Critical feminist studies in religion

A range of different feminist socio-political directions and theoretical frameworks exists. Critical feminist studies in religion, as I have sought to develop them, ¹ seek to articulate their theoretical analytics not in terms of gender and feminine identity but in socio-political terms. They understand wo/men ² as socio-political subject-citizens who are producing cultural knowledges and religious discourses in situations of domination and alienation.

Feminist theory has proposed two different social analytics for exploring wo/men’s position in society and religion: one is the analytics of gender; the other is the analytics of intersectionality ³ of oppressions, which I have spelled out as an analytics of kyriarchy/kyriocentrism. ⁴ This critical analytics must be judged in terms of its heuristic power to investigate and deconstruct relations of domination as well as to articulate alternative religious visions for personal and societal change and transformation. Such critical feminist studies in religion and the*logy ⁵ have as a dialogue partner critical theory, not of the French ⁶ variety but of the Frankfurt school. ⁷

I understand critical theory in terms of the Frankfurt School’s (Bohman, 2005) argument that a theory that is critical must meet three criteria at one and the same time:

It has to be explanatory; that is, it must develop a theory of society that explains what is wrong. According to Max Horkheimer, (1982: 244) a theory that is critical aims “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.” I have developed such a theory by explicating the structures of domination not just in terms of kyriarchal gender but also in terms of kyriarchal intersectionality.

Such a critical theory must secondly be practical, i.e. it must identify the agents that seek to bring about change. With Habermas, I see the new social movements (Edwards, 2004) in general and the global women’s movements in particular as such agents of change. Critical feminist studies in religion not only seek to understand and explain religion but also to change its kyriarchal formations.

Finally, a critical theory must be normative, i.e. it must clearly articulate practical goals, ethical norms, and theoretical visions for a different future free from domination. Critical feminist intersectional studies in religion articulate such a normative theory and practice whereas gender hides its theoretical normativity in and through its naturalizing discourses. Hence, critical feminist studies in religion must be careful not to take over critical theory’s gender analysis.

In her very significant study of critical theory, Marsha Aileen Hewitt has amply documented “the sexist moments within Critical Theory that surface in its idealization and reification of women” (Hewitt, 1995: 4). Despite this result, she argues that critical theory is significant for articulating a critical feminist theory of religion, although its credibility is questionable in feminist terms. The*logical discourses, in her view, are, however, “so intertwined and embedded in the status quo” (Hewitt, 1995: XI) that they can no longer formulate emancipatory feminist visions but must be left behind.

I would argue to the contrary, that critical feminist studies which seek to address the questions and oppression of wo/men in religion, that is of wo/men who are committed members of religious communities, must be religious−the*logical–if they should be able to mobilize wo/men’s internalized religious convictions for doing the critical work of deconstructing religious-oppressive identity formations. Critical feminist studies in religion have both a critical deconstructive task of denaturalizing hegemonic religious kyriarchal relations and a reconstructive the*logical task of envisioning a different world, society, and religious community in which wo/men can exercise their “birthright” of fully entitled and responsible citizenship.

One has not only to theorize kyriarchy as an analytic heuristic concept that can articulate the multiplicative intersectionality of the discourses and structures of domination but also to envision a positive alternative, which I have called the ekklēsia of wo/men, i.e. the congress—the coming together—of wo/men as an alternative socio-religious theoretical and practical vision. Such a feminist religious “world-making” which seeks to articulate a radical democratic alternative space to kyriarchal relations of domination has been, and is again and again realized in and through emancipatory movements in religion.

Insofar as the radical democratic vision of the congress of wo/men annunciating “the equal dignity and power of the many” (Hannah Arendt) has been realized historically and practically only within and despite of kyriarchal democracy, it is necessary to qualify the democratic Greek term ekklēsia, the assembly of full citizens, with “wo/men.” Such an oxymoronic marker is necessary as long as wo/men are not full decision-making citizens in academy, society, and religion. In short, critical feminist studies in religion, I argue, have to work with a radical democratic, feminist political rather than just an anthropological or cultural theory of society and religion.

A critical theory of religion must be aware of its rhetoricality and articulate its social location, epistemic interests, and practical functions for changing relations of domination. In order to sustain such a critical theory of religion, I submit, feminist studies in religion must remain “religious” or “the*logical” in the broadest sense of the word. Feminist inquiry needs to locate itself within religion rather than just deconstruct and objectify religion as the “other,” making it an object of the scholarly, allegedly value-neutral gaze.

A radical criticism of religion, i.e. one going to the roots of the tradition, has to come from within a particular religion if such a radical critique should not lead simply to the rejection of wo/men’s religiosity as “false consciousness” or to provoke an apologetics of the kyriarchal status quo rather than engendering the transformation of kyriarchal societies and religions. In short, I agree with Hewitt that critical feminist and liberationist studies in religion need a critical theory of religion that is explanatory, practical, normative, and self-reflexive. However, they need not only “break through the established boundaries of the*logy” (Hewitt, 1995: 3) but also through those of the study of religion.

A critical feminist analytic needs to conceptualize the study of religion as a site of struggle over meaning, ethics, and the*logy. Insofar as such a critical approach exposes and indicts structures of subordination, exploitation, and oppression in society and religion, it undermines the structures of “othering,” silencing, and exclusion inscribed in religion so that the ethos of religious studies is transformed. Critical feminist scholarship in religion, I argue, may neither subscribe to a scientist disciplinary ethos nor advocate parochial the*logical interests but must critically study and evaluate religion and the*ology as public discursive sites of struggle over meaning, visions, and values with respect to all wo/men’s wellbeing. Consequently, such a critical approach to the study of religion and the*logy has to re-conceptualize the discourses of the discipline in terms of a critical rhetoric ⁸ rather than in terms of positivist science.

Religious and the*logical studies, I argue, need to develop an ethos of inquiry that is able to critically display and reflect on the rhetoricality of all knowledge, be it scientific or otherwise. Because scholarly discourse always works with probabilities rather than certainties and speaks from a particular social location to an interested audience, it is best understood in rhetorical terms. In order to bring about change in the ethos and ethics of the discipline the academic study of religion and the*logy needs to develop a rhetoric of inquiry that is not only able to critically and systematically reflect on the discursive practices of religious communities, but also to foster communication and respect between them.

Critical feminist studies have sought to contextualize the academic discourses on religion historically and politically as well as to bring to the fore their gendered, class, national, and racialized character. In particular, feminist scholars have challenged the “scientist” objectivist and value-free ethos of religious studies as serving colonial interests.

First: Critical feminist scholarship has shown that, in modernity, religion has been feminized. Religion has been conceptualized as belonging to the private feminine, emotional, esthetic sphere over and against which the public rational, culturally authoritative masculine sphere of progress, rationality, subjectivity, and modernity has been defined.

Since the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America, institutionalized religions have been relegated to the private sphere of individualistic piety, charitable work, and the cultivation of home and family. The culture of silencing and exclusion that has marginalized all “the others” of elite Western Man has also configured the public location and social position of religious studies. Just as woman in modernity, so also has religion been relegated to the private sphere and has been made an “affair of the heart.” Consequently, engaging religion has become a private matter restricted to individual spiritual edification and ecclesiastical use, because the*logy is not considered to be a science and reason is defined in contradistinction to religion.

In modernity the concept of “religion” was invented to operate within the limits of reason alone. It was feminized insofar as European Christianity was dislodged from its hegemonic role, restricted to the private sphere and turned into a civilizing project of colonialism. ⁹ Religion, just as wo/men and “primitive” peoples, belonged to the “childhood” of “mankind,” which in modernity has progressed to masculine adulthood. In the process of religious privatization and cultural “feminization,” the clergy and the*logy lost their privileged intellectual status and came to be treated like “wo/men” in polite society. This feminization of religion has led both to the emasculation of the*logy and clergy in society and to the reassertion of their masculine roles in the*logy, church, and the home.

The discourse on the “Eternal Feminine” or the Cult of True Womanhood, which I have dubbed the discourse on the “White Lady,” was developed in tandem with Western colonization and romanticism that celebrated Christian white elite European women/ladies as paradigms of civilized and cultured womanhood. This ideology functioned to legitimate both the exclusion of elite wo/men from positions of power in society and church and at the same time to make them colonial representatives who mediated European culture, religion, and civilization to the so-called savages.

This identity-politics of the “Eternal Feminine” and the cult of the White Lady is a projection of elite, Western, educated gentlemen and clerics who stress the complementary nature of wo/men to that of men in order to maintain a special kyriarchal status for upper class white wo/men. This construct does not have the liberation of every wo/man as its goal but seeks to release the repressed feminine in order to make men whole.

Associated with this cult of the White Lady was and is a spirituality of self-alienation, submission, service, self-abnegation, dependence, manipulating power, backbiting, powerlessness, beauty and body regimen, duplicity and helplessness—“feminine” behaviors that are inculcated in and through cultural socialization, spiritual direction, and ascetic disciplines such as dieting and cosmetic surgery. In and through traditional spirituality, wo/men internalize that they are not made in the Divine image because G*d is not She but He, Lord/Slave-Master/Father/Male. They are told that if they fulfill their religious and cultural calling to supplement and complement the Divine Masculine Other, they will fulfill their Divine feminine calling, albeit in a subordinate mode. In both cases cultural and religious structures of self-alienation and domination are kept in place in and through spirituality and the the*logical articulation of the Divine as Lord in masculinist and imperialist terms.

Second: Critical postcolonial feminist studies, moreover, have argued that the study of religion has its roots not only in the European Enlightenment university but also in the history of Western colonialism. Like the “White Lady,” Christianity functioned to both spread Western culture and to ameliorate the horrors of imperialism. Its task was to “civilize” the savages, who were understood as “untamed nature.” The Western discourses on femininity and female nature have their socio-political contexts in this colonial exercise of power. Both anthropology and comparative religious studies have their origin in such a colonial context (Chidester, 2000: 430−432).

Because gender and religion/the*logy are not separate discrete discourses but inform and construct each other, the modern construction of religion and the feminine has also shaped colonial discourses on gender relations; colonial discourses constructed “colonial man” and his culture as effeminate, emotional, superstitious and primitive. Cultural decolonization discourses have rejected Western feminism and called, for example, on the black man to “reclaim his manhood.” Whether they are politically conservative or emancipatory, many nationalist and fundamentalist movements, therefore, use religion and “woman” both as identity- and as boundary-markers.

As Nira Yuval-Davis (1997: 67) has pointed out, female figurations such as “mother India,” “lady liberty,” or “mother church” symbolize in many cultures and religions the identity of the community or collectivity. Fundamentalist movements are political movements who use cultural and religious traditions as symbolic border guards. Gender symbols, control of wo/men, and the wellbeing of the patriarchal family, appeals to religious laws, specific cultural codes of dress and behavior—all these become central to the maintenance of traditional values and the construction of national identity. Such rhetorical identity constructions can be articulated both in the name of emancipation and in the interest of the hegemonic order and the control of wo/men.

Third: Although, like wo/men, religion has no public presence in the Enlightenment university, both religion and wo/men are crucial in maintaining public interest in the antithetical “other” and in shaping cultural and communal self-identity. Whereas postcolonial scholars have underscored the colonialist conceptualization of religion and the imperialist functions of the positivist study of religion, feminist religious and the*logical studies continue to remain critical of the positivist articulations of the academic study of religion as “hard science” that is gendered in “masculinist” terms. As Randi Warne has observed:

Unacknowledged in this version of scientific objectivity is the male gender- embeddedness of the vast majority of practitioners and their thoroughgoing implication in the prescriptive gender ideology of androcentrism in its specific nineteenth and twentieth century cultural form of “separate spheres.” ¹⁰

The political context and rhetorical situation in which feminist as well as malestream research takes place today is constituted by the resurgence of the religious Right around the world claiming the power to name and to define the true nature of religion. ¹¹ The interconnection between religious antidemocratic arguments and the debate with regard to wo/men’s proper place and role is not accidental or just of intra-religious significance. ¹²

If one asks why critical feminist, postcolonial, or LGBT scholarship not taken seriously but often evokes violent public reactions, one is justified in suggesting that the reason is the refusal of such emancipatory scholarship to shroud its work in the cloak of disinterestedness. William Arnal (1997: 317) has pointed out that the reactions to feminist or postcolonial scholarship reveal what is ultimately at stake in the desire for objectivity: a desire to view the object of one’s inquiry through the lens of things-as-they-are. The distinction between a fact and a value is itself not based on fact, but on a dichotomy between things as they are and things as one wishes them to be; the removal of so-called value from scholarship is really the removal of hope—something that is not central or necessary to the daily ideological work of the privileged.

If academic scholarship in religion is to overcome the tendency of the general public to “feminize” religious discourses as privatized religious practices, it needs to investigate the structural and ideological constraints that in modernity have prohibited not only wo/men but also religion from effectively speaking in public.

Fourth: Critical feminist and postcolonial theories have problematized and unmasked the discourses of the science of religion as ideological operations that ontologize, essentialize, reify, authorize, valorize, naturalize, normalize, or pathologize relations of domination such as gender, race, or class. The notion of “sui generis” religion has been studied and critically evaluated by Russell T. McCutcheon. He argues that such a conceptualization has been used not only to constitute and institutionalize the field of religious studies but also to define its research object as an apolitical, fetishized, and sacrosanct area of study (McCutcheon, 1997: 26)—excluding or peripheralizing both the subject of inquiry and the social and political contents in defining what really counts as “religious” or constitutes the “uniquely religious.”

Such malestream discourses on religion represent the “homo religiosus” or the “biblical hero” as a collective subject, which is undifferentiated by race, gender, class, ethnicity, or age. This view from “above” is underscored not only through the sui generis nature of religion but also through the emphasis given to religious texts and the privileging of scholarly elites. Wo/men who have been excluded from the articulation, proclamation, and interpretation of religious classics such as the Bible or the Koran were thereby excluded from the higher levels of religious authority.

Rather than essentializing and masculinizing the notion of religion, “religion” and “the*logy” must be redefined in critical liberationist feminist terms. In Rosalind Shaw’s (2000: 73) words: “By re-conceptualizing power as integral to—as opposed to a detachable ‘dimension of’—religion, feminist religious studies has the potential to generate conceptual change and renewal.”

In sum, critical feminist studies in religion have greatly contributed to a different self-understanding of religion and the discipline of religious or the*logical studies by insisting that both academic feminist and religious/the*logical studies must remain accountable to social movements for change. An explicit connection between feminist critiques and social change has been made in critical feminist studies in religion from its very beginnings. Critical feminist studies in religion and the*logy have consistently argued that we need to study religion because it has played, and still plays, a key role in both wo/men’s oppression and liberation (Jasper, 1999). Hence, a central task consists in understanding the implication of religion in continuing political exploitation of wo/men as well as its power to inspire wo/men for active participation in social−political feminist change.

To a much greater extent than feminist scholars in other areas, feminists in religion and the*logy have sustained strong connections to wo/men’s communities outside the academy. Much work of critical feminist studies in religion has been generated and challenged by wo/men in and outside organized religions who search for a feminist spirituality and politics of meaning for their lives. Conversely, feminist scholars are also involved either in traditional religious feminist groups or in Goddess and spirituality movements that have critically challenged and enriched the*logical articulations and religious formations (Plaskow, 1993).

By conceptualizing religious and the*logical studies as critical rhetorical−political emancipatory practices, I have argued here, that one can avoid the positivist modernist snare of identity politics and objectivist reification. Only if academic religious and the*logical scholarship becomes more feminist, i.e. conscious of its socio-political kyriarchal locations and cultural functions as well as developing a critical self-reflexivity in its methods and research programs, can it rearticulate itself as a critical emancipatory academic discipline that no longer serves to legitimate relations of domination.