Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!apple!usc!orion.cf.uci.edu!uci-ics!tittle From: mhuxu!mls@att.att.COM Newsgroups: soc.feminism Subject: Re: feminist spirituality Message-ID: <8906301514.AA15744@ncar.UCAR.EDU> Date: 30 Jun 89 15:21:47 GMT Sender: news@paris.ics.uci.edu Lines: 90 Approved: tittle@ics.uci.edu Richard Shapiro wrote: + + >> 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. and my response was: + >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. He repeats what I omitted and extends it a bit: + 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) Agreed; one very important contribution of feminism to our whole intellectual structure is to open the question of gender, to insist that there's something wrong with the traditional "certainties" (or equally rigid "modern" ones). + 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 I elided the part I did, even though it was close to the central point, because I am *not* in agreement here, or at least not with what I take to be the underlying point (maybe I'm overreading) -- namely there seems here to be an ideologically based rejection of religion, or at least of the religions of Christianity and Judaism. As a Christian, and a feminist (and as a gay man with transsexual inclinations and a very complex relation to gender constructions in our society) I obviously feel that there is some way of creatively resolving the tensions of my position. I do agree that simply "replacing patriarchal notions by matriarchal ones" is not likely to be a good answer (what is the question? a sprituality that is not distorted by social assumptions that cripple us, male or female.) My suggestion was that, to the extent that a deity is personal and gendered, the gender attributes need a dynamic construction, not a rigidly pre-defined one (which I would oppose, as Mr. Shapiro does.) But my spiritual search, like that which started this thread, involves as one *starting* point the postive use of feminine gender within the traditions -- and Hagia Sophia or the Jewish Wisdom figure are definitely good entry points here. (Thus, I want to encourage the sort of explorations Mr. Shapiro is warning against.) One philosophical quibble: talking about gender in a "transcendental" context seems to me misleading -- transcendental philosophies, whether Platonic or Kantian or whatever, tend to *de*personalize at the largest scale, and to be perhaps the *least* genderal of any religio-philosophical systems. Instead, the main point is the one explicitly stated later, that of deity as person: + 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. I think we agree here while coming to rather different final evaluations. Given that gender attribution is important to human beings, we will to that extent tend to take a personalized deity as gendered in some manner. But I am not ready at this stage in my own thinking to grant it as "a large part of what makes a god 'personal.'" Rather, it is the *interaction* of people that defines the "personal" and constitutes the model (or the reality, for someone who believes in this as "revelation") of deity as personal. And if deity is conceived in terms of interaction, then a dramatic development of a role (genderal or otherwise) is inherent in the conception. I hope this "unpacks" my previous note; I am not so much contradiciting Mr. Shapiro as taking his points and repointing them in a different direction. ---------- Michael L. Siemon "Inflict Thy promises with each contracted to AT&T Bell Laboratories Occasion of distress, att!mhuxu!mls That from our incoherence we standard disclaimer May learn to put our trust in Thee"