qur’an and other authoritative sources, but rather the manner in which human beings had interpreted such ordinances, thereby bringing home the point that changes in women’s status cannot be made in Muslim majority countries without framing and addressing the debate in Islamic terms. The debate surrounding honor killings makes clear that in popular Muslim conceptions, the notion that the Qur’an gives men rights over women, including the right to discipline women, no matter how erroneously, is appropriated in order to justify violence against women. Further, under closer examination, it is clear that in many cases of such violence, the motivations of the perpetrators are rooted in hopes of gains in economic and/or social capital. The phenomena of honor killings suggest that social attitudinal factors toward women as essentially expendable, religiously derived justifications, and structural economic inequities, coupled with an enervated justice system unwilling, unable, or unequipped to deal effectively with such violence, intersect to perpetuate the practice.

Capitalist practices and women’s bodies In looking at the causes for increased poverty globally, it seems clear that the pursuit of wealth through corporate means, which have been greatly facilitated by globalization, is a key factor. The growth and consequent power of multinational and transnational corporations have placed both resources and labor at risk, as each are exploited for the purpose of wealth generation and profit. For example, millions of hectares of

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rainforests in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand are being cleared at an alarming rate in order to grow palm oil trees, a cash crop. Palm oil is used for generating bio-fuel at the cost of destroying land and aquatic ecosystems. It is also the oil most heavily used in processed foods as well as cosmetics and a range of other products. In Indonesia, the destruction is funded by both multinational corporations and the Indonesian government, as each participates in a globalizing economy in converting forests and the sustainable agriculture of the peoples who live in those forests to cash crop agriculture for export in order to maximize profits. However, the environmental cost—of sending two billion tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere annually as valuable forests are destroyed, destroying ecosystems as the forests are cleared, and heavily applying pesticides and fertilizers that render the soil unusable after a mere twenty-five years in order to sustain a monoculture—is immense (Butler 2006). Maximizing profit comes at the expense of pushing farmers off their lands, forcing laborers to work long hours for little pay, and destroying their health, especially women’s health, through the aggressive pesticides used (and often sprayed by women workers). In addition, the processes of converting palm oil fiber into commercially usable forms produce effluent that poisons the waterways and the coastal waters off Indonesia. Thus, the issues arising from joining the globalized economy are the rapid degradation of the environment, a move from self-sufficiency to a cash economy that barely delivers a decent standard of living for workers, endemic and long-term health issues faced by workers, especially female workers, for which neither the corporations nor the government are willing to take responsibility, and greater government repression as workers try to claim some rights. Currently, environmental groups have taken up the challenge of addressing the ill-effects of deforestation, introducing a monoculture in the form of palm oil trees, and the effluents caused by the processes to convert the plant to its use in products as well as in producing bio-fuel. However, the human costs of creating a category of environmental refugees, as well as the health and economic disparities generated by such corporate practices aided by governmental policies, have not even begun to be addressed. Rather, they create the conditions that will facilitate the growth of Islamist opposition to globalization, even as they open up the necessity for thinking about how Islamic values might inform the manner in which humans interact with the larger ecosystems in which they live. In addition, they also call for a critique of capitalism that may or may not be represented in Islamic terms, depending on how the men and women affected by such forms of globalization respond to the challenges that face them.

Note 1. The Christian Science Monitor reports: ‘Social activists and opposition politicians say the government still needs to offset the Islamic law of qisas and diyat (retribution and blood money), which allows families of the deceased to either forgive the murderer or to ask for blood money in return. Since most honor killings are committed by brothers, fathers, or

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other kin, the perpetrators go unpunished after they are pardoned by other members of the family. “So a son could forgive his father for murdering his mother, a mother could forgive her husband for killing their daughter, a father could forgive his brother and so on,” says Saba Gul Khattak, executive director of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) and a women’s rights activist’ (Tohid 2005).

Works Cited Abu-Odeh, Lama (1996). ‘Crimes of Honor and the Construction of Gender in Arab Societies’, in Mai Yamani (Ed.), Feminism in Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives. New York: New York University Press. Ahmed, Leila. (1992). Women and Gender in Islam. New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press. Anderson, Sarah, and Cavanagh, John, with Thea Lee and the Institute for Policy Studies (2000). Field Guide to the Global Economy. New York: New Press. Barber, Benjamin (2001). Jihad vs. McWorld. New York: Times Books. (Quoted in Moghadam, 44.) Bayes, Jane H., and Tohidi, Nayereh (Eds) (2001). Globalization, Gender, and Religion. New York: Palgrave. Brubaker, Pamela K. (2001). Globalization at What Price? Economic Change and Daily Life. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press. Butler, Rhett A. (2006). ‘Why Is Oil Palm Replacing Tropical Rainforests? Why Are Biofuels Fueling Deforestation?’, 25 April, available at http://news.mongabay.com/2006/0425-oil_ palm.html Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (2007). Killings for Pakistan. Availabe at http://www. hrcp-web.org/Publication/currentStats/Killings.pdf [email protected] Lau, Martin (2007). ‘Twenty-five Years of Hudood Ordinances—A Review’. Washington and Lee Law Review, 1291: 1300–2. Moghadam, Valentine M. (2003). Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East. Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner. (2005). Globalizing Women: Transnational Feminist Networks. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Robertson, Robert (2001). ‘Comments on the “Global Triad” and “Glocalization” ’, available at http://www2.kokugakuin.ac.jp/ijcc/wp/global/15robertson.html Shah, Anup (1998–2008). ‘Poverty Facts and Stats’, available at http://www.globalissues.org/ TradeRelated/Facts.asp Spivak, Gayatri (1994). ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (Eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press, 66–111. Stiglitz, Joseph E. (2003). Globalization and Its Discontents. New York/London: Norton. Stowasser, Barbara Freyer (1994). Women in the Qur’an, Traditions, and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tohid, Owais. (2005). ‘Pakistan outlaws “honor” killings’. The Christian Science Monitor 20 Jan., available at http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0120/p06s01-wosc.html Unu-Wider (2006). http://www.wider.unu.edu/. . ./2006–2007-1/wider-wdhw-launch-5-12-2006/ US Department of Justice. Office of Justice Programs. Bureau of Justice Statistics (2007). http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs//homicide/intimates.htm

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Further Reading Doumato, Eleanor Abdella, and Posusney, Marsha Pripstein (Eds) (2003). Women and Globalization in the Arab Middle East: Gender, Economy and Society. Boulder, CO: Lynn Rienner. Eaton, Heather, and Lorentzen, Lois Ann (Eds) (2003). Ecofeminism and Globalization: Exploring Culture, Context, and Religion. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Nouraie-Simone, Feresheh (Ed.) (2005). On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era. New York: Feminist Press at CUNY. Ruether, Rosemary Radford (2005). Integrating Ecofeminism, Globalization and World Religions. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Shiva, Vandana (2008). Soil Not Oil. Cambridge, MA: South End Press.

chapter 20

theology a n d iden tit y i n t h e con te xt of gl oba liz ation maría pilar aquino Globalization, identity, and feminist theology have been the object of extensive academic research, and they are perhaps the concepts that have had the greatest influence on our understanding of contemporary social reality and the function of religious rhetoric in today’s world. In the theological field there has been a growing need to clarify the relationship between theology and identity formation in the current context of the social processes of ‘globalization’. I will explore the systematic interaction of these three concepts in order to bring to light the theological pertinence of a critical feminist theology of liberation for the visions and practices of social change. From my perspective, such a theology develops the most appropriate analytical and hermeneutical frameworks to face the challenges raised by the current model of globalization. In the context of the social conditions created by this model, a critical feminist theology functions as a religious ethical-political force of transformation for a new world of justice. In the first of three parts I highlight some methodological dimensions that expose the theological relevance of critical feminist liberation theology and its significance for present-day aspirations of social change. In the second part I address some key features of today’s dominant model of society characterized by kyriarchal globalization, and point out their implications for feminist theological thought. In the third and final part, I focus on the social function of theological knowledge in the present circumstances and discuss some aspects that may shed light on possible future developments in feminist theology.

Theological relevance of feminist theology of liberation The abundance of literature on globalization, identity, and feminist theology may become intimidating and even overwhelming. The multitude of globalization discourses seems to fashion a complex world of ideas in which, like merchandise in the marketplace,

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discourses compete among themselves to offer the most enticing explanations about the world and the role of the human community in it. At first sight, this conceptual world is so vast and diffuse that it appears as a labyrinth of complications specifically designed to hide possible ways out. Before beginning to examine contemporary approaches to these terms, I must recognize that the intellectual world of today is dominated by post-neoisms (i.e., modernism/postmodernism, neoliberalism/postliberalism, neomarxism/postmarxism, neostructuralism/poststructuralism, neocolonialism/postcolonialism, etc.). When these three terms are analyzed the conceptual structures created by the postneoisms that dominate contemporary discourse appear to make the walls of the labyrinth even higher. This intellectual world represents such varied, diverse, and even contradictory cognitive theories that it often casts in doubt the relationship between concept and the reality of the world. In today’s world there are so many discourses, so many words and sounds on those three terms that, instead of striving to comprehend what these say about humanity and the world, one’s temptation is to take refuge in deafness. The meaning of those terms has been explored in every possible discipline of human knowledge and every area of study within these disciplines. Should any individual flirt with the expectation of attaining by themselves and through just one discipline a total knowledge, this flirtation leads only to deception, as it deceives thought itself with a myth that has already vanished into the walls of the labyrinth. In addition, some trends of the postneoisms fail to root knowledge in the emancipating cultural traditions and transformative sociopolitical practices developed by the poor and oppressed of this world. These are theories unconcerned about the living conditions and fate of the marginalized humanity. The harsh realities of poverty lived by the majority of women around the world and their struggles to overcome subordination and violence find no place in many of those discourses. In a world based on purity of thought, intellectual practices become a labyrinth of speculation surrounded only by emptiness as such a world is built on concepts snatched from the void. When faced with the concrete realities of a world largely characterized by poverty and violence at a scale never seen previously, intellectual practices are called to both give an account of and take such realities as a referential point for articulating knowledge. Creative intellectual exploration by means of the infinite combinations of the alphabet is not the problem, but the creation of intellectual labyrinths divorced from those who bear the burden of social injustice is. This problem is closely bound up with the conceptual relevancy of many discourses for those of us looking for a way out of the most tangible, most pressing, and most widespread of the world’s labyrinths: the labyrinth of social injustice. For liberation theologies, theological relevance is found in the relationship between concepts and the realities of the world. Transformative praxis has a central epistemological value because liberation theologies understand that the problem is not simply understanding conceptual systems, but of selecting those consistent with the demands of eradicating unjust social and religious systems. In this sense, not every theological conceptualization has theological pertinence for those seeking to transform the structures of domination and violence. Those of us who seek a way out of the labyrinth of social injustice without getting lost along the way must find lights to guide us. These lights or conceptual tools not only highlight the terrain to be covered, but also show the

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optimum route to follow to reach our destination. Across societies, cultures, and religions, the struggles of marginalized women for justice and liberation become guiding lights to pursue the creation of something new. In reference to the struggles of black women, Katie G. Cannon illustrates how countless generations of these women found guiding lights in their route to emancipation from slavery: black women were aware that their lives depended upon their being able to decipher the various sounds of the larger world, to hold in check the nightmare figures of terror . . . to resist the temptation to capitulate to the demands of the status quo, to find meaning in the most despotic circumstances, and to create something where nothing existed before. (1995: 54)

With this insight in mind, my reflections have as their guiding light the theoretical and political horizon of liberation. In order to decipher the sounds of the labyrinth and not to fall by the wayside, I will follow the routes opened by those social movements around the world that struggle for the rights of women and for a just world order where all humanity can flourish. If liberation is understood historically as the work of all to overcome ‘forms of domination and exploitation’ and as ‘the imaginative construction of new relationships among human beings as well as human beings with the earth’ to achieve ‘freedom from all bondage’ (Fabella 2000: 125–6), this vision of liberation is what provides a guiding light and meaning to critical feminist liberation theology. Given that achieving justice is the main aim of liberation, this theology seeks the transformation of the reality of the world today. That is why this theology shows its relevance in the way theological knowledge can help to decipher the sounds of the world and to eradicate the tangible labyrinth of social injustice. In the context of Christian tradition, liberation theologies have asserted that the relevance of any theology must be judged not only by its effective intervention to change oppressive social and religious systems, but by how it responds to the classic problem of the relation of Christian salvation to historical liberation. This relation is crucial to discern the social function of theological knowledge. Liberation theologies respond to this problem by clarifying how God’s presence and activity take place in the world. As Ignacio Ellacuría points out, the central concern of these theologies lies in clarifying ‘which historical acts bring salvation and which bring condemnation, which acts make God more present, and how that presence is actualized and made effective in them’ (1993: 251). But besides this, the pertinence of any theology is to be judged by its ability to show both what happens in the world when it is configured by the reality of God itself, and which method is most effective for theological language to contribute to the actualization of God’s liberation in a world like ours, scarred by social injustice. For critical feminist liberation theology, today’s world demands that theological activity be at the heart of the social and religious movements committed to the transformation of this world of sin. In theological terms, not only do these movements gather the longings, hopes, and visions of change of those who affirm that another world is possible, but their struggles for justice themselves embody the presence and activity of God in the world. Feminist theology asserts that the realities of degradation, poverty, and violence lived by

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women around the world—the vast majority of humanity—most profoundly express the negation of the presence of God and the all-pervasiveness of sin in the world. Theologically, this degradation and dehumanization of women is a sin that must be eradicated. The importance of stressing this formal relationship between the realities that affect women and the reality of God is based on the fact that this relationship is what makes explicit the pertinence of feminist theological discourse. As long as the realities of degradation and subordination of women last, the liberating purpose of God in the world remains unfulfilled. Refusing mere speculative thought, a critical feminist theology of liberation takes these widespread realities as its central concern and seeks to work more effectively for their transformation. For this theology, the effectiveness of its function in historicizing God’s purpose demands the adoption of methods and strategies consistent with the tasks of transformation. In Christianity, the aim of the Gospel—its Good News—is to bring about change, conversion, transformation, and the renewal of all things, but it is not its role to provide the analytical or political means to achieve this. Theology’s task is to seek out and determine the analytical means required, and that is why critical feminist liberation theology asserts a twofold methodological requirement. On one hand, it must go beyond the conventional explanations on the subordination and violence inflicted upon women as being mere isolated events, and recapacitate the whole of theology with feminist analytical and hermeneutical frameworks. These would enable it to expose the dynamics of subordination and emancipation in critical systemic terms, as well as the ethical–political dimensions of theology. On the other hand, it must transcend the mere abstract explanation of the oppression of women and equip theology with practical–political approaches that lead individuals and communities to devise modes of contextualized intervention in social reality. In theological terms, these measures open up new and better ways for identifying the systemic sin that denies the presence and activity of God in the world, open up possibilities for visualizing ways for eliminating the systemic subordination of women, and allow a deeper understanding of the function of theological knowledge in terms of infusing historical liberation processes in the world. This twofold methodological demand also enhances the theological relevance of critical feminist liberation theology. All these factors that underline the pertinence of this theology lead to the understanding that in the present-day context dominated by postneoisms, where many feminist theoretical perspectives coexist, not just any theory of theology that claims to be feminist is relevant for the tasks of transforming this worldwide labyrinth of social injustice. There are many feminist theologies with a great capacity for intellectual seduction, but not every feminist theology is able to elucidate where and how God’s liberating purpose is actualized in a world profoundly affected on a global scale by poverty and violent conflict, a world where the subordination and dehumanization of women is a fact of everyday life all over the planet. For example, for their articulation, while some theoretical perspectives face the danger of supporting monoculturalism, ethnocentrism, and ultimately fragmentation by focusing exclusively on insights found in their own cultural and ethnic contexts and traditions, other perspectives face the danger of depoliticizing and neutralizing the critical force of feminist analytic and hermeneutics by their exclusive focus on feminine or gender dualistic approaches. These perspectives

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are insufficient for ‘analyzing in depth the interstructural, multiplicative, and simultaneous nature of the present-day systems of domination’, as well as for understanding in systemic terms ‘how the feminist struggles contribute to a new world of justice and human rights for women’ (Mena-López and Aquino 2007: xix–xx). The context of kyriarchal globalization today makes it even more vital to continue to develop critical feminist theological visions centered on social, cultural, and religious transformation in the name of justice and liberation. As long as the sin of social injustice endures, liberation will continue to be both the motive force and the end of theological knowledge. As long as the global system of kyriarchal domination lasts, critical feminist liberation theology will continue to be a religious–political necessity for the building of doors to escape the labyrinths. This is confirmed by the processes that characterize globalization today.

Kyriarchal globalization: idolatry, dehumanization, and divided societies My contribution to this Handbook does not aim to rethink feminist theology in the light of globalization, but to rethink globalization in the light of critical feminist liberation theology. What is in question is not the relevance of this theology, but the model of society that today’s globalization is creating. The challenge facing any feminist theology lies in rethinking what it has to do for intervening in the redesign of this model in the coming decades. Despite the fact that there is no one single meaning for the term globalization, the term has served to name the multidimensional, intersecting, and simultaneous processes that characterize the dominant model of world society at the beginning of the twenty-first century. As such, the specificity of this term is that it has been loaded with meanings that emerge from the distinctive circumstances in which the human community lives today around the world. Generally speaking, however, globalization is both a process and a paradigm. As a historical process, globalization is not a recent phenomenon, but has its roots in the expansion of the empires of old, including that of the colonizing western European nations that stormed the entire world to expand their empires during and after the sixteenth century. More recently, globalization refers to the social model that emerged around the period of the end of the Cold War, symbolically marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, in which the capitalist market society reached world dominance. Globalization is also a dynamic process: as a social model it is neither static nor organized into individual, autonomous components, but composed of a set of interrelated and multidimensional social forces that operate simultaneously at different levels of society. According to Ellacuría, these social forces are what make historical processes take one direction or another, a certain content or a different content (Ellacuría 1991: 449–57). As a paradigm, globalization is ‘a key for reading and understanding history’ (Gebara 2000: 159). Thus globalization interprets society as grounded on the social forces that make up the capitalist market—forces that work toward the imposition of the market model on a global scale.

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This societal paradigm is based on large transnational commercial and financial corporations, on the weapons industry, on high technology, and on a powerful ideology that provides justification for the concentration of power, the maximization of profit, superfluous consumption, and individual success through untrammeled competition in the markets. The following are some of the paradigm’s principal characteristics. First, the social groups who benefit from globalization are not the two-thirds of humanity living in poverty. Nor are the vast majority of women who live realities of subordination and violence proponents of this kind of globalization. The groups behind this market-oriented model are the financial and political elites of the most powerful countries, who, under the economic, political, and military leadership of the United States work together with the powerful elites of developing nations to establish the new empire of the global markets. The interests and aspirations of the great majority of humanity have no influence either on the design or the governance of this empire. Together with a welfare state for a small part of the world’s population, the design of this dominant social model has the capitalist market at its center and pursues the maximum possible profit for these elites. Meeting the basic human needs—work, housing, education, health, and so forth—of the impoverished vast majority of the world’s population is not its main interest. In fact, a number of studies confirm Kofi Annan’s judgment that ‘the benefits and opportunities of globalization remain highly concentrated among a relatively small number of countries and are spread unevenly within them’ (Annan 2000: 10). The world of this model is not a world that lacks the resources to provide a minimum of human dignity for the entire population of the world, but a world divided by deep inequalities at all levels of social life. It is a world that continues to assign a marginalized, subordinate status to the great majority of women of all cultures and religions, in a world where more than two-thirds of humanity live in a constant state of hardship and insecurity. This model of globalization breeds social injustice and unequal social relations to a degree previously unseen in the world. Given the analytical framework of critical feminist liberation theology, due to its all encompassing, interlaced pyramidal systems of domination, the term ‘kyriarchal globalization’ is thus the most appropriate to describe the present model of global capitalism. Second, if we ask ourselves which values are promoted by kyriarchal globalization, it would be irresponsible to argue that they are the values of social or environmental justice. While other studies have praised the good points of this model of globalization, here I wish to highlight one of its most pernicious aspects. The paradigm of kyriarchal globalization has developed a powerful ideology that not only idealizes the existing reality, but also transforms the capitalist market into a miraculous living agent that furnishes capital as a source of life, endorses profit as the supreme value, and leads the world toward a horizon of supposed endless progress, without any concern for environmental justice. In the words of Franz J. Hinkelammert, ‘this results in a real idolatry of the market’ (Hinkelammert 1984: 77). In his study, now a classic of critical studies of the relationship between economics and theology, Hinkelammert explains that the ethics of the market also consecrates money as the ultimate, infinite value that must be pursued, and since the goal is of infinite value, money becomes an object of worship:

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In this way the money fetish becomes an object of worship, and through this worship relationship the necessary values are internalized for actions required by the quest for money. Once this fetish is created and a worship relationship is established, on every dollar bill can then be written In God We Trust, and the bank of the Vatican can be named the Bank of the Holy Spirit. (1977: 33)

Hinkelammert’s understanding of the divinized market and the fetishization of money highlights the ideological nucleus of kyriarchal globalization because it is this fetishization that legitimizes the market society and stands behind all the decisions of those who form policies on a global level. This ideology also declares any other vision of society and any other emerging social model illegitimate. For this pernicious ideology, democracy means participation in the laws of the market, freedom the unrestricted expansion of free trade, virtue obedience and submission to the laws of the market, and personal liberation the result of the liberation of prices in the market. That is why any other social vision or activity that challenges or threatens the rules or values of the market is considered to be a mortal enemy that must be annihilated through all the political, economic, and military power available. Under the aegis of this ideology, the country that is the leader of kyriarchal globalization defends the market society by means of aggressive military invasions, such as the ones against Haiti, Panamá, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Colombia, to name just a few. The mass murder of the civilian population is justified as inevitable collateral damage or as necessary sacrifice for a greater gain, and the devastation of the environment as a lesser evil in view of the greater good, namely the preservation of the market’s existence. The capitalist market is thus more valuable than human life or the environment in which it is lived. The rhetoric of the empire is so insidious that in its eagerness to establish world dominance, it not only justifies unjust practices that have the sacrifice of human lives as a result, but also declares that such unjust practices are good. In this manner, the kyriarchal market’s ideology performs a total inversion of ethics by which what is evil is presented as being good and what is good as being evil. However, as argued convincingly by Hinkelammert, ‘when evil is regarded as being good, this apparent good becomes satanic. . . . It is self-destruction’ (2003: 133). For this ideology, the weapons industry and the sacrifice of human lives are regarded as being good, and the social movements that pursue respect for human rights and structural transformation are regarded as being evil. This inverted ethics of the market makes up the ideological basis of both capitalist idolatry and the religious fundamentalism encrusted in the religious and political rhetoric that has characterized the US administration in recent years. The idolatry of kyriarchal globalization continues to be the most sinful dimension of contemporary societies and the most neglected by contemporary theologies, including feminist theologies. A third feature of kyriarchal globalization is its vision of society, a vision not based on the recognition and respect of human rights. Rights for everyone around the world are neither credible nor possible because human beings are not at the center of social, political, or economic activity in the globalization model, but the unrestricted expansion of the capitalist market. In this type of society, the only rights are those that correspond to the market, not the rights of human beings themselves. In fact, in recent years, movements and organizations that struggle to advance human rights are seen as social forces

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opposed to the market society, or as bodies that obstruct its global implementation. Even international organizations, such as the United Nations, that seek to correct the oppressive trends of global markets, or to prevent further environmental damage, are declared to be enemies of market society. Speaking about the USA as a unipolar empire focused on preserving what they call ‘a global Pax Americana’ (Donnelly 2000: 1), the ideologues of kyriarchal globalization do not recognize any other human right apart from those arrogated by the laws of the market protected by militarism. Any other kind of struggle for human rights is seen as an enemy of the democracy and freedom promoted by kyriarchal globalization. This environment breeds a climate of social and political intolerance and rejection of cultural differences. The vision of society connected to this type of globalization disguises the fact that those human rights accessible to a minority of the world’s population can only exist at the expense of the lack of basic human rights for more than two-thirds of the world’s population. While less than a third of the world’s population enjoys the conditions to satisfy their habits of unnecessary consumption, more than two-thirds live under conditions that deny their aspirations to achieve a standard of living compatible with the bare minimum for human dignity. In the face of this reality, any understanding of human rights should be based not on the privileges available to this small sector of the world’s population, but on the needs and rights consistent with the dignity of every person solely for being human. Amnesty International recognizes that today the human rights of ordinary people are neglected in all corners of the planet, and adds that: economic interests, political hypocrisy and socially orchestrated discrimination continued to fan the flames of conflict around the world. The ‘war on terror’ appeared more effective in eroding international human rights principles than in countering international ‘terrorism’. The millions of women who suffered gender-based violence in the home, in the community or in war zones were largely ignored. The economic, social and cultural rights of marginalized communities were almost entirely neglected. (2005)

As Amnesty International suggests, the effects of global poverty affect women most severely. Recent studies in Latin America show that this privation of human rights has a distinctive effect on women, ‘especially in terms of access to the job market and working conditions, vulnerability at home, the exercise of full citizenship and reproductive rights’ (Machinea and Hopenhayn 2005: 30). Feminist theological studies have shown on many occasions that social injustice is only too clear and acute in the reluctance of the societies, cultures, and religions of the world to recognize and accept the human rights of women. It has also been shown that ‘the most common rationale for denial of human rights to women is the preservation of family and culture’ (Rose 2001: 10). This situation helps to explain why, for critical feminist liberation theology, those rights are neither viable nor possible in the context of kyriarchal globalization, which validates and receives validation from kyriarchal cultures and religions. That is why this theology maintains that a radical transformation of kyriarchal systems of domination is both a historical and a theological necessity.

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Fourth, the social conditions that kyriarchal globalization creates are clearly not ideal for building a common future of harmony and hope for all humanity. But these problematic conditions are not the first. Throughout the centuries, the history of violent conquests and countless atrocities has been part and parcel of the legacy of western European civilization in its move towards global expansion. The present spread of kyriarchal globalization is no more than a link in the long chain of destructive social conflicts that the world has inherited from this civilization. The design of today’s world did not originate in the southern hemisphere, in the former colonies of the western European empires, but from the elite of the new metropolises of this empire. This history of violence has transmigrated and colonized all the peoples and cities of today’s world and has merged with other cultures that also demand obedience and submission. If anyone treasures a romantic fantasy about the blessings of today’s globalization, an encounter with the brutal reality of the world dissolves this into the deceptive fantasy it is. The start of the twenty-first century has been marked by violent conflict, political tension, and human insecurity in every continent. In the majority of these conflicts, confrontations have been sparked off by issues of ethnic identity and religion combined with systemic factors linked to social injustice, long-standing hatreds, or demands caused by human needs not being met. Ted Robert Gurr notes that at the beginning of 1999 there were fifty-nine armed ethnically based rebellions under way, at least one of them in every world region. . . . In 1999 there were 11.5 million internationally recognized refugees and an estimated 7.5 million who were internally displaced. Most of these people were fleeing from civil wars, interethnic rivalries, and campaigns of mass murder and ethnic cleansing. (2003: 164)

More recent evidence gives no more reason for optimism. In the field of study of violent conflict prevention and resolution, the work of the prominent International Crisis Group is highly valuable for updated field-based analyses on situations of conflict or potential conflict around the world. Its monthly bulletin called CrisisWatch presents the development of conflict situations in terms of their deterioration, improvement, stagnation, resolution opportunities, and conflict risk alerts. For illustration purposes, I am taking data from CrisisWatch to compare these situations within a period of just two years. According to this bulletin, while in January 2004 eight countries were subject to deteriorated situations of conflict, by November 2007 the figure had risen to ten. While in January 2004 fifty-nine countries were involved in an unchanged level of conflict, by November 2007 this number had risen to sixty-seven. In January 2004 five nations showed improved situations of conflict, whereas in November 2007 there were only three. In these two years, four different countries were considered to have a high risk of conflict. While in January 2004 there were conflict resolution opportunities in three countries, in November 2007 there were no opportunities for resolution of conflict anywhere. Moreover, this bulletin points out that July 2006 was ‘the grimmest month for conflict prevention around the world in three years. In 36 months of publishing CrisisWatch, the International Crisis Group has not recorded such severe deteriorations in so many conflict situations as in the past month, and several have significant regional and global implications’ (2006).

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This backdrop clearly reveals that the conditions generated by kyriarchal globalization, far from advancing peace with justice, have rather thickened and multiplied the existence of ‘deeply divided societies’. Although this is a technical term (Lederach 1997: 11) commonly used to refer to societies that have experienced or are experiencing armed conflict, it might also be applied to societies that are living a situation of false peace. While the majority of violent conflicts continue to occur in countries of the Two-Thirds World, it is undeniable that all the nations of the world today are affected by destructive violence and conflicts caused by social injustice. These conflicts leave most of the world’s population in a precarious situation, damage the environment, and fan the flames of international conflict. In all cases, and especially where there is armed conflict, women and children are the main victims of such conflict and its deadly consequences. More serious still, in recent years situations of armed conflict have shown that rape and sexual violence against women have been used extensively and systematically as weapons of war. It seems clear that it is within this context of social conflicts, product and result of systemic social injustice, that discussions on conflicts based on ethnicity and race should be framed. Otherwise, our work continues to be lost in the labyrinth of post-neoisms and has no influence on real-world conditions. The term ethnic conflict, according to Michael E. Brown, can be defined as ‘a dispute about political, economic, social, cultural, or territorial issues between two or more ethnic communities. . . . Ethnic problems are likely to be widespread, moreover, because fewer than 20 of the more than 185 states that exist today are ethnically homogeneous (with ethnic minorities constituting less than 5 percent of the population)’ (2003: 211). Although not all ethnic conflict results in armed confrontation, all ethnic conflict is both kept alive by the legacy of colonialism and exacerbated by conditions generated by kyriarchal globalization. In a societal setting articulated by asymmetrical power relations (across intersecting markers, such as ethnicity, social position, sex, religion, or other), diverse social groups interact on unequal and antagonistic terms, some to maintain and consolidate hegemony, others to change subordination, and still others to gain privileges in the existing structures through fierce competition within and against the subordinated groups. These conditions have proved extraordinarily favorable to the growth of a pernicious cultural environment in which ‘individuals and groups are motivated to form and maintain images of an enemy even in the absence of solid, confirming evidence of hostile intentions’ (Gross Stein 2003: 190). In this atmosphere, religious rhetoric has been used by those groups concerned with preserving the empire of global markets for political ends to legitimize an absolutist vision of the world as fashioned by the ‘global Pax Americana’. This is a totalitarian ideology that not only produces a fundamentalist religious vision of the world in which rejection of cultural, religious, or political differences flourishes, but also leads some to undertake actions aimed at the total destruction and annihilation of those who supposedly personify the perceived enemy. Martha Minow points out that ‘mass ethnic and racialized violence shares with eruptions of single, horrific incidents of hatred one constant precondition. That precondition is the dehumanization of a group—the treatment of people marked by membership as subhuman, dirty, a cancer on the society, incompetent,

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immoral, unworthy, or excrement calling for immediate disposal’ (2002: 32–3). However, this type of ideology that demands the dehumanization of human beings is not only endorsed by those who rule kyriarchal globalization, but is often also deeply rooted in the whole social environment. For Minow, ‘It is not an accident precisely which groups are targeted for hate. In the United States, it is usually persons of color, immigrants, gays and lesbians; sometimes women, Jews, Catholics, persons with disabilities. Each of these markers signals long histories of degradation and subordination’ (2002: 33). Given these chronic conditions for maintaining divided societies and systemic conditions for unleashing hostility, hatreds, and antagonism between and within diverse social groups, it is crucial that feminist theological discourse on the dehumanization of peoples and the degradation of women must occur within the framework of critical analysis of the causes and effects of kyriarchal globalization. Possibly, one of the most harmful effects of those conditions on feminist theological work is the enacted competition and division between and within diverse groups of women. Issues of identity, difference, and social recognition have been at the core of intellectual and political contentions for the past few decades. On these, while M. Shawn Copeland notes that isolation of nonwhite women could be instigated by the ‘the politics of difference’ in its attempt to pluralize the experience of women, Sheila Greeve Devaney exposes the existence of contending theoretical perspectives that show ‘the fragmentation of feminist thought and political solidarity’, and Mary Hunt asserts that she is ‘wary of an identity politics that can divide and conquer rather than unite and build’ (Copeland 1995: 17–8; Greeve Devaney 1997: 4; Hunt 2007: 87). What this situation reveals, however, is not that groups of women are crashing against each other due to identity differences, but the effective results of the kyriarchal powers at work to preserve the domination of the few over everyone else. Because those conditions emerge from the core of kyriarchal globalization, there is no such clash of identities but only diverse historical subjects who relate to each other according to and in terms of the logic proper of kyriarchal powers. Competition, animosity, hatreds, isolation, fragmentation, intractable resentments, and other similar behaviors enacted by subordinate social groups toward both themselves and others only come to reveal the true identity marks of the kyriarchal powers. They are cause and effect of the totalitarian ideology embedded in the empire of ‘global Pax Americana’. This implies the critical reframing of countless feminist theories of identity, and even the need to go beyond them insofar as they fail to connect concept and the reality of the world in systemic terms, and they remain oblivious to the impact of that globalization on the dehumanization of subordinate people, and on the daily life of impoverished women of the geopolitical South. It is my belief that many of these theories are still trapped in the labyrinth of speculative language devoid of sociopolitical analysis, and are often suffocating. Feminist theological discourses must face the challenge of contributing critically to the fashioning of religious visions and practices leading to the transformation of present conditions, and of supporting the feminist struggles for a shared future of justice.

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Feminist theology of liberation: for a new world of justice Feminist theologies of liberation envision and work toward new structures in society and religion that are enabled to sustain the historical conditions for a world more compatible with God’s purpose of liberation in and for the world. In Christian terms, the content of this aim is understood as the establishment of a new world of justice because only a just world actualizes the liberating presence and reality of God. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza states that ‘God’s vision of a renewed creation entails not only a “new” heaven but also a “renewed,” qualitative different earth freed from kyriarchal exploitation and dehumanization’ (1994: 27). The vision of a renewed creation reaches its historical expression in the actualization of a new world of justice. In terms of the social function of theology, the immediate consequence of this vision is that theological knowledge cannot continue to function as a mechanism that, covering up injustice, confers validity on ideologies and practices that maintain human degradation, the subordination of women, the destruction of the environment, and profound social divisions. In the present context of kyriarchal globalization, the calling of feminist theologies is to promote knowledge and practices that transform adverse conditions to God’s purpose. Their function is to bring forth the visions of justice that are behind every effort to change the present situation. Although the meaning of the term justice remains elusive for women, Ann-Cathrin Jarl makes the point that justice is not ‘a state of affairs but a continuous effort to overcome injustice. Justice is an ongoing process of diminishing injustice and establishing something more just’ (2003: 91). For the Christian community, the duty of working for justice has its roots in the vision of inclusive discipleship that the Gospels present through the symbol of the basileia of God, in which Jesus and his movement of renewal anchored his practice and his message. Likewise, the demand of working for justice springs from the religious affirmation that human beings are made in the image of God, and, as Elizabeth A. Johnson asserts, ‘women are imago Dei in the exercise of stewardship over the earth and the capacity to rule as representatives of God. . . . Practically speaking, this leads to the moral imperative of respect for women, to the responsibility not to deface the living image of God but to promote it through transformative praxis’ (1992: 71). In the words of Schüssler Fiorenza, this affirmation is also the unquestionable moral truth of liberation theologies, for which the value of the human being is considered ‘absolute, unchangeable, and not subject to comparison or competition. Such radical equality is not sameness but only the absence of any need to subordinate one person as inferior to the control of another who is more powerful’ (2001: 88). Consequently, everything that destroys the world and degrades humanity is contrary to God’s liberating purpose and formally constitutes a reality of sin that must be transformed. That is why the struggles for justice and for the transformation of the world are a historical and theological necessity that cannot be disregarded any longer.

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Through its involvement in the transformation of the world, critical feminist liberation theology becomes a discursive ethical–political practice that provides strength to other social forces dedicated to fashion an alternative social model, conceptualized as a new world of justice. The overwhelming global scale of kyriarchal globalization does not, however, mean that this is the only model that exists. Since the early years of the current century, there has been an extraordinary increase of organizations, institutions, social movements, world marches, world summits, centers, networks, and others similar—too numerous to name—focused on advancing human rights, women’s reproductive rights and elimination of sexual violence, weapons control and disarmament, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, peacebuilding and conflict prevention, democratization and transparency, sustainable development and environmental justice, among others. Across the globe, these are the new social forces that, through their struggles for change, affirm that a world of justice is possible on Earth and demonstrate the emergence of a new emancipating social model. They are providing alternatives for understanding the self, both personal and communal, in terms of sharing values, interests, and commitments for renewing the Earth and flourishing together as humans, while discarding attitudes and sociocultural traits that have led to destructiveness. These social forces function at different levels of society and in different churches, establish democratic alliances to promote shared values, forge new links of local and transnational reach, develop emancipating rhetorical strategies to reject social and religious fundamentalism, devise mechanisms to heal and prevent violent social conflict, and keep the vision of liberation alive as a horizon of hope. Feminist liberation theories and theologies form part of this new field of struggle, along with numerous social forces that today provide a challenge to kyriarchal globalization from multiple and diverse sites of struggle. With these, far from being homogeneous and entirely contaminated by kyriarchal globalization, the global arena is being contested by social forces advocating for a present of dignity and rights for women and a shared future of justice for all humanity. Only in this way will it be possible to ensure the survival of the planet itself. The relevance and vitality of critical feminist liberation theology are derived from its roots in these forces for social change, because it is these groups that embody God’s liberating presence in the world. According to the prominent Peruvian feminist scholar Virginia Vargas, with their practices intended to change traditional common sense and the material conditions for living, the emancipating social forces are working for ‘a radical transformation of the global landscape’ (2005). In other words, although the paradigm of kyriarchal globalization appears to hold total sway in the world, this model does not have the last word. A new world landscape rooted in justice is emerging, and this is the reason of our hope. It is precisely within this context of dispute over the present and future of the world that the debate on the struggle for social recognition, traditionally seen through the conflictive theories of identity, can be reframed. Owing to the fact that this subject is needlessly imprisoned in the rhetorical labyrinth of post-neoisms, one must question the relevance of the term identity for the future of feminist theology in the coming decades by asking questions about its role in the paradigm of kyriarchal globalization.

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It is clear that this paradigm only represents the interests and values of a very small portion of humanity such as the privileged social elites, and it is designed to benefit elite educated propertied men. Important in kyriarchal globalization are the values of the capitalist market and the supremacy of the weapons industry, not the value of the human being, and less still the interests and values of that excluded two-thirds of the population. It is also clear that kyriarchal globalization cements severe conditions of social antagonism, and it transfers to the subordinate population the savage competition that characterizes kyriarchal social forces. This has resulted in the society we live in, where equally subordinate social groups relate to each other as adversaries and assert their license to compete savagely between themselves, to the point where some groups have ended up in armed conflict involving massacres and unspeakable atrocities. In this type of society, identity conflict has affected the feminist theological activity by maximizing the perceived or actual differences between equally subordinated women. It has also affected how feminist theologians relate to each other, and who or what women identify to be the enemy. The subordinated status of women in society, culture, and religion, however, cannot be conceptualized as being a women’s problem, or as a conflict between women who are enemies to ourselves, but as engendered by kyriarchal globalization. Just as the US feminist and womanist theological agenda needs to ‘move beyond the white/black focus’ (Aquino et al. 2002: xv), feminist theory and theologies need to move beyond their obsession for defining the hierarchy of women’s racial or social oppression, so that women can access the best rhetorical weapons to blame and condemn each other for the evils affecting women. Under kyriarchal globalization, the greatest problem faced by feminist theory and theology is not to build ever more sophisticated theories on constructing, deconstructing, or reconstructing the so-called identities, but as Anne E. Patrick writes, ‘to press more deeply than ever before for answers to questions of human suffering and injustice’ (1998: 11). The conventional language of identity is so heavily loaded with meaning that its use not only establishes the basis for the perpetuation of internal divisions, but it also deafens us, taking away our ability to decipher the sounds of the wider world. It is from the midst of one of the largest and more violent empires of human history that the cry for human dignity and justice for women emerges worldwide. In a world where people count only as commodities, as consumers, as competing market agents, or as collateral targets of war, it is imperative to affirm recognition and respect of women’s dignity as humans beyond any ascribed or prescribed identification marker, while affirming at the same time the value of social and cultural diversity. Feminist theologies indeed affirm the absolute value of the human person and find worth in cultural diversity but, due to its pervasiveness, they would seem to be unprepared to cease using the term ‘identity’. Nonetheless, encouraged by the words of Cannon above and by the wisdom of the women she speaks about, feminist theologians are called ‘to resist the temptation to capitulate to the demands of the status quo, to find meaning in the most despotic circumstances, and to create something where nothing existed before’. New critical theological languages are needed for both, moving beyond the divisive agenda of identity politics and naming that space where an individual’s faculties, abilities, and aspirations can develop and basic human needs are met.

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As humans, every person needs a space where a sense of belonging and partnership is supported. This dimension of human beings leads to the establishment of connections with a social group or a theoretical–political space that provides a frame of reference, a sense of shared values, and a direction to a person’s life. The connection to a community or a particular space marks the way a person sees and acts within the world; it comes to be what Judith Plaskow calls an ‘organizing center through which we view and interpret and give room to others’ (2005: 35). It is also the case that human beings establish links to relate to themselves, to other people and to the world. These links may change in the course of time, or they may be multiple and simultaneous links that depend on situations in which the social group affirms or denies the dignity and fundamental rights of the person. Social groups intervene simultaneously in social life, but although interdependence determines their relationship, their needs, aspirations, and social aims are not always convergent. In the context of divided societies where some social groups are hostile to the human dignity of other groups, relations between social groups have been studied largely in the framework of theories that explore the cultural and political significance of human differences. Pui-lan Kwok is right in suggesting that ‘if the buzzword in feminist theorizing and theologizing was “difference” in the 1990s, feminist theorists have begun to rethink the feminist agenda for the twenty-first century because of the challenges of late capitalism and globalization’ (2005: 135). The preoccupation of feminist theories with differences forms a substantial theoretical labyrinth that ranges, for example, from critiques of prescribed identity markers to their total fluidity or collapse. It ranges from debates on legal mechanisms for the regulation of human affiliations and citizenship to lengthy discourses on the politics of identity and recognition (Fraser 2002: 107–20; Shachar 2002: 200–35). It included the famous debate between Butler and Fraser on the power of feminist theory’s critique to respond to struggles for recognition through the mere order of the symbolic or the materiality of history (Butler 1998; Fraser 1998; Bacci et al. 2003: 101–4). All these approaches provide intellectual stimulation, but many of them deal with social differences only at the level of thought or abstract rhetorical exploration, that is to say, with no direct relationship with people’s immediate problems and initiatives for change. While feminist scholars in religion have examined the global impact of the structures of violence on women (Schüssler Fiorenza and Copeland 1994; Mananzan et al. 1996; Adams and Fortune 1998; Castelli and Jakobsen 2004), more feminist analyses are needed today to shed light on the root causes of social conflicts and provide resources to empower interdependence, partnership, linkages, and connectedness as shared values for conflict transformation and prevention. Such analyses would help to envision alternatives to the present situation and change the global conditions that place social groups as competing adversaries; that maintain divided societies through systemic social injustice; that beget hate and violence as means to deal with differences; and that neglect to stop the devastating effects of weapons, violent conflict, and poverty on women. Those shared values are the more useful alternative to identity/different issues. From the perspective of critical feminist theology, the key problem is not the value assigned to human differences, but the political use of these to keep the paradigm of kyriarchal globalization intact. In this model, differences are understood as incentives

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for competition in the market society, where each social group asserts entitlement to fight for control over those in no position to compete. In this race for control by the strongest, human differences become a mechanism for maintaining the scandalous inequalities that affect more than two-thirds of the world’s population, who live a precarious existence in deeply divided societies. As long as kyriarchal globalization continues, the effects of social inequalities will continue predominantly to affect women because kyriarchal globalization removes the material conditions for attaining the basics of their human dignity. Nowhere on the planet have the dynamics that fan the deep enmities between social groups ceased to act in the face of the classic markers of human difference, and deep-rooted conflict has not respected factors of identity but has turned them into sources of hostility. These factors include religion, ethnicity, language, class, sexual orientation, territory, customs, interests, values, and other factors considered to be distinctive of particular social groups. Conflict transformation expert J. Lewis Rasmussen notes that internal conflict involves power asymmetry and denial of basic human needs, and is ‘characterized as bitter, hostile interaction among groups, where hatred, political and economic oppression, and other forms of victimization (perceived or actual) run along ethnic or other identity-based lines and periodically flare up in acts of extreme violence. . . . Resolving the deeper causes of such conflict requires changing the social order’ (1997: 32). As interethnic conflict around the world also affects the relationships between women, feminist theologians face the challenge of providing insights and resources to counter hostility with shared commitments and activities for changing the unjust world order. Feminist theological work for a renewed creation and a just world demands to go beyond the labyrinth of identities, and must overcome the divisions that spring from struggles for social or political recognition. While this assessment runs contrary to the view that the struggles for recognition of subordinate social groups have contributed to processes of social change in a positive way, the conditions of present-day reality show that these struggles are taking us toward a collective implosion. Under kyriarchal globalization, each social group—or identity community—fights to overcome its status of subordination without worrying about trampling on others, and this is how we become bogged down in dynamics that negate any possibility of attaining a shared future of justice together. In the fight for resources produced by the redistribution policies of the present system, we are corroding ourselves from the inside. Every social group and every human being helps to accelerate the process of self-destructive conflict when, to protect our own interests, we conceal the political use of differences to reinforce obedience to the divinized market, cover up the effects of blind identification with idolatry, and accept the present situation without questioning its manipulation of human differences for the purpose of subordinating others. To build something new, however, we must, in the words of Katie G. Cannon, cultivate our ability to ‘decipher the various sounds of the larger world’ simply because our own lives depend on this. As an active participant in the network of social forces that struggle to make a different social model possible, feminist theology of liberation faces the task of continuing to fashion cognitive resources to foster the personal and collective capacity to

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discern ideologies and theologies in ethical–political terms, depending on whether they support or destroy the construction of a new world of justice. This task is important because the present-day global space is that of social groups that support contrasting and debatable values, conceptual representations, interpretative frameworks, and ethical–political loyalties. In the context of divided societies, in fact, theological activity functions and develops within disputed symbolic–political fields. Because feminist theology of liberation functions in the same space as kyriarchal religious ideologies, where the effects of theological practices on the preservation or transformation of oppressive systems are in dispute, theological activity comes to be a site of struggle. At the core of this dispute are the present and future of humanity and the world. Our reality includes a plurality of discursive practices with visions of the world that are often not only different but also incompatible, and each one affects personal and community self-understanding in that it provides the reasons for people to explain their existence and their actions in the world. This task also implies the strengthening of critical theological languages open to conversation with marginalized cultures and peoples with the aim not only of learning from their emancipating wisdom, traditions, and religious visions, but of empowering them as well. For feminist theology, the shaping of a global space to strengthen visions, practices, and resources for justice means to bring together diverse social groups, so that we share work in actualizing relationships free of dehumanization and subordination. Schüssler Fiorenza conceptualizes this space as ‘the metaphoric space that can sustain critical practices of struggle for transforming societal and religious kyriarchal institutions and discourses . . . a political construct that is at once a historical and an imagined political religious reality, already partially realized but still to be struggled for’ (1994: 28). Emerging feminist intercultural perspectives are providing creative insights into this endeavor as they understand that such perspectives ‘require a dialectical intellectual praxis that allows social and cultural subjects to speak as equals and to forge alliances, on the basis of their real conditions and their diverse contextualities, for the purpose of achieving a common future of justice. An intercultural epistemology requires that we move beyond mere recognition of differences toward designing common spaces for affirming the common emancipative interests of the voices that the dominant culture wishes to suppress’ (Mena-López and Aquino 2007: xxv). With the aim of achieving a new world of justice, it is important that debates continue on the conceptual frameworks of feminist theological language in terms of their ethical– political relevance for the historical advancement of such aim. In conclusion, I propose three areas that may shed light on possible developments of feminist theology in the coming decades. First, it seems vital to attend to the primary function of theological knowledge. The theological activity has meaning and purpose insofar as we understand that its central preoccupation lies in how real people live or die. The fate of the Earth according to God’s purpose depends on this. Together with liberation theologies from other latitudes, the core affirmation of critical feminist theology is that theological knowledge must function as a principle of liberation and not as a mechanism for producing dehumanizing discourses or for validating systems of domination. From this point of view, feminist theology must seek out the best ways to historicize salvation and denounce systemic idolatries and sins that prevent its actualization.

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Second, it is important to continue enriching and broadening that ethical–political space created to sustain everyone who struggles for a just world order with the cognitive and spiritual resources of feminist theology. Persons and communities who participate in this space affirm common traits of personal and collective self-conception based on a shared sense of remembering and reclaiming a common heritage of historical experiences of struggle for emancipation, of recognizing the intrinsic dignity of women and radical equality of every human being, of valuing human differences in terms of interdependence and partnership, and of advocating commitment to eliminate relations of domination across societies, cultures, and religions. Taking into account contextual circumstances and processes, those participants share a common interest of contributing to the renewal of creation from the religious horizon of liberation. The present circumstances of kyriarchal globalization demand the strengthening of every possible initiative for liberation in such a way that we can, in the words of Delores S. Williams, ‘build bridges over which future generations of women can cross from bondage to freedom’ (Williams 1993: 187). Finally, it is crucial for feminist theology to consider the conditions and mechanisms for strengthening a coalition-building politics. As is illustrated by the World Social Forum and the Latin American and the Caribbean Feminist Encounters (Encuentros Feministas Latinoamericanos y del Caribe), there are today a large number of social forces participating in the global space to promote a new societal model. However, the mechanisms for globalizing a feminist religious vision of justice through an explicit coalitional politics have not yet been sufficiently developed. A hopeful starting effort in this regard is the shared work of the Feminist Liberation Theology Networks, a project of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER). However, more work needs to done in terms of articulating a feminist theological agenda in partnership with those organizations and social movements of civil society also committed to social change for a more just world. Mary Hunt points out that ‘feminist religious justice work is conducted in multi-religious ways and makes a difference; religions may be useful for providing vision and values, but they are impotent to make social change without solid so-called secular partners; globalized justice will require new organizational and institutional forms that will challenge existing ones’ (2003). A variety of feminist theorists have also stressed the need to prioritize this area. While Chandra Talpade Mohanty speaks of the pressing political need to strengthen feminist solidarity without borders through forming ‘strategic coalitions across class, race, and national boundaries’ (2004: 18), Chéla Sandoval refers to the importance of understanding feminist work as a ‘coalitional political site . . . that is guided above all else, by the imperatives of social justice’ (1998: 355, 361). From my point of view, coalition-building on different levels—local, national, regional, and global—allows feminist theology to foster its partnership relationship with a variety of organizations and social movements committed to bring about an alternative societal model. However, taking into account that practitioners of feminist theology often lack the necessary resources to implement coalitional mechanisms, serious discussion is needed in the coming years about how to develop and share the available resources worldwide. Further discussion is also needed about how, in connection to the

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global movements for social change, feminist theologies of liberation are contributing to build new models of personal and collective self-conception. Coalition-building provides feminist theologies with the opportunity to broaden the space for religious–political reflection on people’s real aspirations and needs in their diverse sites of struggle. The initiative for coalitional politics drives forward the creation of practical and conceptual bridges to support the tasks of transformation in theological terms. By doing this, feminist theologies of liberation communicate their ethical–political visions to the wider world, so that the power of religion is aimed at making possible a new world of justice. It is through this theological language that we affirm our commitment to a different present and a hopeful future.

Notes 1. The expression ‘theological pertinence’ comes from the Spanish ‘pertinencia teológica’, which sometimes is also translated as ‘theological relevance’. It is commonly used in the technical language of Latin American liberation theology in reference to the constitution of theology as a discipline with respect to its formal and material objects; see Boff (1987: 67–90). 2. On the meaning of kyriarchal globalization, see Aquino (2003: 385–406). 3. This term was coined by my colleague and friend Joseph A. Colombo during our informal conversations on the topic of multiplicity of theories, and serves to name what he calls the contemporary ‘cognitive pluralism’. Here, I use this term in a threefold sense: first, to note that acknowledgment of discursive multiplicity, while it accepts multiple voices in shaping knowledge, it does not necessarily admit the uneven geopolitical status of those who participate at the table of deliberations, or advocate for commitment to change the systemic conditions that prevent some voices from participation as equals in the discursive deliberations. Second, to note that some intellectual practices emerge from and remain at the level of thought as they engage in discursive acrobatics without proper sociopolitical analysis and contextualization. Third, to note that discursive proliferation (as it grows in the academic context of the geopolitical North/First World, notably in the United States) does not necessarily reveal concern for the needs, aspirations, visions, and struggles of the impoverished humanity, particularly those of women whose daily existence is marked by deprivation, violence, and subordination. 4. On some on these perspectives, see Schüssler Fiorenza (2001: 59–64). 5. For a comprehensive study of these processes, see Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Globalization and Development, coordinated by José Antonio Ocampo, Twenty-ninth Session, Brasilia, Brazil (Santiago de Chile: United Nations, 2002), available from http://www.eclac.org accessed March 23, 2007. 6. ‘Kyriarchy means the domination of the emperor, lord, slave master, husband, the elite freeborn educated and propertied male colonizer who has power over all wo/men and subaltern men . . . Kyriarchal relations of domination are built on elite male property rights over wo/men who are marked by the intersection of gender, race, class, imperial domination, as well as dependency, subordination and obedience or second class citizenship’ (Schüssler Fiorenza 2007: 158). 7. See International Crisis Group, ‘Trends and Watchlist Summary: January 2004 Trends’, CrisisWatch no. 6, February 1, 2004, and ‘Trends and Watchlist Summary: December 2007

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Trends’, CrisisWatch no. 52, December 1, 2007, both documents available from http://www. crisisgroup.org and accessed January 28, 2008. 8. On this situation, see for example: Amnesty International, Lives Blown Apart: Crimes against Women in Times of Conflict: Stop Violence against Women (London: Amnesty International, 2004), available from http://www.amnesty.org/ accessed November 12, 2005; Amnesty International, Making Rights a Reality: Violence Against Women in Armed Conflict (London: Amnesty International, 2005), available from http://www.amnesty.org/ accessed November 12, 2005; Amnesty International, International Action Network on Small Arms IANSA, and Oxfam International, The Impact of Guns on Women’s Lives (London: Amnesty International, IANSA, and Oxfam International, 2005), available from http://www. amnesty.org/ accessed November 12, 2005); Elisabeth Rehn and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Women, War and Peace: The Independent Experts’ Assessment on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Women and Women’s Role in Peace-building (New York: United Nations Development Fund for Women UNIFEM, 2002). 9. On this, see World Social Forum, Another World Is Possible, available from http://www. forumsocialmundial.org.br/; Internet accessed February 3, 2008. 10. On this, see Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual, Feminist Liberation Theologians’ Network, available from http://www.his.com/~mhunt/FLTN.htm accessed February 3, 2008.

Works Cited Adams, Carol J., and Fortune, Mary M. (Eds) (1998). Violence against Women and Children: A Christian Theological Sourcebook. New York: Continuum. Amnesty International (2005). The State of the World’s Human Rights: Amnesty International Report 2005, available at http://www.amnesty.org/ accessed January 24, 2007. Annan, Kofi A. (2000). We The Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the 21st Century. New York: United Nations, available at http://www.un.org/millennium/sg/report/ full.htm accessed April 5, 2007. Aquino, María Pilar (2003). ‘The Dynamics of Globalization and the University: Toward a Radical Democratic-Emancipatory Transformation’, in Fernando F. Segovia (Ed.), Toward a New Heaven and a New Earth: Essays in Honor of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. , Machado, Daisy L., and Rodríguez, Jeanette (2002). ‘Introduction’, in María Pilar Aquino, Daisy L. Machado, and Jeanette Rodríguez (Eds), A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice. Austin: University of Texas Press, xiii–xx. Bacci, Claudia, Fernández, Laura, and Oberti, Alejandra (2003). ‘De injusticias distributivas y políticas identitarias. Una intervención en el debate Butler–Fraser’, Revista Gênero, 4/1 (2003): 101–14, available at http://www.portalfeminista.org.br/ accessed April 5, 2007. Boff, Clodovis (1987). Theology and Praxis: Epistemological Foundations. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Brown, Michael E. (2003). ‘Ethnic and Internal Conflicts: Causes and Implications’, in Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall (Eds), Turbulent Peace: The Challenges of Managing International Conflict, second printing. Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 209–26. Butler, Judith (1998). ‘Marxism and the Merely Cultural’, New Left Review, 227 (Jan–Feb): 33–44.

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Cannon, Katie Geneva (1995). Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community. New York: Continuum. Castelli, Elizabeth A., and Jakobsen, Janet R. (Eds) (2004). Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Copeland, M. Shawn (1995). ‘Toward a Critical Christian Feminist Theology of Solidarity’, in Mary Ann Hinsdale and Phyllis H. Kaminski (Eds), Women and Theology, Annual Publication of the College Theology Society, vol. 40. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 3–38. Donnelly, Thomas (2000). ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century’, Report of the Project for the New American Century, with Donald Kagan and Gary Schmitt. Washington, DC: Project for the New American Century. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (2002). Globalization and Development, twenty-ninth session, coordinated by José Antonio Ocampo, Brasilia, Brazil. Santiago de Chile: United Nations, available at http://www.eclac.org accessed March 15, 2007. Ellacuría, Ignacio (1991). Filosofía de la Realidad Histórica. Madrid: Trotta. (1993). ‘The Historicity of Christian Salvation’, in Ignacio Ellacuría, S.J., and Jon Sobrino, S.J. (Eds), Mysterium Liberationis: Fundamental Concepts of Liberation Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 251–89. (1993). ‘Liberación’, in Casiano Floristán and Juan José Tamayo (Eds), Conceptos Fundamentales del Cristianismo. Madrid: Trotta, 690–710. Fabella, Virginia (2000). ‘Liberation’, in Virginia Fabella, and R. S. Sugirtharajah (Eds), Dictionary of Third World Theologies. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 122–4. Fraser, Nancy (1998). ‘Heterosexism, Misrecognition and Capitalism. A Response to Judith Butler’, New Left Review, 228 (March–April): 140–9. (2002). ‘Rethinking Recognition’, New Left Review, 3 (May–June 2000): 107–20, available at http://newleftreview.org/A2248 accessed April 5, 2007. Gebara, Ivone (2000). ‘Paradigm Shift’, in Virgina Fabella and R. S. Sugirtharajah (Eds), Dictionary of Third World Theologies. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 159–60. Greeve Devaney, Sheila (1997). ‘Introduction’, in Rebecca S. Chopp and Sheila Greeve Devaney (Eds), Horizons in Feminist Theology: Identity, Tradition, and Norms. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1–16. Gross Stein, Janice (2003). ‘Image, Identity, and the Resolution of Violent Conflict’, in Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall (Eds), Turbulent Peace: The Challenges of Managing International Conflict. Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 189–208. Gurr, Ted Robert (2003). ‘Minorities and Nationalists: Managing Ethnopolitical Conflict in the New Century’, in Chester A. Crocker, Fen Osler Hampson, and Pamela Aall (Eds), Turbulent Peace: The Challenges of Managing International Conflict. Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace, 163–88. Hinkelammert, Franz J. (1977). Las Armas Ideológicas de la Muerte. El Discernimiento de los Fetiches: Capitalismo y Cristianismo. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Universitaria Centroamericana. (1984). Crítica a la Razón Utópica. San José, Costa Rica: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones. (2003), El Asalto al Poder Mundial y la Violencia Sagrada del Imperio. San José, Costa Rica: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones. Hunt, Mary (2003). ‘Globalization of Justice’, Women, Religion, and Social Change II Conference, The Pluralism Project, Harvard University, April 30 – May 4, 2003, available at http://www.his.com/~mhunt/pluralismtranscript.htm accessed April 4, 2007.

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(2007). ‘Unfinished Business. The Flowering of Feminist / Womanist Theologies’, in Rosemary Radford Ruether (Ed.), Feminist Theologies: Legacy and Prospect. Minneapolis: Fortress, 79–92. International Crisis Group, ‘CrisisWatch No. 36, 1 August 2006’, CrisisWatch 36, available at http://www.crisisgroup.org accessed March 29, 2007. Jarl, Ann-Cathrin (2003). In Justice: Women and Global Economics. Minneapolis: Fortress. Johnson, Elizabeth A. (1992). She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. New York: Crossroad. Kwok, Pui-lan (2005). Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. Lederach, John Paul (1997). Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies. Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace. Machinea, José Luis, and Martín Hopenhayn (2005). La esquiva equidad en el desarrollo Latinoamericano. Una visión estructural, una aproximation multifacética, United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Santiago de Chile: Organization de las Naciones Unidas, available at http://www.eclac.cl/ accessed January 25, 2006. Mananzan, Mary John, Oduyoye, Mercy A., Tamez, Elsa, et al. (Eds) (1996). Women Resisting Violence: Spirituality for Life. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Mena-López, Maricel, and Aquino, María Pilar (2007). ‘Feminist Intercultural Theology. Religion, Culture, Feminism and Power’, in María Pilar Aquino and María José RosadoNunes (Eds), Feminist Intercultural Theology: Latina Explorations for a Just World. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, xiii–xxviii. Minow, Martha (2002). Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law, and Repair. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade (2004). Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Patrick, Anne E. (1998). ‘Markers, Barriers, and Frontiers: Theology in the Borderlands’, in María Pilar Aquino and Roberto S. Goizueta (Eds), Theology: Expanding the Borders, Annual Publication of the College Theology Society, 43. Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 3–21. Plaskow, Judith (2005). The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972–2003. Boston: Beacon Press. Rasmussen, J. Lewis (1997). ‘Peacemaking in the Twenty-First Century: New Rules, New Roles, New Actors’, in I. William Zartman and J. Lewis Rasmussen (Eds), Peacemaking in International Conflict: Methods and Techniques. Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace Press, 23–50. Rose, Susan D. (2001). ‘Christian Fundamentalism: Patriarchy, Sexuality, and Human Rights’, in Courtney W. Howland (Ed.), Religious Fundamentalisms and the Human Rights of Women. New York: Palgrave, 9–20. Sandoval, Chéla (1998). ‘Mestizaje as Method. Feminists-of-Color Challenge the Canon’, in Carla Trujillo (Ed.), Living Chicana Theory. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth (1994). Jesus, Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet: Critical Issues in Feminist Christology. New York: Continuum. (2001). Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. (2007). The Power of the Word: Scripture and the Rhetoric of the Empire. Minneapolis: Fortress.

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and Copeland, Mary Shawn (Eds) (1994). Violence against Women. London: SCM. Shachar, Ayelet (2002). ‘The Thin Line between Imposition and Consent: A Critique of Birthright Membership Regimes and Their Implications’, in Martha Minow (Ed.), Breaking the Cycles of Hatred: Memory, Law, and Repair. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 200–35. Vargas, Virginia (2005). ‘A diez años de Beijing’, paper delivered at the 49th session of the Commission on the Status of Women, United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, New York, February, available at http://www.flora.org.pe/ensayos.htm accessed January 6, 2006. Williams, Delores S. (1993). Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Further Reading Aquino, María Pilar, and Rosado-Nunes, María José (Eds) (2007). Feminist Intercultural Theology: Latina Explorations for a Just World. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Kriesberg, Louis (2003). Constructive Conflicts: From Escalation to Resolution, 2nd edn. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Ruether, Rosemary Radford (Ed.) (2007). Feminist Theologies: Legacy and Prospect. Minneapolis: Fortress. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth (2007). The Power of the Word: Scripture and the Rhetoric of the Empire. Minneapolis: Fortress. Smock, David R. (2002). Interfaith Dialogue and Peacebuilding. Washington, DC: US Institute of Peace.

chapter 21

doing a theology from disa ppe a r ed bodies: theology, sexua lit y, a n d the e xclu ded bodie s of t h e discou r se s of l at i n a m er ica n liber ation theology marcella althaus-reid

Habeas Corpus for Catalino Flores. Three women come down From Susulí, crying. They come dressed in black At dawn. Pablo Antonio Cuadra, from ‘Catalino Flores’ I understand that a major rebellion is in the making. This is a rebellion coming from (our people in) simultaneous confrontation with Capitalism and Patriarchy but also with ideologies [against] sexual diversity. Lohana Berkins, Sexual Human Rights activist and politician from Buenos Aires

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‘There has been a body’: Confrontations Throughout thirty years of reflection by the diversity represented in feminist theologies from the so-called First and Third Worlds, there have always been divergences but also some common agreement. One of these commonalities, perhaps the most significant of all, has been the understanding that our theological reflections had to be grounded on some kind of everyday life, some cotidianidad. Moreover, these women’s life experiences were to be understood at the crossroads of multiple ideological discourses such as those of race, class, sexuality, and religion. Therefore, one of the most important contributions by feminist theologies in the twentieth century to the life of the churches and to Christianity in general has been the return of the body and a recognition of the fact that the female body has been the locus of many subjections: economic, political, and racial, as well as sexual. That is to say, women’s bodies must contribute to theological actions and reflections from the location of hunger, unresolved hunger: hunger for bread and for sexual justice as well as for a grounded spirituality that could be developed outside the narrow confines of patriarchal ideology. The contribution of feminist theologies has therefore been twofold. First, women’s bodies in theology have helped to locate and define the envisaged praxis of Liberation Theologies. Lisa Isherwood calls this a theological ‘hearing’ of the bodies of women, and an enfleshed hermeneutical spiral of interpretation. In her own words, ‘[We have] allowed the flesh to show us the divine rather than submitted to the divine moulding of the flesh’ (2004: 140). From the ethnographic methods used by Mujeristas in the United States to the Womanist storytelling circles of Black Americans and the Latin American women’s leadership of Basic Ecclesial Communities, there has been no more important catalyst of praxis in the militant churches than the irruption of women’s movements in the churches. In other words, feminist theologies provided liberationists with a concrete praxis of action and reflection grounded in people’s everyday lives. A second contribution is no less important: namely, the relocation (or dislocation) of systematic theological orders carried out by feminist theologies in general. Especially in the past decade, feminist theologies have further removed themselves from the danger of theological co-optation as they address the challenge of structural change. If patriarchy is part of the structures of sin, as liberationists have argued, then theology needs to dismantle itself as well as announce a new way of doing theology. The presence of women’s bodies in theology not only grounds but questions traditional theological reflection on redemption, sin, and grace. It also raises questions about a dogmatic corpus characterized by the exclusion and denigration of the Other, particularly the feminine Other, in the discourse of the divine. We may say that feminist theologies started with an emphasis on issues of visibility, the woman’s body reclaiming its presence in the discourse of the church and in theology, but continued with a deeper challenge at the epistemological levels of ecclesiology and dogmatics. If in the past structural sin has pervaded the understanding of being the

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church and of Christianity, then in recent years we have observed scenes of resurrection (Althaus-Reid 2007). The bodies of women, and specifically of marginalized women in church and society, have reappeared in theological discourse to produce a crisis, a crisis in the sense of God’s judgment upon the patriarchal ideologies, which have sadly pervaded Christian theology, a theology that silenced the multitudes. In Latin America the image of silenced voices and disappeared bodies has a long history in women’s everyday lives. However, it is a history of struggle rather than of passive victims of churches and societies. The disappeared bodies of theology have never gone quietly or without a struggle, and many a habeas corpus has been presented in our lives. Paraphrasing the poem from Pablo Antonio Cuadras, ‘Catalino Flores’, women in Latin America are used to reclaiming bodies with courage, the bodies of their relatives, disappeared during the dictatorial regimes of the seventies, but also bodies of knowledge, including divine knowledge, that their churches have ignored or silenced. Feminist Liberation Theologies have thus been theologies of habeas corpus; that is to say, that by refusing to accept the disappearance of women in the past and present of Latin American churches, they have claimed the existence of bodies. The same situation appears in the Gospel of John, when Mary Magdalene in her grief cries out, ‘They have taken away my Lord and I do not know where they have laid him’ (20: 13). There was a body, the body of Jesus, but it has disappeared during the night. Where is it now? How easy is it for those in authority to make a body disappear! And in an ideological system this is accompanied by a decree forbidding all mention of that person. But bodies do not disappear into thin air. Although people are silenced, the names of those lost do not disappear from the hearts of those who love them: the memory of them is surrounded by the hope of resurrection. And that, in the end, is what Christian theology is, a praxis based on the disappearance of one body, the body of the Messiah, and the stubbornness of a community to claim back that body while waiting for resurrection. In Argentina, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo have been talking resurrection to successive governments for decades: ‘You took them alive and it is alive we want to see them back. Their children were taken from their neighborhoods as Jesus was taken from his community: alive. As in the poem ‘Habeas corpus for Catalino Flores’, there has been a body, there have been friends and neighbors and we demand that the person be returned to us, alive. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo are not mentioned here as a simple example. As a witness of their time, the images of the Mothers will always accompany me and other liberationists from my generation throughout our lives as theologians. These are images of a small group of housewives with white headscarves decorated with names and photographs of their missing relatives, repeatedly asking their questions: ‘What have you done with my children? What have you done with my grandchildren?’ In their silent procession around the Square every Thursday afternoon they claim this basic right: habeas corpus. Our friends, our relatives, our neighbors used to live amongst us. You cannot simply eliminate people and deny their previous existence by decree and fear. Yet, the fascist government of the time had created its own irreality, its own normalization of horror. In this reversal of reality, we might say that the Mothers were Queer. Their

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behavior was not in keeping with the social and religious expectations of their female sexuality. Their disruption of the order of things was clearly transgressive, with a hint of immorality in their actions. Some churches would hesitate slightly to be associated with them, not only for fear of political repression but also because of implied association of political protest and immorality. These women did not submit to the constraints of the political order: perhaps they did not observe the moral order. Political struggle has links with Queer activism. The struggle for social justice requires the challenging of structures of knowing and organizing society, including the place of gender.

Liberation Theology: a body theology critique Liberation Theology, formed at the times of political repression, has always been a body theology. It was a theology reflecting at the concrete site of bodies in suffering. It took seriously the body that suffered hunger, malnutrition, and torture, and the body that did not fit into society: that is, the body of the marginalized and invisible in church and in society. Paraphrasing Marx, I have said elsewhere that one of the characteristics of ideologies is to exalt ideas to the point of making dogmas almost ‘living things’ with ruling values and power, while people tend to become insignificant. People become ‘things’ while ideas become ‘people’ (Althaus-Reid 2004a: 66). This is the process of reification that Marx refers to when he explains ideologies as methods. The poor, for example, usually become disembodied people. For many students, as I discovered while teaching Christian ethics in Europe, poverty is only an idea, a distant concept. They do not connect ‘poverty’ with the bag lady standing next to them as they wait to cross the street: poverty can become an ideology, too. Poverty becomes an ideology in theology when the bodies of the poor (including their bodies of knowledge) disappear from theological reflection. As someone who has worked in poor communities, I am aware that theology struggles to keep people in line—a problem found even in Liberation Theology. It is not always possible to develop a theological praxis from the poor while maintaining systematic theological integrity. This dilemma is, of course, part of the colonial inheritance of Liberation Theology, which in the end struggles with the idea of the authority of the believer (and the poor believer) and the magisterium of the church. Somehow, in the midst of this, an ideology of poverty appears to disenfranchise the abnormalities of praxis. For example, when I joined some women from my country (Argentina) a few years ago to complain about sexism in Liberation Theology, we were told that we were not ‘real’ Latin American women, but educated women influenced by a European feminist agenda. ‘Real’ Latin American women apparently were not concerned with these issues of feminism. They were poor and had more worthy concerns in their lives. Of course, that judgment ignored the life of domestic and public violence that women in my continent suffer, as well as their early marriages and

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exclusion from the educational system. It ignored their lack of choices and the religious perpetuation of a mixture of gender, class, sexual, and racial oppression. Our criticism of sexism was answered simply by a definition: Liberation Theology was a theology with an option for the poor, that is, a theology from the poor. However, the poor were here defined and classified according to ecclesiastical criteria. Somehow, and with few exceptions, the classification of the poor in Liberation Theology became a moral category. The poor were deserving poor, according to the criteria of the church. I have elsewhere elaborated on the stereotype of the polite peasants, the poor but legally married and church-blessed families, and the general image of a stereotyped Christian universe where poor people seldom transgress the social and religious norm considered proper, or ‘decent’. Women were subsumed into a general male category of poor communities, and their struggles and expectations were ignored. Needless to say, the real poor in Latin American were rendered invisible. The real poor, especially poor women who did not fit the stereotypes of the church, disappeared. We can see from that example how the body of the disappeared is an important theological metaphor here. We may ask, for instance, where are the bodies of women in theology? Or where are the bodies of the rebellious poor, the ones who challenged Christianity and became controversial in their praxis for liberation? The church in Latin America may remember Bartolomé de las Casas, who was a lucid and courageous priest in the fifteenth century, who denounced the structures of exploitation of indigenous people by colonial powers in alliance with the Roman Catholic Church. However, the church does not remember or celebrate the indigenous people who committed mass suicide. They did so as an ethical decision when the conditions of life were impossible, in a kind of ontological exodus. When the land of oppression could not be transformed into a land of justice, they decided to leave, following the example of Exodus. When looking for a praxis of liberation we may ask, Where are the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo who challenged ecclesiologies? We may also ask: Where is the collective of transvestites from Buenos Aires who offer a soup kitchen to the poor from the city? This transvestite collective presents not only a challenge to the discourses of the churches and of human rights in Argentina, but significantly, in the theological reflections concerning la mesa del Señor (the Lord’s Supper: literally, the Lord’s table) as well. The fact that poor heterosexual families and transvestites sit together to break the bread of the poor in solidarity is a deeply spiritual gesture in itself. Reflecting on this, we may ask why nonheterosexual solidarity has been excluded from Liberation Theology and to a certain degree from Feminist Liberation Theology. We may ask: Where have the Queer bodies gone in Liberation Theology?

Queer Liberation Theology Let us consider now what a Queer Liberation Theology, concerned with issues of politics and sexuality, can contribute both to the Liberation Theology project and to the Feminist Liberation Theology movement. In other words: How we can be queer and

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revolutionaries while our struggle for sexual and political justice grounds our theological reflections? That need drives my project of ‘Indecent Theology’, which insists that we question the theological absentees in the praxis of liberation in Latin America. First of all, we remember that Liberation Theology was developed with a rural constituency in mind. That was entirely justified because Latin America has a vast constituency of peasants. However, that theology produced a praxis nurtured by blindness and a tendency toward generalizations. Feminist Liberation Theology, for example, has been addressed to rural women, and not to poor women from the cities. The difficulty here lies in the fact that Liberation Theology did not acknowledge its own constituency, as illustrated in the following example. Most Freirean conscientization work, if followed ‘by the book’, tends to fail if the workers do not acknowledge that Freire worked with rural Brazilian communities. His style of work requires many changes in different settings (such as large cities where the poor form an unstable population instead of a fixed community as in the rural areas) with an explosive mixture of cultural expectations, traditional beliefs, and values. Basically, Freirean work is like Liberation Theology: contextual. That implies the existence of a knowledge that is always located, situated. Therefore, when Feminist Liberation Theology later acknowledged the absence of women’s bodies in Latin American theology, it forgot to contextualize that knowledge. Thus, point number one: we need a theology from poor women in the big cities such as Buenos Aires. Such a theology speaks for me and my family and friends, for women with lives and experiences different from those of rural women, and women with a different sexual understanding as well. And it goes without saying that the heterosexual picture of rural women or men is a piece of sexual ideology in theology, too. The second point is that the absence of other bodies means also the absence of other ways of understanding relationships and love (what I call the love/knowledge of the poor). By taking heteronormativity for granted, theology has ignored different forms of loving and economic exchanges that could prove real alternatives to the challenges of globalization presented to the church of the poor. By excluding bodies, Liberation Theology excluded alternatives. It excluded the body of the poor and the queer domestic spaces of relationships in a poor culture, such as promiscuity, which I have argued in my previous work (Althaus-Reid 2004b) have much to offer to the understanding of love and solidarity in Liberation Theology. Such absences (of people and praxis) are extraordinary because Liberation Theology was supposedly a theology that drank ‘from its own wells’, or listened to the experience of the people. And the Latin American wells are full of different amatory praxis and different types of economic exchanges that still flourish in some regions. In Perú, for example, gift economies have a lot to say about solidarity, religiosity, and reciprocity. I have already reflected at length (Althaus-Reid 2004b) how the institution of el cariño (the tenderness) is part of an economic culture of reciprocity that goes beyond heterosexual monogamist mental and affective contracts. Economic tenderness implies working with others for others in a community with no other currency than affection and no other payment than a communitarian celebration or fiesta. A fiesta is

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the site of excessive affections, indiscriminate and transgressive, and that is reflected in the excessivity of the community economic arrangement, too. Moreover, a doctrine of redemption based on a debt economy could be considerably challenged by el cariño or other forms of a gift economy based on a promiscuous loving exchange. However, the last one would prove more faithful and fruitful to our understanding of God in Christ than many Christologies of liberation that still presume the economy of a debt system. We are talking here about communitarian, transgressive amatory theologies from the margins. For instance, there is the everyday reality of a spirituality of bisexuality in Perú, where interesting relations happen due to the fact that towns may be dedicated to the protection of sacred ‘bisexual’ hills (Althaus-Reid 2004b). In the Peruvian religious universe, the sacred is compounded of male, female, and bisexual spiritualities. The bisexual spirituality is considered the most important. Is this not the basis for a more authentic Gospel and cultural paradigm: a bisexual town? Or ‘tenderness’ as an economic capitalist anticontract, where prosperity grows limited only by the growth of love and excess? Why has Liberation Theology ignored the deep sexual praxis of our own continent and its implications for a more just social order? My answer would be that this happened because every theology, including Liberation Theology, is a sexual act. Every theology carries a sexual epistemology around the heteronormalized theological imagination of gods who are fathers and virgins who give birth. Such is the poverty of the sexual story theologically imagined behind the messiah. Such is the sexual story that pervades our theological imagination, impeding different constructions of sexual and economic systems. Liberation Theology has made its own sexual options, too, and limited its potential.

On ‘indecenting’ theology This was my project of what I once called Indecent Theology (although names are not what matters): to subvert the ‘implicit’ sexual understanding of theology, and specifically that in Liberation Theology. Why indecent? I have used the term ‘indecent’ for a theology that tries to subvert, to queer not only the class ideology that perverts theology but also its sexual ideology (Althaus-Reid 2000: ch. 1). Not just one, but both the sexual and political agenda need to come together. The term indecent comes from my own country, Argentina, where the dynamic of decency and indecency is the basis of a whole set of prescriptive behaviors and gender expectations, not only at a private but also at a social level. That decency/indecency dynamic rules everything from women’s hairstyles and expected behavior according to age and civil status, to religious expectations. Therefore, Indecent Theology is a Liberation Queer Theology that de-essentializes the construction of the poor in Liberation Theology and specifically the construction of poor women in that heteronormal framework, which I denounced previously. It also problematizes the praxis of Liberation Theology at different levels. It does this first of all in presenting a hermeneutical suspicion to the addressee of Liberation Theology, that is,

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the poor as sexual subjects. The ‘from whom’ and ‘for whom’ we are reflecting theologically fixes our theological agendas, and if we challenge the addressee, such an agenda enters into crisis. That is, it suffers a challenge and a judgment of God, and a call to efficacy. Second, it extends the suspicion to systematic (Liberation) theology in the choice of themes and in the methodology used. It may problematize the reading of the Scriptures and put a question mark on the so-called sexual neutrality of the theologian of liberation. And it may offer alternatives to the traditionally inefficient organization of the churches. Queer Theology brings to Liberation Theology’s class and ethnic analysis the conflict in the construction of sex, sexuality, and gender. Indecenting is then a hermeneutical circle, a queer and liberationist way to produce a theological hermeneutical praxis. By indecenting I mean a way of doing theology; a way to do a political and Queer Theology of belonging and becoming that is concerned with a gospel of justice, including sexual justice. Moreover, indecenting is a way to unveil sexual ideologies in theology. An Indecent Theology, as a Queer, informed Liberation Theology, may consider that in challenging genderization processes in theology we can challenge also what we can call theological behavior. And what is ‘theological behavior’? Theological behavior can be understood as the result of social processes that influence what theology is supposed to do, and how. This could extend from theology understood as a logocentric activity around words and The Word, to expectations of the type of questioning that one can posit. Key to the gender behavior of theology is a tradition of acceptance of a certain sexual performance of theology. That is the masculinity of theology, which contributes to the enforcement of normativity in theology. Recall, for instance, the resistance experienced by Feminist Theology in the First Wave when trying to produce a more inclusive type of theology. The resistance did not come just from some individual theologians, but from the whole structure of theology. Even the inclusive reading of the Bible or the genderization of some theological doctrines proved to be a failure. Theology is genderized from a heterosexual ideological framework. By challenging genderized behavior in Liberation Theology, a space of instability is created where cultural, racial, class, and sexual theological behavior can be confronted in their many combinations: not to reform theology, but to transform it. The point is that challenging theology as a gendered theology from a queer perspective means also challenging the people with whom and for whom theology is done. In doing so, we also dismantle the assumption of what corresponds to what, assumptions that come from sexual ideological binarism in theology. Liberation Theology is masculinist and keeps using non-Latin American masculinities in the understanding of people and their relation to the sacred. I have come to the conclusion that when Liberation Theology speaks about the poor, ‘the poor’ have already become a sanitized category, a decent one, that eliminates the cultural and sexual dissent from many Latin American rural and urban cultures of poverty. Finally, there are other types of dislocations that an Indecent Theology can produce, as in the following two examples. First, there is the dislocation of the binary thinking in theology. That binary thinking ‘genderized’ poverty. It attributes some

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sexual expectations from the community of the poor. Secondly, there are sexualization processes in theology. I refer here to patterns of reproduction in theology. These patterns of reproduction care little for a theology of invention, disruption, and creativity. No wonder the most radical traits of Liberation Theology have been viewed as spurious or illegitimate in a continent where the laws on legitimate and illegitimate children are still in force.

Bisexuality and Latin American liberation spirituality What we should aim for is a complete permutation. We have moved from a queer analysis only preoccupied with sexuality as ideology to show that sexuality is a foundational theological praxis that needs to be subverted epistemologically in order to subvert the current capitalist system and its religious allies. I have tried to do this by using different sexual epistemological locations, such as bisexuality or sadomasochist practices (S/M) or even fetishism, for instance, to see how transgressive sexual thinking can relate creatively to Liberation Theology. Because if we ask, ‘Where are the different bodies in theology?’, we are asking for people’s bodies but also excluded and marginalized or denigrated bodies of knowledge and tradition. So, where are the bisexual bodies in Liberation Theology? Bisexual thinking is an interesting starting point for theological thinking. To begin with, bisexual thinking is produced through a different framework, such as ‘sexuality and gender’ representations. Bisexuality is characteristically not consistent in relation to sexuality and gender relationships, and in bisexuality, sex and gender do not match. Also bisexuality is a type of thinking that pervades other sexual thinking (including heterosexuality) and does not settle easily. If critically informed, it has many possibilities for a liberating theological praxis. All this makes in itself an interesting style of thinking that we can call bi/thought, characterized by instability and a construction of identity at the edge of any theological praxis. With bi/thought we can no longer keep separate the public and the private or the constant dualism of the heteronormative Liberation Theology. The point is that any materialist theology is a grounded theology, that is, a theology that starts in the concreteness of life. The starting point of Liberation Theology lies in critical reality, requires a discussion on its politics of representation. Indecent Theology proposes to per/vert theological representations. Indecent Theology is then a project of queer and political theology from the poor, but not a project measured against heterosexuality per se, but against heteronormativity and what I have called ‘heterosexuality in the closet’ (Althaus-Reid 2000). If heterosexuality is an ideology, it means that heterosexual people still need to find their own identity as heterosexual. Even if the church wants to find itself as heterosexually

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informed, it also needs to discover what is heterosexuality behind the ideology. This involves examining the construction of heterosexuality, which, beyond determining who should love whom, also creates a vision based on dualism, hierarchies, and specific dynamics of organization. To recall the bisexual tradition of spirituality in Latin America means to rescue the different, the rebelliousness against the imposition of the regimes of the theologically normal imposed on the continent. The churches have not yet acknowledged, for instance, that the Christianization of Latin America was more of a sexual program than a program of evangelization. Examining the traditions of the church in Latin American could uncover the fact that many of the rebellions against the church, at the time of the Jesuits for instance, were of a sexual origin. People fought for the right to keep their own amatory traditions in the face of a mono-loving church which continued the tradition of monotheism together with imperialism. It is true that Liberation Theology needs to continue its path of hermeneutical suspicion. Indecent Theology wants to be a theology of instability and serious doubting. Liberation needs to be seen as part of a nonreproductive theology, more of an arborescent model than a repetitive one. The arborescent or rhyzomatic model, coming from Deleuze and Guattari, is a particularly useful model of thinking for doing theologies from the margins. This model makes connections between ideas and praxis that have not been considered before, and expands in a kind of queer creativity, finding the unexpected in a process of thinking characterized by solidarity rather than exclusivism. This kind of nonreproductive solidarity then becomes larger than homosolidarity. I have argued elsewhere (Althaus-Reid 2000) that the foundational model of solidarity from Liberation Theology is a type of homosolidarity; it excludes women, but it also excludes men outside the parameters of heterosexuality. The presence of God amongst the poor needs to be witnessed as a moment of passion as well as compassion. The moment of seeing, judging, and acting of the liberationist needs to become a sexual challenge. It opens up the interconnection between sexual structures, and political and religious ideologies. The action required implies that Liberation theologians and Feminist Liberation theologians need to come out of the closet. We all need to come out of our closets, even as heterosexuals, to confront the fact that heterosexuality as an ideology misrepresents the life of heterosexual people, too. No theology founded upon the heterosexual ideology can represent people’s real lives: it provides only an ideological representation of them. The example of Chiapas in Mexico should have been a guide to every liberationist. There indigenous people started a revolution, the objective of which was to show that the different can still exist in this world and that the people have produced a truly spiritual, economic, and political conscientization that challenges the gendered structural system of their society. Yet indecenting as a method takes courage. It requires unfaithfulness to ideologies and honesty with God. At least it requires some discernment in terms of where our faithfulness lies. Is it with the real actors of history in Latin America, the real poor, or with the construction of the category of the poor, genderized and adapted

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to the church’s consumerist needs? It requires a less idealist starting point to do theology and a more materialist-based theology. Indecenting implies rescuing excluded bodies, even theological bodies and even the body of God at the margins of sexual and political heteronormativity.

Queer and liberationists Let me conclude by affirming my identity as a Feminist Liberation theologian. Although we are living at a time and in an academic world where ‘labels’ mean little, as our theological projects include a combination of many different elements, I am still locating myself in the Liberation theological discourse. I am a sexual theologian, a postfeminist, and more than that, a queer and political theologian of liberation. In this, my theological identity is defined by materialism. I am basically a materialist theologian whose praxis of action and reflection has been and still is informed by two key ‘liberationist’ elements. The first is the ongoing project of the critique of ideology in theology. The second is the understanding of the presence of God in history, and in the history of the excluded from society and theological discourses alike. That is to say that God manifests Godself in the ‘gaps’ of official historical narratives, but also in the gaps of theological reflections and ecclesiastical history. The critique of ideology in theology always has a movement of ‘coming back’ to people, as a coming back to the real protagonists of Christianity. I am conscious that the unveiling of ideologies in theology has been recently considered as part of a negative (or deconstructive) project in Liberation theology. Sometimes this critique has been denounced in the North Atlantic aristocratic circle of theology as the irruption of secularization into theology. Obviously this will come from those who consider that theology is a neutral, metaphysical art. But I disagree with that. It has been the presence of God in our history, and particularly in the mystery of incarnation, that has mixed up the categories of the sacred and the secular in theological thinking. Also, I do not in any case believe that deconstructivism is a negative exercise. As the unveiling of ideological constructions in the church and in theology it is a very positive thing to do. Perhaps it has never been so necessary as today, at a moment when even the World Bank website has an entry about Gustavo Gutiérrez and Liberation Theology under the title ‘writings about poverty’. However, the point I have been trying to make is that the unveiling of ideology in theology also applies to Feminist Liberation Theology itself, and to its own ideological presuppositions. If our theological projects are nurtured by the understanding that theology is a second act, then Feminist Liberation Theology needs to take more seriously the fact that a critical reflection on women’s material lives and experiences is the starting point and the only valid agenda of our theological reflections. And that includes women’s sexualities. Feminist Liberation Theology’s own poiesis (or sense of creation) should come from that. In a way, this is the kind of theology that allows God to be God by allowing people ‘to come as they are’, too, beyond the politics of ideal theological constructions.

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Thoughts for the future: The postcolonial (queer) twist One important area of development is what I would like to call ‘the postcolonial queer twist’. As the process of Western nativization in Liberation Theology has not been fully challenged in the past, the theological identity of the poor believer followed the usual conventions of the West: poor, polite, heterosexual, Christian. Colonial processes in theology have resulted in too many false constructions as the zeal for unveiling ideologies in theology tended to decline. Feminist Liberation Theology struggled in similar ways within an ever more restrictive regulatory church and academic markets. The nativization or fixation of the Third World Christian women was a denial of the reality of the lives of the people, especially of poor sexual dissident people. I have personal experience of how difficult it was, a few years ago, to maintain a theological dialogue with European women who would refuse to accept a voice of sexual divergence in my own Latin American theological position. If I was not heterosexual, I was not considered to be a Third World woman theologian. Additionally and curiously, my own Latin American identity was called into question. A sexual liberation theology was not considered to be representative (as far as any theology could be considered ‘representative’) of Latin American women. Curiously, some of the First Wave of Feminist Liberation Theologies had a colonial sympathy with patriarchal theologies, for they fixed their subjects, defined them, and excluded the richness of difference and diversity of our cultures and lives. Looking back, it is clear that in the past few decades what liberationists lacked (with some important exceptions) was a postcolonial analysis with a queer twist. Postcolonial analysis could have been useful in order to keep building a Feminist Theology on different, dissident grounds; a theology that would no longer need to be called ‘systematic’; a theology that would acknowledge the links between what I have called elsewhere the system of debt and grace in Christianity and the external debt; a theology dealing with the interrelation between redemption and colonial subjugation. This lack of ongoing suspicion was fed by the theological market of the West, by fixing the image of Feminist Liberation Theology for its own consumption and comfort. For instance, there is a complex, psychological subtext in the rapturous rapport between First World theologians and certain Feminist Liberation theologians, based on the common naivety of praising the role of the Virgin Mary in Latin America, for instance, without sustaining a serious analysis of what Mariology has brought legally and judicially, apart from religiously, to the lives of poor women in Latin America. It has produced nothing less than servitude and oppression, based on this infantilism in relation to the Latin American theological subject. So the Western market successfully reified Feminist Liberation Theology and as a consequence of that people forgot that behind Liberation Theology there are people, not stereotypes for accounts of nativization. This takes me to the last point of this reflection, Feminist Liberation Theology and sexuality. Part of the reification of Liberation Theology in general was due to the fact

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that the theological subject of theology, ‘the poor’, has been too broad as a category, and too influenced by the church’s own essentialist discourse on gender. I believe that the concept of the poor in Liberation Theology derives from a particular time and geography, for instance, a theology based on a praxis amongst a rural, male constituency. It is well known that Liberation Theology had—and sadly, still has—problems acknowledging the ideology of gender: feminist liberationists have been working on that. However, in relation to Feminist Liberation Theology, my critique is different from a gender critique. My point is that I have been trying to continue the path of ideological critique in theology by unveiling the presence of a powerful sexual (heterosexual) ideology that sustains the liberation theological discourse, as inherited by a Western heterosexual construction of the sacred. I am not just talking about the need to have an ‘inclusive’ theology or church (that is, a church where gays and transvestites can participate on equal terms) but a different theology. My interest has been to consider how our theological understandings and church organizations depend on heterosexual thinking—from dualist conceptions, to many epistemological categories associated with reproduction, property, and a hierarchical system. More than gender patterns, these are heterosexual patterns of behavior. My critique is then addressed to Feminist Liberation Theology in this sense, because Liberation Theology failed to continue the path of unveiling ideology and in this case, sexual ideologies that, combined with racial and class patterns, produce oppression of women and men. Poor women, particularly, have been assumed and expected to be the main sustainers of the same heterosexual ideological presuppositions that may be closely linked to their poverty and exclusion in the first place. Heterosexual ideology is not politically neutral. Any project of unveiling heterosexual ideology in Liberation Theology upsets the nativization of Liberation Theology carried out by Liberation theologians in complicity with the Western theological market. And yet there is more to Latin American women and men than these theological idealizations that do not even take into account the different patterns of affections and economic exchanges that traditionally existed in the continent. For instance, these idealizations ignore the fact that there is a tradition of sexual resistance against Christianity in Latin America. They ignore the fact that ‘bigamy’ and bisexuality were honored sacred traditions that influenced the way that people loved, not only in their private lives but also in the public sphere of political and economic exchange. It has been my understanding that Liberation Theology ended its walk, its caminata, on the day that it discontinued the unveiling of ideological constructions, such as the honored and taken for granted heterosexual ideology that has given ‘a sense of normativity’ to the liberationist enterprise. Therefore the political projects and the alternative projects have been ‘normalized’. I am asking that Feminist Liberation Theologies not do the same. It is not that nonheterosexual ideologies are necessarily more politically illuminating, except that critical nonheterosexuality or queer thinking implies a challenge to political as well affective identities, two things that should be dear to Feminist Theology and to Liberation Theology.

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Notes 1. Cf. Claudia Korol interview with Lohana Berkins, ‘Derechos Humanos. Revolucionar el Cuerpo y el Deseo’, in Argenpress, October 22, 2004. Available online at http://www.argenpress. info/notaold.asp?num=006304 Ms. Berkins is a well-known activist fighting for transvestites’ rights in Argentina. 2. With the exception of the contribution of Paulo Freire to Liberation Theology in Latin America, who contributed with his Conscientization processes to the establishment of Christian Basic Communities, women’s praxis has the best example of using everyday life (la vida cotidiana) as a methodological and thematic principle. For further references, see Elina Vuola (1997: ch. 3). 3. For the censorship of the military regime in Argentina during the 1970s, see Eduardo Blaustein and Martín Zubieta (1998). 4. In this chapter, the term ‘Liberation Theology’ refers only to Latin American Liberation Theology. 5. For a discussion of the use of the adjective ‘real’ to qualify or disqualify women’s praxis, see, for instance, Mary McClintock Fulkerson’s reflection on the lack of analysis on difference presented by early feminist theologies (1994: esp. 377–81). 6. For a study on the tradition of ethnical mass indigenous suicide during the Conquista of Latin America, see for instance Frank Salomon (2001). The tradition of indigenous suicides continues till today. In 1997 the U’wa tribe from Colombia threatened to commit tribal suicide if the Occidental Petroleum Corporation continued destroying their environment and economy but also the cultural and religious tradition of the U’was. Cf. Clarín, April 27, 1997, Buenos Aires, 12. 7. Cf., for instance, the work in this area by the Paraguayan theologian Graciela Chamorro (2004). 8. Theologically, a rhyzomatic model implies a wandering, and an inconclusiveness, as well as a deviance from an original. That style of doing theology is then the opposite of a reproductive ‘theology of the same’ and represents a way for doing theology from Otherness. For the concept of arborescence, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987). 9. I am using the term ‘aristocratic circles’ in the sense of self-selectivity and lack of representativity of some theological thinking, such as Radical Orthodoxy. 10. For this point, see Kwok’s reflection on what she aptly calls ‘a new genealogy of morals’ as part of a colonial theological discourse (2005: 142).

Works Cited Althaus-Reid, M. M. (2000). Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender and Politics. London: Routledge. (2004a). From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology: Readings on Poverty, Sexual Identity and God. London: SCM. (2004b). ‘Popular Anti-theologies of Love’, in The Queer God. London: Routledge, 113–32. (2006). Liberation Theology and Sexuality. London: Ashgate. (2007). ‘On Dying Hard: Lessions from Popular Crucifixions and Undisciplined Resurrections in Latin America’, Concilium, 5: 35–43.

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Blaustein, E., and Zubieta, M. (1998). Decíamos Ayer: La Prensa Argentina bajo el Proceso. Buenos Aires: Colihue. Chamorro, G. (2004). Teología Guaraní. Quito: Abya-Yala. Cuadra, P. A. (1970). ‘Catalino Flores’, in Nueva Poesía de Nicaragua. Buenos Aires: Nueva Tierra, 380. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Captialism and Schizophrenia. London: Athlone. Fulkerson, Mary McClintock (1994). Changing the Subject: Women’s Discourse and Feminist Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress. Isherwood, L. (2004). ‘The Embodiment of Feminist Liberation Theology: The Spiralling of Incarnation’, in Beverley Clack (ed.), Embodying Feminist Liberation Theologies. London: Continuum. Kwok, Pui-lan (2005). Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology. London: SCM. Salomon, F. (2001). ‘Una etnohistoria poco étnica’, Desacatos: Revista de Antropología Social, 7 (Otoño): 65–84. Vuola, E. (1997). Limits of Liberation: Praxis as Method of Latin American Liberation and Feminist Theology. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia.

chapter 22

gl oba liz ation a n d wom e n ’s bodie s i n l at i n a m er ica maría cristina ventura (tirsa)

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don’t go back to sleep Rumi, Poems

In this chapter the aim is to consider globalization and its relationship with women’s bodies in Latin America, both the effects this new face of capitalism is having on women’s bodies in this part of the world and the ways in which women construct modalities as creative resistance strategies. I will go beyond a mere analysis of the socioeconomic impact in a variety of situations to examine what women invent, represent, and endow with power in their discourse, practices, and collective quest to redefine the status of all women and particularly of women excluded from the so-called global economic system. When we come to examine the subject of globalization and the body we notice the presence of two ways of looking, ways steeped in deception and lies. On one hand, the fallacy of a discourse that constructs and represents the body of a universal woman, ignorant of the experiences of women of all parts of the globe, is only too clear. On the other, we see a design for globalization, or what is euphemistically called globalization, which conceals the trap of a market from which the economic and human productive and reproductive benefits flow in only one direction, toward the countries of the center, making it into a vast and pathetic obscenity. That is why we need to be alert, as it says in the fragment of the poem with which this chapter begins, ‘people are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch’.

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For few of us is it a secret that the phenomenon of globalization is not as new as it claims to be, but is an economic, political, social, and cultural event in concord with the first aims of capitalism. Put another way, present-day globalization is in fact merely a phase in the history of the spread of capitalism. Walter Mignolo (2000: xiv and following chapters) says that the new era continues to be an expression of the capitalist mode of production in its continuation of the colonialist power that disciplines and punishes Latin America. We must recognize, however, that it does this in a more sophisticated and profound way. This leads us to affirm with Eduardo Grüner (2002: 245) that the situation today demands a critical understanding of the process of world domination, which cannot be analyzed in abstract terms, or more specifically, without the flesh of materiality—bodily materiality in the here and now that tries in some sense to express real-life experience, a history not only of the present but also situated in it. It is important to stress that, from a Latin American perspective, this materiality has not only a spatial but also a sexual dimension in the bodies of indigenous, black, mestizo, and poor white women.

The trap of globalization There are many sides to the strategy of dominant globalization. As Giulio Girardi states (1999: 17), ‘The beginnings of neo-liberal globalization were inspired by a dualist anthropology which divides humanity into two classes of individuals and peoples: those who were born to submit themselves and those who were born to act; those with the “manifest destiny” to civilize and govern the world, and those whose calling is to play a subordinate role.’ This separation between ‘us’, the force behind the dynamic of exploitation and the organizer of the lives of peoples, and an ‘other’, characterized by its vulnerable, undervalued, and exploited condition, is clear today in all types of social relations: from diplomatic relations between countries (the war against Iraq) to gender relations (political power is a male domain) and relations between generations (absolute control of adults over private areas of young people’s and children’s lives, such as sexuality, pleasure, etc.). What this means from the point of view of the oppressed is that domination, whether expressed in terms of racism, sexism, or adulto-centrism, is not just a pathological phenomenon typical of certain individuals or social groups, but an essential feature of any social system based on exploitative relationships. Domination is an essential characteristic of Western civilization in its neo-liberal period. Neo-liberalism brings with it exclusion, as Maryse Brisson points out (1999: 56). Its appalling economic inequalities, says Saskia Sassen, lead to poverty and unemployment. These conditions foster crime as a way of survival, and cause the dismemberment of the fabric of society, stirring up ethnic animosities as well. We live in a society that feeds the frustration of those who have the right to watch the world on a widescreen television, where they can look but not touch. A huge range

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of products invade and privatize the public. The shopping center is a great shop window of shop windows, imposing its presence on all of us. Crowds of people make pilgrimages to this great temple where the mass of consumerism is held. Most of the devotees contemplate in ecstasy the products that they cannot afford, and the few who can buy submit to the unceasing, exhausting bombardment of offers (Galeano 1998: 269–70). What we have before us is a new version of imperial colonialism, sustained and fed by the dynamic of the conquistador, worshipping the desire for domination and enslaving the rest of the planet, destroying without mercy any opposition that dares to question it. What powers the process is the rush to produce, in tandem with the practices of domination, conquest, and colonization (Roca 2002: 111). In this sense, globalization needs to be examined from the perspective of the two groups of actors involved. One group is subjected to its effects and pain. The other group operates in a more opaque way, setting up transnational corporations or limited companies that, beyond responding to the demands of the market, lead to commercial reorganization on a global scale. As Raúl Fornet-Betancour explains (2001: 325), neo-liberal globalization ‘is no more than a blanket to hide the harsh reality of a new colonization of the world by capital’. And the forces behind this new colonization are not empires in the form of national states but multinational companies or international consortiums, albeit with the same historical consequences for the rest of the world, that is, submitting people to the logic of the capitalist market. This, as we shall see, is a logic that constructs bodies, ‘real’ bodies, as Tania Navarro Swain writes (2000: 70): ‘real women’, seductive, beautiful, tender, silent, images identified as true feminine beings. And ‘real men’, confirmed males, with hard hearts, bulging muscles, intelligent and able to express what they want and think, images of true male beings. So we must probe deeper, as Hugo Assmann suggests (1997: 116), into the ‘anthropological, sociocultural, religious, and ideological obstacles of this bleak landscape, and not seek comfortable refuge in the so-called unmasking of the great enemy supposedly pulling the smallest strings of the economy and of political power.’ That is why it is a challenge to untangle these manipulations from the perspective of our own bodies, part and parcel of this phenomenon, whether consciously or not.

About bodies Businessmen boast of their skill and cunning • • • • • • Bragging to each other of successful depredations, They neglect to consider the ultimate fate of the body Chen Tzu-ang (656–698 ce), poet of the T´ang dynasty

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In the dominant Western intellectual tradition the body has been viewed with suspicion: identified as the source of uncontrollable passions and appetites capable of interrupting the progress of truth and knowledge. The negation of corporality and the corresponding elevation of the mind or spirit express a transhistorical desire to aspire to the intelligible as the highest form of being. The Judeo-Christian tradition saw the body as an obstacle to the attainment of purity, as shown by Descartes (Price and Shildrick 1999: 1–2). From this point on, the body has simply been seen as an unchangeable material, a fixed biological entity in which the plan for transcendence is frustrated. In this way of thinking, the female body was characterized as less than a complete human being, and in the case of black or working-class people, slaves, or animals, the body was associated principally with all that is vulgar. An excellent description of today’s neo-liberal politics can be found in the poem by Chinese poet Chen Tzu-ang quoted above. The author was not acquainted with capitalism as such, and additionally he does not specify which body he is referring to. Despite this, his poem shows that he did understand the mercantilist logic advancing like a triumphant machine without realizing it is at the same time destroying our means of reproducing as a species, which is the true meaning of denying our corporality. From a Latin American perspective, we are particularly interested in the heterogeneity of bodies at the center and on the periphery. The terms ‘periphery’ and ‘center’ are neither static nor unilateral. The periphery can only be seen from the attitude of the center, and the center only from the periphery. This is a differentiation based on reciprocal implications, which highlights as much the difference between them as their equivalence (Toro 1995: 11), and thus is marked by the heterogeneity of social and cultural effects, which, as Nelly Richard states (1994: 210–22), each is the product of the interactions of the transnational market and the mixtures of codes recombined by the shock between networks of consumption and popular symbologies or everyday ritualizations that show up the contradiction inherent in the uniformizing tendency of the progress vector of international modernity. These are Aymara, Maya, Quechua bodies, African American bodies from the islands of the Caribbean or the continent, Bribris and so many others, all marked by the mixing of identities, of interrelating traditions, of hybrid languages. This means that the dimensions of race, class, and sex cannot be ignored. And furthermore, these dimensions influence the way we see and devalue bodies. In contrast, the design for transcendence and the exercise of rationality have been restricted to men alone—and indeed to only a few men, white, middle, or upper class, in good health, and heterosexual—so that women remain locked into their bodies, subject to their natural biological processes. Their bodies are deprived of the right to express the delight of life, the right to eat when they are hungry, to sleep when they are sleepy, the right to feel pleasure. In this sense, it is possible to argue that the globalization of the neo-liberal system shows itself in the way it affects time and space in individual lives. On this we base our proposition on the conclusion that the economic politics of neoliberalism is fundamentalist and suicidal, as it leads not only to the methodical exclusion of ‘other’ nations, cultures, and religions, but also to the exclusion of specific bodies.

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Talking about bodies: the importance of gender My body is not my body, It is the illusion of another being. He knows the art of hiding me And is so astute That he hides me from myself. Carlos Drumond de Andrade What is this body that imposes on me an identity, a place in the world, that carries me through the labyrinth of social and moral norms and values? What is this body I live in, the inverse image of which reflects the lookingglass of others? What is this body that, being just one, can become two and occupy the same space? This female body, reproductive body, where the motherhood that splits me in two is the very thing that integrates me into the social world, into the representation of ‘real woman’. Swain (2000: 47)

So there are bodies fixed in symbolic and socially constructed identities, which listen to talk of a globalized world where supposedly economic growth is the norm and the whole population reaps the benefits of its powerful overflow. Bodies waiting for a moment of salvation with long-awaited gifts from Providence. How far away my body is! The structures of domination that mark specific societies and the organization of the world itself are not only economic, political, and religious, but also educational. The model of man and woman expressed by the vision of the unified organization of the world today is sometimes called ‘planetary’. This is a person who feels s/he is a member of a unitary totality that is under construction, the planet Earth. The political and economic structures of domination play a pedagogical role, working toward the expression of not just the personal model concordant with them, but also the desired model institutions—family, school, university, youth organizations, religious institutions, and so on. Gender may be understood, in the terms of Gayle Rubin (1993: 2, 23), as ‘a set of arrangements through which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity’. In other words, sex/gender systems are not ahistorical emanations of the human mind, but the product of historical human activity. In other words, the difference between the sexes is socially constructed, which means that neither anatomy nor nature can explain the control of women by men, and that this social domination reinterprets, uses, and gives meaning to biological difference, and to motherhood and fatherhood in particular. From this perspective, this globalized world

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sets up as truths a number of fantasies the repetition of which come to form an apparently solid basis for their interpretation. To deepen our understanding of the socioeconomic reality of the world today, we must therefore look at it from a multidimensional viewpoint of gender, class, and ethnic group, bearing in mind, too, the environmental deterioration the planet is suffering. It is important that we learn to understand the world from a multi-sided perspective that enables us to move forward toward a more hopeful future. The use of gender as an analytical category for the understanding of neo-liberal globalization, a process affecting all humanity, entails examining the social organization behind the levels of material production and reproduction of every society in every historical moment. This model of society has a tendency toward the centralization of social power, benefits, resources, and decisions, which has a dramatic impact on the lives of socially disadvantaged groups, women in particular. In Latin America, the bodies are immobilized or in flux, and in them poverty, shelters, hunger, disease, illiteracy, unemployment, overpopulation, ecological imbalances, abuse, and exploitation of children and of the old are plain to see. Women are the ones who suffer most from these ‘problems of the world’, and furthermore they are not consulted about possible solutions. Sick, diseased bodies. Like most women in other parts of the world, Latin American and Caribbean women, for the most part black or indigenous, are poorer than men, and worse still, we have less control over our own lives. This loss of control is exacerbated not only by being poor, but also by the process of construction of a new knowledge controlled by doctors. This new form of control began in the Western world between the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the twentieth, tightening its grip throughout the twentieth century (Martins 2000: 288–9). The authority of medical discourse led to the control of the female by the male, and its principal aim was the unwrapping and subsequent management of women’s bodies. On top of all this, as Maxine Molyneux points out (2001: 141–72), changes in production and employment models and the growth of the informal economy have had their consequences on the meaning of work, as regards security and individual and group identity. In many social groups, full-time work has given way to part-time, casual, or informal work. It is clear, for example, that since the days of colonialism black women have been full-time workers, an economically active sector of the population. They have, however, always been the victims of insecurity and lack of flexibility in the world of work. While women represent half the population of the world and a third of its workforce, they receive only a tenth of global income and possess less than 1% of property. They are also responsible for two-thirds of all hours worked (Morgan 1984: 13). In Latin America, for example, between 2 and 3 million women are employed as seasonal workers, and between 30 and 40 million women run their farms and small businesses in rural areas. Between 70 and 90% of the workforce in the assembly plants near the US border are women. In urban areas in Latin America 45% of women do not have their own source of income, compared with 21% of men.

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Women’s forced illiteracy forms two-thirds of the global total. One of the causes of this illiteracy, as indeed of world poverty, is the burden imposed by patriarchal society: women are the ones who must look after their families, with exclusion their only social and economic reward. This is unpaid work not taken into account in terms of national wealth, as it does not generate money. However much housework is bound up with life itself, in the market economy, because housework does not generate money, it does not lead to economic and social rights. Despite this contribution of women to society, free of charge, they are socially undervalued, because today ‘a person’s value is based on his or her ability to obtain income. The rights of those not directly connected to the market economy (housewives, children) are derived indirectly from those people who actively take part in the market economy’ (Dierckxsens 2004: 55). As Paloma de Villota makes clear (2002: 238–9), despite the fact that women take on a larger proportion of the overall burden of work, as male participation in the labor market is the result of joint production, a large part of which would be impossible if women did not look after members of the family and perform housework, women have limited access to certain social rights, such as retirement pensions. This is because the social security system in many countries of Latin America only recognizes those who perform paid work. Other members of the family are considered dependents of their spouses. A country such as Costa Rica, for example, is no stranger to this situation, which is common to women in most countries. Norma Camacho Pereira (2003: 18) points out, ‘In Costa Rica as in the rest of the world poverty is nothing unusual for women, and in particular for women who are the heads of households.’ According to the author, 21.1% of households were classified as poor in 2001, and 24.5% of households where women were the principal breadwinner lived in conditions of poverty in 2000, compared to 16.6% of households where men fulfilled this role. Unemployment, underemployment, and the lack of quality employment in general is a problem that affects women more than men. The consequences of this are not limited to job security or to higher or lower salaries (though women receive less than 80% that of men of a similar level of education). The scarcity or poor quality of jobs limits access to other resources on which the present and future well-being of women and often of their families depend. In particular, it affects their chances of becoming part of the social security system. It its even more alarming when we consider the situation of people of African origin. A study in Brazil in 2003 revealed that 43% of the black population was living below the poverty line, compared to 20% of the white population. The situation worsens when we look at the figures for abject poverty; while 7% of the white population receive less than a quarter of the minimum per capita wage, the figure for the black population is almost three times higher, at 19%. In the same year, Brazilian women received around two-thirds of men’s salary (an average of 695.4 Brazilian reals for men and 439.9 for women). If we compare inequalities in salary by race, we see that black people received on average around 48% of the

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salary of the white population. And for black women the situation was even worse: they received just 30% of the average income of white males (UNIFEM/IPEA 2005). There is no question that in Latin America there are more women than men living in poverty. Women who are heads of households have less income than men, in poor and in richer households. One-parent households, for the most part with women as the main breadwinner, suffer additional disadvantages caused by the absence of unpaid housework (CEPAL (ECLA) 2002–3). But what we have before us is not only relative poverty and growing inequality, but an alarming situation of abject poverty. Almost three-fifths of the population do not have basic sanitation, nearly a third do not have access to clean water, a quarter do not have adequate housing, and a fifth do not have access to modern health services. A fifth of children do not complete five years of schooling, and the diet of around a fifth does not contain sufficient calories or protein (Pereira 2003: 18–19). This is just a snapshot of our reality, to show us that our Latin American societies are still ruled by power relations notable for inequality and conflict. It is a reality that engenders and reproduces exhaustion.

Tired bodies Tired bodies, with no right to rest, such as that of Rosario Asensio, a 48-year-old black domestic worker and a widow. She lives on the outskirts of the city of Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic. ‘Everyday I get up at four o’clock, make breakfast for the kids and go out to wait for transport to get to work by 6:30.’ She does not even have the right to be sick, as this would mean missing a day’s work and so earning less. Thousands of women live similar experiences in other Latin American countries. It is an exhaustion generated not only by the weight of the neo-liberal market, Latin American style, on their shoulders, but also by the ethical and religious tenets of Christianity, which burdens women with the blame for being women, for having female bodies, a religion that demands that women be selfless, ‘getting up when it is still dark, feeding her servants and giving orders to her subordinates’ (Proverbs 31:15). It is an exhaustion reflected in the faces of so many rural and urban women in every Latin American country: workers in the flower industry, sugar-cane cutters, washerwomen, cooks, hawkers, factory workers with wrinkled, hardened hands. After a hard day’s work in the assembly plants or in the fields, they must then bear the responsibility of dealing with the housework. The theologian and feminist Pilar Aquino (1996: 100–2) is quite right in saying that the global economic system works against women, their bodies, and their deepest desires for fulfillment. Given this situation, she proposes that all believers work toward the establishment of a fair economic system that holds the welfare of all people as an integral part of the Christian faith.

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In general, in the countries of Latin America it is clear that the numbers of those who do not eat are growing day by day, and the number of those who do are diminishing. For the most part women live to work rather than work to live. Everywhere increasing levels of poverty, violence, and unemployment inevitably produce bodies that bear the marks of different kinds of abuse.

Violated bodies Gender relations, based since the beginning on the construction of the social representations of male and female, continue to be marked by violence. Violence against women is a global problem that, even if they try to hide it, is shown on and publicized by women’s own bodies. In Latin America and the Caribbean, women of all ages suffer or have suffered some type of physical or verbal aggression. Figures reveal how serious the situation is: 8 out of 10 Ecuadorians, 53% of Costa Ricans, 1 in 6 Salvadoreans are harmed. Between the end of 2002 and the middle of 2004, at least 20 women and children were sexually abused and brutally murdered in El Salvador, 28 women in 2005 (up to the time of writing) in the border town of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico alone, and 18 up to the time of writing in Puerto Rico. When this gender violence is combined with other kinds of violence, economic, political, religious, or based on race, class, age, and so forth, the situation becomes more alarming still. Women are in constant danger in all Latin American countries. Men and white people in general often use sexual violence as a means to enforce their total domination over women of other races. If they are black women, they are generally seen by the rest of society as ‘asking for it’, as they are the ones who labor under the weight of stereotypes. In general, they have been and continue to be discriminated against because of their ‘indecent’ bodies.

The market’s ‘model’ bodies If there is one plaything the market cannot stop playing with, it is women’s bodies. The image and meanings attributed to bodies are not pre-existing surfaces on which roles and social values are engraved. On the contrary, they are a social invention that highlights a biological fact, and, although culturally variable in itself, ends up being natural and indispensable for defining what is female. The body is a cultural product, and so a practical place for direct social control. Through norms such as measurements, skin color, and fashion, habits are created that automatically take the form of bodies. And so, for the poor who are in the majority in Latin America, life is a constant frustration and distress. Many women try to hide their bodies from others, ashamed of their ‘physical appearance’.

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We are bound to parameters of beauty drawn up by the market. And on top of this, the impact of racial discrimination makes women shy, with low self-esteem, since the privilege gained by closeness to the model body demanded by the market society is not to be underestimated, and this leads to a constant increase in the production of cosmetics. Weight loss industries, the medical sector, and advertising campaigns insist that the ideal of good health is slimness, and that finely cut features and straight or permed hair is more beautiful (Lazzetto and Sanford 2000: 107–10). Poor women in Latin America, whether indigenous, black, mestizo, or from the countryside, appear to feel threatened by the big city and its insatiable appetite for bodies. This applies especially to women whose body structure is different, perhaps with hands hardened by manual work (like agricultural workers, washerwomen, or domestic workers) or thin because of poor nutrition, or with hands of different colors, or black women who have historically been proud of their large size in most Afro-American cultures. This reality contrasts with the model of society and body promoted by the market economy.

Bodies in motion—crossing borders One of the most alarming social phenomena that the neo-liberal economic system has produced is the mass migration we see today. If there is just one experience that has defined the past ten years in Latin America, it is the migration of vast numbers of people both within and outside the country. Growing rootlessness is now a reality all over the world. This uprooting and the destruction of the extended family household disrupt the ecosystem that binds a population to its cultural and spiritual centers. More than 90% of all refugees in the world are women and children. In the second half of the twentieth century, in most Latin American countries, the pattern has been one of large population movements. These movements are principally caused by the alarming level of poverty described earlier. The past five years have seen an approximate increase in the numbers of the poor of five million, and great masses of people in rural and marginal urban areas live on only a dollar a day. Some, like the Haitian population of the bateyes (sugar workers’ towns) in the Dominican Republic, do not even have that much. This impoverishment leads to constant movement, generating great migrations of women and men, not only within the country but also to Europe and the United States. While mass human migration has a long history, it is only recently that female migration has been the object of study in Latin America. A variety of factors make women migrants largely invisible. At least until 1984, women obliged to migrate were largely absent from any policy recommendations made in studies on this subject. As Marina Ariza states (2000: 39), the most important reason for this was the bias of gender construction, because of which

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female migration was considered to be ‘associational migration’, in other words, migration that is a sub-product of the migration of others, usually the ‘the man in charge’. For this reason we must analyze the relationship of the migration of women with many types of inequity, such as class, gender, and race. For black migrants in Latin America, for example, the situation becomes even more difficult and dangerous, as they are not only economically, but also sexually vulnerable. The experience of women migrants in Latin America shows that migration does not destroy the primary sphere of identification, which continues to be the home and family life in general. For example, in the Dominican Republic, the internal and external migration of women have provided an economic boost to their families, and the possibility that the social process of migration affects or alters gender relations cannot be discounted. While it is true that, through migration, women in Latin America have in many cases enabled their families to improve their lot, this cannot hide the destruction of social bonds in their countries of origin. It can only make us sad and angry to be forced to admit that many women and men must leave their homeland because of the discrimination and neglect to which the majority of the population is subject. In these countries it seems that only a small group has a right to a decent life, and the dream of one day achieving dignity is draining away from the country. This is why it is hard to disagree with R. Castel (1995: 25) in his affirmation that physical death is an integral part of the process of globalization. Today we produce 10% more food than is needed to feed all humanity, and yet 35,000 children die of hunger every day. Fifty-five million people in Latin America and the Caribbean were suffering from malnutrition to some degree at the end of the last decade. It is estimated that 11% of the population suffers from malnutrition. Nine percent of children under five show symptoms of acute malnutrition (low weight) and 19.4% evidence chronic malnutrition (height below the norm for age). This last figure is particularly serious because its negative effects are irreversible (CEPAL (ECLA)-PMA 2002–3). In like manner cultural death is also a reality since the homogenization of social life and a unitary way of thought devalue the actual identities of persons and peoples, rapidly level traditional ways of life, and weaken human beings’ attachments to their roots. The intent is global control that will allow these forces to present themselves as a universal culture. This is a culture that tries to dominate and control everything. It also causes legal death, in that even the most basic human rights of men, and still more those of women, are ignored, and so bodies are created that are to all intents and purposes superfluous to the world, bodies that begin to feel that even being exploited can be considered a privilege. Faced with this reality, it becomes essential to return to the subject, not in terms of the right of individuals to justify themselves, or as the center for control and possession of the world, but as described by Raúl Fornet-Betancourt (2001: 316), quoting Sartre, ‘The principle of subjectivity means that the leitmotif of what we call the program of the process of the vital-existential formation of the subject is not the idea of individual selfjustification of an egocentric existence but the ethical option of the fight for justice.’

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Weaving other histories One can hardly avoid stressing that the possibilities for peoples and groups to become involved and take part in this global society have become still more unequal and unjust. However, even in this context, it is hard to believe that the forgotten and excluded masses will accept their fate with resignation and wait quietly for the day of their collective death. Neo-liberal globalization does not have the last word. At the moment, the most important factor for groups marginalized by the systemic structures of domination is the constituent power in every individual, a power that can work in favor of justice if it is channeled collectively. And so it is claimed that ‘faced with the subjugation the presentday model is imposing, extreme personal situations arise, from disappointment and despair to resistance and the search for seams of transformation; today’s model sets challenges which are impossible to face alone. Collective work becomes more important, and thought processes unattached to old, inflexible frameworks and ways of thinking’ (Gonzáles 2002: 75). Many Latin American women have understood and recognized that their most important asset is the power they have as political force on a world scale: the magnitude of their suffering combined with their size as a collective unit. Women are not an oppressed minority, but a majority in all parts of the world. From this position it is not simply a question of changing or criticizing the ‘powerless’ status they have been assigned, but of using the power they have to redefine all existing structures and ways of life. The affirmation of women’s power is by its nature a way to provide a counterweight to the aims of present-day globalization through the internationalization of production, which is not designed to lead to the redistribution of wealth and the decentralization of power, but the capacity to produce and reproduce power through further centralization, with its concomitant multiplication of the excluded and impoverished. This power can be seen in the capacity to build localized, everyday utopias. Globalization should be a unique opportunity to universalize the local and localize the universal. It is important not to lose our critical perspective, however, as what is touted as ‘global’ or ‘universal’ is in fact a First World, capitalist Western culture. It cannot be denied that globalization and so-called localization are at the same time the driving forces and the expression of a new polarization and stratification of the world’s population, now divided into the globalized rich and the localized poor. However, as Fornet-Betancour states (2001: 330–1), for there to be any appropriation by the local, what is called local must have a recognized right to self-determination. In other words, the concept of globalization points to the need to grasp a fundamental reality: for the first time in the history of humanity, we are all part of just one world. It is a fact that all the planet’s peoples and cultures are now interconnected through structures created by the capitalist market economy, that is to say, communication and information networks, common environmental problems, global popular culture, the

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financial market, fashion and tourism, science and technology. Likewise it cannot be denied that we are linked to other peoples and human groups through similar struggles and aspirations, through shared dreams of freedom and emancipation, and above all through a planetary consciousness. A new horizon is opening up for humanity, in the way people are coming to understand the world and themselves, and in the possibilities for cooperation and solidarity. The challenges humanity is facing demand a process of mutual understanding between peoples and human groups in relation to questions that transcend the limits of individual symbolic and cultural universes. It is a process of transformation that has changed mental and cultural structures and blown away narrow ways of thinking and closed systems. The need to think globally and act locally has arisen, along with a planetary sense and a concept of responsibility for the common destiny of the world. And the first task to be performed is the creation of a new framework of value judgments for the body. This new horizon before us unlocks a vast potential energy, mobilizes the will and develops creativity, challenges us to build a world that is home to all of us, where we can feel all human beings to be our sisters and brothers.

Freeing bodies Given the situation in Latin America, women have challenges before us, individually and collectively: challenges that go beyond announcing the coming of the Kingdom for the poor, but at the same time inspire us to build what Giraldi (1999: 18–19) calls a ‘mobilizing utopia’, which despite seeming impossible is capable of inspiring action with specific aims in the present, a project that can break the chains of fatalism, stimulate the imagination, awaken creativity, and lead to new relationships between women and men, and among women themselves. Poor women have understood that it is not enough to protest against injustice, and they now have before them the challenge of transforming situations and making effective decisions. We must free women’s bodies, trapped as they are in the falsehoods of a global discourse that organizes the imagination in metaphors and narratives that express the dispersal of meaning. We see every day that we are part of a new culture that we do not identify with, members of a nation that does not belong to us, that we are building a common realm of the imagination that comes from a space alien to us, that we are starting to participate in a temporal dynamic unconnected with our reality and our history. Discourses that make bodies not our bodies: My body of every day My body taken away from me My body the delinquent Yearning for what it will not accept. My body, the body of the crime. I bear the burden of my body and my social guilt; not mine,

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But my personal guilt; from that I free myself and free you, Imprisoned body of mine. Rosa Ofelia Murrieta, ‘My Body Is Mine’

Despite this, through women’s movements we are discovering that our fundamental struggle is the Right to Be. This right centers on the freeing, in a holistic sense, of our body, and the capacity to make decisions regarding it, being able to decide about our own lives. That is why the subject of sexuality cannot be absent from any reflection about the effects of globalization on women’s bodies. Economic measures and their social results that disproportionately reduce women on our continent to poverty not only negate our bodies, but also deny us the right to pleasure, which is part of any complete sexuality. It is clear that the problematic situation of women in Latin America is deeply rooted in the way we consider or do not consider our bodies. Therefore any alternative to neo-liberal globalization from the perspective of corporality itself must take sexuality into account, or put another way, it must take on itself the task of freeing sexuality from all the traps. To put any alternative into practice, it is necessary to exercise power, and sexuality is nothing more than power over our own bodies.

The project of sexuality—a response to neo-liberal ideology When we refer to sexuality, we are referring specifically to the humanity and sacredness of the bodies of women and men, without forgetting nature itself. Sexuality is part of non-human bodies too, an energy in us and in nature. Sexuality affects our whole way of existing, of developing, of relating to the outside world. It has to do with pleasure, but it leads to justice, in that it is the fullest way to live justice, as it puts us in contact with others and with the environment we live in. At the same time it makes us critical of the little instances of injustice with which society tries to deceive us, because it makes us sensitive to our bodies and to those of others. Faced with globalization and its traps to ensure the exclusion and death of the large majority, sexuality opens our hands to form chains of solidarity. It brings with it a sense of complete incorporation, of connection to everything, as women or men. Because our corporality is the emergence of our being in the world, it is the foundation of our sense of well-being and our ability to relate in and to the world. This way of looking at sexuality breaks with the belief that women and men are merely ‘sexual’ in terms of genital contact, which leaves nature itself out of the equation. This sexuality is a way to strengthen hope, to celebrate meeting, celebration, and humor, as human beings are hungry for beauty and elevation, for love and the pleasure of life, as well as for bread and justice. Without sexuality, life becomes a bitter pill, and the poor of Latin America are not bitter, however bad their living conditions, because they firmly believe in the day-to-day living of life. Because sexuality is part of the deepest instincts of

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humanity, it is part of the very freedom of human beings and of peoples. It carries in it the idea of togetherness, and therefore connection with other social beings (Aquino 2003: 172–82), a relationship marked by respect and empathy. The alternative ways of thinking and living that women are creating represent acts of resistance and creativity often inspired by principles inherited from traditional experience, but which, applied in the historical context of new colonizations, create new meanings and new definitions, making a fluidity of identity possible.

Alternative social activity As has been shown throughout this analysis, economic violence against women occurs through the combination of multiple power structures. In the same way, the variety of social activity undertaken by women fighting for justice must necessarily also be polymorphous. Through these activities women wish to show that life does have meaning as long as one is working and fighting to improve it. The conditions of possibility of human life are bodily conditions, and so they include every dimension of society, including economics, of course. While women’s strategies in the face of the economic, political, cultural, and social processes of capitalist globalization may be heterogeneous and multidimensional, and are often even considered contradictory, they can be understood too as a search for meaning. This is why alternatives must be considered from a political, economic, social, cultural, religious, and epistemological perspective. They are not only a group of forces or power relationships, but they also represent the social space in which they exist as subjects. The way, for example, in which sexuality is seen as a relationship between bodies in search of justice is at the same time a meeting of discourses that change and clash in a struggle to give new meaning to the world, in a dynamic interwoven with power relationships. In Latin America many women have recognized the system of the neo-liberal market economy as being based on patriarchal values, which not only make them poorer economically and socially but also drive social sexual relationships, reinforcing male control over women in the exploitation of their work as mothers, housewives, and wives. It is through this unpaid work that the material and symbolic reproduction of society is ensured. That is why women, when organized into movements, have fought to be part of the paid labor market and demanded a more equal salary. Nevertheless, the unique experiences of women have enabled them to see economics in a different light and with different creative processes from those of the neo-liberal globalization economy. Or put another way, they manage to conceive and put into practice an Economics for Life, an Economics focused on Life, or in short an Economics of Life. Black women have again played an important part in this, since throughout history they have had to work, formerly without being paid and later for a pittance, and to invent a form of economics for life, for their own lives and that of their community.

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So these experiences have been forged, and with the support of women’s movements from civic society and churches, and feminist movements, they have led to instances of transformation. As one example, microbusinesses have been an important means of subsistence for many women in Latin America. However, the economic precariousness in which many of these projects originate and the many kinds of discrimination that they suffer mean that many do not manage to become viable businesses capable of reproducing the same production process, providing adequate reward for work, and generating benefits for the businesswomen. This is why the call for support for these microbusinesses run by women has not ceased. Subsistence microbusinesses are not an alternative option for women, but the only possibility, given the lack of options. It is clear, however, that to achieve this it is necessary to rethink economic values and models, and to bring about a genuine democratization of the institutions responsible for economic policy, at both local and international levels. Another issue that has been and continues to be raised by women is health, as they realize that a different society must be organized around human needs. This is a society where medical treatment is not merchandise, and women’s bodies are not the object of markets and experiments dictated by the laws of profit. It is necessary to build a health system that forms an integral part of community life, in which knowledge and know-how are not the sole province of the ‘experts’, but spring from the experience of everyone. It is in these possible and different ways that women are starting to exercise power, breaking down the univocity of images and meanings, and visualizing the reality of a multitude of possibilities. They are unburying their bodies, pushing to escape from the traps of lies, poverty, and suffering imposed by the neo-liberal system.

Works Cited Aquino, María Pilar (2003). ‘El uso de la palabra como afirmación de la Plena Humanidad’, in Clara Ajo and Marianela de la Paz (Eds), Teología y Género. Havana: Editorial Caminos. (1996). ‘Economic Violence in a Latin American Perspective’, in Mary John Mananzan (Ed.), Women Resisting Violence: Spirituality for Life. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 100–2. Ariza, Marina (2000). Ya no soy la que dejé atrás . . . Mujeres migrantes en República Dominicana. Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales. Assman, Hugo (1997). ‘Apuntes sobre el tema del sujeto’, in Perfiles teológicos para un nuevo milenio. San José, Costa Rica: CETELA and DEI, 116. Brisson, Maryse (1999). ‘La globalización capitalista . . . una exigencia de las ganancias’, in Franz Hinkelammert (Ed.), El huracán de la globalización. San José, Costa Rica: Departamento Ecuménico de Investigaciones (DEI), 56. Castel, Robert (1995). Les métamorphoses de la question sociale. Paris: Fayard. CEPAL-PMA (ECLA (Economic Commission for Latin America)) (2002–3). ‘Análisis del Impacto Social y Económico de la desnutrición infantil en Centroamérica’. De Villota, Paloma (2002). ‘Globalización y desigualdad desde la perspectiva de género’, in José Tamayo-Acosta (dir.), 10 palabras claves sobre globalización. Estella, Spain: Editorial Verbo Divino.

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Dierckxsens, Wim (2004). ‘La utopía de otra economía posible’, in E. Toussaint et al. (Eds), La utopía de otro mundo posible. Alternativas. Fornet-Betancourt, Raúl (2001). Transformación intercultural de la filosofía. Bilbao: Editorial Desclée de Brouwer. Galeano, Eduardo (1998). Patas arriba: la escuela del mundo al revés. Mexico City: Siglo XXI. Giraldi, Giulio (1999). Entre la globalización neo-liberal y el desarrollo local sostenible—para la refundación de la esperanza. Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala. Gonzáles Butrón, María Arcelia (2002). Desde los cuerpos: de la crítica a la economía de Mercado. Morelia, Mexico: Centro Michoacano de Investigación y Formación (CEMIF). Grüner, Eduardo (2002). El fin de las pequeñas historias: de los estudios culturales al retorno (imposible) de lo trágico. Buenos Aires: Paidós. Iazzetto, Demetria, and Sanford, Wendy (2000). ‘Body image’, by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (Eds), Nuestros Cuerpos, Nuestras Vidas. New York: Siete Cuentos Editorial, 107–13. Martins, Ana Paula (2000). ‘A medicina da mulher: visǒes do corpo feminino na constituição da obstetrícia e da ginecologia no século XIX’, Doctoral Thesis, University of Campinas. Mignolo, Walter (2000). Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Molyneux, Maxine (2001). ‘Perspectivas comparativas sobre género y ciudadanía’, in Paloma de Villota (Ed.), Globalización a qué precio: El impacto enlas mujeres del Norte y del Sur. Barcelona: Editorial Icaria, 141–72. Moreira, Alberto da Silva (2002). ‘Globalización: retos a la teología de la liberation’, in Juan José Tamayo-Acosta (dir.), 10 palabras claves sobre globalización. Estella, Spain: Editorial Verbo Divino. Morgan, Robin (1984). Sisterhood Is Global. New York: Anchor. Pereira, Norma Camacho (2003). El perfil de riesgo de la microempresa de mujeres: una mirada a mujeres desde su escenario cotidiano. San José, Costa Rica: Instituto Nacional de las Mujeres (INAMU). Price, Janet, and Shildrick, Margrit (1999). Feminist Theory and the Body. New York: Routledge. Richard, Nelly (1994). ‘Latinoamérica y Posmodernidad’, in Hermann Herlinghaus and Monika Walter (Eds), Posmodernidad en la periferia: Enfoques latinoamericanos de la nueva teoría cultural. Berlin: Langer, 210–22. Roca, Joaquín García (1999). ‘Globalización económica y solidaridad humana’, in Foro Ignacio Ellacuría (Ed.), La globalización y sus excluidos. Estella, Spain: Editorial Verbo Divino, 111. Rubin, Gayle (1993). O tráfago de mulheres: notas sobre a “economía política” do sexo. Recife, Brazil: SOS Corpo, 2, 23. St-Hilaire, Colette (1995). Quand le développement s´intéresse aux femmes. Paris: L ’Harmattan. Swain, Tania Navarro (2000). ‘A invenção do corpo feminino ou a hora e a vez do nomadismo identitário?’, in Tania Navarro Swain (Ed.), Feminismos: teorias e perspectivas. Brasilia: UnB, 47–83. Toro, Alfonso (1995). ‘Post-Coloniality and Post-Modernity: Jorge Luis Borges: The Periphery at the Centre, the Periphery as the Centre, the Centre of the Periphery’, in Fernando de Toro, Alfonso de Toro, and Kathleen Quinn (Eds), Borders and Margins: Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 11.

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United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and Institute For Applied Economic Research (Ipea) (2005), ‘Portrait of Inequalities’. On request from [email protected] Winters, Marianne (2000). ‘Violence against Woman’, by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (Eds), Nuestros Cuerpos, Nuestras Vidas. New York: Siete Cuentos Editorial, 167–86. Zamora, José Antonio (1999). ‘Globalización y cooperación al desarrollo: desafíos éticos’, in Foro Ignacio Ellacuría (Ed.), La globalización y sus excluidos. Estella, Spain: Editorial Verbo Divino, 158–60.

Further Reading Bourdieu, Pierre (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dierckxsens, Wim (1998). Los límites de un capitalismo sin ciudadanía. San José, Costa Rica: DEI.

chapter 23

gl oba liz ation a n d na r r ati v e cheryl kirk-duggan

People worldwide experience supreme beings or powers and speak of their experiences through stories. From Genesis, the Gilgamesh epic, and the Vedas to sacred creation narratives of Yoruba, Shinto, Apache, and Cherokee, humankind has pondered its beginnings, witnessed divine revelation, and transmitted these myths orally and in written form. With modern technology, we have access to even more stories, global theologies, and philosophies. But what do these narratives teach us about life? Rich in textures, characters, parables, allegories, and symbols, stories communicate a myriad of dynamics, from epistemology and ethics to rhetoric and revelation. Stories empower and instruct, but also penalize and invalidate those deemed other. Some voices are privileged. Other voices are silenced and oppressed. Some narratives transform and encourage renewal. Other texts humiliate and destroy, stomping on creative cultural imaginations, and scapegoating persons because of gender, class, race, ability, sexual orientation, age, and other categories of identification. While some epics and myths have elevated, empowered, and endorsed women and feminine deities, other stories and their interpretations have dishonored or demonized women and made them responsible for the world’s evils. My essay explores from a Womanist perspective the complexities of how commingled systems, texts, and violence shape lives, stories, and experiences of the sacred across the globe. After presenting my methodology and exploring concepts of narrative, theology, and globalization, I shall analyze an assortment of texts, noting points of ambiguity, especially in the intersections between story, belief, and worldview. The selected texts represent a variety of narratives or modes of expression that convey tensions between inclusion and exclusion, and that pertain to community development, yet are not often used together in feminist or Womanist analysis. My texts include: (1) The Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1–9); (2) selected Articles from the 1948 United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which focus on what happens to human bodies—living bio-texts or embodied narratives in and of themselves); (3) the song, ‘We are the World’ (1985); and (4) human bio-texts, such as bodies of victims of sex trafficking, sexual assault, and rape as an act of war.

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Womanist thought: exploring narratives ‘Womanist’, derived by Alice Walker from the term ‘womanish’ (1983: xi), refers to global women of African descent who are audacious, outrageous, in charge, and responsible; a black feminist or feminist of color. Womanist theory invites one to live in the present, be aware of history, engage in radical discerning, challenge, analyze, and make a difference. Womanist theory is a discipline, thought process, and lifestyle concerned with exposure, analysis, and transformation of societal and personal injustices affecting the marginalized, as symbolized by poor black women. Womanist theory is interdisciplinary and examines oral, aural, visual, and written media, as well as bio-texts to create its epistemology, hermeneutics, and philosophy of intellectual, spiritual, and holistic life. Womanist emancipatory theory engenders mutuality, community, and stewardship of freedom amid responsibility, and honors the image of God, the essential goodness in everyone. The body of knowledge and research of Womanist thought includes, but is not limited to, theology, ethics, and sacred texts that excavate questions about the divine and human, faith, thought, power, language, values, praxis, history, behavior, culture, aesthetics, and community in diverse contexts. Womanists champion God-given freedom and see God as a personal, not an abstract philosophical construct. Womanist analysis mines from both theory and lived reality, a combination critical for engaging theology and narrative amid globalization. By using a Womanist reading founded on noted black feminist bell hooks’ rubric of ‘killing rage’ as a transformative metaphor, I shall use twelve liberative and creative concepts for reading narratives. Hooks argues that oppression is insidious. If we pretend that it does not exist, that we do not see or know how to change it, oppression will continue. Change requires commitment. Denial fuels our collusion in oppression. One way to alter denial is to employ ‘killing rage’: a revolutionary resistance, a place of aliveness where one names, unmasks, and engages self and others in profound politicization and self-recovery in order to grow and change (hooks 1996: 12, 16). Pathological, addictive, and dysfunctional behaviors dull pain and rage, and we become complicit with white supremacist patriarchy. We must temper rage by engaging a continuum of emotional responses toward self-determination (19). For hooks, sharing rage facilitates communication and builds relationships; dampening rage leads to assimilation and forgetfulness. ‘Killing rage’, an electrifying tool for change, energizes and encourages those who experience it, but thwarts violence. It initiates action and exposes how apathy, dominance, misery, and complicit thoughts and actions bind us. It allows us to experience narratives anew as we educate for freedom (4, 8, 19). By using twelve themes that emerge from the concept of ‘killing rage’—radical, revolutionary, righteousness, revelation, rhetoric, realization, risky, representational, rising, restorative, relational, and resilience—we can analyze the content and context of narratives in a way to inspire transformation and just action. ‘Killing rage’, as a lens for reading globalization, theology, and a variety of texts, thus encourages originality and poses difficult, reforming questions that lead toward healing and justice in life-giving ways.

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Playing hopscotch: globalization, narrative, and theology Hopscotch is a game in which one tosses a stone into an area drawn on the ground and then hops through it and back to regain the stone. Game rules vary according to the group and number of players. Because little girls tend to be hopscotch players, hopscotch makes a good metaphorical lens for exploring language about women’s experiences and stories. All players have the opportunity to win (even though, because winning is determined by accuracy of throwing the stone, staying off the lines, and strength and balance, not everyone may score easily), and to win in a game that offers communal enjoyment. A childhood game like hopscotch thus invokes the possibility of transformation, and when used in concert with a form of revolutionary resistance such as ‘killing rage’, it provides us with a way for critiquing both how scholars talk about globalization, theology, and narratives and the impact of economics, culture, and politics on women’s lives. Globalization, a business marketplace practice, affects the designing and developing of financial, technical, personnel, marketing, managerial, and other entrepreneurial decisions for facilitating economic integration and worldwide interdependence of countries, ignoring traditional political boundaries and historic geographical limitations. Globalization emerged with voyages of discovery, land theft via manifest destiny, imperial hubris, freebooting conquest, and colonialism. Recent expansion of technology and increased interdependence has made globalization an even more critical issue in understanding economic, political, cultural, and demographic interconnectedness. When viewed through the lens of hopscotch, we are invited to notice how, in the process of globalization, in the fluid mix of transnational entities, production, people, investment, and information, a particular authority constructs a new sociocultural, economic, political world order (Brysk and Shafir 2004: 4). Globalization exploits and commodifies people through economic and political hegemony, and unequal distribution of resources, and facilitates the movement of power from weak to strong states, and from states to markets (5). ‘Killing rage’, as revolutionary risk, presses us to ask about the impact of globalization on the lives of the ‘least of these’—poor black women and poor women globally—and the levels of our complicity in the process. As a community engaged in hopscotch, as people offering a chance of succeeding, we are thus forced to ask how we can create hopeful possibilities to make a differences in such women’s lives. A Womanist reading of revolutionary risk via hopscotch must also wrestle with how we engage in theology and the structures and functions of narratives. Tensions between belief systems, the quest for justice, and lived-oppression call for us to focus on our human capacity to care and change through prophetic imagination, and to explore the role of creative expression. Narrative, a mechanism for storytelling, allows us to display this creativity by making events and thoughts engaging. Narrative is made up of character, which involves the development of attributes. Scenes are its arenas of action, and time frames the story’s events.

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Narrative technique is use of descriptive dialogue and writing. Narrative’s purpose provides information about the intended action (Anne Fadiman and Joel Rawson, quoted in Scanlon (2003)). Often complex and dynamic, narratives have a lot to teach us, particularly about the use of language to create meaning, and how history scripts one’s complex identity (Mathur n.d.). Thus narratives, as complex, powerful, and fluid texts, can be engaged in order to investigate their interactive world processes (globalization) and to discern experiences of faith, God, and humanity (theology), especially when viewed through hopscotch. I shall begin with the story of the Tower of Babel.

Narrative run amok: Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1–9) The Tower of Babel is an excellent foil for exploring narrative and globalization. In Genesis, the text suggests that there is only one language spoken on Earth, and thereby implicitly rejects different dialects, nuances, and inflections. The narrative introduces migration, building construction, and a city where people become one. The divine character indicates that the people’s perfect communication means that nothing is impossible for them, and determines to go down and confuse their language, creating chaos and a world of different languages. The text thus lends itself to an analysis of divine confusion versus human control, and I shall also use it to explore women’s epistemology. Genesis 11 sits at the crossroads of primeval stories and patriarchal narratives. Previously in the text, God has responded to a rebellious people who had repeatedly failed to recognize God. Such failure to obey shatters the divine–human relationship, so God ultimately intervenes with the flood as reproach. Each reprimand is a response to a particular sin. Amid sin and grace, people act and God responds, toward promises bestowed in Genesis 12: 1–3, where God covenants to give Abram land, a son, and a relationship between Abram’s people and God forever. Genesis 10 adds Israel’s story to all the world’s nations, emphasizing her accountability. Although it mentions other languages for different peoples, the narrative’s real force is not about language development or national identity, but about theological questions of unity and scattering (Bratcher 2008). Genesis 11 focuses on Sumerian arrogance as the people build a tower that challenges God’s power. Israelites twist ‘Bav-El’, Gate of God, into Baffle/Babble Town. God reverses tables on the Sumerians, trumps their ingenuity, tempers their arrogance, and diminishes their empire building. Unity dissolves into divergent communities as God leaves them with difference: of language, people, communities, and cultures. The farmers and shepherds defy the Babylonian empire’s advance between Babylon (the city, ‘the Tower’) and Sinai (the wild, ‘the Mountain’) (Waskow 2001). ‘The whole earth’ (Gen 11: 1) rhetorically signals theological issues. Because God acts in response to the Tower, rather than the huge Babylonian ziggurats or large step pyramids, the real concern of the story is not the construction but the intent behind the tower’s formation.

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Human beings constructed the Tower of Babel to enshrine themselves. Their self-definition contrasts sharply with the divine action whereby God promises to empower Abram. Dennis Bratcher notes that, ironically, people fear being scattered and now God does not want them scattered. While they find meaning in their quest, their own human pride and arrogance are problematic: people do not like God or anyone saying what they can and cannot do. God does not like humans deciding the same for God. Modern Towers of Babel might include the World Trade Center towers before 9/11 and New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. The Twin Towers, like ziggurats reaching to heaven, symbolized heighted greed and capitalistic consumerism, where the haves got more, the have-nots were robbed, manipulated, and got even less. Those who consumed more produced less. New Orleans—a disaster waiting to happen as a seaport on a swamp situated in a fishbowl between a flooding river and two major bodies of water in ‘hurricane alley’—also shows human hubris defying, in this case, God’s natural environment. The aftermath of the World Trade Center suicide crashes and Hurricane Katrina reflect an inability of responders to communicate. Disruption and alienation resulting from human beings becoming gods underlies Genesis 11, where people focus on unity to set themselves apart from God. Theologically, creating human unity for the wrong reasons may precipitate future unspeakable harm. Metaphorically, the scattering and multiple languages depict God’s revelation and God’s purposes for humanity. Often when people violate God’s purposes, disorder or babble occurs (Bratcher 2008). Erecting towers or Holy Roman/Anglo-American empires can cause disorder and, significantly, oppression for those deemed other. Genesis 11 demonstrates human compulsion and obsession to erect monuments in hopes of a peaceful future, argues Bob Deffinbaugh; the Tower is only a detail, not the real problem. A distorted common language endorses unbelief and disobedience, thus embezzling grace. God prevents people from achieving their desired evil (Deffinbaugh 2009). Amid rebellion, and the arrogance, and pride of human activity, the core problem is fear: fear of obscurity drives some to acts of shame and daring, excessive tedium, or self-aggrandizement in order to take that which belongs to God. God halts human progress, and satire highlights the foolishness of human activity (Deffinbaugh 2009). Building a city does not threaten God’s rule. However, the human belief that there is no human limit to human progress and human perfectibility is problematic. Assuming human unwarranted self-confidence if people succeeded with their ‘edifice complex’, God confuses human language in order to clarify reality, abruptly ending the Tower project. Ironically, many people desire most what can destroy them, as they falsely identify with and find real meaning in the accumulation of wealth and bricks and mortar that bear their names. False activity and shallow relationships make us miss life’s meaning, enshrining our insecurity (Deffinbaugh 2009). Three readings of the Genesis 11 narrative by so-called racial ethnic scholars reflect diverse ways of ascribing meaning and identity, and provide an opportunity to search for revolutionary resistance and optimistic transformation. The African Blue Bird story, which contextualizes Solomon Avotri’s reading of Genesis 11, is a folktale that concerns a human community connecting with earth and Sky (Nyame/God) in African traditions (Levison and Pope-Levison 1999: 17). The Blue Bird folktale addresses why people do not have the

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power to affect life, their salvation, or their own group. Avotri argues that when God causes confusion, halting tower construction, God acts to remain transcendent and unreachable. Human identity evokes powerlessness, and people find meaning and connection with Nyame/God. Paradoxically, however, God remains close to humanity. While the God of the Hebrew Bible is an ethnocentric God, with covenantal relations to Israel, Nyame is not related to a particular people (20–4). Thus, by eliminating a particular chosen group or elect, a resistance against elitism optimistically moves toward inclusion of others. An Asian reading focuses on imperialism. Choan-Seng Song frames his reading of Genesis 11 within a story concerning Japanese colonial conquest of Taiwan. After being defeated by Japan, China ceded Taiwan to Japan in 1895, but a group of Taiwanese villagers desired to find meaning in the experience of peace. Therefore, five Taiwanese brothers tried to negotiate for peace with Japanese soldiers via writing in Chinese characters, which both groups understood, but all five brothers were murdered as they approached the Japanese (Levison and Pope-Levison 1999: 27–36). For Song, conflict resides between human beings, not between God and humanity. Those with tremendous power, with financial and political resources, identify with excess and accumulation, building monetary Towers of Babel, perpetuating an unjust global economic order. God strives and suffers with people as they struggle for justice (31–2). Song challenges us to engage in revolutionary resistance toward community where ‘one language and the same words’ can be heard in ‘many languages and different words’ (32), a shift or hopscotch of justice, inclusion, and diversity. A Latino reading of Genesis 11 reflects on genocide and colonialism. Using the blitzkrieg of 1552, when Pizarro landed and began demolishing the Tahuantinsuyu (Inca) empire, José Miguez-Bonino also reflects on the Babel story. Speaking of language as a tool of communication, conquest, and dilemma, he posits that Nimrod, who begins building his empire in Babel, is a tyrant who represents Assyrian or Babylonian kings (Levison and Pope-Levison 1999: 13–16). The text denounces the ancient colonialism found in the false unity of Babylonian domination and imperial arrogance, and celebrates a liberation brought about by new ways of speaking that brings freedom to different nations. God’s action of going to see and act is God’s judgment on colonialism and the deliverance of people: it is hopscotch or transformation enacted by the divine. God wants a new unity and blessing, not domination. Revolutionary resistance asks whether there can there be unity and universality that requires eliminating all languages, or adoration of a tower.

A Womanist reading engages these voices of liberation, via justice and intimacy A Womanist reading of Avotri’s, Song’s, and Miguez-Bonino’s interpretations of the Tower story unmasks imperialism, genocide, and colonialism, but works for global justice, liberation, and intimacy, while my analysis of Bratcher and Deffinbaugh finds

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that fear is at the root of the Genesis narrative. What Genesis 11 affirms for God, it problematizes for humanity and raises the following questions: How can God be so close, yet so far away? How can God be in control, yet good things happen to those who do bad, and bad things happen to people who do good? Following Avotri, we see that many women have no access to power or healthy lives. Technological advance has not necessarily benefited women. Some religious traditions force women into subjugation, robbing them of a salvific experience of God. With Song, many women experience undue conflict and lack financial and political resources; they are forced to do menial, migrant, domestic, and sex trafficking work. Following MiguezBonino, others use language against women, through manipulation, control, and low pay as Western ‘extraction of care’ forces poor women into enslaved, integrated systems. Many want power over and have no desire to share power with women. Some make noise about justice without personal intimacy. Many lie about beliefs and identity. Following Deffinbaugh and Bratcher, many are too afraid of obscurity, shame, being scattered, and being told what to do; ultimately, there is a fear that they cannot control women, and they do not want to be told that women are equal and have a right for liberation. For some, the desire to be God impedes their capacity to hear and see people’s differences without needing to manipulate or do violence. Another way to think about the Genesis 11 narrative focuses on God’s motive for confusing the language. Some persons’ lives indicate they do not believe in a good God, and are not committed to the well-being of others. Has God confused our languages so that we can no longer articulate words of community and empowerment? With my twelve Womanist hermeneutical concepts, inspired by hooks’ notion of ‘killing rage’, we can ask radical, revolutionary questions about women and note how the world is not a safe place for them. By so doing, we can heighten their awareness so that they do not unconsciously contribute to their own harm or demise. We can embrace righteousness by understanding that women are sacred vessels and should not be deemed insignificant. We can temper our need to engage in conflict over manifest destiny, oil, and territory, to colonize or demonize women’s bodies. We can embrace divine revelation by being open to new ways of communication. We can embrace a rhetoric of language to provide opportunities to learn women’s stories that often go unheard and to discern new ways to be with women. Discernment brings us to the realization that such moves would be risky, for this is unchartered, complex territory that might teach us something we would rather not know. Such truth telling requires courage and a commitment to justice that may leave us vulnerable and open to the possibility that such truth telling may alienate the very ones we are trying to help. A focus on representational and relational aesthetics helps us see the one and the many. We are at once individuals and members of multiple communities. Neither experience is superior to the other; thus the impact of both experiences must be recognized. In the rising and restorative view of language, we see how confusion stymies women and thwarts justice. Language and its use are so powerful; once words are spoken, they can never be unheard. Thus, we must also be ever vigilant in the ways we speak and the particular words we use because class, place, and culture all shape how words are heard and the appropriateness of their utterance. We must be careful in what

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we say and how we say it, notably if our goal is justice and solidarity. Relational connections of mutuality promote care and resilience. Perhaps people and communities can come to see new options as we communicate in good faith.

Legal and fragile: United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights In 1948, the United Nations produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After adopting this historic document, the General Assembly requested that all Member countries share and display this text regardless of their political status of country or territory. This Universal Declaration represents the bio-texts, that is, the individuals and communities of persons, often in developing nations, though also including the poor in socioeconomically advanced nations, who as people engage in actions for themselves and their communities in particular places and particular times. The Preamble and thirty Articles claim all persons are due dignity, freedom, and respect (United Nations 1948). In order to decipher connections between narratives, rights, and worldviews, I shall examine selected Articles that highlight gender, race, or class: Articles 2, 4, 12, 16, and 25. Human rights, a focus on the universalization of rights based on valuing a sense of common humanity, were first articulated in the 1789 French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen’. In this historic document, traditions of natural law and individualistic, anti-hierarchical Enlightenment ideas commingle. Such individual rights have since shifted from citizens’ rights in a political entity, to human rights for all persons in a political state, to global solidarity rights that transcend geopolitical boundaries. International human rights do not yet have the coherence of US white male citizenship rights; nevertheless, universal human rights press us toward a global community (Brysk and Shafir 2004: 4–5, 7). Globally, there is tremendous tension between human rights, the rhetoric and reality of human rights, and state sovereignty. Laws and rights are political narratives. State sovereignty, the state’s right to self-govern, is supposed to promote stability, peace, and security, while universal human rights call for action that transcends borders. States view rights as legal entitlements and a form of protection. Human rights activists focus on moral entitlements, toward increasing global legal entitlement. However, loopholes remain in international human rights law, making enforcement and normative global definitions impossible. While these citizen-based, human-based, solidarity-based human rights are connected and interrelated, the sociocultural location, historical dynamics, and the individual or collective nature of these rights often place them in tension with each other (DeLaet 2006: xiii, 2, 12, 14, 19–21). Reverberations from the global human rights movement emerged in the political arena during President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union Address, in which he named his Four Freedoms for the world: Freedom of Speech and Expression, Freedom

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of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear of war. That same year, Eleanor Roosevelt began her work on human rights, and President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill both signed the UN Declaration. In 1945, several groups in San Francisco worked to have human rights incorporated into the charter founding the UN, which resulted in explicit references to the need for, and importance and protection of international human rights, but did not include specific human rights. The Third General Assembly of the UN adopted its Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948. This agreement emerged from the monstrous acts of Nazism and fascism, and the need to reclaim human dignity and rights. Though human rights law emerged strongly after World War I, totalitarianism, World War II barbarism, and the Nuremberg trials heightened the need for international human rights laws. Words of freedom have not always resulted in respect for human freedom. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights expresses human rights significant to life and liberty: civil, political, socioeconomic, and cultural rights (US Department of State 1994: i–iv): Human rights include life, liberty, and security; freedom from arbitrary arrest, unfair trials, and the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty; rights to privacy, freedom of residence and travel abroad; equal rights for men and women in marriage, family life, and property ownership . . . rights of personal opinion, conscience, and religion, for the vote in fair government elections, for rights in employment and for fair pay, for protection of children, and for education. (Neilson and Neilson 1975: 27-8)

The UN’s General Assembly adopted two conventions in 1945 that include race: the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide and the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The Genocide Convention bans actions that seek to destroy racial, ethnic, national, or religious groups (33). The Refugees Convention seeks to protect any refugee, one who fears persecution due to religion, race, nationality, group, or political view (33). Since 1967, the Refugees Convention pertains globally to all refugees, though sovereign states still determine refugee status. Despite stronger human rights rhetoric, the United Nations community has since made limited or no response to genocide (a collective crime that involves destroying a group of persons because of who they are and what they represent), as illustrated by the denial of and impotent response to the 1994 Rwanda Hutu–Tutsi genocide. Oppression is also experienced by millions due to their class. Poverty is a socioeconomic, class-based human rights issue. When people cannot obtain adequate housing, nutrition, or medical care, their well-being and human rights are threatened. Globally, about 11 million children die annually from poor nutrition and preventable disease; 2 million people die from pollution. About 1.2 billion people exist on $1 a day in developing countries, and about 27 million people are forced slaves. At the intersection of discrimination and poverty, laws and policies targeting the end of poverty usually do not address gender, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, or biological sex (DeLaet 2006: 33, 93–8, 139). The Articles of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, when combined with theology and human narrative, can yield new insights into the oppression that infringes the human rights of all people.

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Article 2 Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 2 accords freedom and unalienable rights to every human being. No person or sovereign state should be able to deny anyone freedom because of their appearance, how their culture or science defines them based on their DNA, how they communicate, their beliefs, or their commitments. No authority should deny any person claims of freedom because of birth origins, socioeconomic class, property, or other designated criteria. The status of one’s particular country of residence is also not to infringe on his or her human rights. These rights of freedom herald respect and empowerment, indicating that the gift of life entitles one to respect and dignity. Some people believe a different appearance, politics, or faith makes people inferior and threatening. To deal with such difference, some make those deemed different scapegoats for societal ills. If person(s) deemed ‘other’ have little political power, they may be persecuted. The Preamble and Article 2, state that no designation authorizes limiting the human rights of another because of appearance, beliefs, access to resources, or current residence.

Article 4 No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Slavery concerns the state and conditions of being in bondage, where a person, group, or institution violates one’s human rights, body, mind, or spirit. Chattel slavery is legal ownership of one or many persons, allowing them to control the enslaved for socioeconomic reasons. People experience slavery whenever they work under heinous conditions for little or no compensation. Article 4 does not equivocate: slavery is never an option and must be completely abolished. The proclamation by the United Nations—2004, International Year to Commemorate the Struggle against Slavery and Its Abolition—recognizes that slavery continues. Bondage still exists in the form of company stores where workers must buy all their supplies and never freely possess their own wages, thus similar to sharecropping after the Civil War in the United States. Underpaid, without rights, and with no recourse, some migrant workers experience slavery as illegal aliens, especially when farm or orchard owners easily take advantage of them. In some countries, some people may never go free. Additionally, sexual trafficking constitutes another form of bondage:

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According to the UN, 4 million girls and women are forced into sexual trafficking annually. Sexual trafficking is complex sexual exploitation by commodifying women and young girls (boys and young men are also victims). Such trafficking involves recruiting persons as prostitutes and includes forced labor. Victims often are so trapped because of poverty and deprivation. (Chaung 1998: 11)

In a study of 475 people involved in prostitution from Zambia, USA, Turkey, Thailand, and South Africa, 62% reported having been raped; 73% reported having experienced physical assault; and 92% stated that they wanted to escape prostitution immediately (Farley et al. 1998: 405–26). Annually, approximately 50,000 children and women are trafficked into the United States for sexual exploitation or forced labor (Feminist.com 1995–2008). The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) claims that about one million children enter into various sex trades annually. Along with forced sexual slavery, they may face death due to HIV/AIDS, a pandemic in Africa. HIV infection is six times higher among young girls than boys in Uganda. Old men look for young girls, especially virgins, for sexual exploitation because they feel that these children are free from HIV (Feminist.com). Girls are not valued in some cultures as are boys. In fact, many girls are ‘missing’ due to sex-selective abortions and honor killings (Feminist.com). Mass rape in war has been documented in various countries, notably in the continents of Africa and Asia. More than 20,000 Muslim women were raped during the Bosnian war. Between 250,000 and 500,000 women were systematically raped during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Most recently in Darfur, Western Sudan, people have described systematic attacks against civilians by government-sponsored Arab militia and Sudanese military forces (IRIN 2004). Sarah Maguire, lawyer and human rights consultant, insists that the global community must address rape. Rape, which is often an organized, systematic weapon of war to threaten and destabilize civilian populations, targets girls and women because imposed harm and humiliation hurts not only them, but also significantly hurts and humiliates men in targeted communities. Approximately every 83 seconds a woman is raped in South Africa, although few cases are reported to the police. Other acts of violence against women, against their bodies can also be physically brutal and psychologically damaging (IRIN 2004).

Article 12 No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon [their] honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Privacy is the capacity of an individual to keep personal information secure, and to determine disclosure and access of their own information. With privacy comes certain freedom to make decisions. Some scholars speak of three types of privacy: informational,

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physical, and decisional. Depending upon one’s socio-cultural location and one’s sovereign state, one may or may not experience privacy. Sometimes, access to financial resources or political clout may guarantee more options for privacy. With technological advance, satellites, other surveillance devices, and increased identity theft, privacy becomes more difficult. High profile persons in global politics or entertainment are often stalked by paparazzi and reporters. Private citizens may also have their privacy threatened.

Article 16 1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. 2. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. 3. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State. Marriage is a relationship, historically, between a husband and wife recognized by legal and religious institutions as contractual and consensual; ideally, it is a life-long commitment. This type of union is foundational to creating many families. Since 2003, in some regions, marriage includes legal conjugal union of two persons of the same sex. One concept basic to marriage is the sexual relationship as socially sanctioned activity. Though most cultures primarily practice monogamous marriages, globally, some societies sanction polygamous marriages. Polygyny, and in some settings polyandry, follows monogamy in popularity. In addition, there are several other types of marriages, from a Mormon celestial and civil marriage to a proxy or a shotgun marriage. Article 16, by declaring marriage a human right, makes provisions for a person to choose her or his life partner. However, in some cultures, arranged marriages, where parents find a spouse for their child, remain normative. Parents and society may frown on persons marrying outside the tribe or clan and espousing people from different social classes, races, or religions. Some see such a marriage as one of convenience, to access a higher socio-economic bracket, affording greater respectability. In some cultures, freedom to have equal rights is impeded through dowry killings and sati, present in India (although not central to Indian religion and culture). Dowry killings are homicides whereby men acquire money and gifts through marriage dowries only to murder their wives once they receive such dowries. British reading of Hindu marriage dowry law during colonization changed ownership of marriage dowries from women to men, which led to such dowry murders. Originally, Hindu culture did not make women inferior to men; yet today most Hindu societies marginalize women and restrict them from employing their human rights. Most current restrictions on women in Hindu culture exist because of interpretations of

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Hindu scriptures by sexist males, or due to European colonization and their adaptation of European values and principles. Originally, women in Hindu society arranged dowries that were set aside as collateral for financial emergencies. Additionally, the act of sati, the Hindu/Indian ritual suicide of a wife after her husband’s death, represents a violent practice imposed upon women. Violence negates any sense of mutuality, and full consent (Polisi 2003). Marriage, intimately tied to women’s freedom, is complex, and many narratives about marriage are stories of care, compassion, and contentment. Other marriage narratives include domestic abuse, sexual assault, and murder. While women can be predators and abusers, men are the majority of abusers in marriage. Narratives of marital violence portray the violation of human rights. Each of these UN Articles is a narrative about human rights, which affect women. A Womanist reading calls for a radical understanding of human rights, where there is no excuse to withhold or overlook anyone’s dignity and freedom. Calling for a revolutionary understanding of human rights invites those who are able to become activists toward reforming laws of sovereign states that fail to comply with enforcement of rights. Theologically, a righteousness model of human rights insists that all human beings are holy, and due freedom and human rights. Revelation requires that we investigate to discover where government displaces human rights and have the courage to ask our prophets, ‘What shall we do?’ Rhetoric presses us to take seriously narratives of people’s human rights experiences towards speaking their truth and bringing about legal redress. Realization reveals where people are to help actualize human rights. By taking such risks, we name violations and work for justice. Representational action invites us to be artistic and organic as we invite others to take human rights seriously. Foundationally, human rights initiatives are relational. To bring about global awareness of human rights failings requires alliances and working through, for example, non-governmental organization (NGOs). Working for change involves a rising: we may take three steps forward and two backward. A restorative posture helps us work communally, with much to learn, while avoiding paternalism. Working on human rights reveals human resilience that fosters renewal and good will. Such characteristics are present in a compelling way in the production, ‘We Are the World’.

A litany of global love: ‘We Are the World’ Live Aid, like Band Aid before it, enlisted popular musicians to make recordings in order to help address famine in Ethiopia. This song and the vision behind it reflect an altruistic narrative of globalization toward health and healing. Live Aid began when Harry Belafonte, Calypso singer and civil rights activist, contacted Ken Kraken, president of

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United Support of Artists for Africa, to release a benefit single. Prophetically, over 40 music industry icons enlisted to support a human rights cause. ‘We are the World’, an anthem of conversion, won four Grammys in 1985, selling over 7.3 million singles and more than 4.4 million albums, while harnessing grassroots efforts and raising global awareness of hunger. Later, in February 2005, this anthem was re-issued to raise money for AIDS research and tsunami victims. It represents a positive movement from dream to song, from event to global action (West Coast Rendez Vous 2005). The narratives of musicians and poets are often the stories of those we would often rather forget. ‘We Are the World’ is a dialogical confession and invitation that includes everyone, recognizes people are dying, and invites global participation confronting famine. Because it envisions the world as one neighborhood, this powerful anthem conceives of each life as significant and valuable. The global problem has a solution: access to food and water for famine victims. Live Aid raised over $60 million for Ethiopia, Sudan, and other impoverished countries. This simple answer delivered needed items despite complex bureaucracy, all too often characterized by corruption, graft, greed, and fraud, and the squandering or misappropriating of aid. Ultimately, people need other people’s love, compassion, and support to experience justice. As children of God/Spirit, we are the world that can choose to help others. In saving others, we save ourselves and signal that someone cares. Live Aid reminds us that everyone must lend a helping hand, because when we work together in solidarity, we ultimately cannot fail. Live Aid provoked political change and provided a model for future action. On July 2, 2005, four days before the G8 Summit assembled in Scotland to hear a presentation from the Africa Commission regarding debt and to combat the issue of 50,000 daily deaths of treatable illnesses, Live 8—the sequel to Live Aid—held five simultaneous concerts around the world. However, according to Danny Schechter, in the years since Live Aid, the media, once an ally of suffering people, has become an adversary. In 1985, struck by the Ethiopian tragedy, video-cams recorded, television responded, people reacted globally, aid poured in, and those funds saved lives. Late Kenyan cameraman Mohammed Amin first documented the debacle, but the Western press waited until the disaster became catastrophic before a feeding frenzy between media outlets resulted, confirming that ‘Africans only make the news as victims, when they suffer calamities, coups and conflicts . . . charity, not change, defined the response . . . The famine was the story du jour; the follow-up was not’ (Schechter 2000). In recent natural and war-related catastrophes, there are even fewer documentaries. Shows about human rights, and environmental and development issues air in marginal time slots, to smaller audiences, without promotion; too many people die out of public view, victimized by a mushrooming digital divide. Nevertheless, some signs of change may be on the way. While Live Aid kept African women, as creators of culture, invisible, its focus on Africa has fostered discovery of African contemporary music, where women are many of its finest exponents. Indeed, long before Live Aid, Miriam Makeba focused global attention on South African apartheid. She became a role model for African women musicians who shaped global culture, world music (Schechter 2000). Thus, while the media, conducting business as usual, may not bring about change, creative responses, like Live Aid, can have positive outcomes.

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From a Womanist perspective, the fact that artists embrace global issues through music-making with narratives celebrating people’s lives is a radical move. Collaborating to raise funds for the impoverished transcended boundaries of race, class, and gender, garnering an activist spirit and, briefly, was itself a reformation. The Live Aid group understood the beauty and sacredness of human life and made an implicit commitment to a healthy life for Africans, helping us to discover their impoverished plight. Live Aid artists became a prophetic voice for involvement, and their rhetoric was expressive and forceful. Such work is risky, for to care globally means to be less self-absorbed. Coming together to create this event was representational, artistic, organic, and from the heart; it was relational, as singers helped out of love. Excitement about the event and song was a rising, where global interest served as a gesture of restoration, aimed at healing suffering, so that the impoverished might experience resilience and inspiration in moving beyond the famine. Nevertheless, while many bodies were fed and nourished as result of Live Aid, many women’s bodies are still abused daily as they are targets of war.

Made wretched of the earth: women’s bodies, global bio-texts The underside of globalization conjures up sweatshops, forced prostitution, disenfranchisement, and limited health care access. Although many persons of privilege think women have arrived and do not suffer exploitation, abuse, or violence, obstacles against women remain. Globally, women had only 15% political representation in 2003. In the United States alone, women aged 12 or older experienced almost 5 million acts of violent victimization in 1992 and 1993, and reported about 500,000 rapes and sexual assaults, almost 500,000 robberies, and about 3.8 million assaults (SoundVision.com 2009). Analyzing worldwide statistics of abuse and crime against women, I map out global experiences of contemporary women’s bodies as bio-texts. The women’s bodies reflect the commentary of abuse upon their bodies, as their mental, physical, emotional selves are ravaged and destroyed. Often with great resilience, the women act to resist, regroup, and recover—even forming collectives to recreate their lives, in particular places during their lifetimes, as they tell and embody the stories of destruction, which sometimes end in nihilism, but other times engage the reader in stories of hope and transformation. Globally, violence against women and children occurs on individual, institutional, structural, cultural, and interrelated levels. Individual violence occurs with particular cultural expressions in the form of dowry practices, sati (widow burning), widowhood rites, and genital mutilation. Women are also subjected to rape, sexual harassment, sexual coercion and assault, domestic violence, and female sexual slavery. Institutional violence depersonalizes individual acts of violence and sanctions family violence, espousing family honor and the economic subordination of women. Such belief systems use gender and sexual violence to maintain or champion control and power, patriarchal

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superiority ideology, property and profit-based economy, and militaristic values of dominance. Violence becomes normative, pervasive, and impersonal and makes women invisible (Van Soest 1997: 116–24). Some women experience repeated episodes of violence and are subject to emotional outbursts, emotional withdrawal, intense questioning, and immense control over social relationships and contacts (Kelly 1987: 47–9, 51, 54), including threats against their children. Globally, violence against women and girls includes physical beatings, sexual assault, forced sexual trafficking, rape, forced prostitution, annihilation because of gender selection, honor killings, genital mutilation, murder by intimate partner, and sexually transmitted diseases in girl children. One in three girls and women are sexually abused or beaten during her lifetime across the world (Feminist.com 1995–2008). Other acts of violence towards women include female circumcision and other forms of genital mutilation, and occur in lives of more than 90 million African women and girls. Author Alice Walker has made known this travesty in her activist work and her novel The Temple of My Familiar, but girls and women still remain under threat of sexual violence and assault (Feminist.com 1995–2008). While some men experience violence perpetrated by women, most domestic violence is perpetrated by men. Domestic abuse and sexual assault damage human rights and peoples’ lives. When perpetrators validate their actions using their faith beliefs, theology is crucial. These stories represent bio-texts: the bodies of women and children that have become sites for aggressive, violent acts of individuals, communities, and governments. Portrayals of sexual violence through literature, popular culture, and mass media depict much sexual abuse as desirable, normal, and natural. Denial cultivates stereotypes that portray most rapists as black males, most victims as white females. When abuse escalates to murder, various systems often trivialize women’s deaths (Bell 1993: 21–6). Thus, girls and women are stalked like prey. Unfortunately, both the courts, and faith communities often blame or fail to support victims. Myths about Eve being responsible for the alleged Fall (which was actually an expulsion) continue to underlie oppression of women. Male chauvinist practices— which make women the property of men and demand female virginity before marriage—are often subscribed to by many faith traditions and solidify the stigma of physical and emotional rape for the victim. Until the mid-1970s, rules of evidence allowed a defense attorney in the USA to introduce information about the victim’s sexual history, while laws prohibited introducing the rapist’s past. When rapists come from middle and upper classes and also when the rape victim is older, there is a tendency not to believe the victim. With new laws, rape victims receive care that is more sensitive; however, cavalier, misogynist, institutional attitudes of corruption and power allow rape, sexual exploitation, and violence to continue (Braxton 1977: 123–32, 146–8), for guys are really just sowing their oats, are they not? Until recently, Western law sanctioned battering of women by their husbands or male partners, and was complicit with clergy, police, and legal and medical care systems that failed to address the issue. Indeed, the law against wife-beating was not addressed until about 1970, though it was made illegal by 1870. Physicians often

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underestimate a woman’s abuse, may not identify spousal abuse, or may dispense medication too quickly. Family systems often fall apart when males subject females to violence. Due to fear, low self-esteem, and financial distress, women tend to be at a great physical and psychological handicap in abusive situations (Swift 1987: 3–15). Sexual/gender oppression minimizes the vitality of persons considered a perpetrator’s property. From a Womanist perspective, these bio-texts encourage a radical stance, removing deaf ears and closed eyes to global domestic violence and sexual assault. We must embrace revolution, reform laws, change how we build community, and model and teach about relationships. Silence and complacency amounts to slow homicide for our most beautiful legacy of our children, of all personhood. Devastating statistics call for righteous indignation, where we unite in interfaith conversations and connect narratives, theology, and well-being. Where religious law supports violence, we must advocate and model respect for women and for all of creation. Unfortunately, the presence of billions of religious people throughout the world does not seem to guarantee that respect for others and that human rights are acted on.

Conclusion A Womanist perspective on globalization framed by theology and narrative presses us towards revelation about new ways of being, thinking, and learning. Narratives are critical to Womanist/feminist theology as we are able to use stories to unmask and name injustices, and use other stories to inspire, relate, and empower. When we engage narratives, we connect communally, as in traditional African cosmologies: ‘I am because we are’. The narratives in this chapter are global as they reflect the tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes felt worldwide, relating many challenges and concerns within contemporary human conditions. My twelve steps for reading narratives, from radical to resilience, provide an opportunity for us to reflect on where we are at this moment in history. Have we been good stewards? Do we really care about our neighbors? Do we care about the vast suffering that necessitates a human rights declaration? Do we care about poverty, HIV/AIDS, and war? We cannot read these narratives using this paradigm without having to pause and ask: Who are we? What are we doing? and Where do we go from here? Significantly, we must ask about what we are doing that will support a viable planet for years to come. Certainly narratives are one place that can give us a reading about the realities of the oppressed, those in the middle, and the socio-economically elite. With rhetoric, all words matter, as language is our most accessible weapon. Levels of violence urge a call to awareness and action, despite risk, to nurture healthy relationships, to speak truth to power, and to forbid the brutalization of men, women, or children. We have an opportunity to demand theological justice, to embrace narratives, stories of the one and the many, connected to the divine, in respect, love, and community. Can we really live if we don’t care?

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Notes 1. La Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen is one of the vital documents of the French Revolution that defines a set of individual and collective rights of the people. This document was adopted August 26, 1789—the same year as the United States Constitution—by the National Constituent Assembly (Assemblée Nationale Constituante) as the first step toward writing a constitution. Unlike the United States Bill of Rights, it is intended to be of universal value, and it sets forth fundamental rights not only of French citizens but grants these rights to all men without exception; women were still excluded. 2. ‘The Four Freedoms’ delivered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on January 6, 1941: Mr. Speaker, members of the 77th Congress: . . . In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor— anywhere in the world. That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. (Roosevelt: 1941) 3. See http://www.unmc.edu/ethics/words.html 4. Band Aid was the name of the group that recorded the original single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas? / Feed The World’. Written by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, ‘We Are the World’ was recorded on November 25, 1984, by a group consisting of almost 40 of the United Kingdom’s and Ireland’s best known pop stars of the time. Originally, Geldof hoped to raise £72,000 for charities from sales of the single, but that estimate was exceeded almost immediately the record went on sale; it went on to sell over three million copies in the UK, becoming the best-selling record ever, and to raise over £8 million worldwide (Live Aid). 5. For lyrics for ‘We Are the World’, see http://www.lyrics007.com/Michael20Jackson20 Lyrics/We20Are20the20World20Lyrics.html and Joal Ryan, ‘We Are the World Reloaded’, December 9, 2004, http://www.songfacts.com/detail.lasso?id=1560

Works Cited Avotri, Solomon (1999). ‘Genesis 11: 1–9: An African Perspective’, in John R. Levison and Priscilla Pope-Levison (Eds), Return to Babel: Global Perspectives on the Bible. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Bell, Linda A. (1993). Rethinking Ethics in the Midst of Violence: A Feminist Approach to Freedom. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

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Bratcher, Dennis (2008). ‘Genesis 11: 1–9: Literary Context’, Christian Resource Institute: Commentary on the Texts, available at http://www.cresourcei.org/lectionary/YearC/ Cpentecostot.html Braxton, Bernard (1977). Sexual, Racial and Political Faces of Corruption. Washington, DC: Verta Press, 1977. Brysk, Alison, and Shafir, Gershon (Eds) (2004). ‘Introduction’, in People Out of Place: Globalization, Human Rights, and the Citizenship Gap. New York/London: Routledge. Chuang, Janie (1998). ‘Redirecting the Debate over Trafficking in Women: Definitions, Paradigms and Contexts’, Harvard Human Rights Journal, 11: 65–107. Deffinbaugh, Bob (2009). ‘The Unity of Unbelief (Genesis 11: 1–9)’, in Genesis: From Paradise to Patriarchs, bible.org, available at http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=89 DeLaet, Debra L. (2006). The Global Struggle for Human Rights: Universal Principles in World Politics. Belmont, CA: Thompson Wadsworth. Farley, Melissa, et al. (1998). ‘Prostitution in Five Countries: Violence and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder’, Feminism and Psychology, 8/4: 405–26. Feminist.com (1995–2008). ‘U.S. Statistics’, available at http://www.feminist.com/antiviolence/ facts.html#links hooks, bell (1996). Killing Rage: Ending Racism. New York: Holt. Irin (2004). ‘In Depth: Our Bodies—Their Battleground: Gender Based Violence in Conflict Zones. Africa—Asia: Rape as a tool of war’, available at http://www.irinnews.org/InDepthMain. aspx?InDepthId=20&ReportId=62817 Kelly, Liz (1987). ‘The Continuum of Sexual Violence’, in Jalna Hanmer and Mary Maynard (Eds), Women, Violence and Social Control. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International. Kluger, Jeffrey (2004). ‘Is God in Our Genes? A Provocative Study Asks Whether Religion Is a Product of Evolution’, Time, Oct 25. Live Aid (1995–2008). ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’, available at http://www.herald.co.uk/ local_info/live_aid.html#bandaid Mathur, Ashok (n.d.). ‘Narrative’, available at http://www.eciad.bc.ca/~amathur/narrative/ narrative.html Miguez-Bonino, José (1999). ‘Genesis 11: 1–9: A Latin American Perspective’, in John R. Levison and Priscilla Pope-Levison (Eds), Return to Babel: Global Perspectives on the Bible. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Neilson, Winthrop, and Neilson, Frances (1975). The United Nations: The World’s Last Chance for Peace. New York: New American Library. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (1948). Universal Declaration of Human Rights, available at http://www.unhchr.ch/udhr/lang/eng.htm Polisi, Catherine E. (2003). ‘Universal Rights and Cultural Relativism: Hinduism and Islam Deconstructed’, Bologna Center Journal of International Affairs (Spring), available at http://www.jhubc.it/bcjournal/articles/polisi.cfm Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (1941). The Four Freedoms, available at http://www.fdrlibrary. marist.edu/od4frees.html Scanlon, Chip (2003). ‘What Is Narrative Anyway? (Part I)’, PoynterOn Line: Everything You Need to be a Better Journalist, available at http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id= 52&aid=49550 Schechter, Danny (2000). ‘We Are the World as an Oldie: “Been there, Done That” ’, MediaChannel.org, available at http://www.alternet.org/story/242/

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Song, Choan-Seng (1999). ‘Genesis 11: 1–9: An Asian Perspective’, in John R. Levison and Priscilla Pope-Levison (Eds), Return to Babel: Global Perspectives on the Bible. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. SoundVision.com (2009). http://www.soundvision.com/Info/misc/wvastat.asp Swift, Carolyn F. (1987). Women and Violence: Breaking the Connection. Work in Progress Series. Wellesley, MA: Wellesley College. United Nations General Assembly (1948). Universal Declaration of Human Rights, available at http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html United States Department of State (1994). Civil and Political Rights in the United States: An Initial Report of the United States of America to the U.N. Human Rights Committee under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Washington, DC: Department of State. Van Soest, Dorothy (1997). The Global Crisis of Violence: Common Problems, Universal Causes, Shared Solutions. Washington, DC: NASW Press. Walker, Alice (1983). In Search of Our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Francisco: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Waskow, Arthur (2001). ‘The Very Tall Tale of Babel’, The Shalom Center, available at http://www.theshalomcenter.org/node/307 West Coast Rendez Vous (2005). ‘We Are the World—The Story Behind the Song (20th Anniversary Special Edition)’, Jan. 29, available at http://noted.blogs.com/westcoastmusic/2005/01/ we_are_the_worl.html

Suggested Reading Gunn, David M. and Fewell, Danna Nolan (1993). Narrative in the Hebrew Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heide, Gale (2009). System and Story: Narrative Critique and Construction in Theology. Eugene, OR: Pickwick. Jacobs, Mignon R. (2007). Gender, Power, and Persuasion: The Genesis Narratives and Contemporary Portraits. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic. McCreight, Kathryn Greene (2000). Feminist Reconstructions of Christian Doctrine: Narrative Analysis and Appraisal. New York: Oxford University Press. Say, Elizabeth A. (1990). Evidence on Her Own Behalf: Women’s Narrative as Theological Voice. Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Song, Choan-Seng (1999). The Believing Heart: An Invitation to Story Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

chapter 24

l a mor en ita on sk is: wom en’s popu l a r m a r i a n piet y a n d fem i n ist r e se a rch on r eligion  elina vuola

What do a skiing Virgin Mary in the snow-covered woods of Karelia and the dark-skinned Latin American Virgins, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe, La Morenita, have in common? In this chapter, I take examples from two different cultural contexts—Orthodox Karelia, the region between today’s Russia and Finland, and parts of Latin America—for interpretations of the Virgin Mary as one who simultaneously shares and transcends women’s often intimate everyday experiences, such as sexuality, childbirth, or the loss of a child. Aspects of (women’s) popular devotion to the Virgin Mary both differ from official (especially Catholic) Mariology and, interestingly, coincide with some aspects of it, especially with the view of her symbolizing and transgressing the liminal space between the human and the divine. My examples are from different geographical areas and times, representing different fields of study and methods, such as theology, anthropology, and folklore studies, some using ethnographic methods, some textual. This certainly poses methodological problems, which is why I start with a short discussion on how I see my research relating to some contemporary forms of the study of religion as well as of feminist theology. I take seriously both the sexism in the Christian tradition, including in the image of Mary, and women’s own capabilities to transform and interpret their religious traditions. In this essay, I will concentrate on the latter. There is a living tradition of devotion to a very human (feminine) Mary, who comes close to people (especially women) in some of their most intimate experiences. My main examples, as incompatible as they may first appear, are temporally and geographically distant from each other: the Virgin Mary of Orthodox Karelia of

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nineteenth-century folk poetry and some contemporary Latin American Madonnas and Marian practices. What the Karelian Mary who goes to the sauna to give birth and the dark-skinned Latin American Mary—the primary understander of women’s sufferings—have in common is their rooting in the everyday experiences of ordinary women in a syncretized and multicultural religious context. I consider Mary an important key to understanding women’s lives both in feminist ‘secular’ studies and in feminist studies of religion, including feminist theology, and offer my examples of Marian piety to substantiate this claim.

Lived religion and its interdisciplinary study I do not claim that there is direct causality between certain characteristics in women’s devotional practices and their social and religious status. Nor do I make direct comparisons between disparate materials (collected oral poetry, contemporary ethnographic data, mythology, theology, etc.). However, I have been informed by Wendy Doniger’s ‘from the bottom up’ type of cross-cultural comparison. The method she uses for the study of myths assumes ‘certain continuities not about overarching human universals but about particular narrative details concerning the body, sexual desire, procreation, parenting, pain, and death’ (1998: 59). She introduces the concepts of micromyth and macromyth, the latter of which makes possible the cross-cultural rather than the universalist enterprise. A macromyth includes all variants of a myth as well as scholarly interpretations of them, in order to build up a multinational multimyth (93–4). Even when I am not here working on myths alone—and this makes my attempt more complicated— I have found the methods and suggestions of historians and anthropologists of religion (including folklorists) very useful for my interest in different levels of popular Marian piety, which include the oral, the written, and the ritualistic. Methodologically, this kind of approach involves theoretical borrowing for theology from other fields. As a method, it is not new. Instead of using philosophy or social sciences, I construct my multidisciplinary feminist theology in dialogue with disciplines such as anthropology and comparative folkloristics. The ethnographic method for the study of religion has not been widely adopted by theologians. Just as I think that feminist theology, especially up to late 1990s, had not been in a substantial dialogue with nontheological feminist theory (see Vuola 2002), I also think that feminist theology could work in much closer contact with scholars who study religion as ‘lived religion’, without excluding the level of the symbolic. In this, I join scholars who focus on lived religion by using cultural studies and ethnographic approaches in conversation with textual methods for the study of the ‘volatile interplay of discursive and nondiscursive practices’ (Vásquez and Marquardt 2003: 8). These scholars are critical of such theories of culture, however, that see culture

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(and religion) statically, a view that they claim untenable in today’s globalized world in which religion—like borders—marks both encounter and separation, both intermixing and alterity (26–7, 63). Doniger, too, sees a link to ‘positive’ globalization in how myths and their comparative study can be used as ‘ghetto-blasters’ in the world, so that neither the Western nor the non-Western gets locked into a closed system of interpretation (1998: 71). As various scholars insist, greater pluralism has not led to secularization, and religion refuses to disappear (for example, Casanova 1994: 5, 26–8; Mendieta 2001: 46–7; Peterson et al. 2001a: 1). A central force in that pluralism and persistence is globalization and its connective processes. Global movements of religious revival activism appear to promise the reinvention of religion (Mendieta 2001: 47). To take globalization seriously, however, requires attention to the local, where globalizing processes are often felt dramatically (Peterson et al. 2001a: 10). Such attention has methodological implications, making the ethnographic study of religion even more relevant and necessary. In fact, Peterson et al. refer to Arjun Appadurai and his ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘macro’-ethnography in their search for more usable methods for understanding the interplay of the global and the local, the institutional and the ‘popular’. Instead of a single totalizing theory they propose a methodological pluralism (2001b: 220–3). I take seriously their invitation for methodological pluralism in the study of religion in my attempt to look at spaces for dialogue in different temporal, cultural, and disciplinary settings. My two contexts are influenced by a Christianity that replaced and changed indigenous religious beliefs and practices, and that has been tied to larger colonial and imperial interests, both inside and outside Europe. European colonialism, especially as played out in the conquest of America, was an intrinsic element in the growth of capitalism and, as such, not separable from different forms of globalization today. As my examples will make clear, the ‘syncretized’ Virgin Mary appears in both Karelia and Latin America. Finally, the work of Robert A. Orsi has influenced my conviction of the importance of ‘popular religion’ for theology. In reality, Orsi questions the very use of terms such as popular religion as tendentious and unclear, and uses the term ‘lived religion’ instead, meaning ‘religious practice and imagination in ongoing, dynamic relation with the realities and structures of everyday life in particular times and places’ (2002: xiii–xiv). His critique of the use of the term ‘popular’ is closely related to the hierarchies between the normative and the ‘other’ in academic studies of religion (xiv–xix). Rethinking religion as a form of cultural work, according to Orsi: directs attention to institutions and persons, texts and rituals, practice and theology, things and ideas’ and ‘is concerned with what people do with religious idioms, how they use them, what they make of themselves and their worlds with them. . . . Religious practices and understandings have meaning only in relation to other cultural forms and in relation to the life experiences and actual circumstances of the people using them. (xix–xx, emphasis in the original)

He has been especially interested in different forms of Catholic devotion to the Virgin Mary, which is why his use of multiple sources and methods is very helpful for the sort of work

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I intend to do in this chapter. In fact, Orsi’s ethnography on the Madonna of 115th Street in Harlem strengthens some of my claims about the meaning of Mary, especially for women. An understanding of Mary as one who affirms and shares but also transcends and is beyond human womanhood is sometimes in open contradiction with the ‘official’ Mary of the churches and with theological doctrines, especially when it comes to her bodiliness, sexuality, and motherhood. This both–and character of Mary is one of the central tenets that I wish to dig out from my examples. At the same time, the Marian doctrines are good examples of how doctrinal development has followed popular beliefs and lived spirituality. Classical Mariology is not as much ‘from-top-down’ as one might first think.

Feminist research, the Virgin Mary, and Latin American women My hypothesis, which I have presented in other contexts (see for example, Vuola 2006b), is that much of contemporary secular feminist scholarship on women in Latin America is guided by a twofold relationship to religion: on the one hand, religion is not seen, much less analyzed, as a factor in women’s lives. This I have called a feminist blindness to the importance of religion, especially in its aspects that women might experience as positive and life-sustaining. On the other hand, when religion (in Latin America, mostly Catholicism) is taken into account at all by feminist scholars, it is often done so through something that could be called a religious paradigm or religion-as-alens type of theorizing. Unlike the former, in the latter, religion is seen as the main or sole explanatory factor of women’s lives in a given culture, this culture usually not being the scholars’ own. Religion is, in this case, seen as the root source of women’s oppression. Religion is, thus, taken into account but mainly as a monolithically negative, misogynist, and immutable force over people’s lives. Women’s own interpretations are not necessarily taken into account, nor is ‘religion’ interpreted as lived religion, shaped by people, but rather as an institution with doctrines. In the case of Latin American women, this narrow interpretation of religion gets special intensity in the case of the Virgin Mary, who (rightly) is seen as the main cultural female model, but is often seen as anti-female in practical terms. Women’s intense love for and devotion to the Virgin Mary is (wrongly, I claim) seen as alienation or even some sort of sickness that women must be healed from. Feminist scholarship may thus produce hierarchies, differences, and images of women that might turn out to be very problematic in the light of women’s concrete life experiences. In my ongoing research, I analyze this ‘pathologization’ of religion in some feminist texts and the possible results of it. Here, I will concentrate only on some aspects of it, and then offer interpretations, which I see shedding very different light on women’s relationship with the Virgin Mary. I have presented a more detailed analysis elsewhere (Vuola 2006a) of one of these aspects, what

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has been called marianismo in feminist Latin American studies. Here, I will only cover it briefly. In the early days of Latin American feminist studies, Evelyn Stevens delineated two different moralities and sources of identity for Latin American men and women: machismo for the former, marianismo for the latter. For Stevens, marianismo is a ‘secular cult of femininity drawn from the adoration of the Virgin Mary’. It ‘pictures its subjects as semi-divine, morally superior and spiritually stronger than men. This constellation of attributes enables women to bear the indignities inflicted on them by men, and to forgive those who bring them pain. . . . Men’s wickedness is therefore the necessary precondition of women’s superior status’. Machismo is the ‘other face of marianismo’; together they create two opposite moralities for Latin American men and women, and form ‘a stable symbiosis in Latin American culture’ (1973a: 62–3). Women are deliberate perpetrators of the marianismo myth, which is characterized by the female ideals of semidivinity, moral superiority, spiritual strength, abnegation, an infinite capacity for humility and sacrifice, self-denial, and patience. All this ‘a considerable number’ of Latin American women freely choose and support. Both machismo and marianismo are syndromes, fully developed only in Latin America (1973a: 63; 1973b: 91, 94, 99). Even though Stevens says that marianismo is not a religious practice, she nevertheless uses the term almost interchangeably with Mariology and Marianism. For her, marianismo is, however, a secular edifice of beliefs and practices related to the position of women in society (1973b: 91–2). The machismo-marianismo configuration appears in one form or the other in several subsequent social scientific studies done on Latin American women (for example, Chaney 1979: 49; Fisher 1993: ; Brusco 1995: 79, 96; Melhuus and Stølen 1996: 11–12; Craske 1999: 11–15, 194; Eckstein 2001: 26; González and Kampwirth 2001: 24; Ready 2001: 174). Sometimes marianismo is not used as Stevens meant it (as the cult of female spiritual and moral superiority), but simply as the cult of the Virgin Mary (Drogus 1997: 60; Stephen 1997: 273). The Suffering Mother (la madre sufrida, Mater Dolorosa) is another theme that appears constantly in relationship to Latin American women and the Virgin Mary symbol (Jelin 1997: 76; Melhuus 1990; Bayard de Volo 2001: 99–100), as is the interpretation of women’s public identification with the Virgin Mary and their conscious use of the Mary symbol for their own political ends (for example, Evita Perón and Violeta Chamorro), even when people do not always identify them as imitating the Virgin Mary (Kampwirth 1996; Bayard de Volo 2001: 157–9, 177). Marianismo has also been criticized by some scholars (Browner and Lewin 1982; Bachrach Ehlers 1991; Navarro 2002) for a number of reasons. As a scholar of religion, I have paid critical attention to the difficulties in maintaining a causal link between the image of the Virgin Mary, theological teaching about her, marianismo as a concept, and women’s subjugation in Latin American societies. The importance of multidisciplinarity for feminist research is delegitimized if there is a serious lack of critical dialogue between social scientists who create semireligious constructions such as marianismo on the one hand, and theologians and anthropologists on the other hand, who delineate a very different view of the importance of the Mary symbol and myth for the Latin American culture in general and for women in particular. These scholars work, naturally, on different ‘levels’: doctrinal, symbolic,

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everyday life, sociological, and so on. I hope to offer aspects of women’s popular Marian piety as a critical corrective of an ahistorical marianismo type of feminist research (especially in the Latin American context) that reduces both Mary and women’s devotion to her to an abstract concept that does not really illustrate, explain, or even do justice to the richness of the tradition and to many women’s understanding of Mary as worthy of their intense devotion. I also wish to point to the importance of a more serious and broader multidisciplinarity in feminist studies. The earlier mentioned polarity between ‘feminist blindness’, on the one hand, and ‘religion-as-lens,’ on the other hand, is clearest in social scientific studies of women. Religion is both taken into account and presented in more varied ways in anthropological research, which is probably due to its ethnographical method. When women’s religious practices and beliefs are in focus, a more substantial and in-depth dialogue might be possible between feminist theologians and feminist anthropologists and folklorists than with social scientists, who tend to hold onto an understanding of secularization as an inevitable process and thus do not often take a close look at religion. A critical feminist analysis of the formal teaching on women and the Virgin Mary in Christianity, for example, is of course central, but it has to be done with adequate tools of analysis. Theologians are trained to do this. Scholars from other fields could and should take feminist theological analyses as their point of reference instead of vague and often unfounded theories such as the marianismo–machismo configuration. Anthropological research pays more attention to people’s customs, practices, and everyday life, and the tensions of these with larger society and culture (including religious institutions), which is why the relationship between women and religion is presented in less stereotypical ways by anthropologists. Feminist theologians, for their part, could use anthropological research as empirical evidence of the ways women negotiate with their religious traditions. Feminist theorizing in different fields and disciplines—for example, theology, anthropology, and sociology—should not omit each other’s insights. Thus, I take marianismo, as presented by Stevens and taken up by many contemporary feminist Latin Americanists, as an example of the lack of substantial and well-informed knowledge of both theological and anthropological studies on the Virgin Mary and women’s devotion to her. Latin American feminist theologians (and to some extent, Latino/a and mujerista theologians in the USA) have paid critical attention to the Virgin Mary in several different ways. Unfortunately, there is no space to present that critique here, nor would it serve my primary interest in aspects of lived religion or folk religion and in how feminist theology could use insights from those fields that study religion as lived experience rather than a belief system.

Latin American Mary: La Morenita The vast American continent offers a multitude of Marian practices, beliefs, apparitions, local rituals, and cults, as well as different scholarly interpretations of them. The ones I present here offer a glimpse of women’s relationships to Mary that as a lived religious

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experience contrasts with the marianismo type of linking of women (and especially their suffering) with Mary. Of the many representations of La Morenita—the Little Dark One, the syncretized, often dark-skinned Mary—the best known is the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe, but by no means is she the only one. In Costa Rica, she is called La Negrita, officially La Virgen de los Angeles. In the mid- and late 1980s, I lived in Nicaragua, where one of my interests was the situation of women. Nicaragua during the Sandinista rule (1979–90) is an interesting example of both how religion and revolutionary processes are tied together and how that is related to women’s social and political status. In 1979, after the triumph of the Sandinista revolution, several legal changes were made to improve the status of women. Grassroots women’s organizations that aimed at improving women’s health and legal status, and at opening up new ways for women to participate in political processes, came into being. Some laws from the old regime remained intact (for example, criminalized abortion) and for this and several other reasons a growing conflict between the Sandinista leadership and its feminist supporters became clear toward the end of the 1980s. The Catholic Church was divided in its relation to the Sandinista government. Roughly speaking, by the mid-1980s, the Catholic hierarchy ended up having an openly negative view of the Sandinistas and the revolution, while the so-called popular church (iglesia popular) and ecclesial base communities had been actively participating in the revolution since the 1970s. The Virgin Mary served as one of the symbols of this inner conflict of the Nicaraguan church. For the church leadership and its supporters, Mary served as a conciliatory mother, keeping her flock together, opposing socialist experiments and radical political changes. There were several Marian apparitions, which had to do with the heated political situation. Nicholas Perry and Loreto Echeverría (1988) have analyzed this phenomenon of Mary ‘appearing’ during a political crisis and, almost without exception, disapproving of projects perceived to be socialist, such as the apparition of Fátima in 1917 when the Virgin supposedly warned of the spread of Russian communism. On the other side of the conflict, those Nicaraguans who supported the Sandinista government and were backed by liberation theology—often from the poorer sectors of the population who benefited directly from the revolution—saw Mary as a poor campesina woman, in whom the sufferings and everyday conflicts of their own lives were concretized. In the northern city of Estelí, one of the regions most devastated by the Contra war, poor Catholic women started a weekly via crucis sometime in the mid1980s. These women had lost adult children in the war, most of them were middle-aged or older, and they identified strongly with their roles as mothers. They came from the poorest parts of the city, but decided to ‘take over’ the central square every Friday night in order to have their message heard. They recited (mostly from memory since many of them were illiterate) biblical texts on the suffering of Jesus and interpreted them in the light of their own experience. They identified themselves to an astonishing intensity with Mary, the Mother of Jesus. For example:

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Like the son of Mary, also our sons are sentenced to death [in the war]

and Mary is the mother of crucifixion, death and resurrection. We Christian women of Nicaragua and Latin America are like her, mothers of crucifixion and resurrection of our peoples. Like Mary, we too are under the cross of our children.

A similar account is told by anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes who did extensive field work in northeast Brazil on the construction of mother love in the context of frequent infant and child death, ‘the routinization of human suffering’ (1993: 15–16). The meaning of the Mater Dolorosa certainly is tied to women’s common experience of losing one or several children in contexts of poverty, in which their maternity is constructed in the tension between the impossible Catholic ideals and the severity of everyday life. In the words of Scheper-Hughes: On the inhospitable, rocky outcrop of Alto do Cruzeiro mother love grows slowly, tentatively, and fearfully. The cheerful and resilient ‘maternal optimism’ of which Ruddick (1989: 74) wrote, that allows the mother to greet each new life born to her hopefully gives way in the shantytown to dark clouds of maternal pessimism, doubt, and despair rooted in the unhappy experience of repeated infant death. (1993: 359)

She tells of how ‘doomed children’ (criança condenada), who lack the necessary ‘will’ to live, in their deeply religious mothers’ minds turn into angel children who die so that others may live. It is not possible to feed, tend, and save all of them: The doomed child, like the doomed Christ, ‘needs’ to die so that others may live. I wondered, too, whether the simple ritual evoked in women of the Alto a painful, if only partly conscious, awareness that mothers must at times sacrifice their own children. (399)

Like the women of Estelí, these women expressed their pain and their identification with Mary in a Stations of the Cross that Scheper-Hughes attended. In the words of a nun in Brazil who reflected on the Pietà, Nossa Senhora das Dores, during a procession: Here is Mary, our Mother, receiving the lifeless body of Her Son. What torture! The same hands that received Him at birth, full of life, full of grace and love. Now lifeless, dead. . . . What mother here has not felt those same daggers stab her own heart? In the days in which we are living, motherhood has become a burden, a punishment, even a curse. For like the Holy Mother, the poor women of Bom Jesus all know the sorrowful weight of a dead son or daughter in their arms. (524)

According to Scheper-Hughes, mother love is celebrated in Brazilian Nordestino culture and society at large, in folklore and folk art, in popular music, and: in an intense devotion to the Virgin Mother and to São Antonio, the patron saint of mothers and children. But it is especially the mature Mary, the widow standing tearfully at the foot of the cross or sitting in its shadow while cradling the dead adult Jesus in her arms, her own heart . . . pierced with a sword, that is the popular image of long-suffering motherhood and of tormented but sanctified mother love in this

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community. Our Lady of Sorrows, Nossa Senhora das Dores, reigns over Bom Jesus as the município’s patron saint. . . . But images of the young mother Mary at the crèche, holding her fat infant in her arms or suckling Him at her white breast, that are so common to Catholic imagery and iconography in Northern Europe and North America . . . are curiously absent in Bom Jesus da Mata even during the Christmas season. (357–8)

The specifically female or motherly suffering as the center of women’s devotion of Mary is certainly true, especially when it comes to older women. Younger women, who are not necessarily mothers yet, may reflect their life experiences differently. In both cases, Mary serves as a mirror of women’s lives, because she herself went through it all. These very concrete experiences, also of suffering, are not present in a marianismo that sees the Virgin Mary principally (or only) as a sexist construction of a religious institution and women as its passive victims.

The Virgin jumping over the Río Grande It is not only the suffering mother role of Mary that women identify with. Jeanette Rodriguez, a Latina feminist theologian of Ecuadorian descent now working in the United States, wanted to know how Mexican-American women relate to the most powerful Virgin of the Latin American culture, La Virgen de Guadalupe (1994). She did an empirical study among Mexican-American women of different ages and backgrounds. For women of Mexican descent who live in the United States between two cultures, the Virgin of Guadalupe is a part of their acculturation process, a symbol in the ‘interplay and influence of their mothers’ culture of origin and of U.S. culture’ (125). These women are creating or integrating a new understanding of what it means to be a woman. This is reflected in how the women interviewed by Rodriguez spoke of Mary in terms of both–and: ‘she is a strong woman, in a quiet sense’ (124) and ‘she is perceived as supportive, stable, accepting, relational and nurturing, as one who engages in behaviour that provides maternal or emotional benefits to others. The women did not see her as conforming, subordinate, critical, or sceptical’ (130). The both–and character of Mary is illustrated in how Rodriguez interprets her informants: [F]or the women in the study, Our Lady of Guadalupe scores high in nurturance, personal worth, and affiliation, which represent qualities valued by women in traditional Mexican and Mexican-American cultures (i.e., nurturance, relationality, self-sacrifice). . . . These Mexican-American women ambivalently perceived Our Lady of Guadalupe as being meek and strong-willed, independent and dependent, assertive and shy—all at the same time. (110)

and: The contradictions are not necessarily oppositional. These women may be projecting onto Our Lady of Guadalupe the transitions (intra-psychic, spiritual, social-role

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conflict, etc.) they themselves may be experiencing. These women, as believers, may use Our Lady of Guadalupe as a vehicle to make the transition from hardship to peace, from confusion to direction, or from despair to hope. (130)

It is interesting that Rodriguez’s findings correspond to the age-old role of Mary as both–and (human–divine, like-me–different) and transgressor of boundaries. The interpretations of Mary by Rodriguez’s informants are in tension with the marianismo type of studies that see Mary mostly as a patriarchal symbol. A reason for that may be that marianismo as a concept is so static and abstract, leaving no space for ambiguities, contradictions, tensions, and points of identification, so crucial in Rodriguez’s informants’ interpretations. Something that is beyond words can be reached only through paradoxes and in the language of religion. In a way, it seems that at least some ‘secular’ feminist social scientists interpret Mary and her meaning for women more in the context of official Catholicism and the institutional hierarchy than do theologians such as Rodriguez, conscious of the richness of religious symbols and the necessity to look at them beyond the doctrinal level. Rodriguez notes how ‘traditional social science literature portrays the Chicana almost exclusively in a maternal role. . . . She is described as passive, masochistic, and self-sacrificing, as well as strong, enduring, and the backbone of culture.’ This view ignores socioeconomic, political, and specific historical factors (81). I would add that this view of the Latina woman is then extended to the Virgin Mary, and/or the other way around, the two being presented as mirror images of each other. When women themselves are asked, Mary is neither idealized nor demonized; she represents a special fusion of different qualities, probably reflecting women’s lived experiences. It may be that it is the feminist interpretations of the Mary symbol in Latin America that are guilty of binary oppositions, not women’s complex understanding of her. The power of Rodriguez’s method compared with a more abstract way of presenting the Mary symbol—for example, marianismo—is that she asks what women themselves think (160). And, as such, her study challenges the ways of presenting Mary that I dealt with earlier. Her method, interviewing, is rare among theologians, including feminist theologians. Her results support my view of the importance of anthropological and ethnographical methods for feminist theology. According to Rodriguez: [My study] challenges the perception that Guadalupe is the model of submissive, passive Mexican womanhood. Rather, she is a role model of strength, enduring presence, and new possibilities. . . . They relate to Our Lady of Guadalupe as a role model to whom they pray, a mother, one who intercedes, heals, affirms, gives them strength, and gives direction for a new world order based on love, compassion, help, and defense. (160–1)

The central characteristics of Mary as presented by Rodríguez’s informants are far more varied and richer than in marianismo, which concentrates only on certain characteristics of Mary, such as submissiveness and abnegation, without taking into account that even when they, too, are true in a sexist religious culture, the way Mary functions in

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women’s lives is not just one-way or one-sided. Next, I will take examples of this variety of characteristics as well as of the both–and character of Mary from a very different cultural context.

Finnish-Karelian examples: La Morenita on skis In what follows, I rely mostly on the pioneering work of some Finnish folklorists, who have started to interpret from a gender perspective the vast archives of folk poetry collected in Finland and the surrounding areas, especially the work of Senni Timonen, who most explicitly has worked with material on the Virgin Mary (Timonen 1994). Because of its geographical location, Finland has been an area of encounter and conflict of two great religious currents. The southeastern part of the country, Karelia, is even today home for many of the Russian Orthodox faith, whereas the western part has been Protestant since the sixteenth century. The Catholic Church prevailed approximately four hundred years before the Reformation. Western Finland did not become Catholic until the twelfth century. Before that, what today is Finland, was a non-Christian region with an indigenous religious system, which it shared with other Finno-Ugrian peoples (see for example Honko et al. 1993; Siikala 1994). Shamanism was an integral part of the non-Christian religion of the Finns (Siikala 1994: 14, 19–20). The effects of Christianity varied among the Finno-Ugrian peoples, depending on whether a particular group came under the influence of the Western or Eastern Church. Russia converted to Christianity in the tenth century. In eastern regions, the Orthodox Church showed more tolerance of non-Christian beliefs and practices than did Catholicism first and Lutheranism later in the western parts. Also, contacts with Christian beliefs and doctrines and with Christian missionaries reached different groups in different times and ways. The survival of nonChristian beliefs, myth, and ritual among the speakers of Finno-Ugrian languages alongside official Church doctrine illustrates the coexistence of great and small traditions (Michael Branch in Honko et al. 1993: 33). Different belief systems lived side by side and mixed up to the nineteenth century. The pre-Christian religion of the Finns was never a defined religious system, but was rather a set of beliefs. The late arrival (and success) of Christianity in Finland explains why so much of the pre-Christian religious culture survived into the nineteenth century. This is also why understanding the influence of the ancient religion for women’s devotion to Mary is important. In many ways, Karelia was, until sixty years ago, a unique area. Just before the Second World War, poetry, incantations, and ritual laments were still being recorded by folklorists in the area. In terms of religion, the Ladoga Karelians belonged to the Orthodox Church, although in many ways their being Russian Orthodox was intertwined with elements of a pre-Christian folk religion (Heikkinen 1998: 279–80). The ancient Finno-Ugrian ethnic groups, the Ingrians and the Votes, settled in Ingria, a part

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of Finland before the country was an independent nation. The similarity between the culture of their descendants and that of the Karelians has been noticeable. The culture of this area, including its religion, has been shaped by influences from both East and West, and its diverse origins have resulted in a rich heritage (Ilomäki 1998: 148). However, as a consequence of the Second World War, Finland ceded large parts of Karelia in the southeast and Petsamo in the north to the Soviet Union.

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Most of the ancient Finnish Karelian folk poetry, including materials in the Finnish national epic Kalevala, was collected in Karelia and Ingria, largely in the nineteenth century. Parts of this poetry are pre-Christian and reflect the ancient Finnish religion, other parts have Christian (Russian Orthodox) influence, even though often in syncretized form. Karelia preserved elements of an indigenous non-Christian belief-system for much longer than neighboring regions in Finland (Timonen 1994: 301). The oldest layer of the oral tradition was collected for roughly a century between 1820s and 1920s. According to Timonen, in the Karelian prayers, spells, and narrative poems recorded from oral tradition and collected mainly in the nineteenth century, the name of Mary is mentioned more than any other person (302). One typical feature of incantations addressed to the Virgin Mary in Orthodox Karelia is the focus on the parts of life traditionally considered feminine: childbirth, sexuality, care of children and livestock, tending wounds (302). Whereas the appeals to the Virgin in prayers and hymns performed in church are theological and abstract in content (seeking her protection in general), folk prayers are always clearly defined, relating directly to practical concerns and anxieties of women; they beseech the Virgin to appear as a living person to help them (303). According to Timonen, ‘The placing on the same level of the mundane and the sublime, the past and the present, the Virgin and the ordinary woman in the Orthodox Karelian prayers to the Virgin, reflects the fact that at the time of collection these prayers were still founded in a living faith’ (303–4). A large cluster of epic poems on Mary, called Marian virsi (The Song of Mary), and published for the first time in 1831, tells about the birth and suffering of Christ from the perspective and experience of his mother. Each of the component songs highlights a turning point in Mary’s life, which the singers, for one reason or another, understood as being of fundamental importance. At the core of the songs is not only the event itself, but Mary’s attitude to it (307). The various nativity poems from Karelia, which scholars call ‘The Search for a Sauna’, present the three aspects of Mary: first, Mary’s (the woman’s) existential loneliness; second, the cosmic overtones of the event, her ability to transcend the ordinary, the human; and, third, Mary as the divine mirror of women’s experiences. According to Timonen, the Mary epic could also serve as a myth in a rite. By telling of the first impregnation and birth, its performance in a ritual around childbirth conveys strength to women in childbirth, likening them to Mary and at the same time leading up to the request to the ‘oldest of wives’ and ‘the first among mothers’ (emoloista ensimmäinen) for help. The story of the first birth is a sacred model to which all subsequent births can be traced (314, 323). But in the epic, Mary is also left alone, rejected. The landscape through which Mary wanders is the Pohjola (Land of the North), the place to which the worst diseases are sent to join the ‘other murderers’ and ‘evil-doers’. Mary is in every respect outside the boundaries of the human world, but even there, in the dark North, she retains her confidence and has the strength to seek her child (313). This landscape is mythical, and combines different images of this world and the otherworld, re-ordering the universe. The hill where Mary stands can be simultaneously the place to which diseases are exorcized, the stony hill of Pohjola, the cosmic mountain, the berry hill where her impregnation took place, and Golgotha (313).

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Other biblical themes get a new layer of interpretation as well. Mary’s flight to Egypt is described from her perspective almost as going off to war: ‘Dressed for war, put on her armour’. She marches or skis across the fields and marshes, in some versions defined more specifically as being in the otherworld, with the baby (314). For dramatic purposes, the figure of Mary is a mixture of the traditional warrior hero as he departs for battle and the Mary praised in the Byzantine Akatisthos hymn, ‘Our leader in the battle’, preparing for a catastrophe, the loss of the child (315). Different from the purely Christian story, it is Mary who, against all dangers, prepares herself for a dangerous journey to find and save the lost child. Nothing can get in her way: she proceeds in giant steps over the hills, seeking the help of those she encounters on the way—the road, the moon, and a star, sometimes a tree and the wind, and finally the sun (316). Timonen says, ‘The idea of losing a child is every woman’s nightmare and for this reason alone almost an archetype image; as in many other songs and legends, it acquires mythical dimensions and the appropriate manifestations. Mary seeks Christ in exactly the same way as other mothers seek their children in Karelian songs’ (317). When Mary descends to Tuonela, the land of the dead, the story, coincidentally or not, has several elements from other stories of mythical mothers who save their sons from death (for example, Isis putting together the pieces of her son Horus and then marrying him). Mary also sides here with another archetypal mother in the Finnish folklore: the mother of Lemminkäinen in the Kalevala. The woman who raises the hero from death has proved to be a supracultural figure. The figure of Lemminkäinen’s mother has been influenced by the Christian Virgin Mary (2002: 342, 356). The role of the woman is the same: ‘Mary’s acts in Tuonela acquire cosmic proportions: victory over the otherworld enemy’ (1994: 318). The singers simply consider that evil (i.e., death) robbed Mary of her child; that Mary herself overcame evil and snatched her child back; she saved the child for herself, and placed him back on her knee. The child did not go to heaven or to God (1994: 322). Since the Marian poems were normally performed by women, it is easy to see how Mary functioned for them as a point of identification but also as someone of heroic, mythical, and divine powers who could win victory even over death. It may be assumed that The Song of Mary was regularly performed when women came together in the evenings to pass the time. These were occasions for communal activities, such as handicraft work, conversation, and singing about topics of common importance. Some women from whom these poems have been collected said that they also sang about Mary while performing solitary tasks, such as spinning or milking (1994: 323). Another link between the song and its performer concerns the ritual roles of women as midwives, healers, and lamenters (that is, as specialists in crisis and separation rites). It is also possible to identify some direct links between the Marian epic and death rites (1994: 323). Telling about the first mother who lost her baby supports mourning women. At the time the oral traditions were transcribed, child mortality was still high, and losing one or more children was a common experience. This is true even today in many regions of the world, which may explain the power of the symbol of the Mater Dolorosa, or Pietà, as we have seen it centrally present among poor Latin American women’s devotion to Mary.

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The central events of a woman’s life take on the quality of transcendence. Giving birth becomes the core symbol for the creation of new life, also in its cosmic meaning as creation of the world. Here the popular Marian traditions transmitted by women from different cultures and times touches the theme of the Mother Goddess, which describes the creation of the world in terms of a cosmic birth, found in various creation stories in different cultures, including the Finnish national epic Kalevala. Timonen concludes that the Marian epic is to be understood as part of women’s tradition rather than merely as something that was sung on certain feast days. The epic is closely connected with major events in a woman’s life—sexuality, childbirth, loss of a child—but is at the same time firmly rooted in the everyday lives of women: caring for children, cleaning, gathering berries, cooking, handwork, tending the cattle. Like the women who sang, Mary had the dual role of one who experiences (becoming pregnant, giving birth, losing her child) and one who shares, supporting other women in the same situations (midwife, healer, lamenter) (1994: 324). The association of the freeing of the child from the grave with the freeing of the baby from the womb is also common, thereby linking resurrection to birth (1994: 323, referring to Lotte Tarkka). Mary of these songs is both a hero and a lamenter-mother, ‘the prototype of every Karelian lamenter who guides the deceased to Tuonela’ (1994: 326). In other words, she is yet another personification of the Mater Dolorosa, though equipped with supernatural powers—not necessarily a goddess, but somebody who is able to move between worlds? The subject alternates in the Marian epic—at times the ‘I’ is Mary, sometimes the singer assumes the role of first-person narrator (1994: 312). This is one of the reasons why Timonen says that the Marian epic is about a ‘lived myth’, women’s own hero myth. When singing of Mary’s fate, women also sing of themselves (1994: 326–7). Finally, according to Timonen: The Marian traditions of Karelian women may be seen as one manifestation of the cosmic popular Christianity of Eastern Europe. Their myth tells how Mary receives a child from another world, from the divine being, into her womb, which is as large as heaven and as deep as the cave in the cosmic mountain; it tells how she conquers otherworld forces and speaks to the sun, moon and stars. (1994: 328)

In this popular piety on Mary, it is possible to trace what I call the both–and character of Mary. She is both immanent and transcendent, shares human womanhood at the same time that she transcends it. She is simultaneously close and distant, ‘someone like me’ and ‘unlike me’, in the midst of human life and beyond it. In Jeanette Rodriguez’s interviews with Mexican-American women as well as in the Karelian folk poetry, Mary for women is the one who ‘knows how I feel and I can talk to her woman to woman, mother to mother’, ‘a person with whom the women relate on a daily basis, a person with whom women can be intimate, honest and frank about their lived situation’, and ‘from a psychological point of view [Our Lady of Guadalupe is for these women], someone with whom they can identify. They confide in her, for she is consoler, mother, healer, intercessor, and woman’ (121, 127, 138). According to Rodriguez, the way women speak about her is experiential, profound, affective, and reciprocal—the latter because she is

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also seen by them as intercessor, as one who listens to and responds to petitions, which usually have to do with marital problems, issues with children, pregnancy, family, friends, or husband (135). This is the same claim that Timonen made about Karelian women’s identification with Mary: she helps women in their most everyday, ordinary problems. The core of their worldview is relationship, the interrelatedness of human life.

Woman’s body as a passageway between worlds The work of Finnish feminist folklorists on the previously mentioned folk poetry, laments, and songs, has brought to light material that earlier either was not seen as relevant or was silenced. I will here make a short excursion into the work of some Finnish folklorists who do not necessarily make the direct link to the Virgin Mary, but whose findings reveal a pattern of interplay between women and religion, women’s bodies and the sacred, and sometimes all this related to stories women told of Mary. According to Laura Stark-Arola, a US-born folklorist resident in Finland, female bodies in FinnishKarelian magic rituals, folk beliefs, and taboos were depicted traversing and negotiating symbolic boundaries. Women’s bodies have female väki, which Stark-Arola defines as a dynamistic power believed to be released through women’s sexual organs (1998a: 37). The specifically female väki could be used to protect from or to cause harm. The power was released when women exposed their genitalia. A specific term, harakoiminen, relates the female väki to women’s ability to protect and destroy, which could be performed by jumping or stepping over the person or animal to be magically affected (in latenineteenth-century rural communities women did not usually wear undergarments beneath their skirts), by standing over the ‘target’, or by lifting one’s skirts and/or bending over so that the pubic area or buttocks were visible. One of the most common forms of harakoiminen was the protection of cattle in the spring when the animals left their shelter: the woman stood spread-legged and without underwear above the cowshed door and let the cows go out to pasture underneath her spread legs (1998a: 39; Apo 1998: 66). Women were also known to sometimes milk their cows with their lower body area exposed to increase the effectiveness of harakoiminen (Apo 1998: 74; Stark-Arola 1998b: 168). A woman could also perform harakoiminen over her small children or over her husband when he went hunting (Stark-Arola 1998b: 168). Or harakoiminen could ‘be perfected when the wife touched her genitals with a finger and made the sign of the cross with it on the child’s head’, a transferral of power from the mother to her child (1998b: 73). The act of harakoiminen itself, according to Stark-Arola, was performed on things or beings that crossed the boundary in going from the ‘inside’ to the ‘outside’ (such as men and cattle leaving the farm household) or to defend against magical harm coming from the ‘outside’ in (1998a: 39–40). There is also a substantial body of folk belief material in which female harakoiminen is represented as negative,

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harmful, and destructive, when used inside the area of the farm household associated with male activities or outside the farm household unit (1998a: 47; Apo 1998: 75). Satu Apo also relates female väki and harakoiminen to ‘transgressing situations’ (1998: 73). Conceptions of force concealed in a woman’s vagina can be seen in the kind of folk poetry, sung by men, in which genitals are separated from the rest of the body and personified. The female vagina may fly through the air and land on the fence or it may walk through the forest and climb up a tree. The vagina is also described as so powerful that one man cannot be sufficient for it (67). Parts of this poetry are incantations, used to calm or cure ‘the vagina’s wrath’ (vitun vihat), that is, the harm or illness caused by the female genitals (63; Stark-Arola 1998b: 206–11). For example, Ulos ukko uunilta, pätsiltä pätevä herra kierosilmä kiukuulta viemään nyt vitun vihoja kyrvän reikään syvään johon kyrvät päin putos mulkun latvat lankiil —phui— vie sie vittu pois vihas . . .

Get off the oven, old man Capable gentleman, from the furnace, cross-eyed one from the stove to now take away the vagina’s wrath into the deep hole the penis into which the cocks fell like trees the tops of the pricks toppled over (healer spits) vagina, take away your wrath . . . (Taken from Stark-Arola 1998b: 238–9)

According to Apo, harakoiminen as magical protection was given in situations where a visible or invisible boundary was crossed. Interestingly, in the Finnish-Karelian folk poetry material it is the man, not the woman, who is depicted and understood as an intact vessel, the boundaries of which are closed (1998: 75). The ‘human’ and the ‘animal’ were joined in the woman’s lower body, as was ‘this world’ and the ‘other world’. In their description of the origin of the female genitals, eastern Finnish singers related women’s sexuality to ‘nature’. The vulva itself is made from parts of animals (such as the clitoris from the tongue of a fox). The sung poetry also describes the pleasure and enjoyment that the female body can offer. Together with the vagina wrath, it leads to male respect for the vagina: Pojat kaikki polvillah Vittua kumartamah. Vatsallah miehet vanhat vittua kumartamah tuota tervehyttämäh. Pappi nosti partoah kuningas kypäriäh tuota tervehyttämäh.

The boys all go to their knees to bow to the vagina. The old men on their stomachs bow to the vagina, give it their greetings. The priest raised his beard the king his crown, to give it their greetings. (Taken from Apo 1998: 67–8)

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According to the shamanistic belief system, a person who has strong contact with nature, especially with animals, belongs to the category of supernatural and ‘otherworldly’. Thus, at least in one incantation, the female body is conceived as a passageway through which it was possible to come from the other world to the world of humans and to go to the other, the ‘lower’ world (76). Women had a prominent role in traditional Orthodox death and memorial rituals as lamenters (83), mentioned previously in the discussion of women’s songs about Mary. Some feminist anthropologists use the term culture of suffering, especially in reference to women’s roles in lamentation, death, and burial rites (Nenola-Kallio 1982, Utriainen 1998: 193, Nenola 2002, both of them referring to the work of Anna Caravelli-Chaves who studied Greek laments). The suffering is not only about maternal suffering. Through lamentation, women convey to themselves and others that it is a role and burden of women to be both sufferers and social actors who take upon themselves the responsibility of coping with everyday life. A woman’s selfhood shows up as clearly intersubjective (Utriainen 1998: 193; Nenola 2002), this intersubjectivity of lamentation coming to the fore in the ways in which lamenters construct a perspective of time that unites the past and the future, mother and daughter, death and life (Utriainen 1998: 194). In the Karelian folk poetry as well as among many Latin American women, the Virgin Mary is both one of the lamenting women and the (two-way) Mediatrix not only of grace but also of suffering, negotiating the boundaries of immanence and transcendence, the mundane and the sacred—again, a woman’s role of marking, being the boundary, reflected and crystallized in the Virgin Mary, the premier female sufferer and her body. Harakoiminen, with all its potential for amusement and vulgarity for today’s people, has been a very concrete way of marking this transgression of boundaries with a woman´s body. Here, we can think of Mary’s intercessory role in classical Mariology, as well as of the Christian view of woman (Eve) as the devil’s gateway (Tertullian). Mary’s body, like all the other female bodies, is the ‘passageway’ between the divine and the immanent, which we can also interpret in terms of transgressing boundaries. That again can be interpreted as either positive or negative, but in both cases it is about specific female power, which the ancient Finns called väki. In fact, Apo herself makes this comparison with the Christian myth: The Christian story of the son of God, who descends from Heaven and comes into the world through the body of a woman presumably strengthened . . . notions that beings on the earth surface had their origins in the other side. (1998: 78)

Also: [I]n particular situations, a woman really was more powerful, she had more väki than the man. The conceptualizations of the female body as a passage between worlds is a glorifying image; even the Christian God sent his son into the world of humans using this means. (84)

This power is a woman’s power to protect or to harm, which in fact is a concept of power associated usually with pre-Christian goddess figures and with the monotheistic

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male gods, as well as Eve, to whom I will refer more in the next section. The material dealt with by Finnish feminist folklorists reveals the ambiguity of a woman’s power, which relates her to transcendence in a way that males are not related, but which also makes her vulnerable and does not necessarily bring along sociopolitical and economic power. There was no strong cult of virginity in the Finnish-Karelian peasant culture (84), which means that the reverence of female power and sexuality is not only about fertility. The vagina and the concomitant female väki were potential points of contact between antithetical spheres—not only between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, but even between nature and culture (Tarkka 1998: 122). Thus, they linked female sexuality and body to wider cultural contexts beyond reproduction, just as ‘fallos’, the vittu, vagina, of old Finnish folk culture did not refer simply to a physiological organ but also to a higher symbolic abstraction. According to Stark-Arola, this reflects more ‘vaginacentric’ thinking than is found in most other western European cultures (2001).

The virgin, the tree, and the fruit Is there a continuum or a link between the sort of Mariology that sees the Virgin Mary as the privileged connector of the human and the divine and the above-mentioned examples of popular religiosity? To say the least, the doctrine of incarnation itself is centered around a pregnant, birthgiving, lactating, sexual female body. This has traditionally not meant the affirmation of human bodiliness and its goodness, except in some minor parts of the tradition. In women’s popular Marian piety, there are elements that do not separate Jesus’ incarnation (Mary’s motherhood) from ordinary human reproduction (all the other women’s motherhood), and connect rather than separate the two events, bridging some of the oppositions or dualisms created by the same tradition: Eve–Mary, male–female, human–divine, body–soul, and so on. To illustrate this, I take a myth, which has different variations in different cultures, but which seems to live in one form or another in folk religiosity of Mary. It is the story of the impregnation of the Virgin by the fruit. In Orthodox Karelia, the story of how Mary was fertilized by a berry (puolukka, lingonberry) or an apple is one of the key themes in the poems about the Virgin (Timonen 1994: 307). Mary hears the berry calling, shouting, screaming to her from the forest: ‘Come, maid, and pick me . . . !’ Mary cannot resist and she must leave her home. Her departure is given extra significance by the accounts of how she dresses and prepares herself. The journey to the berry can be of immeasurable length, proceeding in giant steps. When the berry is before her, she sometimes simply ‘takes the berry from the hill’, while other versions emphasize her ecstatic state: her desire to obtain the berry is so great that she addresses it with lines from spells designed to rouse a man’s sexual desire and potency: ‘Rise up, rise up, my little berry, roll up on my bright hems! Rise up, rise up, my berry on the tips of my brass belt, on to my fair breasts, my silver lips, my golden

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tongue!’ The more southern, Ingrian version is usually of an apple or a nut or both: ‘Took an apple from the bough, took the nut from off the tree, put the apple to her lips, from her lips on to her tongue, from her tongue into her throat’ (307–9). This is how the Virgin Mary becomes miraculously pregnant in Ingria! The slipping of the berry (or apple or nut) into Mary’s stomach ends the dramatic climax in the poem about the miraculous fruit. Sometimes Mary goes on to describe the goodness of the berry: ‘Many have I picked, many plucked, many fingered, but never one so good!’ The epilogue is always calm and Mary is ‘fulfilled’ (309). It is easy to think here of the imagery of Eve and the apple tree, which for the singers would amount to an active, significant reinterpretation. The Eve imagery is even stronger in another miracle story where Mary is accused (by her own mother) of being a whore after she eats the berry: ‘You were not, you whore, picking berries; you were looking for a husband!’ Mary, the young woman, defends herself and the purity of her sexuality: ‘This is the Creator’s work, begotten by holy God!’ (310). There are several versions of the same theme, in which Mary is left alone and laments her life even to the point of wanting death. In the words of Timonen, ‘[T]he holy Mary cannot proceed through life in perfection and humility, carrying out her purpose, for she also experiences moments of great weakness and needs help from outside in order to overcome them’ (311). Assurances of virginity and purity are here profoundly symbolic. They reflect a woman’s interpretation of sexuality as something pure, as opposed to the traditional Christian view. It also refutes the dichotomy between Eve and Mary. The epic elevates women’s sexual experiences into the mythical, sacred sphere (in total opposition to the official Christian tradition). Sexuality and sexual intercourse are seen from the point of view of the woman, and sexual encounter is interpreted as a manifestation of the divine in the everyday world (310–11, 324–5). As a supracultural myth we can also find the story of the impregnation of the maiden in the other cultural context of this essay, Latin America. In the Popol Vuh, the pre-Columbian book of the Quiché Maya Indians (with some Christian influence), there is the story of the virgin Xkik´, or Blood Moon (daughter of Blood Gatherer, a lord of the underworld), who ate from a tree and became miraculously pregnant: And when his [One Hunahpu] head was put in the fork of the tree, the tree bore fruit. It would not have had any fruit, had not the head of One Hunahpu been put in the fork of the tree. This is the calabash, as we call it today, or ‘the skull of One Hunahpu’, as it is said. . . . The state of the tree loomed large in their thoughts, because it came about at the same time the head of One Hunahpu was put in the fork. The Xibalbans said among themselves: ‘No one is to pick the fruit, nor is anyone to go beneath the tree’, they said. They restricted themselves; all of Xibalba held back. . . . A maiden heard about it, and here we shall tell of her arrival. (97–8)

Xkik´ could not believe that the fruit of the tree was truly sweet so she went to find out for herself: ‘What? Well! What’s the fruit of this tree? Shouldn’t this tree bear something sweet? They shouldn’t die, they shouldn’t be wasted. Should I pick one?’ said the maiden (98). The head of One Hunahpu from the tree spoke to the maiden, asking

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why she wants a mere bone. She stretches out her right hand in front of the bone. ‘And then the bone spit out its saliva, which landed squarely in the hand of the maiden. And then she looked in her hand, she inspected right away, but the bone’s saliva wasn’t in her hand’ (99). And: [B]y the time the maiden returned to her home, she had been given many instructions. Right away something was generated in her belly, from the saliva alone, and this was the generation of Hunahpu and Xbalanque. (99)

Thus, it is the skull of One Hunahpu—an epithet for the calabash—that by spitting in her hand makes her pregnant by the second generation of heroic twin deities whose triumphs make the sky-earth (world) a safer place for human habitation (33, 36, 356). After this, the father of Xkik´ intends to sacrifice her because she had been dishonored. She replies, ‘There is no child [in my belly], my father, sir; there is no man whose face I’ve known’ (100). Her father orders her to be taken away for sacrifice, but the owl messengers who were told to bring back her heart in a bowl are persuaded by the girl to spare her: ‘It would not turn out well if you sacrificed me, messengers, because it is not a bastard that is in my belly. What is in my belly generated all by itself when I went to marvel at the head of One Hunahpu’ (100). With the help of a tree (it gave the substitute for her blood) and these two servants, Xkik´ is able to defeat an oppressive social order, represented by her father: ‘In this way the lords of Xibalba were defeated by the maiden; all of them were blinded’ (102). In the person of Xkik´, the images of Eve and Mary are mixed, as are Christian and pre-Christian elements, just as in the Karelian myths. The good defeats evil with the help of the woman, the tree, and the miraculous pregnancy of the virgin/maiden. How much Christian influence can be seen exactly in this part of the vast story told in the Popol Vuh is hard to say. What we know is that the myths and stories it tells are much older than the then couple of decades of Christianity in the Quiché lands when it was first written down, but that the authors were also familiar with Christian mythology. Jaroslav Pelikan offers an example of yet another variation of the story of the impregnation of the Virgin by the fruit. It is the story of the Annunciation and Mary’s impregnation in the Qur’an. Quoted by Pelikan: When she [Mary] conceived him (Jesus) she went away to a distant place. The birth pangs led her to the trunk of a date-palm tree. ‘Would that I had died before this’, she said, ‘and become forgotten, unremembered.’ Then [a voice] called to her from below: ‘Grieve not; your Lord has made a rivulet gush forth right below you. Shake the trunk of the date-palm tree, and it will drop ripe dates for you. Eat and drink, and be at peace. If you see any man, tell him: “I have verily vowed a fast to Ar-Rahman and cannot speak to any one this day” ’. (1996: 72–3)

I do not know the background of this in the Qur’an and Islamic tradition well enough to say how it should be correctly interpreted. What we can read in this excerpt, though, is

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that, first, Mary did experience pain at birth like all women do, so her importance was not in being different from other women, and, second, the story offers us another version of the cross-cultural combination of woman–fruit–sexuality/fertility. The Finnish-Karelian women interpreted Mary’s story and life in the light of their own experiences, as many Latin American women do today, not by reflecting the official doctrines and Mariology, but the other way around: by placing their own life experiences in the Mary story, as it had come to them, through various levels of inculturation and syncretization. In Orthodox Karelia, women connected Mary’s (heroine) story with the cultural connotations given to the female body. If my interpretation of the work of Finnish folklorists is correct, those connotations would include the väki. As we saw, väki is not only about fertility, but about the power of the woman to protect and to harm, to bring life through her body, this interpreted as a cosmic movement between transcendence and immanence, this world and the other world, including death. Thus, by combining the Marian interpretations of the popular piety with the väki beliefs of the shamanistic worldview, as I am doing, we could see Mary’s body, just as any woman’s body, as a passageway between worlds. In Finnish-Karelian magic incantation poetry, even the (male) shaman, tietäjä, is described as descending through the vagina, the passageway to the lower world. In traditional Finnish-Karelian folk thought, a woman’s body was situated within the same paradigm of vertical passages between the upper, middle, and lower worlds as sacred trees, steep cliffs, caves, as well as smoke-holes within cottages and saunas, through which the smoke rose to the sky (Apo 1998: 78–81; Stark-Arola 2001). To take my interpretation even further, could we understand the female väki as the immanent divine in women’s experience, which again makes a projection of the divine– human Mary possible? Women’s embodiment and the cultural connotations related to it seem, in women’s own interpretations, to be about the deification or sacralization of the human female and her experiences. Mary is both like other women and different from them. She is the divine mirror for all the other women because she is both like them and different from them. This view of Mary between the human and the divine would then reflect the (self-)understanding of women as passageways, transgressors, and intercessors. I am fully aware that to see structural parallels between all these stories, from different times and cultures, some recorded or written folk tradition, some information gathered through ethnographic fieldwork, is not without difficulties and should not be made too easily. We might not be able to interpret the different cultural variations of a myth as a vindication or reinterpretation of Eve and the Fall and the concomitant symbolism of the woman, the tree, and the fruit. However, they might be reflective of women’s cultural resistance against the demonization of their sexuality, and—theologically speaking—of a possibility of a life-affirming, bodily image of the Virgin Mary based on women’s concrete experiences. The combination woman–tree–sexuality (together with the serpent) is a powerful symbol of sin in Western culture. However, as in the stories above, the combination can be interpreted as harmony and cooperation with nature and as something sacred and good. Fertility can be seen as an essential part of the cycles of nature, as a woman’s active cooperation in the creation of the world, and as sacralization of human corporality. There is a possibility of

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human divinization, the overcoming of oppositions and dualisms with the help of the figure of the divine–human Mary, and finally, the stories offer us a variety of possible interpretations of both traditional Mariology and popular piety from different cultures.

Imitatio Mariae: Becoming divine with Mary? Based on my material, the least I can say is that Mary should not be judged too easily by feminists as an alienating figure for women. Or, if this is done, the argument should be contrasted with all the richness of the tradition and its varied meaning for people, including its contradictions and ambivalences, as well as with interpretations in popular Marian piety. Even in formal theology, Mary has always been the representative of ideal and exemplary humanity, somewhat differently in the East than in the West, and not only for women but for men as well. Could her role be maintained at the same time that we give new and positive meaning to it (not anti-bodily and anti-sexual) by seeing her as a metaphor of the sacred and the divine in humans, including the body, sexuality, and reproduction? And because she holds special meaning for women and, especially in the Catholic tradition, is presented as not only the exemplary human being but as the exemplary woman as well, we might as well take that for granted, and go on to ask what kind of femininity, what kind of womanhood? The Virgin Mary, Mariology, and feminine symbolism in Christian theology have been defined mainly by men in Catholic, Orthodox, as well as in the Protestant tradition—and often men isolated from the rest of society and their fellow human beings (especially women), fearful of their own bodiliness and mortality. The negative image of women and the body in Christian symbolism and practice has had serious effects especially on women. My examples from Latin America and Karelia, as arbitrary as they may seem when presented together, nevertheless can point toward the possibility of alternative interpretations, traditions within the tradition, which have not only managed to survive but which have had considerable influence on the development of doctrine. In contrast with the view of Mary as somebody above and beyond all other women, some feminist theologians too seem to be looking for a Mary who could affirm and share human womanhood, thus coming close to the image of Mary in popular piety (for example, Ruether 1975). In different cultures ordinary people, especially women, have encountered the same ordinary and loyal Mary who understands the pains and contradictions of life. Women’s popular piety sees Mary not only as a maternal friend but also as a divine figure, and there might be a deeply embedded need in women to see her as such. To see her as the representative of the original and eschatological humanity (58) and as someone who knows women’s difficulties (Maeckelberghe 1989: 125; Rodriguez 1994), together with her apparent divinity, in fact may come close to what is meant by the deification of humanity in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Mary is an example of the possibility of human

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deification in that tradition. Human beings, women and men, can look at her as a model, as a predecessor, and strive for the same with her help. Formally, deification means participation in the human nature, deified by Christ, thus it is christocentric. However, since Mary is not only the mother of Jesus Christ, but also the mother of God (Theotokos), her importance for humanity lies not merely in being exemplary. As Theotokos, she participates in the divine in a special way: she gave human nature to the divine. Mary’s humanity is female humanity and as such not without importance. Her both– and being could be experienced both as the possibility of female deification and as an expression of the deeply human aspect of the divine. Mary is the Mediatrix also in the sense of being able to ‘move’ between the immanent and the transcendent; she transgresses these boundaries as well as others. Whether this is, theologically, what my examples tell of Marian piety on a ‘lived’ level, I leave open to the reader. From a different perspective, the feminist philosopher of religion Grace Jantzen discusses Luce Irigaray’s idea of ‘divine women’ in the context of philosophy of religion: the symbolic in religion, in particular the idea of God, has served as an ideal of perfection, provided a horizon for becoming (whole, a subject) and a mirror. We cannot do without the divine ideal (1998: 12–13). Are the examples that I have taken from women’s popular piety on Mary hinting toward this sort of a horizon for women? Something that we could paraphrase as imitatio Mariaea, not in contrast with but parallel to the more approved imitatio Christi type of piety and ethics? In the latter, humanity’s need of an exemplar is of both psychological and theological importance; imitation here is not copying, but rather an ethical ideal (Tinsley 1986: 293–4). Apparently, for many women, it is Mary rather than Christ that they feel more able to follow, ‘imitate’, and look up to as an ideal. For Irigaray: [A]s long as woman lacks a divine made in her image she cannot establish her subjectivity or achieve a goal of her own. She lacks an ideal that would be her goal or path in becoming. . . . If she is to become a woman, if she is to accomplish her female subjectivity, woman needs a god who is a figure for the perfection of her subjectivity. (1993: 63–4)

Of my examples in this essay, neither Jeanette Rodriguez nor her informants, I guess, use the term goddess in relation to Mary, even if it is evident at times that this is how she is experienced. Referring to Elizabeth Johnson, Rodriguez says that Mary ‘nonetheless represents the psychologically ultimate validity of the feminine, insuring a religious valuation of bodiliness, sensitivity, relationality, and nurturing qualities’ (155). I think this way of seeing Mary comes very close to what Irigaray says about the feminine and the divine, the need of women to experience themselves as ‘divine women’. However, if feminist theologians see Mary as either an aspect of the divine or ‘God imaged with feminine and maternal characteristics’ (163), it may imply that ‘God’ has ‘feminine qualities’ but is essentially male. Because of this, it might be more fruitful to use the sort of language Irigaray uses, speaking of ‘the divine’ rather than of goddess, the two implying different meanings, or of imitatio Mariaea as an ethical ideal and a form of popular piety of Christian women. What these popular devotions offer is not merely a different Mariology but an alternative way of thinking about incarnation. To think about the Virgin Mary as

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a transgressive symbol means taking the female body as a starting point and a center in itself, not only in the context of how we think of God, Christology, and Mary as an exemplary human being. Mary and the different indigenous mother goddess traditions behind and around her are not predicated on a strict disjuncture between the human and the divine, between the body and the soul or mind, and possibly, not even between male and female. I have given examples of interpretations of the Virgin Mary that could possibly be seen as a divine ideal for many women. I am not only saying that the Mary symbol could serve as such after enough feminist critique—as necessary as I consider it—but also that that is exactly how many women in different contexts have seen her and venerate her still today. Thus, it is principally on the level of the symbolic that feminist theology might be able to both critique and reinterpret classical Mariology. In this task, fields such as anthropology and folkloristics may have more to offer than the sort of feminist theorizing that sees religion primarily as sociopolitical or institutional, drawing its conclusions from either an easy link between formal religion and women’s subjugation or from doctrinal statements. In the words of Robert Orsi, who—not coincidentally for my research—did an ethnographic study of a Marian devotion: ‘In the devotion . . . people’s own suffering thus undertaken became the pathway to the encounter with the divine. And through transformed suffering, the people articulated their acceptance and transcendence of suffering’ (2002: 223). Here is the both–and character of the Madonna again. Very much as I do, he traces the ordinary as the site of the divine in Mary and women’s faith in her as incarnational faith: ‘[T]he women in the community believed that Mary had suffered the pains of childbirth, that she had menstruated, and that she worried constantly about her child. They felt that she could understand and help them because she had shared their most private experiences and because she was as powerful—and as powerless—as they were’ (227). I hope, for my part, to have been able to give sufficient examples of how women can be active agents in the appropriation and interpretation of their religious traditions, and how we as theologians should be attentive to our methods and fields of study in our pursuit to see and hear these women.

Notes 1. I thank the following persons for comments on this chapter: at an early stage, Professor Mark Lewis Taylor, as well as my colleagues at the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at the Harvard Divinity School in 2002–3: Clarissa Atkinson, Paola Bacchetta, Marie Griffith, Kelly Pemberton, and Brigid Sackey; and at a later stage, Laura Stark and Senni Timonen in Finland. 2. According to Appadurai, locality today is not what it used to be because of the changing social, territorial, and cultural reproduction of group identity. To respond to the reality that groups are no longer tightly territorialized or culturally homogeneous, he calls for a ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘macro’-ethnography, whose task is to think of the nature of locality as a lived experience in a globalized, deterritorialized world’ (Peterson 2001b: 219–20, ref. Appadurai). 3. I wish to thank Sheila Briggs for this insight.

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4. ‘[A] basic aversion to the phenomenon of lay piety, out of which . . . so much of the history of the development of Mariology, including the assumption, had emerged’ (Pelikan 1996: 210). In his book, Jaroslav Pelikan makes the point that we should not automatically assume that what the councils of the church legislated as dogma was what the common people actually believed, or conversely, that what the common people actually believe is always different from dogma and creed. According to him, the veneration of the Virgin Mary is one of the clearest examples of how ideas and practices have moved from the faith of common people into liturgy, creed, and dogma, rather than the other way around (216). 5. See also Vuola (2006a, b) for further analysis. 6. In the next two paragraphs, I follow my analysis made in Vuola (2006a and 2009). See my previous work on the Virgin Mary in Vuola (1992, 1993, and 2002: ch. 3) and the book on the Virgin Mary symbol in Christian theology and feminist thought as well as in women’s piety in Finland and in Latin America (Vuola 2010; in Finnish). 7. She uses Marianism and Mariology as synonyms to describe a religious movement around Mary, which is inaccurate, since the first is something not really used at all, and the second refers to a distinctive set of theological teachings and dogmas on the Virgin Mary developed since the first Christian centuries as well as contemporary research related to her person. 8. In fact, Drogus uses the term in both meanings: ‘marianismo, a complex web of beliefs about the Virgin Mary and devotional practices centered on her’ and ‘Catholic images associated with Mary—suffering motherhood, purity, and moral superiority, for example—become part of the cultural norm of the ideal woman’ (1997: 60–1). 9. See ch. 3 in Vuola (2002) for a discussion of Latin American liberation theologians’ and feminist liberation theologians’ views on Mary. 10. These quotations are from my handwritten notes, taken in the dark while walking along with the women during the via crucis. 11. Similarly, Anne Carr writes, ‘Mary as virgin and mother need not to be understood as an impossible double bind, an inimitable ideal, but as a central Christian symbol that signifies autonomy and relationship, strength and weakness, struggle and victory, God’s power and human agency—not in competition but cooperation. Mary is a utopian figure, a mystery’ (1990: 193). Carr is very careful not to divinize Mary, for both ecumenical and historical reasons. 12. In English, see for example the edited collections of Apo et al. (Eds) (1998); Siikala and Vakimo (Eds) (1994). 13. Parts of what is called Karelia never belonged to Finland, whereas other parts that did were lost to the Soviet Union in the war and a minor part still today belongs to Finland. By and large, here I refer to all of these as well as to Ingria. Finland was formally a part of Russia between 1808 and 1917, when it gained its independence in the Russian revolution. Before 1808, the area that today is called Finland belonged to Sweden. As in many other areas between competing superpowers, the borders of Finland have changed constantly over the centuries and the region has formally belonged to both the West (Sweden) and the East (Russia). 14. In Finland, the study of folklore was part of the nationalistic agenda from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the Second World War. The collection of the vast folklore material was part of the nation-building of a small linguistic group (still today, only five million people speak Finnish as their mother tongue) to find out, so to say, the Finnish ethno-cultural identity, its origins, and its relationship to other traditions. This is, again, partly due to the fact that the area of Finland is between cultural influences from both the East and the West. The meaning of this still today is clear in the fact that the Kalevala is obligatory reading in the public school system and, it seems, an endless inspiration for new generations of artists. The oral poetry material, only partly published, is housed in the Finnish Literature Society

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Folklore Archives in Helsinki, one of the largest folklore archives in the world. Only recently have researchers influenced by feminist theories started to interpret this material. Given the still vital common knowledge of the Finns of this heritage, interpreting it from a gender perspective is not without importance. See the introduction in Apo et al. (Eds) (1998). 15. The sauna was the primary place for giving birth until the first half of the twentieth century. Besides that, it was the place where healing and many other rites were regularly performed. The sauna was a marginal world or an initiation camp to be used in connection with birth, weddings, and death. See Honko et al. (1993: 530). 16. Raising a close relative from the dead is a natural and recurring motif in women’s lyric songs. Ingrian women, in particular, have developed an image of opening the grave with their own hands and lifting out the dead. These attempts to raise relatives from the dead in narrative songs are features of the epic lament tradition and thus link Mary with the women lamenters (Timonen 1994: 319–20, quoting Tarkka 1990: 248–9). See also Timonen (2002) on Lemminkäinen’s mother and Mary as aspects of the same supracultural theme. The lament has survived in the Baltic-Finnish area almost exclusively among the members of the Orthodox Church. See Honko et al. (1993: 58). 17. Folklorists have compared väki to or equated it with the Melanesian concept of mana and the Iroquois concept of orenda. There are different kinds of väki: kalma väki (the dynamistic force of death), metsän väki (located in the forest), veden väki (located in waters), löylyn väki (located in the sauna steam), and so on (Stark-Arola 1998b: 120–1). All beings and categories carry within themselves power charges, which can be dealt with and which require special treatment, including power transferral (Apo 1998: 67, 71 in the same collection). 18. According to Apo, as far back as classical Greece, women warded off evil forces by exposing their genitalia. The tradition was known in christianized Europe, too. However, in comparison with, for example, the folk belief system of the Mediterranean, Finnish-Karelian mythical and magical models of thought appear to lay heavy emphasis on the female genitalia; the presence of the phallus is noticeably weak (1998: 83). See also Stark-Arola (2001). 19. In fact, to translate vittu as vagina is far too ‘medical’ and ‘scientific’. Vittu is today one of the most common curses in Finnish. The English equivalent would be ‘cunt’. However, this is not how vittu was seen in the traditional Finnish folk culture, in which vittu was rich in diverse cultural meanings, many of them positive for women. Sometimes vittu marked the generational difference between mother and daughter; ‘having vittu’ implied attained social status and sexual experience (rather than just fertility); and the väki did not necessarily lessen in menopause. See Stark-Arola (2001). 20. In Vuola (2006a), I discuss the idea of the Mater dolorosa and sexuality and the culture of suffering in relation to the Virgin Mary. 21. See Giovannini (1981) for a somewhat similar, somewhat very different construction. What is interesting in the southern European context for the purposes of this chapter is that the legacy of Catholicism is different from that of the Orthodox tradition in how the Virgin Mary is incorporated into the culturally coded and (differently) syncretized understandings of women and female sexuality. In both Catholicism, especially in Latin America, and the Orthodox tradition, pre-Christian elements merge into the image of Mary, even if differently. 22. The Finnish word marja means both berry and a ‘Finnishized’ Mary (in the poetry, all these names for Mary appear: Maria, Maaria, Marja, Marjatta). 23. Timonen asks, ‘Is the poem dominated by Christian (Eve and the apple tree, Mary and Gabriel) or pre-Christian (the archetype theme of the immaculate conception) beliefs, a hero myth (journey descriptions), women’s daily work (cleaning, berry-picking) or erotic

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and sexual fantasies? Or does it incorporate elements of all of these?’ (1994: 309). I would say that modern feminist theological reinterpretations and similar stories from other cultures and times point toward a cautious yes to the latter question. 24. The Popol Vuh is of the Quiché people of Guatemala. It was written in the Roman alphabet sometime in the mid-sixteenth century, not so long after the European invasion, in order to preserve the ancient knowledge and story of the beginning of life. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, a Spanish friar named Francisco Ximénez made the only surviving copy of the Quiché text of the Popol Vuh, adding a Spanish translation. It was published for the first time as late as 1857 in Europe. See the translator’s introduction in Popol Vuh (1996: 25–7). 25. Xibalba is the underworld or ‘Place of Fear’, the fearful world beneath the face of the earth, the equivalent in the Finnish tradition of Tuonela (see Popol Vuh, introduction: 34; glossary: 361). 26. I wish to emphasize that it is by and large my interpretation of works by different feminist folklorists to, first, see Mary as one important theme in the materials they deal with, and, second, to place these Marian themes in an explicit connection with their discussions on the female body and the väki, for example. 27. The translator of the Popol Vuh to English from Quiché, Dennis Tedlock, says in his introduction that in the Quiché Maya thinking, dualities are ‘complementary rather than opposed, interpenetrating rather than mutually exclusive. Instead of being in logical opposition to one another, the realms of divine and human actions are joined by a mutual attraction. If we had an English word that fully expressed the Mayan sense of narrative time, it would have to embrace the duality of the divine and the human in the same way the Quiché term kajulew or “sky-earth” preserves the duality of what we call the “world” ’ (Popol Vuh, Introduction: 59). Interestingly, the word meaning ‘world’ (maailma) in my own mother tongue, Finnish, is the same combination as in Quiché of earth (maa) and air (ilma).

Works Cited Apo, S. (1998). ‘Ex Cunno Come the Folk and Force: Concepts of Women’s Dynamistic Power in Finnish-Karelian Tradition’, in S. Apo, A. Nenola, and L. Stark-Arola (Eds), Gender and Folklore: Perspectives on Finnish and Karelian Culture. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Nenola, A., and Stark-Arola, L. (Eds) (1998). Gender and Folklore: Perspectives on Finnish and Karelian Culture. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Appadurai, Arjun (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bachrach Ehlers, T. (1991). ‘Debunking Marianismo: Economic Vulnerability and Survival Strategies among Guatemalan Wives’, Ethnology, 1: 1–16. Bayard de Volo, L. (2001). Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs: Gender Identity Politics in Nicaragua, 1979–1999. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Browner, C., and Lewin, E. (1982). ‘Female Altruism Reconsidered: The Virgin Mary as Economic Woman’, American Ethnologist, 1: 61–75. Brusco, E. (1995). The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia. Austin: University of Texas Press. Carr, A. (1990). Transforming Grace: Christian Tradition and Women’s Experience. San Francisco: Harper and Row.

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Casanova, J. (1994). Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chaney, E. M. (1979). Supermadre: Women in Politics in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press. Craske, N. (1999). Women and Politics in Latin America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Doniger, W. (1998). The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth. New York: Columbia University Press. Drogus, C. A. (1997). Women, Religion, and Social Change in Brazil’s Popular Church. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Eckstein, S. (2001). ‘Power and Popular Protest in Latin America’, in S. Eckstein (Ed.), Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fisher, J. (1993). Out of the Shadows: Women, Resistance, and Politics in South America. London: Latin America Bureau. Giovannini, M. J. (1981). ‘Woman: A Dominant Symbol within the Cultural System of a Sicilian Town’, Man, 3: 408–26. González, V., and Kampwirth, K. (2001). ‘Introduction’, in V. González and K. Kampwirth (Eds), Radical Women in Latin America: Left and Right. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Heikkinen, K. (1998). ‘The Role of Own and “Other’s” Everyday in the Construction of Identity: The Case of Finnish-Karelian Families’, in S. Apo, A. Nenola, and L. Stark-Arola (Eds), Gender and Folklore: Perspectives on Finnish and Karelian Culture. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Honko, L., Timonen, S., Branch, M., and Bosley, K. (1993). The Great Bear: A Thematic Anthology of Oral Poetry in the Finno-Ugrian Languages. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Ilomäki, H. (1998). ‘The Image of Women in Ingrian Wedding Poetry’, in S. Apo, A. Nenola, and L. Stark-Arola (Eds), Gender and Folklore: Perspectives on Finnish and Karelian Culture. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Irigaray, L. (1993). Sexes and Genealogies. New York: Columbia University Press. Jantzen, G. M. (1998). Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jelin, E. (1997). ‘Engendering Human Rights’, in E. Dore (Ed.), Gender Politics in Latin America: Debates in Theory and Practice. New York: Monthly Review Press. Kampwirth, K. (1996). ‘The Mother of the Nicaraguans: Doña Violeta and UNO’s Gender Agenda’, Latin American Perspectives, 23: 67–86. Maeckelberghe, E. (1989). ‘ “Mary”: Maternal Friend or Virgin Mother?’, Concilium, 206: 120–7. Melhuus, M. (1990). ‘Una vergüenza para el honor, una vergüenza para el sufrimiento’, in M. Palma (coord.), Simbólica de la feminidad. La mujer en el imaginario mítico-religioso de las sociedades indias y mestizas. Quito: MLAL and Ediciones Abya-Yala. and StØlen, K. A. (1996). ‘Introduction’, in M. Melhuus and K. A. Stølen (Eds), Machos, Mistresses, Madonnas: Contesting the Power of Latin American Gender Imagery. London/ New York: Verso. Mendieta, E. (2001). ‘Society’s Religion: The Rise of Social Theory, Globalization, and the Invention of Religion’, in D. W. Hopkins, L. A. Lorentzen, E. Mendieta, and D. Batstone (Eds), Religions/Globalizations: Theories and Cases. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Navarro, M. (2002). ‘Against Marianismo’, in R. Montoya, L. J. Frazier, and J. Hurtig (Eds), Gender’s Place: Feminist Anthropologies of Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nenola, A. (2002). Inkerin itkuvirret: Ingrian Laments. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society.

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Nenola-Kallio, A. (1982). Studies in Ingrian Laments, Academia Scientiarum Fennica 234. Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science. Orsi, R. A. (2002). The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880– 1950. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. (2005). Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pelikan, J. (1996). Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Perry, N., and Echeverría, L. (1988). Under the Heel of Mary. London/New York, NY: Routledge. Peterson, A. L., Vásquez, M. A., and Williams, P. J. (2001a). ‘Introduction: Christianity and Social Change in the Shadow of Globalization’, in A. L. Peterson, M. A. Vásquez, and P. J. Williams (Eds), Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. (2001b). ‘The Global and the Local’, in A. L. Peterson, M. A. Vásquez, and P. J. Williams (Eds), Christianity, Social Change, and Globalization in the Americas New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life (1996). Rev. edn. Trans. Dennis Tedlock. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ready, K. (2001). ‘A Feminist Reconstruction of Parenthood within Neoliberal Constraints: La Asociación de Madres Demandantes in El Salvador’, in V. González and K. Kampwirth (Eds), Radical Women in Latin America: Left and Right. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Rodríguez, J. (1994). Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among MexicanAmerican Women. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ruddick, S. (1989). Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace. London: Women’s Press. Ruether, R. R. (1975). New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Scheper-Hughes, N. (1993). Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Siikala, A.-L. (1994). Suomalainen samanismi: Mielikuvien historiaa. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura. and Vakimo, S. (Eds) (1994). Songs beyond the Kalevala: Transformations of Oral Poetry. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Stark-Arola, L. (1998a). ‘Gender, Magic and Social Order: Pairing, Boundaries, and the Female Body in Finnish-Karelian Folklore’, in S. Apo, A. Nenola, and L. Stark-Arola (Eds), Gender and Folklore: Perspectives on Finnish and Karelian Culture. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. (1998b). Magic, Body, and Social Order: Gender through Women’s Private Rituals in Traditional Finland. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. (2001). ‘Vaginan tuntematon historia: Naisen seksuaalisuuden kuvat suomalaisessa suullisessa kansanperinteessä’, Naistutkimus–Kvinnoforskning, 2: 4–22. Stephen, L. (1997). Women and Social Movements in Latin America: Power from Below. Austin: University of Texas Press. Stevens, E. (1973a). ‘Machismo and Marianismo’, Society, 6: 57–63. (1973b). ‘Marianismo: The Other Face of Machismo in Latin America’, in A. Pescatello (Ed.), Female and Male in Latin America: Essays. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.

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Tarkka, L. (1990). ‘Tuonpuoleiset, tämänilmanen ja sukupuoli: Raja vienankarjalaisessa kansanrunoudessa’, in A. Nenola and S. Timonen (Eds), Louhen sanat: Kirjoituksia kansanperinteen naisista. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. (1998). ‘Sense of the Forest: Nature and Gender in Karelian Oral Poetry’, in S. Apo, A. Nenola, and L. Stark-Arola (Eds), Gender and Folklore: Perspectives on Finnish and Karelian Culture. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Timonen, S. (1994). ‘The Mary of Women’s Epic’, in A.-L. Siikala and S. Vakimo (Eds), Songs beyond the Kalevala: Transformations of Oral Poetry. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. (2002). ‘Lemminkäinen’s Mother: Some Aspects of Lönnrot’s Interpretation’, in L. Honko (Ed.), The Kalevala and the World’s Traditional Epics. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Tinsley, E. J. (1986). ‘Imitation of Christ’, in J. F. Childress and J. MacQuarrie (Eds), The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Ethics. Philadelphia: Westminster. Utriainen, T. (1998). ‘Feminine and Masculine in the Study of Balto-Finnic Laments’, in S. Apo, A. Nenola, and L. Stark-Arola (Eds), Gender and Folklore: Perspectives on Finnish and Karelian Culture. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society. Vásquez, M. A., and Marquardt, M. F. (2003). Globalizing the Sacred: Religion across the Americas. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Vuola, E. (1992). ‘Neitsyt Maria naisideaalina: Feminististä kritiikkiä ja uudelleentulkintoja’, Naistutkimus–Kvinnoforskning, 3: 33–43. (1993). ‘La Virgen María como ideal femenino, su crítica feminista y nuevas interpretaciones’, Pasos, 45: 11–20. (2002). Limits of Liberation: Feminist Theology and the Ethics of Poverty and Reproduction. London/New York: Sheffield Academic Press and Continuum. (2006a). ‘Seriously Harmful for Your Health? Religion, Feminism, and Sexuality in Latin America’, in M. Althaus-Reid (Ed.), Liberation Theology and Sexuality: New Radicalism from Latin America. London: Ashgate. (2006b). ‘Sick with the Virgin? Religion, Feminism, and Latin American Women’, in H. Gardarsdóttir (Ed.), Mujeres latinoamericanas en movimiento: Homenaje a las feministas latinoamericanas del siglo XX [Latin American Women as a Moving Force]. Gothenburg/ Reykjavik: Red HAINA and Iberoamericano Institute, University of Gothenburg and Vigdís Finnbogadóttir Institute of Foreign Languages, University of Iceland. (2009). ‘Patriarchal Ecumenism, Feminism and Women’s Religious Experiences in Latin America’, in H. Herzog and A. Braude (Eds), Gendering Religion and Politics: Untangling Modernities. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 217–38. (2010). Jumalainen nainen. Neitsyt Mariaa estimässä. Helsinki: Otava.

chapter 25

fem i n ist r it ua l pr actice teresa berger

A glance at the past: women and ritual practice in the Christian tradition Women are no newcomers to religious ritual, having practiced their faith through the ages (even if often such practice was neither in their own right nor in their own rite). Unfortunately, we have no history to render visible the complex ways in which women have engaged in ritual practices. A feminist reconfiguration of ritual requires one to write gender back into the ‘facts’ of ritual history, thereby uncentering the malestream construction of this history. Undoubtedly, the history of Christian ritual practice has been shaped by, and has itself shaped performances of gender, gender divisions, and symbolic meanings associated with femininity and masculinity. In traditional liturgical historiography, however, gender has been marked as marginal—if only through silence—for what is deemed central to the history of ritual practice, namely the development of rites, institutions, and ritual texts. Moreover, where gender does surface, traditional liturgical history presents it as natural, essential, and binary. Seeking simply to include women in this history by focusing on women’s ‘participation’ in the established master narrative is problematic, because women will forever remain marginalized and particularized subjects in this narrative. Women’s inclusion in the master narrative, after all, does not challenge it, but rather assents to its foundational making. One can also no longer represent women primarily as victims of the master narrative, that is, as mere objects of patriarchal oppression. Such an approach renders invisible the multiple sites of women’s agency and engagement in ritual practices. Moreover, this approach does not do justice to the ways cultural materials, including liturgical materials, actually circulate among dispossessed groups. Dispossessed groups (in this case, women) are not devoid of agency. They never simply receive; they also transform. In attending to the history of women’s ritual practices, then, one must understand these practices

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within the deeply gendered cultural contexts in which the Christian tradition was formed. These cultural contexts were marked by myriad forms of marginalization and legislated inferiority of women on the one hand, but also by women-specific power structures, networks, and sites of women-centered agency on the other. The development of Christian ritual practice occurred within these contexts and must be displayed as such. Writing women (back) into the history of ritual practice thus must begin with the assumption that gender has shaped practices of faith in a multitude of ways, and must examine how gendered differences are constitutive of the historical development of ritual practice. Proceeding from this knowledge, one can then ask how gender as a marker of difference affected women’s ritual lives in particular ways (Berger 2006). It will be clear by now that I assume the category ‘women’ to be unstable, a variable rather than a constant. The category never stands by itself, since it is always inflected by other markers of difference, such as age, ethnicity, and ecclesial affiliation, to name but a few. Similarly, gender is coded differently in different historical contexts. In fact, for much of the history of Christian ritual practice the dominant marker of difference might be said to be ascribed status (combining gender and class), rather than gender alone. In restoring women to a history of Christian ritual practice, one thus best assumes multiplicity in both the cultural and ritual constructions and performances of gender divisions. Attempting to write women back into this history, then, is primarily an attempt to historicize not to essentialize gender differentiations in worship.

A watershed: the twentieth century In the history of women’s ritual practices, the twentieth century represents a watershed, at least for Christian women, since it profoundly (re-)shaped their liturgical lives. At the beginning of the century, the overwhelming majority of Christian women worshipped in a starkly gendered world. In most churches, liturgical leadership was in the hands of men; women seldom took a public role in worship. Some rites excluded women by virtue of their gender (such as various ordinations); others focused on women for the same reason (e.g., the blessing of the bride or the ‘churching’ of women after childbirth). Ritual space was clearly divided by gender, and women were all but excluded from the center of the sanctuary, i.e., the altar and the pulpit. In the Roman Catholic Church, women’s liturgical singing, where it was possible at all, was defined as ‘non-liturgical’. Most Catholics did not understand the language of the liturgy (learning Latin was the prerogative of an educated elite, a group that for the most part excluded women). And women were subjected to detailed regulation of their dress code and appearance at worship. The renewal movement known as the Liturgical Movement, which emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, did not challenge the basic gender divisions in worship. The movement nevertheless offered women a vision of worship that enabled them to claim ritual space for themselves in new ways. In that sense, the Liturgical Movement served as a midwife of the feminist liturgical movement, which erupted in the second part of the

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twentieth century. Together, these liturgical renewal movements spawned a redefinition of women’s ways of worship unimaginable in preceding centuries (Berger 1999). At its heart the Liturgical Movement was a rediscovery of the communal celebration of public worship as the fundamental act of the church. The movement thus signaled a break with an understanding of liturgy that centered on a conglomeration of individual rites and rubrics. The rediscovery of the local assembly as the subject of the liturgy included the recognition of women as liturgical agents. This was no mere theoretical recognition. Women activists in the movement gained space for their own liturgical experience, work, and leadership—something previously inaccessible to women in the pews, at least in the more catholic churches. Despite its traditional woman-script, the Liturgical Movement proved empowering for women, especially for educated and professional women. They were the ones who had gained decisively from the First Wave of the Women’s Movement and claimed the Liturgical Movement’s potential for themselves. Shaped by major cultural shifts at the turn of the twentieth century, these women had begun to enter secondary and higher education, and professional and semiprofessional careers. They fought against their legal inferiority and in favor of the right to vote. Not surprisingly, these women began to draw on ecclesial practices (including ritual practices) to critique the traditional woman-script. However, they needed more than the Liturgical Movement had to offer and more than the First Wave of the Women’s Movement achieved to challenge the deep-seated gender divisions in Christian worship.

From ‘man’s liturgy’ to women’s rites Women’s ecclesial activism gained momentum as a result of a number of cultural and ecclesial developments in the second half of the twentieth century, among them especially the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement and the liturgical reforms sweeping through many churches at the same time. Churches were confronted with sustained feminist reflection just after official liturgical reforms were implemented. For many women, dissatisfaction with worship patterns grew despite all the top-down liturgical reforms put in motion. Worship became a focal site of women’s protest within the churches, and women began to develop alternatives to existing worship practices. By 1974, the first collection of feminist liturgies, aptly titled Sistercelebrations, was in print in North America (Swidler), and European materials followed within a year (actual worship services obviously preceded these publications by some time). These worship services were not limited geographically to the North Atlantic world, but women’s rites in other parts of the world often remained ‘undocumented’. The earliest documented women’s ritual community in the Global South is Talitha Cumi, a group that originated in Lima, Peru in 1983. Initially, the changes in Christian feminist rituals vis-à-vis traditional liturgies concentrated on individual elements, and the new rites were often designed as occasional

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‘special events’. These rituals thrived in diverse contexts, among them women’s groups in parishes, adult education centers, divinity schools, independent feminist communities, and other ecclesial and nonecclesial settings. In the early 1980s publishers put out an avalanche of materials: ‘Women’s Prayer Services’, ‘WomanWorship’, ‘Feminist Liturgies’, and ‘Women Church Celebrations’. By the 1990s there was a clear development of worship services by and for women, or, more precisely, a feminist liturgical tradition (Procter-Smith 1990). With the beginning of the twenty-first century, Christian feminist liturgies and rituals are celebrated across the globe. There are also long-standing committed liturgical communities of women all over the world (Berger 2001). One can find regular women’s worship services in parishes, women-identified celebrations at large gatherings of women, and lively networking between many of these women at worship, supported by an unparalleled explosion of religious materials by and for women. There are hundreds of new women-identified hymns, meditations, and creeds, and a host of new prayer books and devotional resources specifically for women. Feminist ritual communities have become a stable and visible phenomenon.

The development of feminist rituals Feminist ritual communities emerged on the heels of a number of developments. Christian women in the second half of the twentieth century experienced growing dissonance between their lives as women and their lives as ecclesial subjects. The official renewal of liturgical life that swept through the churches largely ignored the starkly gendered nature of ecclesial practices. This official renewal also remained mostly unaffected by the profound cultural shifts in women’s lives, which within just a few decades allowed women to shape their own lives in ways unimaginable for their mothers and grandmothers. Worship that was unresponsive to these cultural shifts left many women dissatisfied. The liturgy continued to be a ‘man’s liturgy’, albeit renewed. But women’s scrutiny of this liturgy deepened as feminist tools of analysis grew sharper. While early critiques noted problems such as exclusive male leadership and exclusionary language, more in-depth criticism soon followed, and complex examples of marginalization, silencing, and misnaming surfaced. A growing feminist awareness revealed wideranging gender asymmetries for women at worship. At the same time, other ways of ritualizing women’s lives were emerging in the wider culture, including New Age and neo-pagan rituals, but also Jewish feminist, Native American-inspired, and interfaith circles. These were supported by the broader, renewed interest in and appreciation of women’s rituals of everyday life. Together, these trends spelled the weakening of the churches’ and synagogues’ ritual powers over women’s lives, and the strengthening of women’s grassroots ritual agency. Given these developments, a significant shift occurred: a number of Christian women experimented with a liturgical exodus into a promised land of womenidentified prayers, hymns, creeds, readings, and rituals. Whole new communities

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emerged as a movement of ‘feminists in exodus within the church’, as Rosemary Radford Ruether described them in her influential book Women-Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities (1985: 67). From a starting point of women praying ‘pre-prepared’ liturgies, these feminists moved on to claim their own rites in a sacred space of women. This exodus of course took quite different forms in different geographical and cultural locations, in different ecclesial environments, and in the midst of different kinds of ‘women’, be they mothers, poor, lesbians, single, old, belonging to an ethnic minority, literate, and so forth. What this phenomenon looks like on the ground differs vastly in, say, North America, Chile, South Africa, and the Philippines. Even though feminist religious materials have flourished, feminist ritual groups continue to spring up, and feminist ritual materials circulate globally (and have in some cases been mainstreamed), there is no simple linear progression from man’s liturgy to women’s rites. These developments have all been accompanied by a renewed insistence in some parts of the church on priestly (that is male) predominance and on the continuing marginalization of women in liturgical life. There has also been vocal opposition to feminist liturgical concerns from some conservative women in the church (for example, Hitchcock 1992).

The globalization of feminist rituals The past forty years have seen not only the emergence of feminist rituals but also their rapid global circulation, even if this ‘ritual globalization’ was not visible in the secondary literature until quite recently. For many years, scholars paid little or no attention to women’s liturgies beyond the (so-called) First World. Indeed, few people recognized that such liturgies existed outside of North America and Europe. Western voices defined the discourse of women’s rites. However, mapping feminist rituals as a global flow should not be based on facile assumptions of sameness or on cheap theological cosmopolitanism. Much recent theorizing both of women and of globalization makes such assumptions difficult to sustain anyway. Rather, the globalness of feminist ritualizing must go hand in hand with a focus on local sites of the struggle for women’s rites. The distinctiveness of these local sites is of overarching importance in understanding feminist ritual practices in a global context. I emphasize this distinctiveness for three reasons. First, I refrain from facile claims to globalness because of both the discursive explosion around notions of globalization and the often inadequate theoretical frameworks for what constitutes the ‘global’ that are integral to the discursive explosion. Many claims to globalness, especially in the religious realm (‘global Christianity’, ‘the world church’), rest on theoretical sand in that they insufficiently account for the underpinnings of their notions of the global. And even the best theorizing about processes of globalization always lags behind the processes themselves, one of whose characteristics is precisely their speed. Second, many feminist rituals are intentionally local rather than self-consciously global in their vision.

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That is to say, feminist ritual groups, for the most part, are not a transnational advocacy network. And last, I am convinced that the claim that feminism is a worldwide theological flow needs to be substantiated ‘from below’, that is by highlighting the distinctiveness of local sites of feminist theological and ritual production. Thus, while I do assume that feminist ritualizing can only be understood in a global context, my starting point is the multiplicity of feminist ritual practices and the differing material realities that shape them. When one takes seriously the diversity of local communities with their own particular stories of struggle, growth, and inspiration, it becomes clear that these communities live in ‘different temporalities of struggle’ (Mani 1992: 306–22). Some of the feminist ritual communities around the globe are well established. They emerged out of Second Wave feminist activism in the church and can look back on almost a quarter-century of celebrating feminist rituals. Other communities are just beginning with liturgies celebrated in the company of women; these communities emerge in dialogue with differentiated feminisms and major cultural shifts in women’s lives. And some communities have disbanded in the midst of specific situations of social upheaval. While feminist ritualizing always emerges from within local sites, each with its own distinct geopolitical, cultural, and ecclesial context, these sites nevertheless participate in some common developments, even if the impact of these developments is felt differently in each site. One can see the global flow of feminist ritualizing as part of a larger confluence of circulating movements that significantly shaped Christian women’s practices in the twentieth century. In order to understand the emergence of feminist ritualizing, a look at these movements is indispensable. I highlight two interrelated movements in particular: the development of international networks of Christian women and the rich array of feminist activism in the church.

International networks of Christian women Christianity, one might say, has had a globalizing impetus whenever it heeded the imperative to ‘go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation’ (Mark 16:15 nrsv). This globalizing impetus took on particular shape and force with the nineteenth-century Missionary Movement, and then again on the heels of rapid processes of globalization in the second half of the twentieth century. Christian women engaged these globalizing movements in a variety of ways, one of which was the creation of international networks of Christian women. These networks ranged from confessional groups (for example, the World Federation of Methodist and Uniting Church Women), to issue-centered networks (for example, Women’s Ordination Worldwide), to particular regional guilds (for example, the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, and the European Society of Women in Theological Research), to myriads of informal networking paths between women around the globe. One network of particular importance for the emergence of feminist rituals is that of Christian women engaged in the Ecumenical Movement.

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The inspiration drawn from the Women’s World Day of Prayer and the energies focused through the Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women are but two indications of this importance. The Ecumenical Movement emerged at the same time as the First Wave of the Women’s Movement, in the confluence of nineteenth-century movements in which Christian women had achieved a certain prominence. In the Missionary Movement in particular, women developed a women-identified vision and championed work across national and ecclesial boundaries. One of the ways in which women shaped the early Missionary Movement was through practices of prayer. Methodist women, for example, called for ‘Prayer at Noontide Encircling the Earth’, while others invited women to set aside time on Sunday afternoon for prayer for missions. The best known liturgical initiative of women in the Missionary Movement is undoubtedly the Women’s World Day of Prayer—a still-healthy foremother of the feminist liturgies and rituals that now span the globe. This first ecumenical liturgical initiative of modern times goes back to Mary Allen James, an American Presbyterian and president of a women’s home mission board. In 1887 James called on other women to join in a day of prayer for ‘home missions’. This day of prayer became an annual event. Three years later, two North American Baptist women, Helen Barrett Montgomery and Lucy Peabody, called for a similar day of prayer for ‘foreign missions’. The idea of women joining in prayer across denominational lines and around the globe spread rapidly. In 1919 the two days of prayer were combined and in 1927 officially became the Women’s World Day of Prayer. This Day of Prayer continues to be celebrated annually by Christian women (and some men) around the world on the first Friday of March. The ten years between 1988 and 1998 were marked worldwide as the Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women. The Decade’s objectives centered on empowering women to challenge oppressive social and ecclesial structures, on affirming women’s leadership and agency in the church, on giving visibility to women-identified perspectives and practices, and on encouraging churches to stand in solidarity with women against all structures of marginalization and exclusion. The Decade was brought to a close with a Decade Festival in Harare, Zimbabwe, in conjunction with the eighth Assembly of the World Council of Churches. More than 1,000 women from around the world joined in the Festival, which included a liturgy centered on violence against women in the church. In North America, the Decade spawned one of the most controversial events in recent ecclesial memory, the 1993 Re-Imagining Conference in Minneapolis. This conference originated as a way of marking support for the Ecumenical Decade at the half-point. In the uproar that followed the gathering of 2,000 women (and some men), the Milk and Honey Ritual surfaced as one of the conference’s most contested features. Worship, once again, became a peculiarly marked site of struggle for women. Many more sites of women’s activism could be identified on the local level and at the grassroots. But the thrust of the development will be clear even without going into further detail: women have always moved the churches. In the previous century, women’s visions have developed in distinctly transnational and women-identified ways.

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Feminist activism in the Church In the early 1980s, Christian feminists converged under the vision of Women Church. After the 1985 publication of Radford Ruether’s book Women–Church, prayer, ritual, and liturgies became increasingly visible in the feminist process of ecclesial transformation. Not surprisingly, several feminist ritual communities around the globe claim Women Church as their inspiration and their ecclesial home, and a few have adopted this name for themselves, for example 꾡ꫦ霅쁁 in Korea and Kvennakirkjan in Iceland. There are also communities, however, such as that in the Netherlands, which consciously opt for other ways of naming and defining themselves, foregoing Women Church as a common denominator for feminist ecclesial activism across the globe. Whatever ways of naming women privilege, ritual practice clearly has developed into a crucial site of women’s activism. Indeed, liturgy has become one of the most politicized of ecclesial sites in our time. For many women, the ‘right to ritual’ is as Catherine Bell puts it ‘the symbolic equivalent of the right to vote and receive equal pay’ (1997: 238). I cannot emphasize strongly enough the importance of liturgy as a site of struggle over symbolic resources that shape women’s religious lives. For the Christian tradition in which ritual authority was the prerogative of a male priesthood, or, more recently, a caste of liturgical experts, women’s active claim to ritual authority is a prime example of their claim to power (Northup 1997: 11, 22). Women have moved from liturgical consumption and reproduction to production, as they grasp ritual as a crucial site for the negotiation of faith and feminism. Claiming women’s rites has involved recognition both of the regulatory power of the traditional liturgy and of worship as a potential site of alternative and oppositional liturgical practices. Ninna Edgardh Beckman emphasizes a paradox of feminist liturgies: they destabilize dominant patriarchal liturgical patterns by establishing an alternative built on feminist commitments, and at the same time they depend upon the dominant discourse for their own alternative construction (Beckman 2001). The struggle for women’s rites thus is always both transgressive of and parasitic on established liturgical practices. That liturgy has become a primary mode of claiming power, and a distinct site for the negotiation of faith and feminism is clear in all feminist ritualizing. As strategic ways of such negotiation, feminist celebrations provide rich examples of how rituals emerge and how social change, in this case especially change in gender systems, affects ritualization. This, of course, holds true not only for distinctly Christian feminist rituals, but also for all other feminist rituals, whether Jewish, neo-pagan, New Age, and so on.

Feminist rituals: ‘Glocal’ While the struggle for women’s rites may be ubiquitous, it takes place locally and does not necessarily lay claim to universal significance. Consequently, feminist rituals do not thrive primarily on the ‘global’ or the ‘international’ as theoretical frameworks, but instead invite attention to the ways in which meaning is constructed in specific contexts. Who the

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‘women’ are and what ‘feminism’ might mean for them depend on a multitude of factors, especially diverse and changing gender systems. Gender takes different forms as it is inflected by ecclesial and geopolitical location, ethnicity, sexual preference, class, and other markers of difference. Rituals consciously gendered from and to the social location of women correspondingly take different forms, even when and where a shared style emerges. To put this by way of an example: Naming a community Women Church ‘means’ differently in North America, in Korea, in Iceland, and in Germany, because in each context gender as well as church takes different forms. The insistence on the distinctiveness and particularity of different sites of feminist ritualizing does not, however, imply that these rituals are strictly local and indigenous productions. ‘Glocalization’ aptly describes the binary of the global and the local as they intertwine in these rituals. In a growingly migratory, hybrid, and cyberspatial world, feminist rituals are shaped by a variety of transcultural linkages (primarily ecclesial and/or feminist), all the while focusing on their own local context. In fact, contemporary theories of globalization have insisted that globalization and localization are complementary processes, and that there is a constitutive relationality between them. Let me illustrate this relationality, this ‘glocality’, with a few examples from feminist ritual communities. Transcultural linkages are evident, for example, in the migration of peoples written into the very fabric of these communities. Thus, at the roots of the Peruvian community Talitha Cumi stand two North American women, whose missionary vocation took them to Peru. These two women were influenced in the sixties and seventies by the growing feminist activism in their North American home church, which they adapted to their Peruvian context. The distinct migration of missionary work thus produced the link between North American and Peruvian feminist activism in the church. Other feminist ritual communities are similarly shaped by the migration of peoples. The associate pastor of 꾡ꫦ霅쁁 in Korea is a missionary from the United Church of Canada. One of the founding members of Con-spirando in Chile was born in Germany; the solidarity movement there with progressive social movements in Latin America took her to Nicaragua and eventually to Chile. An international speaking engagement of a North American feminist theologian influenced the formation of the British Catholic Women’s Network. Three women from the Network were in turn deeply shaped by their pilgrimage to the Dutch motherhouse of the International Grail Movement. Other migrations shape feminist ritual communities around the globe, especially those related to coloniality (by which I mean colonialism, as well as postcolonial and neocolonial realities). Vrouw-en-Geloof Beweging in the Netherlands, for example, struggles with truthful relations between white women and women of color, many of whom live in the Netherlands as a result of Dutch colonizing in Asia and Africa. There are also transcultural linkages inscribed in the geopolitical and social location of different communities. WATER in Washington, DC, is located in a vibrantly multicultural metropolitan area; its liturgies, not surprisingly, almost always include multilingual texts. 꾡ꫦ霅쁁 in Seoul is particularly committed to the Filipina migrant workers in the city; its worship services with and for these migrant workers are consequently held in English. Kvennakirkjan in Iceland confronts international sex trafficking in women by protesting Reykjavík’s striptease establishments.

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Transcultural links are also visible in the materials used in feminist liturgies and rituals. Several communities have drawn inspiration from worship resources provided by the Women’s World Day of Prayer, the World Council of Churches, and feminist liturgies produced in other contexts. Many feminist rituals witness to the fact that womenidentified materials circulate globally. Transnational meetings, networks of women, and increasingly cyberspace are particularly fertile ground for this global circulation, which for some groups—such as Women Church in South Africa—has been vital for their survival. The origin and movement of these materials are multidirectional and, at times, surprising. Many worship materials borrow obviously from North American spirituals, feminist prayers, creeds, and women’s songs. However, a resource book by and for Christian women in the Philippines draws on insights from Central American feminist and biblical scholar Elsa Tamez. Kvennakirkjan in Iceland includes a Spanish song in its liturgy, and German and Chilean feminist rituals meet in their common attraction to an ecofeminist spirituality (which for the German women finds a focus in the spirituality of the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen, and for the Chilean women is grounded in the spirituality of the native peoples of their land). These transnational linkages coexist with strong antiglobal and localizing strategies. Some of the feminist communities clearly choose resistance strategies to dominant processes of globalization and the flow of global capital. Con-spirando in Chile has turned to the native summertime and colonial carnivalesque practices to bring meaning to the celebration of Christmas in the Southern hemisphere. Talitha Cumi in Peru has taken public action protesting the commercialization and sentimentality of Mother’s Day, challenging people to discern the real and pressing needs of Peruvian women. One of the key ritual events for the Canadian women’s group The Circle is their ‘Ritual of Re-Membering’, a response to the Montreal Massacre in which fourteen women engineering students were murdered in 1989 by a male student who claimed to hate feminists. The Filipinas gathering to celebrate the Year of Jubilee 2000 protested globalization and its adverse effects on women and the environment. Kvennakirkjan fights the global trafficking in women. Many feminist rituals also draw consciously on local and indigenous traditions, thereby validating the regional and the particular. 꾡ꫦ霅쁁, for example, uses traditional Korean forms of ritual drama, and rice cakes and chilled ginger tea as part of its liturgies. In Central America, a women’s group uses indigenous Mayan symbols for God, and a creation liturgy includes a prayer from the Popul Vuh, the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life. Talitha Cumi incorporates into one liturgy offerings to pachamama, the earth mother, and uses the leaves of the indigenous coca plant in another ritual. One of the services of the group Women and Worship in Melbourne, Australia, includes a litany, ‘Hannah’s Heirs’, which begins with a list of biblical women but then focuses on Australians as heirs of the biblical women’s hope and courage. Filipinas draw on indigenous instruments, foods, cloth, flowers, music, dances, and a native creation story in their celebrations. All these examples of transcultural as well as antiglobal and localizing elements are ultimately pointers to the glocalization deeply embedded in women’s rites. These rites, and the communities that produce them, are sites simultaneously of exchange, resistance, compromise, and transformation. To assume that—as feminist rituals—they are by necessity

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countercultural is too simple a description of the complex interplay of resistance, ambivalence, complicity, borrowing, and adaptation in women’s rites. Such an assumption is also predicated on too-facile and unified a notion of ‘culture’ as the backdrop to these rites. A telling example of the complexity of feminist countercultural ritualizing appears in a Pista-Lakbayan celebrated by Filipina women in the year 2000. The liturgy contains strong antiglobalization messages but at the same time makes use of a song from an American blockbuster movie, a juxtaposition the women do not consider contradictory. Feminist communities range broadly from a dozen women gathering regularly in private homes to large national gatherings of women once every four years. This range of group formations shows well the different levels at which women organize and ritualize. However, in all their distinctiveness, many feminist ritual groups share certain features, even if the meaning of these features differs around the globe. First, most feminist ritual communities were created by women in some form of leadership position: a missionary, an ordained minister, or a person with academic theological training. Several women at the heart of these communities hold advanced degrees or doctorates in theology, and the majority trained (at least in part) in the North Atlantic world. Overwhelmingly then, these women are no subaltern subjects, even if they do find themselves marginalized in their traditional ecclesial communities and particularly in the site they claim for themselves, ritual. Second, and related to their educational and ministerial positions, these women explicitly embrace forms of feminist theologizing, sometimes having worked to introduce feminist theology in a given location. A third notable feature of feminist ritual groups is how many are established in capital cities or metropolitan areas. Feminist ritual groups seem to have arisen in or close to geopolitical centers of power. Additionally, some theorists of the globalization of the Women’s Movement have argued that there is a correlation between urbanization and industrialization and the spread of the Women’s Movement. Many feminist ritual communities seem to support this theory, if only for the particular kind of Women’s Movement associated with Second Wave feminism as it originated in the North Atlantic world. Another shared feature is the commitment many of these groups have to progressive social movements, especially to local women’s movements. But there are other social movements that feminist ritual communities engage. The German Frauenstudien- und Bildungszentrum has roots in the student revolts of the 1960s, and the founding mothers of WATER emerged from the civil rights movement in the United States. Women Church in South Africa is related to the antiapartheid struggle. Con-spirando traces its origins to the awakening of women to gender issues in the antidictatorial struggle in Chile. And many feminists continue to align themselves with local political struggles, be it support for the reunification of North and South Korea, or recognition of the women drafted for military sexual slavery as is the case for 꾡ꫦ霅쁁 in Seoul, or support for land rights for aboriginal people as is the case for the women’s group at Fitzroy Uniting Church in Melbourne, Australia, or support of striking workers at a Shoemart factory in the Philippines. Women involved in feminist ritualizing also share telling institutional characteristics (or lack thereof). Most groups with Protestant roots have structural links with the ‘mother’ church, and, in several cases, these groups are funded or otherwise supported

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by the church. At minimum, they are tolerated within the institution. Groups of Catholic origin are less likely to have a direct ecclesial affiliation. Working within the Catholic ecclesial institution, and being dependent on its goodwill or at least its tolerance, has on the whole proved difficult for women-identified communities.

Ecclesial borderlands For almost all communities of feminist ritualizing, though, whether Catholic in origin or Protestant, whether small or large, the boundaries of ecclesial identity have become distinctly blurred. The oxymoronic wording is intentional here. While those with traditional understandings of the nature of the church must find such blurring of ecclesial boundaries problematic, theological reflection attentive to postmodern theories of culture will, from the outset, assume Christian identity to be hybrid, unstable, composite, and relational with wider cultural materials. ‘Church’ or ‘denominations’ become not fixed categories but shifting, unstable, flexible bodies, multiply positioned across coordinates such as geography, gender, class, and ethnicity. Many women involved in feminist ritualizing clearly encourage this destabilizing of traditional ecclesial categories, because theological reflection open to such destabilization presents new possibilities. Such theological reflection, for example, will not force one to assume that the journey into feminist rituals can lead nowhere but outside of the Christian faith. Several feminist communities, after all, no longer recognize a sharp boundary between Christianity on the one side, and broader movements of feminist spirituality and ritualizing on the other. These communities thus render visible a space described only inadequately by categories that suggest the existence of two distinct spheres. Granted that many women in these groups have left behind the struggle ‘to fit into’ traditional church structures, at least as a primary concern; they also refuse to be defined as ‘outside’, extra ecclesiam, or to validate the binarism underlying such definitions. Rather, these feminist communities defy traditional demarcation and claim a space of their own at the very borders of traditional ecclesiology. In these borderlands, feminist ritualizing exists with all the complicated richness that such a space offers. One can see this ritualizing as an ecclesial form of border politics: the transgression and thereby subversion of ecclesial borders and their exclusionary powers.

Feminist ritualizing around the globe: A shared style Finally, there is the question of shared characteristics among feminist rituals around the globe. Obviously, rather than defining overarching theological themes, or holding feminist rituals accountable to a set of traditional theological loci, one does well to look at

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actual feminist ritual communities themselves and to ask how they understand and shape ritual (Procter-Smith 2003). What emerges in the answers, I suggest, is remarkably close to the characteristics of what Kathryn Tanner calls ‘theologies of the people’ (1996). These theologies are eminently practical, hospitably inclusive (‘syncretistic’), with a certain isolating selectivity and attention to form over content, and an openended flexibility that responds easily and quickly to change. Issues that surface in these communities and their rituals cluster around a number of recurring themes, but are addressed quite differently in different contexts. A concrete example might be the different forms the engagement with sex tourism and trafficking of women takes, say in the Philippines and in Iceland. Diversity also marks other recurring themes such as the exercise of women’s agency and leadership, the re-reading of Scriptures and a broadened understanding of what counts as sacred Scripture in the first place, the reconfiguring of tradition, the appreciation of indigenous and local materials, the sacrality of nature and of the whole of the cosmos, and coalition-building among and struggles of different women. These themes are all relevant for feminist ritualizing, but are engaged quite differently in each community. With this caveat, I highlight a number of characteristics that are shared in feminist ritual practices around the globe. First, women as authoritative ritual subjects. In feminist celebrations, women are the authoritative subjects of the ritual event. At first, this simple fact may seem unremarkable, but the significance of this ritual subjecthood of women is immense. Women as authoritative ritual subjects all but turns on its head the traditional gender hierarchy in Christian worship. Moreover, feminist ritual leadership generally is shared and nonhierarchical. There is no distinction between those with ritual power and those without. Second, most feminist rituals are designed to be highly participatory. Against the background of centuries of women simply watching and hearing, these rituals put a high priority on every single worshipper actively participating in some way. Often, participation-intense rituals, such as processions or meditative writing for the whole group, are given preference. However, participation in feminist rituals is not dependent on traditional liturgical expertise (i.e., how to navigate in sacred space, when to stand or kneel, and what response to give when). Rather, feminist rituals typically presume no more expertise than that of active presence in the moment. This does not mean that they are undemanding events. On the contrary, most feminist rituals demand much more than traditional liturgy, where a breathing body might suffice. Third, tradition and innovation. Many feminist rituals play creatively with the tension between tradition and innovation. In most cases, traditional forms are retained to some degree, but are filled with new, women-identified content. A ritual of anointing can be offered to a victim of rape. An exorcism might target the evils of patriarchy. A Good Friday liturgy can center on women’s suffering. In their struggle with tradition, however, feminists also generate a host of new ritual practices. Thus, for example, liturgical dance is (re-)discovered, and meditative exercises become part of worship. And there are entirely new celebrations specific to women, particularly rites around the cycles of women’s bodies, such as a healing ritual following a miscarriage or a stillbirth, and celebrations of menarche, menopause, and croning. Alienation from the established liturgical

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tradition also invites a look at other ritual traditions. Some North American feminist rituals borrow from Native American practices. However, some feminist communities, attentive to ‘ritual theft’, abstain from ritual borrowing, particularly from peoples who have experienced colonial expropriation in the past. But in whatever way communities resolve these tensions between liturgical tradition and innovation, the rituals cover new ground. As such, they are experimental, playful, flexible, and momentary. They are never written in stone. Behind them stand not monumental ecclesial buildings, but feminist communities of exploration and uncertainty. Obviously then, the process of creating these rituals as well as celebrating and then assessing them is inherent in the whole ritual event. The image of a recipe book, used in a number of collections of feminist liturgies, illustrates this characteristic well. However, there is no reproduction of ritual here, only suggestions of ingredients to stimulate other women’s own ritual creativity. Fourth, sacred symbols. Women’s liturgies are intensely and vibrantly symbolic (Roll 1991). Most feminist rituals are stamped with an intensive predilection for symbols: rose-scented water, freshly baked bread, milk and honey, fragrant oil, burning incense, flowers, candles, branches, ashes, earth, grain, bulbs, straw, wine, or fruit. All these symbols appear much more frequently than in traditional liturgies. Indeed, a natural symbol can easily be the focus of a whole feminist ritual, for example those rituals centering on water. But it is not only the natural symbols that come alive in worship. Women also bring to the liturgy their social world and its materials, such as weavings, photos, ribbons, mirrors, yarn, fabric, bowls, spices, tissue paper, children’s toys, and chiffon scarves. The symbols appeal to all the senses, and women’s bodies themselves easily become the key symbolic focus of a ritual. This is the case, for example, in birthing preparation liturgies or in menstrual and New Moon rituals. Ritual symbols and women’s lives intersect in a very direct and immediate way. The ‘ordinary’ of women’s lives becomes the ‘matter’ for liturgical symbols. Feminist rituals thrive on symbols that speak to and of the lived lives of women. Symbols, of course, always image a particular world. The symbols listed above speak particularly of and to the experience of white, middleclass North Atlantic women. In contrast to these, the central symbolic focus in a Latina feminist liturgy might be a home altar, holy cards, or rosaries. In Womanist worship, overturned pots might be a key symbolic ingredient (Procter-Smith and Walton 1993). In an Asian feminist liturgy, a Zen bell might be used as a symbol of prayer. In a Central American women’s liturgy in an urban settlement, a piece of zinc siding (used in construction) can serve as an offertory. As part of the feminist attention to symbol, women’s rituals also redefine sacred space on several levels. Feminist worship communities typically gather in the round: the circle signaling the conviction that all participants are ritually equal. Feminist communities also typically do not gather in institutional ecclesial space, but in private homes or in other nonecclesial gathering areas. Most feminist gatherings are also oriented horizontally, rather than vertically. Holy ground in feminist rituals, then, is not established by gathering in a ‘church’, but by women coming together to celebrate, by women taking off their shoes before each other, by women hallowing with their own presence the space they choose for their ritualizing.

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Fifth, women’s words. In many parishes and other ecclesial settings, the struggle over ‘inclusive language’ has been the most visible part of the struggle for women’s rites. In most feminist rituals, language indeed is a crucial, yet multifaceted and complex concern that goes far beyond the avoidance of ‘men’ and ‘brothers’ in prayers and hymns. To begin with, women have found their own voices in feminist rituals. It is women who speak (and typically only women). After the experience of being voiceless in more traditional worship, women have claimed feminist rituals as a space that lets them raise and hear each other’s voices. This is particularly important when it comes to interpreting sacred Scriptures. Women as preachers have generated not only a new ‘sound’, but also new ways of reading the Word—new images, illustrations, and homiletic concerns. Beyond the basic issue of whose voice(s) the assembly hears, there is the question of the kind of language that is spoken. Naturally, feminist rituals opt for women-friendly language. But the spectrum of what that might mean is broad indeed. Marjorie Procter-Smith has distinguished between three kinds of language: non-sexist, inclusive, and emancipatory. The first one avoids gender-specific terms; the second seeks gender balance in references. The third, emancipatory language, ‘seeks to transform language use and to challenge stereotypical gender references’ (1990). One finds all three kinds of language in feminist rituals, the first two particularly in earlier liturgies. Another characteristic of the language used in feminist rituals is the predilection for the poetic. Related to this is the fact that the feminist ritual vocabulary is not that of (dogmatic) theology as is the case in much of traditional worship. Rather, the feminist vocabulary reflects the language of women’s longings, fears, dreams, pains, and hopes. As far as women’s lives are concerned, traditional liturgical language is aseptic. It seems to have few words for what matters to women as women. Sixth, women’s experiences. Early feminist rituals were concerned with reversing the pervasive invisibility of women in the traditional liturgy. Where were women’s stories, bodies, voices, pains, and longings? A powerful shorthand for these concerns was the category ‘women’s experience’. Often the specific experiences of women highlighted in early feminist rituals were experiences of suffering: everyday forms of discrimination and harassment, the exploitation of women in the domestic and the work spheres, and the many forms of violence against women, from the subtle violence of advertising to wartime mass rapes. Other indicators of the painful realities that women brought to feminist rituals are the resurgence of lament as a dominant form of prayer, and the many rites of healing, for example for victims of incest. But the claim to women’s experiences, so crucial in early feminist rituals, underwent changes in later years. As voices within the Women’s Movement diversified, problems with the category ‘experience’ emerged. ‘Whose experience?’ became the key question as African American and Native American women, Latinas, lesbians, and women from the Global South challenged white-feminist discourse. Two developments in feminist rituals followed directly: first, women began to acknowledge and name divergent and conflictual experiences among themselves. Second, white feminists had to confront the fact that the privilege of naming gender more important than other markers of difference and struggle signaled their own cultural dominance. Womanists, Latinas, and women from the Global South typically do not make gender the one and only focus of

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oppression; gender justice is always linked to other justice struggles, such as class, race, ethnicity, and religion. These insights have led to new themes in more recent feminist rituals, themes such as the acknowledgement of oppression among women, of diversity of experiences, and of particular forms of suffering in particular contexts. Seventh, redefining memories. The initial concentration on women’s experience led to a rereading of the Christian tradition through women’s eyes and with feminist lenses. This rereading had profound implications for ritualizing in a faith tradition that cherishes memory and remembrance (‘Do this in memory of me’). Feminist rituals obviously thrive around the remembrance of women who have gone before, for example in various ‘Litanies of Naming’ that invoke a host of foremothers. The naming and remembering of women is complemented by women’s inscription into the sacred texts in a variety of ways. One of these is the reading of Scripture against the grain, for example by superimposing the memory of a woman’s childhood abuse onto the biblical Suffering Servant texts. What applies to the texts also applies to the history of the church. Early feminist liturgies began to speak not of the church fathers but of church mothers as part of God’s story of redemption. Well-known women saints, such as Hildegard of Bingen and Teresa of Avila, quickly became favorites in these liturgies. But the commemoration of women soon included other women, sainted or not, within Christianity and beyond, women like Sojourner Truth or Aung San Suu Kyi. There is yet another ‘inclusion’ in women’s ritual remembrance. With their particular sensitivities for women’s suffering, feminist rituals remember the ‘losers’ in the dominant narrative, ecclesial and otherwise. Examples of such remembrance are rituals that focus on women who died during the witch hunts, or women who lost their lives because of domestic violence and abuse. Eighth, naming and confronting evil. Given the history of witch hunts and women’s lives lost to violence, it is not surprising that feminist rituals in general disavow the traditional Christian understanding of sin. As feminist theologians noted early on, the dominant Christian understanding of sin was shaped around ‘man’ as the norm. Sin was primarily identified with pride, self-will, and power. In feminist rituals, a new narrative emerges about what sin might be in and for contemporary women’s lives. First of all, confessions of (women’s) sins simply are not staple diet in feminist liturgies, particularly not in the early ones. If there are confessions of sins, they obviously do not reiterate the traditional catalog of women’s sins. Rather, the sins confessed might be the lack of resistance to whatever diminishes women’s lives or the lack of networking with other women across all divides. But the infrequent confession of sin in feminist ritual does not mean that sin and evil do not matter. In fact, feminist rituals have a lot to say about sin—but not necessarily in confessions. The sins regularly mentioned are usually sins against women. Behind the rite of anointing for a rape survivor stands a sin. Behind prayers for abused women stand sins. Behind recollections of women who died in the witch hunts stand sins. In more recent feminist ritualizing, women have also begun to confess sins that women commit against other women, whether on the basis of ethnicity, status, sexual orientation, religious identity, or other markers of difference. Ninth, healing and hallowing creation. Most feminist rituals display a profoundly positive emphasis on creation. They emerged, after all, in a time of heightened awareness of

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ecological crisis, and with the development in the 1980s of an ecofeminist theology. Where feminist rituals are influenced by an ecofeminist spirituality, earth and nature come to be venerated as the Body of God. The ‘earthiness’ of these rituals is obvious in their intensely symbolic nature. From water to oil, from flowers to ashes, from earth to apples, these liturgies embrace and celebrate God’s creation wholeheartedly. There are whole feminist rituals that focus on water, on earth, or on fire. There are celebrations of Earth Day, of seasons, and of the solstices. Not surprisingly, the visions of the future developed in feminist rituals often link the liberation of women with the desire for a healing and hallowing of all creation. Tenth, wrestling with the Holy One. Grounded in the feminist hermeneutic of suspicion, it is not surprising that feminist rituals wrestle with how to image and name the Holy One, extending traditional images of God. Early feminist liturgies praised God’s motherhood, understood as nurturing and loving. After the initial enthusiasm for the image of a mothering God, however, the understanding of motherhood as nurturing and loving itself came under suspicion as part of a traditional woman-script. Together with the broadened image of motherhood, a plethora of other images for God emerged, with Sophia (the female embodiment of Divine Wisdom in the Hebrew Bible) enjoying particular popularity. The wealth of images witnesses to the intensity of the search for new and authentic ways of naming God, but ‘God’ certainly is no easy presence in feminist rituals. From the absence of specific God references in some and the claim of God’s presence in sisterhood in others, from the absence of Christ references in some to the defiant embrace of the title ‘Lord’ in a few (not least of all out of respect for Womanist concerns), from calling God ‘mother’ to holy silence in invoking God—there is a broad range of God talk and God silence in feminist rituals. Eleventh, boundaries in feminist ritual communities. Feminist communities in the Christian tradition practically always have an ecumenical orientation. However, the dividing lines between individual churches fade in light of the gulf in all Christian communities between kyriarchy and women’s flourishing. And the community of feminist ritualizing extends far beyond the Christian world. How far this community extends in actu often depends on geographic location. Particularly in North America, feminist liturgies can blur the lines between Christian, Jewish, Native, Wiccan, and other women. More so than in Europe, the North American feminist ritual community tends to be broader than the ecclesial world. For a feminist community in Latin America, the ecumenical openness to include both Protestant and Catholic women may be an achievement; for a feminist community in Los Angeles, it in all likelihood is not. For Women Church in Korea, openness might mean inclusion of women shamans. For some of the above, embracing out-lesbians is a sign of openness. And for most feminist ritual communities, the inclusion of men in liturgies is a question that causes much soul-searching and divergent answers. But what almost all groups share is a willingness to err on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion. In some ways, one can subsume other characteristics of feminist ritualizing under this one: feminist rituals will opt to err on the side of inclusion whenever women’s voices, stories, experiences of pain, symbols, traditions, and images of God are concerned.

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Conclusion What might the future hold for women’s ritual lives? There obviously is no turning back to a time before feminist ritualizing began. Women creating and celebrating feminist rituals are here, and here to stay. At the same time, of the roughly one billion Christian women around the globe, those who participate in feminist ritual practices are a distinct minority. A multitude of Christian women, however, do practice their faith in symbol, ritual, celebration, and song, and they do so—whether self-consciously or not, in an established group or alone—in gender-specific ways. For whatever the future of distinctly feminist rituals might hold, this gender-specific meaning-making of the rituals of faith will remain, at least until gender loses its defining force as a marker of difference in our world. It seems imperative for all those interested in and committed to feminist ritualizing to (re-)connect with the many ways in which women make meaning within a given faith tradition and its established worship life (Berger 2005).

Works Cited Beckman, Ninna Edgardh (2001). ‘Mrs. Murphy’s Arising from the Pew: Ecclesiological Implications’, Ecumenical Review, 53/1: 5–13. Bell, Catherine (1997). Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions. New York: Oxford University Press. Berger, Teresa (1999). Women’s Ways of Worship: Gender Analysis and Liturgical History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. (Ed.) (2001). Dissident Daughters: Feminist Liturgies in Global Context. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox. (2005). Fragments of Real Presence: Liturgical Traditions in the Hands of Women. New York: Crossroad. (2006). ‘Women in Worship’, in Geoffrey Wainwright and Karen Westerfield Tucker (Eds), The Oxford History of Christian Worship. New York: Oxford University Press, 255–768. Hitchcock, Helen Hull (Ed.) (1992). The Politics of Prayer: Feminist Language and the Worship of God. San Francisco: Ignatius. Mani, Lata (1992). ‘Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception’, in Helen Crowley and Susan Himmelweit (Eds), Knowing Women: Feminism and Knowledge. Cambridge: Polity, 306–22. Northup, Lesley A. (1997). Ritualizing Women: Patterns of Spirituality. Cleveland: Pilgrim. Procter-Smith, Marjorie (1990). In Her Own Rite: Constructing Feminist Liturgical Tradition. Nashville, TN: Abingdon. (2003). ‘Feminist Ritual Strategies: The Ekklēsia Gynaikōn at Work’, in Fernando F. Segovia (Ed.), Toward a New Heaven and a New Earth: Essays in Honor of Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 498–515. and Walton, Janet (Eds) (1993). Women at Worship: Interpretations of North American Diversity. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox.

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Roll, Susan (1991). ‘Traditional Elements in New Women’s Liturgies’, Questions Liturgiques, 72: 43–59. Ruether, Rosemary Radford (1985). Women-Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Swidler, Arlene (Ed.) (1974). Sistercelebrations: Nine Worship Experiences. Philadelphia: Fortress. Tanner, Kathryn (1996). ‘Theology and Popular Culture’, in Dwight N. Hopkins and Sheila Greeve Davaney (Eds), Changing Conversations: Religious Reflection and Cultural Analysis. New York: Routledge, 101–20.

Further Reading Procter-Smith, Marjorie (1995). Praying with Our Eyes Open: Engendering Feminist Liturgical Prayer. Nashville, TN: Abingdon. Roll, Susan K. et al. (Eds) (2001). Women, Ritual and Liturgy = Yearbook of the European Society of Women in Theological Research 9. Leuven and Sterling, VA: Peeters. Walker, Barbara (1990). Women’s Rituals: A Sourcebook. San Francisco: Harper and Row. Walton, Janet R. (2000). Feminist Liturgy: A Matter of Justice. American Essays in Liturgy. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press.

chapter 26

gl oba liz ation, wom en’s tr a nsnationa l m igr ation, a n d r eligious de-tr a dition i ng kathryn tanner

Far-flung movements of women from disadvantaged areas of the world to more advantaged ones are at the heart of the present configuration of global capitalism. Rather than simply leaving their countries of origin to set up temporary or permanent residence elsewhere, women who move in today’s global economy, in order to take jobs as housekeepers or nannies (for example), are typically transnational migrants. Even as they settle into new places, their lives remain bound up with where they came from, in virtue of rather dense social and familial networks bridging national boundaries. Connected simultaneously in this way to at least two places at once, these women are working out in their everyday lives a fundamental reconfiguration of the way cultural traditions are set up and maintained, with significant implications for the understanding of religious traditions in particular. Coming undone, we’ll see, in the lives of these women is the familiar association of tradition with the intergenerational transmission of an already established way of life by means of face-to-face interactions in a single location.

Globalization and women Leaving to one side the relatively small number of professional women engaged in the transnational maneuvers of corporations, global finance, or diplomacy and academic conferencing on an international level, one might easily imagine that global flows of goods, monetary instruments, information, and people exclude women in the main.

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Women remain rooted in place while global networks are established independently around them. The question of globalization and women becomes, accordingly, the question of globalization’s impact on women: how their lives, otherwise constituted, come to be affected for better or worse by forces of globalization arriving unbidden from outside them. One might ask, for example, how the work lives of women in previously subsistence-based agrarian economies are affected when a wage economy is introduced through foreign industrial investment. Or how these women’s entrance into such a wage economy changes gender relations. The common contrast between the global and the local would in this way match up with a fundamentally gendered (and no doubt racialized) division between globalization—the construction of elite (presumably white) men—and the world of women (perhaps most especially of indigenous heritage in formerly colonized territories). Despite the fact that globalization necessarily interpenetrates the local—for example, has its fundamental centers of command within the so-called global cities of nation-states— and despite the fact that the local is now so often formed from the beginning with reference to far-off places to which global media, for example, provide access, globalization, on this common way of looking at it, is simply the antithesis of the local (Gupta and Ferguson 1997a). Global processes and flows are therefore typically thought to do no more than disrupt already-established local customs and ways of life. Perhaps trading unwittingly on the way that home and intimate relations are commonly gendered female, globalization would seem to have only the same effect on women here: women and the local both stand outside processes of globalization and come into contact with them at their peril. Of course there is no denying the power differentials that characterize present global processes, especially economic ones: the present global organization of capitalism severely disadvantages the vast majority of the world’s people. And the lines of advantage and disadvantage typically divide north from south, men from women, those of European descent from indigenous populations,‘whites’ from racialized ‘others’, and so on. No one could, or should, deny the destructive cultural, social, and economic consequences of the way the weak of the world are brought within globally integrated business and financial networks. The structural adjustment conditions, for example, placed on debt-strapped nations by the International Monetary Fund, disadvantage women by privatizing—locating in the home—all caregiving functions that a welfare state could conceivably help provide. The need to amass foreign currency to pay back international loans leads to export-driven agricultural production that turns food into a cash crop few can buy. These sorts of unsustainable economic changes in local communities undoubtedly spell new social disruptions and divisions. Although post-Fordist techniques of production on the current world stage no longer require homogenized mass demand for the same standardized goods, they still work by a thoroughgoing commodification of cultural forms worldwide, which is inimical to the often person-specific and community-building character of those goods and services not ordinarily subject to sale in many areas of the world. Something disruptive, and in a sense homogenizing, happens to religious objects, for example, when they become trinkets for sale to tourists at religious sites, or fashion accessories marketed as women’s wear in far-off urban spaces.

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However, theorizing that makes these points about globalization’s disproportionate impacts by dividing the global from the local and from women who are presumably settled and enclosed within that space of the local—as if the two sides had to form independently constituted arenas—distorts the realities of today’s global capitalism. Most importantly for our purposes here, this theorizing hides from view the way women are fully integrated in global processes, the way women sustain those very global processes by being on the move in today’s world. There are global trends that keep people from moving in the free-flowing way consumer goods and financial instruments do now: people in depressed economies must be kept in place if transnational corporations are to benefit from the low wages their outsourcers can pay them there. Immigration restrictions have also become a popular way to deflect attention in developed nations from growing economic inequities within their borders. However, these trends are more than offset by contrary trends in global capitalism that foster immigration from every regional sector and class of disadvantaged states, and across the board primarily from women. The many disadvantaged nations of the world—whose economies, say, have been restructured to pay foreign debt, whose labor forces are paid next to nothing to provide cheap goods to consumers in other nations, goods their own meager wages will never allow them to buy—these nations are merely failed states without the foreign currency that emigrating workers send home from overseas to help defray their relatives’ living expenses. Foreign remittances—money sent back home by immigrants—now form a substantial portion of almost every disadvantaged nation’s income pool; these nations simply cannot do without them. Lacking economically secure positions at a living wage in their own countries, workers forced into a wage economy by export-driven industrialized manufacture and farming are eager to migrate. The manufacturing sectors of these receiving nations have generally declined with, for example, transnational corporations’ global outsourcing of industrial inputs, leaving poorly paid service sectors the usual employment destination for immigrants. Already associated with women’s work— clerical positions, entertainment services, home care work, now commodified domestic duties—if these jobs are staffed by foreign women rather than men, and by those fitting stigmatized racial categories in the receiving countries to boot, wages in the service sector can be kept much lower than demand would warrant (Sassen 2003). So-called global cities—the managerial and infrastructure hubs for global financial and media networks—are sites indeed of very high demand for service provision—people to cook your meals, clean your clothes, do your shopping, tidy up your house, tend your children, and so on. Besides the benefit to individuals of lower-than-market wages for these services, companies in advantaged nations are in this way freed from paying their workers’ real costs of reproduction in wages—immigrants are carrying the costs by working long hours for next to nothing. The wives of mostly male corporate employees used to serve the same function, but declining wages for men now force two-career families. With women engaged in wage work and with the hollowing-out of any state-sponsored public services to help families, domestic service provision (e.g., child care) must be commodified: one must pay someone to do it. Women who enter the workforce as immigrants

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step into the breech in a way that maximizes corporate profit again at the expense of women, but now foreign-born ones. For a host of structural reasons such as these, women from areas of the world that global capitalism disadvantages—Africa, much of Latin America, and Asia—have become the dominant face of the present system’s global population flows.

Women and transnational migration These new immigrants of today’s global economy remain connected to their places of origin (see Basch et al. 1994). They do not therefore simply migrate, move to another region of the world at the expense of their attachments to home, with the hope perhaps of someday returning there. Instead, their rooting in a new locale—finding gainful employment, setting up social networks, gaining political voice in that new locale—often only heightens their connections with their sending countries. Transnational migrants remain at once in a variety of ways: connected to two places at once, they regularly send money home to family and friends whose livelihood depends on them; they continue to nurture their children and make decisions about their education at a distance through the use of new media (the mail, cheap telephone connections, Internet access, home video and cassette recordings); they build houses in their home countries in which to stay on frequent visits back; they contribute to public works there; they often retain citizenship and vote in their home states’ elections; and so on. They establish genuinely transnational social fields that are anything but local; they interact on a daily basis with family and friends at far remove with much the same density and intensity of interaction—perhaps more—than they have with those in their same physical space. Connection for them is no longer simply a function of close geographical proximity (Sassen 2001: 273). These connections at a distance are clearly facilitated by media with global reach and the capacity for near instantaneous transmission. Events in their home state are commonly simulcast to immigrants in, say, New York City, by way of cell phones, television, radio, and the Web, giving them the lived experience of being in two places at once. These connections are facilitated as well by global financial instruments. In a world where money is de-territorialized and de-materialized so as to move to the other side of the world at the speed of a computer key stroke, it has become very easy for immigrants to send money to friends and relatives back home or to pay the people in their employ who mind their children and property there. Fueling these continued connections with home are a number of far from ‘virtual’ economic and social factors, many of which involve the complex intersection of women’s lives with forces of global capitalism. Women who immigrate, despite their physical remove from children, husbands, and parents, are often still expected to take primary responsibility for the physical, emotional, and educational well-being of loved ones. They leave the children they remain responsible for at home in part because of

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immigration restrictions and because the nature of their employment—for example, as live-in domestics—often does not permit their children to join them. However, they also leave children at home and try to care for them at a distance because the inequalities of today’s global capitalism mean that the wages they earn in a foreign country will go much farther in their home country: their children can be better fed, housed, clothed, and educated if the children remain at home (Parrenas 2001: 106). Receiving nations have an interest in this same way of keeping the reproduction costs of their immigrant workers low; they don’t need to increase wages to cover the higher living expenses these women would have if their children were with them. ‘By containing the costs of reproduction in sending countries, wages of migrant workers can be kept to a minimum’ (107). A desire to maintain and improve one’s class or status position also seems a factor for many in maintaining transnational connections (see Basch et al. 1994). Women who emigrate are often better off in their home countries—in material and educational terms—than women who don’t; they often have higher education and income levels, and the independence, consequently, to enable them to flee insecure economic futures at home. However, they suffer a rather severe decline in status in the places they migrate to; they may make more money than the richest people back home but they do so in very low status professions (e.g., as maids) in societies that often discriminate against them as racial or ethnic minorities. Maintaining connections with people back home, remaining part of the community there (e.g., by sending money or consumer goods back home), elevates one’s status there and compensates for the loss of it in the receiving country. The sorts of jobs that women take, moreover, typically allow time for travel back home, and provide an incentive for continued close relations with people there (Levitt 2001: 26). The jobs are often insecure and poorly paid (relative to, say, unionized manufacturing jobs in receiving countries), without much room for advancement, and with a kind of temporary-worker irregularity of employment. Layoffs are unpredictable and one’s ability to support oneself while sending money back home is rarely a sure proposition: it might well be best to hedge one’s bets by solid relations with family members in other areas of the world upon whom one can depend if things go sour. Sending nations, finally, have an incentive to make immigrants feel connected to their home countries, without, however, actually encouraging them ever to come home to stay. It is in the sending nations’ economic interest if immigrants feel sufficiently connected to send foreign remittances home and spend foreign dollars when visiting often as quasi-tourists. However, this economic benefit would be offset were they to feel so well connected that they one day forego foreign employment altogether. Immigrants today are often, therefore, considered honored members of their home nation even at a distance, even extended certain rights of citizenship, while being discouraged from repatriating—for example, by the imposition in that case of taxes on money earned abroad (Basch et al. 1994: 269–78). These forms of official membership help make clearer what distinguishes transnational migrants from other displaced populations in the past and present. Because they remain in these often official ways members in some strong sense of their home communities, transnational migrants are not typical immigrants living in a diaspora

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(269). They remain members of their home state even though they do not live within the territory of that state’s control. Greek immigrants, for example, do not simply remain Greek—members of the Greek people or nation while no longer members of the territorially defined Greek state—as they were in the tide of immigration to the USA around the turn of the past century. They are now also considered members of the Greek polity even while living and settling down permanently abroad. Nor do transnational migrants, consequently, have the same longing to return as exiles might, if and when the situation that led to their voluntary or forced migration ever changes (270). Transnational migrants have many of the benefits of home membership without actually living there most of the time. And they are able to influence what happens in their home countries as members of it while remaining at a distance; for example, they are often courted by politicians from home for their votes and influence on folks back home around election time. Nor, finally, are transnational migrants properly considered cosmopolitan in their attitude to place, in the way jet-setting globe-trotters or academics born in India, educated in Britain, and teaching in the USA might be thought to be (Friedman 1995: 78). They are not abstractly open to many places and cultures, in virtue of their experiences of movement and dislocation, or able to consider every culture and place—even or especially those they are and have been closely associated with—at a reflective distance. Instead, transnational migrants remain very much rooted in their places of origin, not simply in their imaginations but by dense forms of everyday connection between where they are now and where they have come from; physical displacement therefore does nothing to alter that rooting. Being here, they are almost as intimately connected to people and places there as they would be if they lived there.

Transnational migration and de-traditioning Despite the fact that transnational migrants remain intimately connected to their places of origin, for reasons that in the case of women in particular often have to do with rather traditional expectations about women’s continued responsibilities for children and family, transnational migration does have certain de-traditioning effects. The sheer fact of the great physical distance that transnational connections span, and certainly what women experience at that remove from home, tend to loosen the grip of traditional expectations about gender roles and family life. These traditions about women and household relationships—meaning by tradition, intergenerationally sustained assumptions about proper beliefs and behaviors that are a function of ongoing social relationships—tend to be de-traditioned in the course of transnational migration in the sense that they now cannot (1) be taken for granted, (2) function as reliable guides for action in new circumstances, or (3) provide stable social placements or identities.

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The ‘de-’ in de-traditioning indicates here not the loss or repudiation of those traditions as simply a part of a rejected past—of the ‘old’ world left behind. It signals instead their reworking and renegotiation as they enter the trans-local social fields in which the new women immigrants participate (see Heelas 1996; Luke 1996; Thompson 1996). Thus, even as transnational immigrant women continue to bear a large burden for the care of home and family, their distance from home and family necessarily reconfigures such responsibilities in ways that mitigate these burdens (Parrenas 2001: 109). The opportunity to escape traditional female roles—of, say, dutiful daughter to sick and elderly parents or faithful wife to an abusive husband—is often indeed a factor propelling women’s migration. A woman may not be able to divorce a bad husband legally but transnational migration means she won’t have to live with him either (66–7). If these women remain responsible for domestic chores, they do so by paying for the help or by directing operations over the phone. These women may still be expected to play a primary role in raising children, but that involvement can bring with it little direct, faceto-face supervision of those children. Women’s continued association with the domestic now overlaps, moreover, with their new role as breadwinners. Earning money, negotiating the public spaces of their new environments without any immediate help from male relatives, may mean an independence for these women not previously thought compatible with the roles of wife and mother. Families, the traditional site of cultural reproduction, can no longer be assumed to be linguistically or culturally homogeneous, now that their members spend so much of their time in physically dispersed spaces (Erel 2002). An Ecuadoran mother might go to Spain to work as a maid, while her husband emigrates to some other South American country to work in the mines; two of the older daughters leave for the USA to join an aunt who cleans offices, while the younger sons of the family stay home in Ecuador to be raised by elderly grandparents. When the family reconfigures itself again in a new pattern of migration—say, the elder daughter, along with a young son, joins the mother in Spain and the daughter assumes childrearing responsibilities for him—caregivers are unlikely to speak the same language or have the same cultural expectations as their charges. Contrary to the often traditional association of families with a harmony of interests, families spanning distant locales in virtue of transnational migration are also now riddled in novel ways by class conflict (Basch et al. 1994: 241). The extended families of transnational migrants do remain connected to each other for the united purpose of making ends meet in a global economy that prevents the sustenance of the whole family in any one place. The family wouldn’t be economically viable if they all stayed home; but neither would their situation be improved by emigrating as a group anywhere else. Located disparately, their interests diverge. Women sending remittances home often face hardship as a result in their receiving countries; what they earn goes far where they come from but not where they are. They are often nagged, as well, by worries that their money is being misspent by those they have left behind. A sense of inequity haunts, moreover, the nonmigrating members of transnational families. Someone must stay put to tend the children of emigrants and the property that emigrants buy to remain connected

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materially to home, but that means these people forego the more lucrative and higher status futures that might have been theirs by emigrating themselves. Transnational migration also leads to an odd instability in the identity function of traditional norms. That identity function is not locally sustainable without being peculiarly dependent on conformity to contrary norms somewhere down the transnational line. One remains a highly respected person at home because of money made abroad, with significant power and freedom therefore to influence one’s fate at home, but only by becoming a lowly maid and an ethnic outcast in the place one earns that money. And the reverse: restrictive norms are escaped at one end of transnational social networks only to reappear at the other; changes in status-associated traditions at one end are purchased by an enforced status quo at some other. One breaks out of poverty or a lower class status, and the traditionally disparaging forms of identity associated with those social locations, only by assuming them in some other locale. One is able to avoid the responsibilities of motherhood in the country one leaves only by taking up the same sort of burdens in the country one migrates to. One asserts one’s independence of traditional expectations on women by emigrating only to be, for all intents and purposes, imprisoned as an illegal immigrant in the house where one works as a maid. A gendered division of labor is subverted in relations with one’s own husband—who, say, takes over child care responsibilities for you while you are working overseas—only by playing into them in the country one enters (Parrenas 2001: 61–79): the woman executive in the USA who hires a Brazilian housekeeper needs to do so because her husband won’t share the chores; hiring that housekeeper enforces the idea that domestic work is women’s work of little value, and means that her husband never has to share household duties. A woman who emigrates has the money, in virtue of wages earned in another country, to buy a certain independence from her roles as wife and mother, but only by locking into those same roles a poorer woman in her home country who now becomes her own paid maid and childminder. In the course of transnational migration it is not simply the substance of traditional norms and expectations—what it means, for example, to be a wife and mother—that is changed in these ways, but the fundamental associations of the notion ‘tradition’. This is a kind of de-traditioning at a deeper level—not (once again) the simple repudiation of the whole notion of tradition, in favor, say, of the sort of purely individualistic process of self-formation taken to be the antithesis of tradition in the West, but a fundamental transformation of what are taken to be the defining features of tradition. Since families and especially the women in them are considered primary agents of the transmission of heritage—establishing a kind of paradigm for socialization as it takes place in other less domestic venues—the way families and mothering are reworked in the course of women’s transnational migration brings with it an altered understanding of what it means for traditions to be established and passed on (see Appadurai 1996: 43–5). For example, when the character of motherhood is altered by women who remain primary caregivers of their children at a distance, the meaning of tradition is also altered: the suggestion is now that physical proximity is not essential for transmitting traditions to the next generation.

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One major alteration to the notion of tradition through transnational migration is the breaking of the association of tradition with particular locales. If traditions are sustained by family social networks that cross multiple, widely dispersed locations, it clearly no longer makes sense to think that particular places can be lined up with particular cultural traditions (see Gupta and Ferguson 1997b; Malkki 1997). Fijian traditions are no longer the prerogative of Fiji, in other words. And therefore, contrary to the usual assumptions about anthropological fieldwork, finding out about those traditions no longer involves simply traveling to that single location where they reside. Traditions simply cannot be assigned discrete places on a map in that way. Traditions do not cover particular territories and break off with their boundaries. They are just not geographically located and spatially bounded, in the way, say, nation-states are—or were prior to the reconfiguration of states with the offer of citizenship at a distance to a vast pool of transnational migrants, as is currently happening. Since traditions are not naturally proper to particular places, they are not essentially sedentary either (see Malkki 1997: 65; Peters, 1997: 80–3). Contrary to the usual theories of immigrant assimilation, transnational migration suggests that when people move the traditions they started with are not necessarily stripped from them in virtue of that fact, and traditions naturally suited to their new place of settlement put in their place (Rosaldo 1988: 81). Contrary to the underlying assumptions of most theories about processes of enculturation, when traditions are set up in a new locale, one need not think of this as their imposition on a territory where they do not naturally belong. Traditions, in the current global sociocultural scene at least, are instead by nature moveable across geographical space. Contrary to the idea that diverse immigrant cultural traditions will melt or blur into the homogenizing tradition of their new nation, transnational migration suggests that a single territorial boundary, like that of the USA, will continue to contain diverse cultural traditions sustained by dense social networks spanning their new homes and their places of origin. Being in the same physical space does not bring along with it integration within the same traditions, then, as a matter of course. Transnational migration suggests instead that traditions are space spanning. The assumption of cultural homogeneity within national territories—the kind of imagined community that Benedict Anderson (1983) has famously argued is at the historical root of nation-states—is in this way contested by patterns of transnational migration. Different cultural traditions crisscross the nation-state along multiple lines that form circuits running through that nation-state’s territory to a host of distant places. Indeed, following the transnational circuits of their culturally distinct populations, now different nation-states crisscross each other in space. Differences between states often remain associated with differences in the cultural traditions of their respective populations (see Schiller and Basch 1995: 51–2). Greeks, for example, remain part of the Greek state when they migrate because they are considered to be Greek in cultural or ethnic terms (e.g., they speak Greek, are Greek Orthodox). And this means the same kind of violation of territorial boundaries that occurs on the level of cultural traditions also occurs on the level of state polities. In neither case is difference a matter of mutually

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exclusive territories; in neither case is difference constructed by aligning differences between cultural traditions or state polities with differences among tightly bounded spaces. Mutually exclusive spaces are not sufficient for establishing differences between nation-states, because sending nation-states infiltrate the territory of receiving nationstates by way of transnational migrants who remain the citizens of the sending nationstates at a distance. The people or nation, in cultural and ethnic terms, that constituted a state’s population always had the capacity in principle to pass over the territorial boundaries of another state, and now, often in virtue of that fact, the sending state is also taken to have set up roots within the territory of other sovereign nation-states. For instance, locales that are densely populated with transnational migrants in a receiving state, for all intents and purposes, form voting districts of the sending state. Given the fact of traditions formed in and through the trans-local social fields of today’s transnational migrants, a tradition’s movement across space, as I have suggested, shouldn’t be considered the problematic extension of a tradition already established in some other locale. Instead, movement across space, the joining of geographically distant spaces, goes into the very making of a tradition; if mothers raise their children at a distance, the integration of spaces is at the heart of the intergenerational process of transmission of heritage, which defines tradition as an active process. In this way the notion of tradition as a process of transmission is fundamentally detemporalized. When intergenerational transmission comes up in the context of transnational migration, the question of overcoming historical distance, extending norms and practices of the past into the present and future, is outweighed in urgency by the question of transmission across, the bridging of, space between young and old. Establishing and maintaining a tradition is not so much a historical matter, then, as a spatial one. The question of a tradition’s reach in geographical space—and not just its formation—is similarly de-temporalized. Transmission of cultural forms across space, before the present global configurations of media and social processes, could easily be understood in terms of transmission across time—from the past, identified with the place one left, into the present and future of a new land—because of the often extended temporal lag involved in movement (e.g., it took you months to make the journey to a new place) and because the linear, sequential character of that movement suggested the similar trajectory of time (one could not, for example, easily go back and forth or remain connected to the place one left in a circuit of continuing exchange). When the place one has left remains a part of your present social field, as is the case in transnational migration— the idea of synchronic movement across space replaces this usual historical frame: connecting to the place one has left is no longer connecting to one’s past. A tradition’s ability to move across space, to influence people at a remove, is no longer a function, moreover, of de-localizing it. Print media, for example, already suggested ways that traditions could cope with geographical distance, and complicated thereby the picture of face-to-face social interaction in a shared locale (for example, sitting at a teacher’s feet, or participating in local rituals) as the paradigmatic form of cultural transmission (Thompson 1996). However, print media allow cultural forms to be disarticulated or abstracted from the particulars of place, and that is what often enables the

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cultural forms they mediate to encompass new locales. Rather than requiring direct contact with people, things, or activities rooted in a particular place, a tradition can be maintained anywhere, whatever the locale, by reading a book. However, in the case of transnational migration, the traditions of a distant place are an influence because one can remain connected to the particulars of that locale via new digitized and computerized media that allow one in some strong sense to be present and interact with people in real time even at a physical distance. Traditional forms remain localized, then—they can have everything to do with the particulars of a specific locale—even as they exert a hold on people at a distance. Also undermined, for the same reason, is the assumption that traditions can influence distant places only by actually moving across space and being physically transplanted—say, the way a book might convey traditional norms to a new place only by being taken from one place and physically carried to a new one. The traditions of a place can extend their influence to far away transnational migrants simply by staying put. The traditions of a place—say, motorcycle racing around the town square every Friday night—remain where they are; people just connect to them at a distance, in some form of virtual participation—say, by way of a live cable television feed. It is the space-spanning social fields of transnational migration that do the transmitting. The people and things in the different places bridged by such fields do not necessarily have to do a lot of moving around themselves. Indeed, people left at home are part of the social fields set up by transnational migration, and therefore feel the full effects of the traditions formed in and through those social fields, without having moved at all. The way transnational social fields integrate traditions of different places should also not be viewed as the subsequent coming together of already constituted, homogeneous traditions at either end, in which, say, the one eventually breaks through its boundaries and flows across to the other (see Friedman 1995: 86). Different traditions instead overlap at either end, in virtue of a constant social circuit back and forth. For example, at the US end of such a social circuit a Haitian woman might have the ideas she grew up with about wives’ dependence on their husbands altered by the fact that she now works to support herself and her family back home. However, one also finds much the same reworking of traditions on the other end of the circuit in Haiti: women, and men, who have never emigrated have their ideas about womanhood altered in the same direction because of their close social connections with Haitian women in the USA. Haitian traditional norms do not lie at the one end, maintained and sustained in virtue of their own self-contained processes of social transmission, nor do norms embedded in the practices of women’s paid labor at the US end remain untouched in some isolated social circle of formation of their own—with the question then being how the two are to be bridged. Instead, there is a single unified process of social transmission, encompassing both ends from the start, and incorporating throughout the same mix of diverse cultural norms and expectations. Finally, the usual vertical, one-directional or top-down, account of immigrants struggling to accommodate themselves to, or to resist as best they can, the dominant cultural traditions of the countries that receive them finds itself offset by an emphasis on the at

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least equally important horizontal, multidirectional circuits that immigrants form among themselves and with family and friends left back home (see Lionnet and Shih 2005). At least as interesting as the way immigrants define themselves over and against, say, mainstream US cultural traditions, or, for that matter the way nonmigrants form their identities vis-à-vis the images transmitted by global media and the products of transnational corporations, is the way these populations set up and maintain cultural traditions laterally across the spaces of their own widespread geographical dispersal. Rather, for example, than thinking of Moroccan transnational migrants becoming French in virtue of the way they relate to the ideal image of French culture projected by the state, one might explore the way they interact among themselves and with other immigrants in the common project of refashioning what it means to be French (2).

Religion and de-traditioning How might religion figure in the de-traditioning effects of transnational migration? It is important to see, first of all, that religion and religious institutions are often central facilitators of the social networks that define transnational migration (see Vasquez and Marquardt 2003). Ante-dating present transnational movements, religious institutions (often supported by their concomitant religious ideas about human community) see no incompatibility between being rooted in one place while being connected to another, often by fairly dense social ties. An overarching institution spans, say, churches in farflung places. Catholic priests, for example, go back and forth across national boundaries; missionary outreach and contributions to public works in far-off places are common in parish life; the designation of parishes in other countries as ‘sister’ churches is hardly unusual; and so on. All these institutional networks can be used by transnational immigrants to remain in close touch with people back home: an immigrant church might send funds back to the home church; the two churches might share priests, engage in common, transnational charitable projects; and so on. When they form part of the dense social ties of transnational migration, religions often work as de-traditioning forces. They often, that is, loosen and refigure traditional norms and expectations in sending countries that might otherwise hamper transmigration altogether or at least render it more difficult. The influence of Pentecostalism on Ghanaian transnational migration is a good case in point (Van Dijk 2002). Its transnational character—the fact that goods, ideas, and people circulate in highly accelerated ways between Pentecostal churches in Ghana and, say, the Netherlands, where Ghanaian transnational migrants often work—is one major reason for Pentecostalism’s appeal to young Ghanaians who see emigration as their only road to success. Pentecostalism feeds into Ghanaians’ traditional expectations of spirit-centered religion—that spirits will protect them and give them the power to flourish—while undermining the hold of traditional ancestral spirits. According to Pentacostalism, those spirits are now malevolent forces, binding Ghanaians to home, jealous of the success

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that emigration might bring, and depleting any funds they might earn that way through very burdensome obligations to send money back home to kin. Pentecostalism has the more powerful spirits to protect transnational migrants from the malevolent spirits of their own kin back home and so ensure their success. ‘Pentecostalism appears to continue a cultural pattern in which the migrant is included in a protective religious domain. Interestingly, however, Pentecostalism in the diaspora does not construe this domain as a continuation of Ghanaian . . . culture per se, but as affording a critical distance from it’ (191). Pentecostalism establishes a transnational religious practice that deflates the hold of traditional Ghanaian religious norms by the usual de-localizing strategies for enabling a religion’s geographical spread. Replacing the herbs or potions found only in a particular locale, or the libations that must be poured onto specially designated spots associated with the ancestors, are prayers and fasts that can be duly performed anywhere (192). However, transnational religions on the present global scene have the potential to alter the theological significance of space in far more radical ways, ways that bring religious traditions into line with those alterations in the general understanding of tradition discussed earlier. The religious identity of Christianity, for example, has often been assured territorially, with reference to its location of origin—in Palestine and then a short time later, in the greater Mediterranean basin. The Christian identity of churches in other places is, therefore, often cemented by showing connections between their religious forms and ones that had their start in these places of origin. Is communion with coconut milk close enough, for example, to the wine used in Europe (whose churches are assumed to be the historical continuation of those of the Mediterranean basin) to ensure its identity as a Christian rite? The Christian identity of individuals has been similarly a matter of territorial localization (Hervieu-Leger 2002). Thus,‘church-type’ Christian communities (those, in other words, that hold out the ideal of incorporating all humanity by encompassing all space, the whole world) tend to presume the Christian identity of anyone living in the territory over which they have control. Competition for members among Christian communities of this type, therefore, brings with it a competition for presence in space: they gain more members the more they are able to exercise religious influence over the territory under dispute (101). ‘Sect-type’ Christian communities require a personal conversion experience of their members and, therefore, do not presume that people are Christian simply in virtue, say, of living within the territory of a Christian state. However, this kind of extraterritoriality—that is, the irrelevance of spatial environment when individuals are bound together in virtue of their personal faith—is combined with an ultra-localizing of identity: the local gathering of an isolated band of individuals marks their identity—the purity of that identity—over and against an insufficiently religious wider world (102). The proof of the ‘spirit and the power’ of their religious experience is proved for the sect type in the failure of their geographical reach: their religious standards are too rigorous to be widespread, in a sinful world at least. The kingdom, understood as a territory of some wide extent populated by saints, remains, however, a hope for the

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end-times, and a spur to present evangelism. For the church type, to the contrary, even in this life the universal geographical reach of the church is what demonstrates the truth of the Christian message and the holiness of its institutions (101). Christianity must be de-localized, in the sense of being freed from the hold of any one territory, in order to spread over every one. This generally means the development of practices that float free of particular places (e.g., as we have seen in the case of Pentecostalism, ritual practices of a rather abstract sort, say, verbal prayer) and/or the willingness to replace or modify ritual forms that have grown up in one place with those more appropriate to another (something the Catholic Church has shown itself quite willing to do). In this way, a tension arises within Christianity (and perhaps within other religions) between a territorial localization of religious identity (identity has a place) and a de-localized exhibition of the religion’s universal significance (103). One might argue—by appealing, say, to Ernst Troeltsch’s third type of religious community, the mystical—that on the present global scene this tension is resolved by a thoroughgoing de-localization. One does not have a localized religious identity any longer either, when one flits in and out of different religious gatherings depending on the particular need of the hour— when one’s connection to any one religious community, in short, is insecure, temporary, and provisional—and when one’s religious life as a whole is made up of a self-constructed network (better, hodgepodge) of such fluid and porous religious associations (see Wuthnow 1998: 58–82). New Age religions would be the paradigm, then, of the novel way that religions now occupy and manage space. The traditional connection between religious identification and belonging to a local community is disrupted by the growing antithesis in modern life between, on the one hand, individual decision and, on the other, formation by communal traditions, and disrupted, too, by religious believers’ increased mobility and increased access to a variety of religious forms through global media (Hervieu-Leger 2002: 103). To the extent transnational migration is indicative of what we can expect from global processes, I would argue, however, for a new configuration of the tension in which the functions of geographical spread and locality are inverted. Movement across space is now inherent to the establishment of religious identity for transnational migrants: what constitutes a religious tradition is no longer apparent from any localized territory, but only from the social circuits of religious practice spanning geographically dispersed spaces. The universal reach of religious practices, moreover, no longer requires de-localization. Instead, religious forms can extend their influence across the globe even as they remain bound up with particular places. One can be a Hindu, then (to switch religious examples), at a distance from the traditional sacred places of Hindu ritual practice—not by replacing those places with, say, new ones in one’s receiving country, or by undermining their importance through abstract ritual alternatives of a non-localized sort (say, prayer from a sacred book) but by remaining connected to those places. The reach of the local is extended by new media that allow ritual observance to center on those locales even at a distance:

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Hindus unable to make it to the Ganges River for the festival of Maha Kumbh Mela, for absolution of misdeeds can be absolved in a more modern way: via the web. Hindus can log on to the web site www.webdunia.com/kumbhupinfo, which is written in Hindi and run by the government of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The visitor must then fill out a questionnaire which asks his caste, gender, color, body type (slim or portly), and choice of auspicious days to be virtually cleansed. The user must also attach a passport-size photo. Once the information is submitted and the photo received, the profile is considered for the date selected. On that date, participants will be able to go to the web site to see virtual representations of themselves (their photo superimposed on a body chosen to match what they described in the questionnaire) being cleansed in an animated image of the Ganges River. The webmasters say they also dip a photo of the supplicant in the actual river [at just that time]. (Vasquez and Marquardt 2003: 92)

For all the disembodied virtuality of the experience, it is presence at the real river that makes the difference here: someone’s actually dipping the photo into it, as one logs on, is what it takes ‘to guarantee the ritual’s authenticity and to ensure the power of its electronic enactment’ (117). Here we have a particularly pointed example of how religious forms now achieve a universal reach and relevance while remaining place specific: a ritual’s power extends indefinitely across all space, even as that power remains.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Appadurai, Arjun (1996). Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Basch, Linda, Schiller, Nina Glick, and Blanc, Cristina Szanton (1994). Nations Unbound. Langhorne, PA: Gordon and Breach. Erel, Umut (2002). ‘Reconceptualizing Motherhood: Experiences of Migrant Women from Turkey Living in Germany’, in Deborah Bryceson and Ulla Vuorela (Eds), The Transnational Family. Oxford/New York: Berg, 127–46. Friedman, Jonathan (1995). ‘Global System, Globalization and the Parameters of Modernity’, in Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (Eds), Global Modernities. London: Sage, 69–90. Gupta, Akhil, and Ferguson, James (1997a). ‘Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era’, in Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Eds), Culture, Power, Place. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1–29. (1997b). ‘Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference’, in Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Eds), Culture, Power, Place. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 33–51. Heelas, Paul (1996). ‘Introduction: Detraditionalization and Its Rivals’, in Paul Heelas, Scott Lash, and Paul Morris (Eds), Detraditionalization. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1–19. Hervieu-Leger, Daniele (2002).‘Space and Religion: New Approaches to Religious Spatiality in Modernity’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 26/1: 99–105. Levitt, Peggy (2001). The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Lionnet, Francoise, and Shih, Shu-Mei (2005). ‘Introduction: Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally’, in Francoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih (Eds), Minor Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1–23. Luke, Timothy (1996). ‘Identity, Meaning and Globalization: Detraditionalization in Postmodern Space–Time Compression’, in Paul Heelas, Scott Lash, and Paul Morris (Eds), Detraditionalization. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 109–33. Malkki, Liisa (1997). ‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees’, in Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Eds), Culture, Power, Place. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 52–74. Parrenas, Rhacel Salazar (2001). Servants of Globalization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Peters, John (1997). ‘Seeing Bifocally: Media, Place, Culture’, in Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Eds), Culture, Power, Place. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 75–92. Rosaldo, Renato (1988). ‘Ideology, Place, and People without Culture’, Cultural Anthropology, 3/1: 77–87. Sassen, Saskia (2001).‘Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization’, in Arjun Appadurai (Ed.), Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 260–78. (2003). ‘Global Cities and Survival Circuits’, in Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild (Eds), Global Woman. New York: Henry Holt, 254–74. Schiller, Nina Glick, and Basch, Linda (1995). ‘From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration’, Anthropological Quarterly, 68/1: 48–64. Thompson, John (1996). ‘Tradition and Self in a Mediated World’, in Paul Heelas, Scott Lash, and Paul Morris (Eds), Detraditionalization. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 98–108. Van Dijk, Rijk (2002). ‘Religion, Reciprocity and Restructuring Family Responsibility in the Ghanaian Pentecostal Diaspora’, in Deborah Bryceson and Ulla Vuorela (Eds), The Transnational Family. Oxford/New York: Berg, 173–96. Vasquez, Manuel , and Marquardt, Marie (2003). Globalization and the Sacred . New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Wuthnow, Robert (1998). Loose Connections. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Index

Aba women 274 Abagusii community 254, 256 Abhinavgupta 140 ableism 309 abortion 314, 484, 500 Abram 477–8 Abu-Odeh, L. 412 Abu Zeid, N. H. 197 Ackermann, D. 6, 8, 15 Adam 408, 413; see also Fall of Adam and Eve Adeola, T. S. 273 Adeyemo, T. 273 Adler, R. 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60–1, 64, 66–7 Afghanistan 196, 205, 319, 410, 411, 424 Africa 1, 4, 6, 8, 168, 176, 182, 198, 212, 242, 251, 252, 274, 357, 372, 484, 486–8, 533, 547 Central 216 East 14, 15, 216, 250–79 Economic Recovery Strategy for Wealth Creation and Employment 258 North 68 Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) 258 Southern 8, 212–38 Sub-Saharan 88, 221 West 216, 239–49 see also structural adjustment programs (SAPs), in Africa Africa Commission 487 African Renaissance 229 African Union (AU) 245 age 8, 23, 342, 395, 464, 474 Agikuyu community 254 Aguilar, D. D. 120 Ahmed, L. 196–7, 406, 409, 410 Akan wisdom 9, 246, 247–8, 396 Akka Mahadevi 135 Al-Ghazali, Z. 206

al-Qaeda 205 Al-Roubaie, A. 250 al-Tabari 408 Alaimo, S. 84, 90 Algeria 202, 268 All Africa Conference of Churches 270 Almeida, A. J. de 321, 323 Almirón, E. 188–9 Alpert, R. 53 Althaus-Reid, M. 15, 320 Alvear Guerrero, A. R. 164 American Express 35 Amin, M. 487 Amnesty International 359, 413, 425 Amoah, E. 9 Anderson, B. 16, 552 Anderson, S. 402 androcentrism 59, 62, 73, 131, 144, 185, 186 Angola 214 Annan, K. 162, 423 anthropology 82 theological 28, 42, 75, 191 anti-discrimination, see discrimination anti-Semitism 160 Anti-War Movement 342 apartheid 8, 215, 218, 231, 487 Apo, S. 510, 511, 512 apostasy 197 Appadurai, A. 113, 496 Aquino, M. P. 9–10, 14, 422, 431, 434, 463 Arab Spring 204, 207–8 Arabia 199, 407 Arango Rivas, M. 164 Argentina 184, 185–91, 322, 443 Buenos Aires 15, 185, 445, 446 Aristotle 147 Ariza, M. 465–6 Armour, E. 11, 12, 14

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index

Arrupe, P. 109 artificial intelligence 75, 76, 90 Asad, T. 13, 376 Asamoah-Gyadu, K. J. 384 Asensio, R. 463 Ashcroft, B. 2–3 Asherah 53 Ashkenazi Jews 68, 69 Asia 1, 4, 9, 10, 11, 198, 403, 412, 484, 533, 547 transethnic feminist theology of 109–30 Assmann, H. 458 Atabaque Center of Black Culture and Theology 170 Auschwitz–Birkenau 62, 63, 64 Australia 5, 294, 534, 535 Avotri, S. 478–9, 480

B’not Esh 59 Band Aid 486 Bangladesh 119 Bantu community 253 Barad, K. 83, 84, 85, 86, 89, 92 Barber, B. 405 Barbour, J. 91 Baring, E., see Cromer, Lord Barlas, A. 411, 412 Barth, K. 392 Basic Ecclesial Communities 442 Batchelor, S. 359, 366 Batstone, D. 309 Batthyány, K. 182 Battlestar Galactica 93, 97, 98–100 Batuque 184 Bauer, J. R. 116 Baumann, Z. 217, 220 Baumel, J. T. 63 Bayes, J. H. 222, 405 Beckford, J. 3 Beckman, N. E. 532 Bedford, N. 11, 15 Beijing Platform for Action 202, 220 Belafonte, H. 486 Belgium 251 belief 13, 26, 344, 377 Belkin, L. 343 Bell, C. 376, 532

Bell, D. A. 116 Bell, E. L. J. Edmondson 342–3 Berger, T. 14 Berkins, L. 441 Berlin Conference (1884) 385 Berlin Wall 280–1, 422 Berry, T. 219, 287 Bhabha, H. 125, 362 bhakti 13, 133, 135, 138 Bible 54, 65, 186, 191, 200, 270, 361, 384, 408, 448 Hebrew 55, 60, 65, 479, 541 see also Gospels; Scripture bigamy 453 biotechnology 75, 78, 87 bisexuality 447, 449–51, 453 Black Power Liberation Movement 342 Blair, C. 197 body, the 6, 25, 28, 30, 31, 32, 40, 41, 81, 82, 83–8, 92, 131, 136, 137, 138, 159, 166, 169, 171–2, 176, 182, 256, 268, 288, 327, 414–15, 441–55, 488–90, 497, 509–12, 515, 516, 539 and globalization in Latin America 456–74 Bohr, N. 84 Bolivia 189, 328 Bonairiri 254 Borg, M. J. 273 Boserup, E. 256 Bosnia 93, 112, 280, 484 Botswana 214, 386 Boyarin, D. 52, 56, 65 Brahman 133, 136, 138, 139, 145 Brahminism 133, 142 Bratcher, D. 478, 479, 480 Braudel, F. 159 Brazil 9, 162, 168, 170, 181, 184, 189, 191, 322, 323, 446, 462, 501, 551 Brecher, J. 111 Brenner, A. 55 Bretton Woods 79, 261, 403, 406 Briggs, S. 12, 383 Brigit, Saint 284 Brisson, M. 457 Britain and Ireland School of Feminist Theology (BISFT) 282 British Catholic Women’s Network 533

index British Empire 8, 149, 197, 214, 292, 293, 294, 295, 297, 298, 409 Brock, R. 219 Brown, M. E. 427 Brubaker, P. K. 402–3 Brueggemann, W. 272 Brusco, E. 185 Brysk, A. 476 Buber, M. 56 Buddha 133 Buddhism 27, 142, 354, 356, 358, 359, 363, 366, 367, 372, 412 Buffy the Vampire Slayer 93, 97 Buganda community 254 Buhlmann, W. 372 Bultmann, R. 66, 392 Burk, M. 333, 334 Bush, G. W. 372 Bush, L. 197 Butler, J. 85, 327, 432

Cadigan, T. 8 Caiazza, A. 333 Campbell, E. 173 Canaanite woman 245 Canada 189, 365 United Church of 533 Candomblé 9, 170, 176, 184 Cannon, K. 9, 77, 170, 420, 431, 433 capitalism 3, 9, 16, 79, 161–2, 170, 190, 251, 281, 284, 285, 312, 315, 317, 322, 332–50, 371, 379, 405, 406, 414–15, 422, 441, 449, 456–8, 478 global 2–5, 6, 11, 12, 35–6, 40, 111–13, 118–22, 148, 149, 158, 163, 180, 181–3, 227, 232, 242, 251–2, 255, 258–9, 264–9, 274, 275, 288–90, 335, 383, 385, 387–8, 402, 423–5, 431, 432–3, 467, 470, 544, 545–8 care 30, 117, 182, 254, 332, 337, 345, 549, 550, 551 ethic of 341, 342 Caribbean, the 157–79, 459, 464 Carneiro, S. 157 Carrette, J. 379 Carter, S. 123 Casas, B. de las 445 Castel, R. 466



Castelli, E. 384 Castells, M. 113, 114, 334–5 Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) 335 Catholicism 9, 167–8, 181, 183, 184–5, 187, 189, 241, 356, 496, 497, 501, 503, 504, 516; see also Roman Catholic Church Cavanagh, J. 402 Celtic heritage 284 Centre for Reflection and Action on Labour Issues (CEREAL) 335 Chagga community 254 Chalá, C. 170 Chalcedon 86 Council of 86 Chardin, T. de 147 Cheney, L. 197 Chicana movement 341, 342 Chicano movement 342 Chidester, D. 360 childbirth 33, 88, 494, 506, 508, 514–15, 518, 526 Chile 188, 189, 529, 534, 535 Con-spirando 533, 534, 535 China 4, 80, 117, 121, 148, 402, 404, 412, 479 Chodren, P. 363–4 Chopp, R. 142, 225 Christ, C. 54, 134, 142 Christianity 1, 2, 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 27, 31, 73, 86, 100, 122, 147, 160, 168–9, 174, 175, 176, 181, 184, 196, 198, 201, 203, 242, 243, 244, 254, 257, 258, 267, 268, 285, 286, 287, 288, 297, 301, 303, 305, 327, 356, 357, 358, 359, 362, 372, 373, 383, 384, 390–7, 420, 421, 429, 442, 443, 445, 451, 452, 453, 459, 463, 494, 496, 499, 504, 514, 516, 529, 540, 556–7 Charismatic 257, 268 missionary 4, 255, 295, 304, 530–1 Pentecostal 257 Western 252, 257, 274, 358 women and ritual practice in 525–43 Christology 32, 34, 240, 447, 518 Churchill, W. 482 Circle of Concerned African American Women 15



index

Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians 1, 215–16, 239–49 Circle of Concerned African Women of West Africa 9 circumcision, female 198–9, 203, 210, 489 class, social 2, 7, 8, 110, 114, 124, 125, 163, 173, 180, 186 , 224, 225, 227, 246, 247, 309, 334, 342, 345, 382, 387, 395, 397, 403, 442, 445, 447, 459, 464, 466, 474, 482, 485, 488, 489, 526, 533, 536, 540, 548, 550, 551 classism 157, 160, 170, 343 Cleaver, W. 334 Clinton, H. 197 Coakley, S. 379 Coats, D. 120 Coca-Cola 4, 37 CocaColonization 113 Cohen, C. 311, 318 Cold War 93, 112, 252, 422 Colombia 162–79, 424 lumbalú rites 168, 170, 176 orishas 168, 175, 176 valsadas 168 colonialism 2, 3, 4, 8, 10, 11, 16, 69, 80, 82, 157, 160, 161, 169, 176, 195–7, 198, 214, 215, 226, 242, 251–2, 255, 266, 271, 274, 307, 311, 314, 317, 318, 321, 325, 328, 357, 362, 371, 373, 383, 384–5, 386, 387, 391, 392, 393, 409, 410, 422, 426, 427, 452, 457, 458, 461, 470, 476, 479, 485, 486, 496, 533, 545 and the Wahine Māori 292–306 and womanhood 255–7 see also British Empire; empire; imperialism; neo-colonialism; postcolonialism Colson, C. 317–18 Columbus 149 commodification 5, 6, 11, 40, 444, 452, 476, 545, 546 sexual 23, 41, 118, 144, 267, 484 communication 4, 5, 6, 8, 17, 36, 38, 111, 113, 148, 195, 207, 217, 219, 222, 323 communism 10, 500 computer-generated images (CGI) 94–5 Condren, M. 284 Confucianism 412

Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination. . . (CEDAW) 202, 203 constructionism 83, 310 consumerism 74, 219, 267, 288–9, 451, 458, 478 Cooey, P. 326 Cooper, W. 299 Copeland, M. S. 428 Córdoba, P. 164 corporations, multinational 214, 251, 264, 267–9, 281, 301, 322, 332–41, 343, 387–8, 405, 414–15, 423, 458, 555; see also capitalism, global Costa Rica 462, 464, 500 Costello, T. 111 Coulthard, G. 311, 317 Cousins, E. 147 creation 32, 33, 75, 83, 273 Crenshaw, K. 310 creoles 168 Cromer, Lord 197, 409 Cuadra, P. A. 441, 443 cultural flows 4–5, 17 culture 4–5, 8, 9, 13, 25, 29, 37, 41, 81, 110, 113, 116, 117–18, 123, 125, 159, 169, 171, 200, 251, 280, 323, 383, 395, 405, 409, 410, 420, 459, 495, 512, 549, 552, 553–5 African 174, 215–16, 225–6, 240 McDonaldization of 4, 113, 182, 404 popular 12, 74, 76–7, 90, 92, 101, 467; see also television Western 4, 82, 174, 285, 389, 515 cyborgs 78, 81, 87

Da Silva, O. J. 159, 173 Daly, M. 11, 13, 373, 379 Daoism 363 Darfur 484 Davaney, S. G. 428 Davis, R. H. 135 death 33, 34, 64, 88, 90, 132, 136, 183, 466, 489, 501, 511 ‘Death of God’ movement 66 Deffinbaugh, B. 478, 479, 480 Degenaar, J. 231 dehumanization 422–8, 429, 434 Deleuze, G. 288, 450

index Dell, M. 337 Dell Inc. 336–8 Global Women’s Summit 336 Deloria, P. 364 Deloria, V. Jr. 353 democracy 11, 40, 79, 80, 112, 165, 206, 208, 210, 213, 214, 216, 251, 268–9, 274, 315, 371, 425 Denetdale, J. 327–8 Descartes, R. 459 desire 288–9 determinism, biological 81 Devi, the 131–56 textual history of 139–41 Dickson, K. 392 Dierckxsens, W. 462 dis/ability 8, 112, 114, 124, 125, 224, 383, 428, 474 discrimination 1, 56, 82, 114, 157, 158, 160, 172, 174, 197, 200, 216, 217, 221, 333, 343, 471; see also ableism; classism; racism; sexism disease 221, 262, 303, 461, 482; see also HIV/AIDS displacement 14, 36, 40, 119–22, 165, 166–7, 214, 244, 264, 266, 269, 274, 303, 360, 362, 396; see also migrants and migration divinity 27, 86–7, 89; see also God dogmatics 442 Dominican Republic 465, 466 Doniger, W. 495, 496 Donnelly, T. 425 Drogus, C. A. 187 Drumond de Andrade, C. 460 duality and non-dualism 135–6, 137, 141–2 Dube, M. 13–14, 212, 246, 247

East, global 372, 516 EATWOT (Ecumenical Association of Third-World Theologians) 1, 170, 216, 241, 317 Ebadi, S. 359 ecclesiology 32, 34–5, 40, 41, 42, 191, 442 , 445, 527, 533, 536 Echeverría, L. 500 Eck, D. 356, 357 eco-feminism 74, 81



Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) 245 economic crisis (2008–9) 3 Economic Policy Council (US) 338 ecotheology 283, 286–7, 361, 396, 541 Ecuador 170, 464, 502, 550 Ecumenical Decade of Churches in Solidarity with Women 531 Ecumenical Movement 530–1 ecumenism 176 education 80, 150, 161, 162, 166, 183, 198, 205, 217, 218–19, 220, 222, 253, 268, 294, 297, 323, 333, 388, 406, 547 Egypt 4, 197, 198, 200, 201, 202, 204, 206, 207, 208, 210, 374, 377, 409, 411, 507 Eilberg-Schwartz, H. 56, 65 Einstein, A. 91 Eisenstein, Z. 110 El Salvador 464 Elizabeth II, Queen 300 Ellacuría, I. 420, 422 Ellenson, D. 55–6 Ellis, M. 57 embodiment 83–4, 85, 87, 92; see also body, the empire 3, 12, 31, 307–31, 355, 422, 425, 426, 478 England 58, 124, 300, 335, 410 Men’s League for Opposing the Suffrage of Women 409 see also Great Britain Enlightenment 66, 132, 144, 147, 230, 358, 481 Jewish (Haskalah) 67, 68 Enron 403 environment, the 12–13, 30, 35, 40, 74–5, 125, 189–90, 213, 217, 230, 231, 251, 253, 286–8, 301–2, 319, 355, 389, 393, 397, 406, 414–15, 424, 427, 429, 467 women and 219–20, 265–7 Ephesus, Council of 86 epistemology, see knowledge equality 52, 113, 124, 186, 197, 208, 210, 272, 294, 407, 408, 412, 429 eschatology 32, 35, 40, 41, 67 Escuela Feminista de Teología de Andalucía (EFETA) 282 essentialism 74, 226, 308, 310, 453 theological 64–6, 73 ethics 30, 60, 61, 228



index

Ethiopia 486, 487 ethnicity 2, 7, 8, 10, 17, 110, 112, 117, 125, 162, 163, 167, 216, 225, 304, 310, 342, 356, 383, 387, 395, 397, 427, 457, 482, 533, 536, 540, 548, 552, 553; see also transethnicity ethnocentrism 421 Evangelicalism 185 Eve 413, 511, 512, 513, 514, 515; see also Fall of Adam and Eve Everett, H. 91 Eurocentrism 68, 145, 148, 394, 395 Europe 3, 51, 144, 189, 264, 372, 403, 422, 426, 444, 452, 465, 496, 512, 527, 529, 556 and feminist theologies 280–91 European Society of Women in Theological Research 281 European Union (EU) 281, 386 euthanasia 88 evolution 75 exploitation 2, 4, 25, 40, 41, 80, 82, 119, 148, 161, 167, 172, 218, 221, 227, 230, 264, 335, 358, 364, 396, 397, 403, 420, 429, 445, 457, 470, 476, 484, 488, 489, 539 export processing zones (EPZs) 264, 404 extremism, religious 204, 205, 206, 207 Exum, C. 391

Fabella, V. 420 faith 13, 31, 32, 38, 55, 67, 198, 200, 231, 270, 463 of Latin American women 180–94 Falk, M. 55, 58, 65 Fall, Y. 383, 384, 387, 389 Fall of Adam and Eve 83, 100, 408, 413, 489, 515 Farley, M. 229 Farscape 94, 97, 98 fascism 10 Fátima 500 favelas 163 Federation of Muslim Women Association of Ghana (FOMWAG) 245 Fels, A. 343–4 femininity 26, 27, 74, 82, 131, 458, 525 feminism 23, 124, 341–2, 444, 533

African 215 Anglican 30 Argentine 187 in Asia 109–30 black 169–71, 475 Christian 14, 55, 225 First Wave 10, 51, 100, 314, 448, 452,527, 531 Islamic 202, 203, 206 Jewish 51–72 materialist 83–5, 90 in the Middle East 198, 201–7 Native 312–14, 319, 321, 327, 328 Reformed 30 religious 202–3, 206 Roman Catholic 30 Second Wave 1, 51, 57, 66, 67, 74, 76, 81, 314, 334, 335, 527, 530, 535 secular 202, 203, 206, 207, 495, 497 in Southern Africa 215–16 as theology 12–17 Third Wave 314 Third World 124, 143 transnational 5 in West Africa 239–49 see also eco-feminism feminism, Inc. 332–50 femiscriptures 393, 394, 395, 397 fetishism 449 Feuerbach, L. 14, 373, 376 Fiji 552 Finland 494, 504–9 Finno-Ugrian people 504 Forbes, J. 353 forgiveness 34 Fornet-Betancour, R. 458, 466, 467 Forrester, D. 224 France 124, 195, 251, 292, 411, 481, 555 Frankenstein 86 Fraser, N. 432 free-will defense 63 freedom 63, 112, 144, 159, 161, 165, 169, 229, 368, 371, 410, 420, 424, 425, 481–6 Freire, P. 446 French Revolution 10 Freud, S. 147 Friedman, T. 148 Frymer-Kensky, T. 65

index Fukuyama, F. 112, 285 fundamentalism, religious 203, 204–5,206, 207, 222, 244, 258, 267–9,274, 275, 384, 389–90, 395,405, 424

Ga people 244 GABRIELA Network 121 Gamburd, M. 265 Gates, B. 3 GATS (General Agreement on Trade and Services) 281 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) 111, 403 gays and lesbians 110, 119, 158, 317, 428, 539 Gebara, I. 74, 159, 422 Geertz, C. 113 Geller, L. 62 gender 1, 5, 7, 8, 9, 25, 26, 27, 29–30, 31, 32, 38, 40, 41, 51, 52, 60, 64, 65, 69, 77–81, 82, 85, 97, 98, 110, 112, 113, 114, 119, 124, 125, 157, 181, 183, 184–7, 197, 201, 208, 210, 215, 216, 221, 222, 224, 225, 227, 246, 247, 251, 254, 256, 257, 258, 265, 297, 299, 310, 317, 323, 332, 333, 336, 387, 444, 445, 448, 449, 457, 460–3, 466, 474, 488, 525–6, 528, 533, 536, 539, 542, 549 and globalization 157–79, 217, 252 in television’s narratives of redemption 97–8 see also body, the; femininity ; masculinity; men; sexuality ; womanhood; women genetics 75, 87 genital mutilation 269, 488, 489 genocide 63, 93, 98, 160, 280, 307, 308, 315, 318, 358, 479, 482, 484 Germany 124, 214, 251, 411, 533, 534, 535 Ghana 5, 8, 215, 240, 243, 244, 555–6 Giddens, A. 288 Gilmore, R. 321 Giraldi, G. 457, 468 Giriama community 254 global-speak 212–38 interrupting 223–32 global warming 32, 219; see also environment, the; glocalization 2–5, 6, 7, 8, 9–12, 14, 15, 17, 23, 25, 26, 29–30, 35–7, 38–42, 73–4, 75,



76, 77–81, 100–1, 307–31, 355, 371–81, 382–401, 544–59 and Africa 212–38, 239–49, 250–79 in Asia 109–30 capitalist 181–3, 186; see also capitalism, ‘global’ cultural 113, 243, 404, 405, 496 in Europe 280–91 of feminist rituals 529–32 and gender 157–79, 387–90, 404–6 and identity 418–40 in India 147–50 kyriarchal 418, 422–8, 430, 431, 432, 433, 435; see also kyriarchy and Latin American women 180–94, 456–73 in the Middle East 195–211 and Muslim women 402–17 and narrative 474–93 and North American feminist theologies 332–50 and theology 418–40 and the Wahine Māori 292–306 and women’s bodies in Latin America 456–73 glocalization 10, 123, 532–6 God 14, 27, 31, 32–3, 34, 35, 40, 41, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62–7, 68, 75, 82, 86, 89, 100, 114, 123, 146, 171, 175–6, 186, 202–3, 223–4, 225, 227, 228, 229, 230, 232, 245, 257, 268, 270, 272, 273, 275, 284, 285, 286, 288–9, 304, 374, 379, 383, 384, 385, 397, 407, 408, 412, 413, 414, 420, 421, 429, 434, 443, 447, 448, 450, 451, 475, 477–9, 480, 507, 511, 513, 517, 518, 534, 541 and gender 62–3, 64–5, 131–56, 373 God–man duo 11, 371–81 Goeman, M. 316 Gonzalez, M. 320, 321 Gonzáles Butron, M. A. 467 Gonzáles Mina, L. 164 Gore, C. 252 Gorringe, T. 222–3 Gospels 224, 245–8, 304, 429, 443, 447 grace 34, 225, 229, 285, 452, 477 Graham, E. 77–8, 81, 85, 87–8, 90



index

Grande, S. 315 Grant, J. 170 Great Britain 195, 196, 197, 214, 251, 253, 256, 265, 281, 386, 549; see also British Empire; England Great Depression 334 Greece 141, 549, 552 Greek Syrophoenecian woman 245 Green, A. 56 Green, R. 308 Green Belt Movement 270 Greenberg, B. 67 Grey, M. 74, 219, 288–9 Griffin, S. 74 Gross, R. 143, 145 Gross Stein, J. 427 Grüner, E. 457 Guardiola-Saenz, L. 386 Guatemala 180, 184 Guattari, F. 450 Gupta, S. 134 Gurr, T. R. 426 Gutierrez, G. 392, 451 Guy-Sheftall, B. 215

HIV/AIDS 3, 6, 15, 88, 212, 213, 216, 223, 224, 225, 229, 230, 231, 232, 240, 243, 244, 245, 248, 259, 260, 262, 372, 388, 484, 487, 490 feminization of 220–2, 227 Haardt, M. de 11, 285–6, 288 habeas corpus 443 Haddad, B. 218 Hadith 200, 204 Haiti 6, 9, 170, 176, 424, 465 , 554 halakhah 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61 Halkes, C. 224 Hall, S. 321, 384, 389 Hallum, A. M. 184–5 Hamas 204 Haraway, D. 81, 85, 90 Harding, S. 80, 101 Hardt, M. 113, 355 Harnack, A. von 73 Harris Interactive 336, 337 Harrison, B. W. 85, 227, 228 Hassan, R. 413

Hauptman, J. 67 havurot 59 Hawking, S. 90 health 30, 162, 165, 210, 253, 261–2, 268, 323, 372, 388, 411, 415, 471, 500 health care 125, 166, 205, 222, 231, 262, 406, 488 Hegel, G. W. F. 112 Hekman, S. 83 Henderson, J. 114 Hennessy, R. 85 Herberg, W. 356 hermeneutics 216, 406–12 Herzfeld, N. 75–6, 90 Heschel, A. J. 56 Heschel, S. 68 heteronormativity 1, 15, 446, 447, 449, 451 heteropatriarchy 317–19, 324, 327, 328 heterosexuality 65, 115, 142, 158, 410, 445, 446, 448, 449–50, 452, 453, 459 Hewlett, S. A. 332, 338–40, 341 Heyward, C. 284–5 Hildegard of Bingen 534, 540 Hinduism 356, 358, 367, 372, 412, 485–6, 557, 558 Tantric 13, 131–56 Hindutva movement 150 Hinga, T. 270 Hinkelammert, F. J. 423–4 Hizbullah 204, 206 Hobbes, T. 112 Hochmah 53 Hodgson, D. L. 254, 255 Holbrooke, R. 112 Holler, L. 363–4 Holocaust 51, 62–3, 66 hominid species 82 homo faber 83 Homo sapiens 82 homophobia 10, 309 homosexuality 317 Homowo festival 244 Hong Kong 4 Special Administrative Region (SAR) 115, 119, 120, 122 Hooks, B. 124, 475 hope 35, 231–2

index Hopenhayn, M. 425 Hopi people 264, 367 Hopkins, D. 264–5 hopscotch 476–7 Howie, G. 285 Hsia, H. C. 122 Human Genome Project 75 humanism 53, 62, 84, 87–8, 145, 230, 358, 366, 367, 375 humanity 32, 33–4, 86, 89, 100, 257, 325–6, 340, 419, 420, 426, 430, 431, 468, 477, 516 Hunt, M. 428, 435 Huntington, S. 148–9 Hurricane Katrina 478 Hurston, Z. N. 77 Hyman, G. 307, 310 hyperdifferentiation 8, 9, 11, 12, 14

IRA 280 Iceland 532, 533, 534, 537 iconoclasm 16 identity 8–10, 11, 16–17, 41, 42, 57, 63, 69, 74, 99, 101, 158, 164, 195, 198, 213, 217, 227, 251, 257, 268, 269, 274, 284, 289, 308, 310, 355–6, 405, 451, 466, 470, 477, 479, 498, 536, 540, 549, 551, 556–7 Afro-feminist 172–3 in Asia 109–30 and difference 9–10, 11, 40, 42, 225–6, 432 European 283 and globalization 418–40 hybrid 9, 12, 41, 245 male 195, 412; see also masculinity Māori 296–7 in a pluralistic world 360–2 politics 8, 9–10, 16, 118–19, 405, 406, 428, 431 see also hyperdifferentiation ideology 25, 85, 112, 148, 149–50, 157, 161–2, 167, 168, 176, 181, 203, 205, 222, 257, 270, 274, 285, 328, 373, 387, 406, 423, 424, 427, 428, 429, 434, 441, 442, 443, 444, 446, 447, 449, 451, 453, 469–70 idolatry 16, 54, 64, 354, 422–8, 434 Ilan, T. 56



imagination 25, 26–9, 31, 32, 230–1 globalization of 38–42 immanentism 56 immortality 87 cybernetic 75, 99 imperialism 4, 16, 23, 32, 77, 132, 144, 146, 149, 181, 226, 257, 286, 320, 358, 361, 383, 384, 385, 387, 389, 391, 393, 405, 450, 458, 479 Incite! Women of Color Against Violence 15, 324, 325 India 4, 80, 118, 131–56, 243, 268, 356, 404, 412, 485–6, 549 Indian Ecumenical Conference 364–5, 367 Indic tradition 131–56 indigenous people 8, 41, 101, 157, 168, 292–306, 307–31, 362, 445, 450, 457, 459, 461, 465, 545 Indonesia 119, 200, 411, 415 Industrial Revolution 161 industrialization 253, 264 inequality 2, 59, 88, 159, 174, 387, 548 economic/income 180, 232, 457, 462–3, 470 gender 157–79, 182, 221, 227, 260, 262 political 164–5 racial 162 religious 167–9 social 165–7, 433 see also discrimination information technology 213, 219, 251 Ingria 504, 506, 513 Institute for Feminism and Religion (Eire) 282 Institute of Women in Religion and Culture 248 Institute for Women’s Policy Research 333 International Astronomical Union 90 International Crisis Group 426 International Grail Movement 533 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 79, 80, 112, 120, 258, 269, 388, 403, 404, 406, 545 Internet 37, 42, 93, 118, 150, 219, 251, 332, 558 inter-religious dialogue 1, 13, 42, 209, 241, 353–70 Iran 195, 202, 206, 208, 359, 410, 411, 412 Iraq 319, 411, 424 US invasion of 98, 281, 457 Ireland 281, 284



index

Irigaray, L. 142, 327, 373, 517 Isaac, sacrifice of 285–6 Isasi-Diaz, A.-M. 209 Isherwood, L. 11, 12, 442 Islam 80, 196–7, 242, 244, 257, 258, 267, 268, 356, 358, 367, 377, 514–15 Wahhabi 410 and women 11, 60, 195–211, 402–17 Islamic Revival movement 377 Islamism 204–6, 207, 208, 405, 408, 411 Israel 31, 51, 53, 56, 62, 64, 65, 67, 68, 195, 196, 197, 198, 358–9, 477, 479 Italy 251, 402 Ivory Coast 243

Jaggar, A. 182 Jainism 133 James, M. A. 531 Jantzen, G. 87, 517 Japan 4, 115, 117, 122, 402, 403, 479 Jarl, A.-C. 429 Jehangir, A. 413 Jemison, M. 90 Jenkins, P. 372 Jesuits 450 Jesus Christ 31, 32, 34, 86, 87, 94, 168, 169, 176, 191, 200, 224, 232, 245–7, 268, 272–3, 284, 286, 287, 429, 443, 501–2, 506, 512, 514, 517, 541 Jihad 204, 206, 405 Jobling, J. 285 John (apostle) 246 Johnson, E. A. 373, 429, 517 Jones, S. 11, 14 Jordan 202, 204, 210, 412 Judaism 51–72, 184, 196, 198, 203, 258, 356, 358, 361, 367, 373, 459, 528, 532, 541 Reform 60, 61, 62, 67 justice 31, 113, 203, 220, 227–8, 270, 319, 321, 329, 385, 387, 412, 418, 420, 422, 428, 429–36, 442, 444, 446, 466, 469, 479–81, 540

Kagwanja, P. M. 251, 266 Kali 132, 136, 137–8, 140, 141

Kamakhya 138 Kang, N. 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 15, 308 Kanogo, T. 255, 256 Kant, I. 344 Kanyoro, M. 215 Kanyoro, R. 240 Kaplan, R. D. 109, 112 Karam, A. 10 Karelia, Orthodox 9, 14, 494–524 Kassam, Z. 11 Kazanjian, D. 315 Kearney, R. 230 Keller, C. 286, 287, 313, 358, 360, 361, 366 Keller, M. 374, 375–6, 379 Kenya 243, 253, 255–6, 259–66, 268, 269, 270–1, 274 Kenya Debt Relief Network (KENDREN) 270 Kenya Land Reform Association 270 Khanna, M. 138, 149 Khasiani, S. A. 266 Khazzoom, L. 69 Kierkegaard, S. 231 King, R. 358, 359, 379 King Ram 150 Kinsley, D. 144 Kinukawa, H. 386 Kirmani, M. H. 388 Kirk-Duggan, C. 14, 77 Kishwar, M. 143–4 knowledge 27, 31, 33, 37, 74, 79–81, 85, 89, 111, 113, 158, 159, 160, 172, 173–4, 175, 209, 217, 219, 372, 419, 434, 443, 444, 446, 459, 477 Kondo, D. 311 Kraken, K. 486 Krauss, L. 90 Krishna 135 Kristeva, J. 117, 142 Kristof, N. 6 Kuma, E. 240 Kuwait 210 Kwok, P.-L. 82, 308, 310, 358–9, 361, 362, 363, 373, 383, 388–9, 394–5, 396, 432 kyriarchy 10, 125, 144, 418, 422–8, 429, 430, 431, 432, 433, 434, 435, 541

index LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) communities 317 labor 4, 6–7, 25, 30, 38, 41, 82, 87, 113, 119–20, 122, 157, 166, 172, 217–19, 221, 222, 230, 251, 253, 254, 256, 261, 263–5, 288, 323, 332–50, 383, 387–389, 403, 404, 405, 406, 411, 414, 415, 461–2, 463, 470, 480, 484, 546, 551 Lacan, J. 327 Lactantius 359 Latin America 1, 6, 14, 110, 124, 157–79, 180–94, 320, 321, 322, 372, 412, 425, 441–55, 494–524, 533, 541, 547 women’s bodies in 456–73 Latin American and the Caribbean Feminist Encounters 435 Latin American Council of Churches (CLAI) 189 Lebanon 196, 200, 202, 206 Lefkovitz, L. 53 Lesotho 214 Lévinas, E. 56 Levine, R. A. 256 Levitt, L. 67 liberation theology 1, 15, 66, 169, 171, 183, 185, 189, 222, 271, 307, 308, 309, 312, 314, 317, 320, 418–22, 423, 500 a body theology critique of 444–5 feminist 429–36, 443, 445, 446, 450, 451, 452–3 Latin American 441–55 Queer 445–7, 451 Liberia 243 life expectancy 88, 165, 261 Lila 145, 150 Lilith, R. 53 Lima, S. R. de 170 Lind, C. 383, 385, 387 Lipszyc, C. 187, 188 Liturgical Movement 526–7 liturgy 51, 55, 60; see also rituals Live Aid 486–8 Long, A. 54 Long, C. 357 Lopez Plaza, M. A. 163 love 231, 285, 446 Lowe, L. 310



Lowenhaupt Tsing, A. 190 Lubarsky, S.B. 52, 65–6 Luce, C. B. 339–40, 341 Luce, E. 148 Lugones, M. 125 Lutheranism 504

Maasai community 254, 255 Maathai, W. 15, 270 McClintock Fulkerson, M. 13, 188, 320, 321, 327, 373–5, 379 McDonald’s 37 McEvilley, T. 141, 147 McFague, S. 74, 373 Machinea, J. L. 425 machismo 185, 498 Mackenzie Brown, C. 136, 139, 140 Magesa, L. 250 Maguire, S. 484 Mahmood, S. 374, 377, 379 mail-order brides (MOBs) 120–2 Maimonides 57 Makeba, M. 487 Malawi 214 Malaysia 119, 200, 411, 415 mana wahine 8, 293–4, 298, 299, 302–3 Mananzan, M. J. 216 Mandela, N. 212 Mani, L. 309, 530 Māori people 292–306 King Movement (Kingitanga) 297–8 women (Wahine) 29, 292–306 Maposela, Z. 212, 225, 232 Maracle, L. 314 Marian piety 9, 14, 494–524 marianismo 498–9, 500, 502, 503 Mariology 452, 494–524 Mark (apostle) 245, 246 markets, see capitalism Marquardt, M. 214, 495, 558 marriage 120–2, 167, 197, 200, 254, 256, 269, 317–18, 408, 413, 444, 482, 485–6, 489 Martin, B. 185, 186 Marx, K. 147, 288, 444 Mary Magdalene 320, 443



index

masculinity 27, 62–3, 64–5, 69, 74, 80, 82, 83, 98, 158, 265, 448, 458, 525 Mater Dolorosa 501, 507, 508 Matsuoaka, F. 310–11 Matthew (apostle) 245, 246 Maunier, R. 385 Mazrui, A. A. 242, 243 Mbeki, T. 229 media 12, 196, 207, 547, 553–4, 555, 557–8 Mekatilili wa Meza 254 men 11, 30, 52, 75, 83, 88, 97, 98, 118, 148, 158, 195, 197, 199, 200, 201, 217, 256, 267, 407; see also masculinity Mena, Z. 164 Mena López, M. 6, 9, 170, 174, 422, 434 Mendes-Flohr, P. 56 Merchant, C. 74 messianism 68 mestizos 168 Mexico 188, 450, 464, 502–3 Chiapas 322, 450 Meyer, M. 328 Michaels, A. 145 microbusiness 471 Middle East, the 10, 11, 68, 264, 359 Midgley, M. 81 Mies, M. 266 Mignolo, W. 457 Migrant Forum in Asia 119 migrants and migration 4, 6, 7, 11, 14, 23, 29, 32, 36, 38, 40, 113, 119–22, 158, 161, 180, 189, 214, 217, 221, 256, 259, 264–5, 269, 281, 289, 304, 342, 356, 360, 386, 387, 389, 396, 428, 465–6, 477 transnational 544–59 Miguez-Bonino, J. 479, 480 Miles, M. 76 militarism 322, 425 Miller-McLemore, B. J. 345 Minow, M. 427–8 Mira 135 misogyny 26, 30, 412, 489, 497 Missionary Movement 530–1 Mizrahi Jews 68 modernism 419 modernity 10, 67, 113, 267, 274, 371 vs tradition 80, 101, 268; see also tradition

Moghadam, V. M. 402, 404–6 Mohamed (Prophet) 243, 407, 408, 409 Mohanty, C. T. 16, 143, 145, 182, 389, 435 Mojzes, P. 145, 147 Moksha 133 Moltmann, J. 224 Molyneux, M. 461 monogamy 485 monotheism 11, 54, 56, 133, 141, 143, 150, 196, 283, 285, 286, 288, 511 Montagu, L. 62 Montgomery, H. B. 531 Monture-Angus, P. 316 Mookerjee, A. 137 Moore, S. 3 Morocco 210, 412, 555 Morse, A. 317–18 mortality 87–9; see also death Moses 65 mothering/motherhood 30, 97–8, 117, 134, 144, 147, 254, 332, 345, 501–2, 512, 551, 553 Mothers of Plaza de Mayo 443, 445 Movimento Sem Terra (MST) 184, 191, 323 Moya, P. 119 Mozambique 214 Msimang, S. 229 Mugambi, J. N. K. 251 Mugica, C. 188 Muiruri, S. 269 mujerista theological movement 1, 30, 308, 309, 442, 499 multiculturalism 169, 200, 314, 495 liberal 308–12 multiverse 91, 92, 101 Mungiki 268 Munyakho, D. 388 Murrieta, R. O. 468–9 Musharraf, P. 414 Muslim Brotherhood 204, 206, 208 Mwaura, P. 14, 15 myths 172, 360, 495–6

NGOs 79, 405, 406, 486 Nair, J. 376

index Nakashima Brock, R. 326 Namibia 214 Narayan, U. 226 Narayanan, V. 134–5 narratives 89–101, 227–8 and gender 97–8 and globalization 474–93 and materiality 91–7 NASA 90 Nasser, G. A. 206 nation-state 3, 8, 16, 17, 30, 36–7, 38, 40, 113, 195, 214–15, 250, 280, 314–17, 322, 328, 329, 371, 545, 552, 553 heteropatriarchy and the 317–19 National Council of Women’s Organizations (US) 333 National Parenting Association (US) 338 nationalism 116, 117, 118, 229, 316, 405 nationality 114, 246, 397, 482, 485 Native Americans 10, 16, 307–31, 356, 358, 362–3, 364, 366, 367, 528, 538, 539, 541 Native informant 320–1 nature–culture divide 81–3 Nauser, M. 358 Navajo communities 29, 327–8 Nazism 62, 63 Negri, A. 113, 355 Neilson, F. 482 Neilson, W. 482 neo-colonialism 8, 144, 215, 251, 266, 383, 387, 391, 396, 419, 533 neo-liberalism 111, 119, 122, 158, 159, 161, 165, 182, 187, 267, 270, 403, 405, 406, 419, 457, 458, 459, 461, 465, 467, 469–70, 471 Nephilim 86 Netherlands 214, 285, 532, 533, 555 Neusner, J. 62 New Left 342 New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) 216, 245 New Testament 245–8, 268, 271, 272 New Zealand 294, 302, 304 Aotearoa 8, 292, 295, 296, 300, 301, 302, 304 see also Māori people Ngai Tahu tribe 302 Nhat Hanh, T. 354, 366



Nicaragua 500, 501, 533 Nietzsche, F. 147 Nigeria 200, 242, 244, 274 Nilotic community 253 9/11 terrorist attacks 93, 148, 196, 478 Nirvana 133 Nkomo, S. M. 342–3 Noah 361 North, global 88, 98, 111–12, 182, 371, 372 North America 51, 264, 314, 367, 372, 527, 529, 533, 541 North Korea 535 Northern Ireland 280 Noble, D. 81, 82–3 Nowak, S. 62

Obama, B. 8 Odier, D. 137, 139 Oduyoye, M. A. 215, 240, 241, 388, 392, 396–7 Old Testament 268, 271–2 ontological hygiene 85–7, 98 Opus Dei 183 Orientalism 116 Orr, L. 217 Orsi, R. A. 496–7, 518 other, the 2, 33, 37, 53, 59, 63, 64, 65, 287, 309, 357, 386, 393, 395, 397, 442, 459 Ozick, C. 54, 59

Pacific Island Nations 299 Paez, J. C. 335 Pākehā 300, 301, 302, 304 Pakistan 268, 410, 411, 412, 413 Palestine 196, 204, 359, 556 Panamá 424 Panikkar, R. 132, 150 Paraguay 189 Parmenides 141 Parrenas, R.S. 548 Patanjali 136 paternalism 185 patriarchy 11, 13, 52, 59, 62, 64, 73, 74, 75, 80, 81, 82, 86, 88, 100, 116, 117, 120, 132, 133, 140, 157, 158, 171, 176, 185, 217, 229, 253, 255, 258, 265, 267, 268, 274, 305, 321, 373,



index

patriarchy (Cont.) 379, 389, 404, 405, 406, 408, 409, 410, 411, 412, 441, 442, 443, 462, 477, 488, 525, 532; see also heteropatriarchy ; kyriarchy Patrick, A. E. 431 Paul (apostle) 86 Peabody, L. 531 Pelikan, J. 514 Pentecostalism 11, 180–1, 183–8, 241, 374–5, 555–6, 557 ‘gender paradox’ in Latin American 184–7 Pereira, N.C. 462 personalism, feminist 64 Perry, N. 500 Peru 184, 189, 446, 447, 527, 534 Peskowitz, M. 67 Peterson, A. L. 496 Philippines 119, 120–1, 529, 534, 535, 537 philosophy 53, 55, 57, 58, 135, 136, 138, 141, 146, 169, 173–4, 203, 250, 316, 328, 360, 475, 495, 517 Phiri, I. A. 216 Plaskow, J. 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59–60, 65, 66, 432 Plato 147, 360, 373 Plumb, M. 55 Plumwood, V. 287 pluralism, religious 174, 184, 242, 244, 257, 355, 356–7 pneumatology 191 politics 114, 115, 116, 123, 125, 162, 164–5, 175, 183, 190, 197, 204, 206, 250, 310, 322, 445; see also identity, politics polyandry 485 polygamy 200, 485 polygyny 485 pornography 219, 324 Portugal 161, 214, 251 postcolonialism 2, 4, 7, 15, 31, 41, 69, 82, 241, 271, 274, 357–63, 366–8, 452–3, 533 postmodernism 73, 74, 85, 145–6, 371, 419 postmodernity 61, 78 post-neoisms 419, 421, 430 poststructuralism 1, 84, 310, 328, 419 poverty 2–3, 6, 14, 144, 157, 158, 162, 213, 216, 217, 220, 240, 243, 252, 253, 265, 270, 273, 358, 388, 444–5, 447, 448–9, 450, 451, 452, 453, 457, 471, 482, 551

feminization of 6–7, 119–22, 163, 175, 218–19, 222, 259–60, 394, 395, 404, 419, 425, 462–4, 465, 468 global 6–7, 78, 79, 114, 119, 121–2, 125, 149, 174, 230, 319, 335, 355, 389, 393, 414, 421, 423, 425, 462 Povinelli, E. 310, 311 power 3, 4, 5, 11, 12, 16, 25, 28, 30, 31, 32, 37, 40, 42, 52, 62, 63, 65–6, 114, 123, 125, 134, 143, 150, 157, 160, 164, 172, 195, 196, 206, 208, 213, 220, 222, 223, 225, 227, 229, 246, 254, 256, 262, 267, 268, 285, 310, 316, 321–3, 324, 327, 335, 355, 382, 387, 394, 395, 404, 409, 410, 411, 427, 456, 457, 458, 467, 470, 471, 474, 488, 540, 545, 551 praxis 225, 227, 228, 232 imaginative 230–1 PricewaterhouseCoopers 332 Procter-Smith, M. 539 Promise Keepers 15, 324 prostitution 167, 189, 219, 221, 269, 281, 388, 484, 488, 489 Protestantism 183, 184–5, 284, 516 Puerto Rico 464 Purusha 136, 139

quantum physics 84 queer 2, 443–4, 446, 448, 451, 452–3 Quiché Maya Indians 513–14 Quirino, S. 170 Qur’an 197, 199–200, 203, 204, 514–15 and women 406–9, 411, 412, 413, 414 Qutb, S. 205

rabbis 55, 61, 67, 184 race 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 23, 31, 77, 110, 112, 114, 116, 125, 157, 162, 173, 186, 216, 224, 227, 246, 247, 280, 304, 310, 342, 356, 387, 395, 397, 427, 442, 459, 464, 466, 474, 482, 485, 488, 540, 545, 546, 548 racism 10, 31, 147, 148, 157, 160, 161, 162, 169, 170, 171, 176, 226, 307, 342, 343, 363, 389, 445, 457, 465, 548 Radha 135 Radhakrishnan, R. 118

index Rai, S. 16 Ramose, M. 214 rape 32, 33, 35, 41, 269, 316, 318, 325, 427, 474, 484, 488, 489, 539 Raphael, M. 13, 14 Rashkover, R. 61 Rasmussen, J. L. 433 redemption 31, 32, 34, 89, 92, 447 and television 93–101 Reformation 504 reification, see commodification relationality, radical 39, 40, 42 religion 2, 13, 14, 23, 25, 27, 29–30, 37, 38, 75, 76, 77, 88, 94, 114, 118, 122, 123, 124, 149, 169–71, 174, 215–16, 240, 246, 247, 267, 280, 342, 344, 353–70, 376, 383, 384, 387, 390, 395, 420, 429, 442, 485, 494–524, 540, 555–8 in East Africa 250–79 in Europe 280–91 indigenous 250–79, 283 in the Middle East 195–211 theology of 353–70 resurrection 443 revelation 33, 57, 60, 67, 160, 486 Rexton, J. 332, 333 Richard, N. 459 Richie, B. 325 right, Christian 22, 317–18, 324, 327 rights 165, 205–7, 270, 314 human 112, 113, 116, 122, 125, 196, 197, 205, 208, 209, 210, 213, 220, 224, 250, 261, 262, 323, 359, 393, 414, 424, 425, 430, 432, 445, 466, 481–6, 490 women 1, 122, 123, 143, 166, 172, 196, 197, 198, 201, 202, 203, 207, 208, 210, 220, 254, 255, 268, 300, 305, 333, 405, 407, 413–14, 420, 425, 430 rituals 14, 29, 35, 53, 54, 55, 61, 63, 67, 100, 123, 134, 137, 168, 170, 172, 176, 216, 241, 248, 258, 268, 282, 295, 298, 299, 305, 359, 360, 367, 391, 393, 459, 486, 495, 496, 499, 501, 504, 506, 507, 509, 511, 553, 556, 557–8 feminist 525–43 globalization of 529–32 glocal 532–6 Rivera, M. 358



Rivlin, G. 336 Robertson, R. 123, 383, 402 Roden, C. 68 Rodriguez, J. 502–3, 508–9, 517 Rojas, P. 321 Roman Catholic Church 282, 445, 500, 504, 526, 557; see also Catholicism Roosevelt, E. 482 Roosevelt, F. 481–2 Rose, S. D. 425 Roth, B. 341–2 Rothschild, S. 55 Rubin, G. 460 Ruddick, S. 501 Rudrappa, S. 337–8, 340 Ruether, R. R. 13, 66, 73, 223, 261, 363, 516, 529, 532 Rumi 456 Russia 4, 494 Russian Orthodox faith 504, 506 Ruttenberg, D. 57 Rwanda 93 Hutu–Tutsi genocide 482, 484

Sacks, J. 360–1 sacraments 87 sadomasochism 449 Sagan, C. 90 Sahgal, G. 384 Said, E. 109, 114, 123, 396 salvation 32, 34, 89, 90, 97, 175, 257, 273, 358, 420 Samaria 247 Samarian woman 245, 247 Samartha, S. F. 392 Samkhya 136 Samsara 136 sanctification 34, 63 Sandinista rule 500 Sandoval, C. 435 Sant’Anna, W. 163 santería 9, 168, 176, 184 Santo Domingo 170, 463 Santos, E. dos 170 Saramago, J. 213 Sartre, J.-P. 466



index

Sarwar, S. 413 Sassen, S. 335, 341, 342, 457 Saudi Arabia 410, 411 Saxena, N. 13 Schechter, D. 487 Scheper-Hughes, N. 501–2 Schleiermacher, F. 59, 344 Schreiter, R. 7, 9, 112 Schüssler Fiorenza, E. 57, 66, 73, 85, 144, 313, 429, 434 Schwarzschild, S. 56 Schweiker, W. 218–19 science fiction 76–7, 89–91 science and technology 12–13, 77–101, 111, 113, 190, 251, 360, 468 and feminist theology 74–6 Scripture 14, 100, 123, 146, 176, 209, 222, 228, 230, 268, 271, 272, 273, 275, 448, 537, 539, 540 world 382–401 Second Temple, destruction of 52 secularism 196, 202, 206, 207, 208, 451, 496, 499 Seneca Falls 10 sex-trafficking 6, 32, 120–2, 167, 219, 281, 355, 387, 474, 480, 483–4, 489, 533 sexism 10, 14, 16, 60, 68, 97, 118, 160, 161, 170, 171, 176 , 309, 444–5, 457, 494 sexual orientation 7, 8, 110, 112, 114, 125, 224, 474, 482, 533, 540; see also bisexuality ; gays and lesbians; heterosexuality ; homosexuality sexuality 34, 41, 65, 67, 110, 138, 144, 146, 163, 186, 210, 310, 317, 397, 412, 441–55, 459, 469–70, 494, 497, 508, 512, 513, 515, 516; see also gender; sexual orientation Shafir, G. 476 Shaivas, Kashmir 135, 137, 140 shakti 16, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 146, 150 shamanism 504, 511 Shanley, K. 308 Sharia law 60, 198, 200, 203, 205, 244, 405, 408, 409, 410, 411 Sharma, A. 146 Shaw, A. 333 Shaw, M. 137

Shekhinah 53, 56, 64 Shelley, M. 86 Sheridan, S. 55 Shiva 135, 136, 140, 141 Shiva, V. 258, 265–6, 267, 268–9, 274 Shohat, E. 308 Shreve, A. 345 Sierra Leone 243 Sikhism 133 Silk Road(s) 492 Silva, P. B. G. 160, 161, 172 sin 31, 32, 34, 40, 42, 477, 515, 540 Sinai, Mount 65, 67 Singapore 115, 116, 119, 121 slavery 161, 164, 168, 169, 176, 251, 272, 274, 315, 325, 420, 482, 483, 484 Smith, Adam 403 Smith, A. 8, 10, 14, 15, 312–13, 316, 362–3 Smith, T. 367 Smith, W. C. 358 Sobrino, J. 273 Sojourner Truth 540 solidarity 5, 63, 158, 167, 210, 225, 259, 445, 446, 450, 468, 469, 481 in Asia 109–30 mutual 239–49 Sölle, D. 228, 284–5 Song, C.-S. 479, 480 Sophia 33 South, global 3, 29, 74, 76, 79, 88, 96, 111, 112, 182, 372, 428, 527, 539 South Africa 6, 162, 214, 218, 226, 393, 484, 487, 529, 534, 535 South Korea 5, 115, 117, 119, 121–2, 532, 533, 534, 535, 541 sovereignty 316–17, 481; see also nation-state Soviet Union 505 Spain 161, 282, 550 special relativity theory 91 speculative fiction 92 Spinks, C. 268 spirituality 1, 13, 25, 257, 274, 283, 308, 316, 323, 378–9, 442, 447, 534, 536 Latin America Liberation 449–51 Māori 292, 293–4, 301 Spivak, G. 117, 124, 134, 137, 320, 321, 354, 410 Sri Lanka 265, 359

index Stam, R. 308 Stanton, E. C. 114 Star Trek 76–7, 90, 92 Starhawk 54 Stark-Arola, L. 509, 512 Stevens, E. 498, 499 Stiglitz, J. E. 402, 403 stoning (practice) 200, 244 Storni, A. 182 Stowasser, B. 408, 409, 413 Stracynski, J. M. 92 structural adjustment programs (SAPs) 243, 258–9, 260, 261, 263, 264, 388, 404–5, 406 in Africa 243, 258–9, 260, 261, 263, 264 subjectivity 13, 62, 74, 85, 90, 138, 159, 187, 188, 189, 191, 268, 310, 362, 466, 517 religious 371–81 Sudan 196, 410, 487 Western 484 suffragette movement 10, 314 Sugirtharajah, R.S. 362 Sumerians 477 Sunna 200, 204 Suu Kyi, A. S. 540 Swain, T. N. 458, 460 Swaziland 214 Swidler, L. 145, 147 syncretism 9, 53, 168–9, 495, 496, 506, 537 Syria 200, 204

Taiwan 115, 119, 122, 479 Taliban 196, 205, 319, 410 Talitha Cumi (Peru) 527, 533, 534 Tamez, E. 392, 534 Tanner, K. 7, 14, 328, 537 Tantra 135, 136, 137–9, 146 Tanzania 253, 254, 255 Tarducci, M. 185–6, 188 Te Arikinui 299 Te Atairangikahu 299 Te Puea Herangi 298–9 Te Wherowhero of Waikato 298 Tegmark, M. 91 television 77, 92–101; see also media Teresa of Avila 540



terrorism 196, 204, 317; see also war on terror Thailand 119, 415, 484 Thandeka 15 thealogy 53–4 gynocentric 131–56 theology 13, 23, 146–7, 240, 418–40 Affect 344 androcentric 131 in Asia 109–30, 308 Black 1, 169–70, 308 Christian 73, 75, 86, 289–90, 390–7, 516 Christian feminist theology 1, 30–5, 60, 62 Christian systematic 13, 59 contextual vs universal 7 defining feminist 24–30 Indecent 446, 447–9, 450–1 Jewish 51–72 Latin American Afro-feminist (TAFLA) 157–79 North American feminist 332–50 post-Holocaust 51, 63, 65, 67 process 84 Queer 447–8 Rational 344 see also ecotheology ; feminism; God; religion; theaology Thistlethwaite, S. 219 Thomas, B. 365 Thorne, K. 90 Thurman, H. 181 tikkun (restoration) 63 Tikvah Sarah, E. 55 Tillich, P. 392 Timonen, S. 504, 506–8, 509, 513 Togo 243 Tohidi, N. 222, 405 Tokyo 4, 36, 335 Tolloch, P. 383 Torah 52, 53, 59, 60, 61, 62 torture 33, 41 Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1–9) 474, 477–80 Townes, E. 170, 341 tradition 80, 101, 268, 544–59 transcendence 285 feminist 81–3, 87 transethnicity 122–5



index

transnational companies (TNC), see corporations, multinational transvestite collective 445 Treat, J. 362, 364–5, 367 Trinity, the 32–3, 40, 82, 169, 229 Troeltsch, E. 557 Tunisia 201, 207 Turkey 4, 195, 196, 198, 202, 210, 484 Turuia, T. 299 Tutu, D. 229 Tzu-ang, C. 458, 459

Uganda 253, 484 Umansky, E. 53, 58, 60, 61–2 Umbanda 184 UNESCO 404 UNICEF 484 United Kingdom, see Great Britain United Nations 79, 112, 120, 162, 210, 220, 250, 266, 406, 425, 481–6 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 474, 481–6 United States 1, 2, 5, 7, 10, 58, 68, 88, 95, 96, 98, 111, 116, 118, 121, 124, 144, 162, 180, 188, 189, 196, 197, 265, 281, 307, 308, 314–15, 317–18, 322, 323, 324, 328, 332–41, 346, 355, 356–7, 364, 365, 372, 386, 403, 413, 423, 424, 425, 428, 442, 461, 465, 481, 483, 484, 488, 489, 502, 535, 549, 550, 552, 554, 555 Harlem (New York) 497 New York 4, 184, 335 North Carolina 6, 23, 27, 38 Seattle 36 Silicon Valley (California) 389 universalism, philosophical 173–4 urbanization 220, 253, 259 Urrutia, M. I. 164 Uruguay 184, 189 Uruguay Round 117, 119 utopianism 230

Vaishnvas 135 Vargas, V. 430 Vasco de Gama 149 Vásquez, M. A. 214, 495, 558

Ventura, M. 6 Ventura, T. 170 Victoria, Queen 292 Vietnam 119, 121–2 Vilenkin, A. 91 Villota, P. de 462 violence 6, 23, 34, 98, 201, 205, 240, 316, 317, 327 against women 14, 29, 33, 42, 157, 167, 197–8, 201, 245, 269, 319, 324, 355, 359, 412–14, 419, 423, 425, 427, 432, 444, 464, 470, 484, 485, 486, 488–90, 539 domestic 1, 240, 303, 319, 323, 325–6, 327, 444, 486, 488, 489 sexual 1, 30, 221, 269 , 318, 319, 325–6, 430, 464, 474, 488 Virgin of Guadalupe 14, 494, 500, 502–4, 508 Virgin Mary 9, 86, 147, 320, 452, 494–524 Latin American (La Morenita) 499–502 Vishnu 135 voodoo 9, 170, 176, 367 Votes people 504 Vrouw-en-Geloof Beweging 533 Vuola, E. 9, 14

Wadud, A. 411 Waitangi Treat 292, 294–5, 297, 298, 300, 301, 304 Walker, A. 77, 170, 475, 489 Wallace, M. 110 Wandermuren, M. 170 war on terror 111, 317, 425; see also terrorism Warren, H. C. 354 Washinawatok, I. 316 Washington Consensus 111 Waskow, A. 56 ‘We are the World’ (song) 474, 486–8 Weaver, J. 356 Weber, M. 338 Welch, S. 10, 13, 315 Werschkul, M. 333 West, C. 115 West, the 2, 3–4, 10, 12, 74, 88, 110, 111, 115, 116–18, 125, 146, 147, 149, 197, 204, 207, 226, 281, 283, 300, 320,

index 357, 362, 363, 371, 372, 389, 452, 459, 516 Whitehead, A. N. 75 Wilfred, F. 250 Wilkinson, J. R. 229 Williams, D. S. 170, 435 Williams, H. 295 Wilson, A. 117–18 Wilson, E. O. 355 Wittig, M. 327 Wollstonecraft, M. 10, 300 Wolterstorff, N. 232 womanhood 26, 27, 29, 30, 328, 497 and colonialism 255–7 Womanist theological movement 1, 9, 30, 77, 110, 170, 308, 341, 431, 442, 474, 475, 476, 479–81, 486, 488, 490, 538, 539 women: African 15, 212–38, 239–49 African American 14, 342, 459, 539 Afro-Colombian 6, 157–79 and agriculture 260–1 Asian 115–22 Caribbean 461, 464 Christian 241, 242, 409, 452, 525–8, 530–2, 541, 542 and the domestic sphere 6, 7, 30, 119, 122, 166, 254, 266, 269, 480, 550 East African 250–79 and education 262–3, 410, 548 and employment 217–18, 263–5, 332–50, 387–9, 404, 462–3, 546, 548; see also labor Filipina 121, 533, 534, 535 and health 261–2, 411, 415, 471, 500; see also HIV/AIDS, feminization of Hindu 241, 485–6; see also women, Indian Indian 143–4, 148, 149, 150, 389 Jewish 51–72, 241, 359, 409, 541 Latin American 157–79, 180–94, 321–3, 441–55, 456–73, 497–9, 538, 539 Māori (Wahine) 292–306 Middle Eastern 195–211, 359, 374, 377 Muslim 241, 242, 244, 245, 248, 374, 377, 402–17, 484; see also women, Middle Eastern oppression of 6, 7, 11, 13, 15, 25, 40, 144, 165, 171, 176, 196, 199, 201, 202,



216, 267, 300, 326, 419, 420, 421, 423, 429, 431, 467, 475, 488–90, 497, 525, 540 Pentecostal 374–5 and ritual practice 525–6 see also mothering/motherhood; poverty, feminization of; womanhood Women Studies 333, 338, 340–1, 342, 344, 346 Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual (WATER) 435, 533, 535 Women’s World Day of Prayer 531, 534 Wong, L. 118 Wood, A. 186 Woodard, T. 336 Woodroffe, J. 137 world: first 4, 5, 78, 112, 386, 387, 392, 442, 452, 467, 529 third 4, 5, 78, 112, 132, 182, 226, 265, 388, 389, 392, 442 World Bank 79, 80, 112, 120, 219, 258, 260, 266, 269, 388, 402, 403, 404, 451 World Council of Churches 534 World Liberation Theology Forum (Brazil) 328 World Social Forum 79, 322, 435 World Trade Center 478 World Trade Organization (WTO) 112, 269, 403 World War I; 299, 482 World War II; 3, 280, 334, 482, 504, 505 Wright, A. 52, 55 Wu Dunn, S. 6

Xena Warrior Princess 92, 93–4, 97, 98, 100, 101 xenophobia 174, 283, 304

Yahweh 272, 273 Yalta 61 Yemen 202 Yew, L. K. 116



index

Yoshino, K. 117 Young, R. 357–8, 360 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) 245 Yuval-Davis, N. 384

Zakaria, F. 112 zakhor (memory) 63 Zambia 214, 484 Zia ul-Haq 410 Zimbabwe 214, 531