Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!dameon
From: rshapiro@bbn.com (Richard Shapiro)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: feminist spirituality and essentialism
Message-ID: <42182@bbn.COM>
Date: 29 Jun 89 21:43:48 GMT
References: <1336@cattell.psych.upenn.edu> <42102@bbn.COM> <12326@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU>
Sender: ambar@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: rshapiro@BBN.COM (Richard Shapiro)
Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA
Lines: 34
Approved: ambar@bloom-beacon.mit.edu

In article <12326@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> mls@mhuxu.ATT.COM (michael.l.siemon) writes:
>In article <42102@bbn.COM>, rshapiro@bbn.com (Richard Shapiro) writes:
>> Replacing the patriarchal notions of, for instance, Christianity, by
>> matriarchal ones does not seem to me to be a step in the direction of
>> feminism... A feminized Christianity or Judaism is not feminist.
>This sounds plausible, and there is a definite point you've made, but
>neither is a neutered Christianity going to be feminist.  It seems to
>me that one wants a PLAY of gender attributes, possibly a dramatic and
>unstable one.

The ellipsis of the quote above expands as follows:

  Just as we have to give up some comforting certainties
  about our own sexual/gender identities (all of us, male and female)
  it may be that we have to give up on religions which attempt,
  intentionally or not, to reinscribe those certainties and thus undo a
  lot of hard, but essential, work. 

A "neutered" Christianity is not at all what I had in mind, as the
omitted portion of the quote makes clear. The point I was making was
that categories like "feminine" and "masculine" should be highly
suspect whenever they're offered as transcendentals; and that
so-called "feminist spirituality", at least as it was described by one
contributor, offers precisely this, and is potentially or actually
anti-feminist for exactly this reason. 

My own feeling is that ANY personalized deity will be just as gendered
as we humans are (gender being a large part of what makes a god
"personal"), and that the very notion of an eternal, gendered being is
profoundly opposed to the crucial concept of contingent, historical,
socially specific gender which feminists have developed. Giving a
gender to a god, implicitly or explicitly, is a way to eternalize and
naturalize "feminine" and "masculine", which should be the last thing
any feminist would want.