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Multiplicity of contradictions
Feminists can’t agree among themselves, Bernice Martin finds
Controversies in Feminist Theology
SCM Press £16.99 (978-0-334-04050-7) Church Times Bookshop £15.30 CONTROVERSIES in Feminist Theology is promoted on the cover as being “clear and accessible”. Its authors are academic feminist theologians; and, while their book may be clear and accessible to an advanced student of feminist theology, the general reader will need a good deal of preparatory homework, especially in finding a way through the early chapters. The book assumes a familiarity with feminist, post-modern, and post-colonial theory. Moreover, the authors argue that, while feminist theology is praxis arising out of women’s everyday experiences, a group of ordinary women will not spontaneously generate it because their experiences need to be “re-read” and “theologised” by feminist theologians deploying “a hermeneutic of suspicion . . . of proclamation . . . of remembrance”, culminating in “creative actualisation”. This illustrates a basic dilemma of the enterprise. It is liberationist, insistent on the validity of difference, and highly critical of patriarchal intellectualisation compared with the embodied knowledge incarnated in the female body; but it is élitist and intellectualist in its operation and in this text — a problem raised, but not convincingly answered, in the final chapter. The contradictions within feminist theology constitute the subject-matter of the book, and the authors celebrate its multiplicity, and reject the “patriarchal” practice of seeking resolution. The chapter on gender and sexuality begins from the premise that it is no longer possible even to agree what a woman is, particularly since the advent of “queer” theory. Chapters covering the Virgin Mary, Christology, and life after death illustrate the extraordinary range of mutually incompatible positions that liberationist and contextual feminists have taken: deploring the Marian tradition as the source of the sexual oppression of women, or celebrating it as the back-door re-entry of “the goddess” into Christianity; rejecting suffering and the cross as justifying oppression, or validating it as the experi-ence of the oppressed; identifying Christ with a young girl prostituted by two men in a public toilet, or with a leather-clad dyke revolutionary leader; advocating feminist readings of selected parts of scripture, or jettisoning the Bible altogether as irredeemably patriarchal; rejecting heaven and resurrection as individualistic egoism displacing the struggle for justice now, or advocating bodily resurrection as an extension of the feminist reclamation of the female body. The argument seems to come out of a Catholic liberationist milieu, but is more inclined to an immanent, rather than a transcendent, perspective. In the final chapter, the authors wonder whether feminist theology is in decline or in rude health, but leave that to lie with all the other contradictions. Bernice Martin is Emeritus Reader in Sociology at the University of London. To order this book, email the details to Church Times Bookshop (please mention "Church Times Bookshop price") |
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