Abstract
With the current cultural fixation on the “crisis of masculinity” and a noticeable trend in North America of men responding to the perceived crisis by joining the Orthodox Church, Ashley Marie Purpura’s book could not have arrived at a more timely moment. Orthodoxy’s traditionalist-coded views of gender and sexuality have been significant contributing factors to and sociological reverberations of such conversions, together with the entanglements of such neo-patriarchalist retrievals with hierarchical (neo-symphonic) political theologies. These trends have been potently emblematized (and caricatured) by the brazen and bombastic digital presence of the so-called “Orthobros,” as one species of a newly reassembled “identity traditionalism” in the postmodern global bricolage. Certainly, these trends are not the only ones in the Orthodox world—nor exclusive to it—and they do not need to predominate.
Nevertheless, they are potent ones and they do make a dance of Orthodoxy, with the feminist question all the more urgent. Orthodoxy’s apologetic self-presentation in contrast to western, technological, individualist modernity is often so stark as to allure those jaded by contemporary culture and disenchanted with its ostensibly disembedded visions of the good life. Into this cultural breach steps Purpura’s remarkable and innovative work, which presents the first full-scale attempt to enact a critical contextualization of the Orthodox tradition with feminist concerns. Purpura draws on predecessors who launched various gender and Orthodoxy conversations (Kyriaki Karidoyanes-Fitzgerald, Elisabeth Behr-Sigel, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, the recent work of Carrie Frederick Frost). But no previous work has offered such a thoroughgoing, encompassing, and multifaceted account of the Orthodox–feminist interface that goes beyond specific issues. That itself will make this a landmark volume for Orthodox studies and for feminist studies in religion going forward.
Purpura brings several modes of feminist theory, and a selection of queer theology, into conversation with a rollicking range of the Orthodox tradition. Those already fluent in feminist discourse or steeped in Protestant and Catholic feminist theology of the past 50 years will likely see much of the early chapters as theoretically recapitulative, and perhaps overly familiar—as the author readily acknowledges. Nevertheless, Purpura has done the hard labor of calibrating and refining those discussions to the intricate particularities of the Orthodox tradition and to its own emic theological idioms and phenomenological emphases. The book combines a highly textured presentation of the vastness and richness of the Orthodox tradition with incisive critiques about its gendered past and present.
The initial results seem bleak. The first three chapters unfold a hermeneutics of assessment of the Orthodox tradition with an unflinching critical analysis of its multilayered “dominating patriarchal presence” (117) under a withering feminist lens. This includes much bracing material and a thoroughgoing suspicion of even the parts of the tradition that have often been offered to soften the edges of its manifestly patriarchal legacies. Chapter 1, in particular, launches a dismantling of the “dominance of the elite institutional religious narrative of Orthodoxy that claims equality or complementarianism while maintaining patriarchy” (32). Purpura pushes this analysis in response to the instincts of many Orthodox traditionalists, who have defended the culture’s status quo as already inclusive of a multiplicity of vibrant feminine elements and symbols, the exalted place of the Marian Theotokos icons foremost among them. Moreover, many elite Orthodox leaders and thinkers have succumbed to the pattern of preemptively trying to delegitimize the feminist question in Orthodox contexts, instead of honestly grappling with it, by the stratagem of portraying feminism merely as a cultural reflex of western modernity and cultural colonialism. Purpura is vigilant and surgical in showing how androcentrism is thoroughly embedded in Orthodox liturgical, ecclesiological, spiritual, and patristic tradition, and how even prominent feminine symbols of the heritage subtly and implicitly betray an “internalized historical patriarchy” (44) that is not “easily excised” (59) from any aspect of the tradition.
Chapter 2 pursues a detailed exegesis of the presentation of women in the Orthodox tradition, including in prominent female hagiographies. Purpura argues that even the portrayals of the tradition emphasizing the “holiness and value of women” are deeply entangled with “mode[s] of expression, religious idealism, and patriarchal determination of reality that negates women speaking for themselves and exercising free self-giving personhood” on equal terms with men (70). Even at its feminine high points, women are thoroughly rendered by men in the tradition in ways that shortcut their own agency and self-articulation (88). Chapter 3 scrutinizes the ostensibly nongendered core theological and spiritual values of the tradition—humility, sacrifice, suffering, sanctification, obedience, and even the paradigmatic Orthodox goal of theosis (divine participation)—and shows how the communal reinforcement and deployment of these virtues and their practices typically reflects “power dynamics that govern” them in masculine ways and that “complicate . . . women’s spiritual progress” (115).
At this point, one has made a long descensus, and it seems uncertain whether there will or can be any ascensus. Guardians of the tradition will likely protectively riposte that some of the case studies examined have been so overinterpreted as to skew the picture; meanwhile, just so much patriarchal material abounds. Simultaneously, it is clear that Purpura also adores aspects of the Orthodox tradition and does not want to jettison it. In contrast to some secular versions of feminism, Purpura argues that faith traditions have been undervalued as a “potential force for liberation and agency” for women (10). Chapters 4 through 6 begin to offer glimmers of feminist reconstruction. That process begins with an incarnational centrality that orients the ideological center of divine–human unity (theosis) around a full affirmation of women’s anthropological equality. This launching point allows Purpura to reevaluate central doctrinal loci of the Orthodox heritage around the full, complete, and embodied humanity of women, according to which patriarchal aspects of the tradition are potently discredited as an “iconoclasm” against the divine image in women (134).
This process of theological reconstruction involves a considerable degree of feminist “unsaying” of traditional language and concepts, which Purpura places under the long-standing and sophisticated tradition of Orthodox “apophaticism,” or negative theology (145). However, such work is not merely ideological but also grounded in a way, in spiritual practices that enact the contestation of patriarchy and the affirmation of women’s humanity concretely; Purpura calls this, enticingly, a “praxis of reclamation” (169). Such a spiritual path includes recommendations for a “kenosis” of power from current Orthodox leaders and a “hesychast spirituality” that engages in “nondominating” (162) encounters of the womanly other as a spiritual discipline. This repertoire of spiritual/theological practices is offered as a “retrieval” of tradition in a way that not only honors many elements of it but also confronts the “challenges of difference” in gender without avoiding them (166).
Lastly, Purpura offers three modes of an Orthodox feminist praxis: first, an “iconodule” devotion to the feminine divine image, drawing here on the mystic Mother Maria Skobtsova; second, prioritizing the stories of female figures in the tradition who resound with their own voice and who exhibit features that manifest “righteous subversions of expected social and gender hierarchies” (172); and third, celebrating and inhabiting a feminine paschal joy that bespeaks liberation and victory—“women can reclaim their own lives and self-expression while prioritizing their identities as known through communion with God rather than social expectations” (190). The lavish envisioning of a constructive program moving forward, beyond deconstruction and clearly painting with the palette of the Orthodox tradition itself, represents a major contribution of this volume and counterbalances the bleakness of the early analysis.
In the end, Purpura concedes that some women may not be convinced. Some may find, she acknowledges openly, the Orthodox tradition to be “beyond repair” and may require a “rupture with tradition” for their own flourishing (171). On the other pole, it is ambiguous whether Purpura has responded directly to the recent flow of women who have embraced a gendered neo-traditionalism and counter-feminism (in contemporary reassemblage), professed in their own agency; this oversight might be a major weakness of the book. Nevertheless, Purpura holds out fervent hope that her spiritual program will breathe new feminist life into the Orthodox tradition for many. Orthodoxy has undergone a distinct historical journey from the western intellectual tradition; nevertheless, as Orthodoxy continues to emerge from its post-Islamic, post-Soviet historical epochs, it will have to engage in its own such reckoning with the feminist question, among several others. In the postmodern digital world, such cannot be avoided entirely—even in attempted withdrawal—and Purpura has made a major contribution to advancing this vital and absorbing conversation.