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‘Our bodies, our selves?’ The body as source in feminist theology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2007

Jane Barter Moulaison
Jane Barter Moulaison*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Theology, University of Winnipeg, 515 Portage Ave., Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9, Canadaj.bartermoulaison@uwinnipeg.ca
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Abstract

This article is, in part, an effort to come to terms with the ubiquitous celebration of embodiment in feminist discourse, and particularly within feminist theology. It will begin with a brief introduction to some of the key concepts in feminist theology and its use of the body, beginning with the body theologies of those who might now be called ‘second-wave’ theologians – Carter Heyward and Beverly Harrison. From here, I will consider postmodern feminist challenges to the reified and essentialised body as I examine what I call the subversive body in third-wave or postmodern feminism, both secular and theological. Finally, I shall move from these to an alternative construal of the importance of the body through the consideration of Christian bodily practices. Such an alternative will allow me to reflect upon what it is to become a specifically Christian body through church practices. I shall then endeavour to return to the critical concerns raised by feminism about the subjugation of women's bodies in the church as I consider the resources that might be available within the tradition itself for critical and emancipatory practices toward women and other strangers within the Body of Christ.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 60 , Issue 3 , August 2007, pp. 341 - 359
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 2007

When my former department, the Women's Studies Program at the University of Lethbridge, decided to offer a new introductory course focusing on the subject of women and the body, it sounded like a wonderful idea. I was keen to rework material that, after having taught the course about a half a dozen times, had become somewhat stale – to me, and I'm sure to my students. The turn to the body in introducing Women's Studies seemed simple enough; after all, third-wave feminists are obsessed with the body and there is a never-ending abundance of material on the subject; however, I soon came to discover that the body itself is a slippery concept, whose meaning, in spite of its seeming self-evidence, is by no means shared, especially perhaps among feminist theorists. For feminists of the second wave, such as Gloria Steinem, Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin and Mary Daly, the female body was a battleground. It was the site in which women were to regain control of that which had been taken from them by pornography, medicine, law and male sexual violence. To their daughters, the rebellious third wave, the body was a place of experimentation, subversion and, predominantly, self-defined pleasure. Neither of these pictures of the body struck me, as a Christian, as adequate or ultimately liberating for women. This article is, in part, an effort to come to terms with my personal dissatisfaction with the ubiquitous celebration of embodiment in feminist discourse, and particularly within feminist theology. It will begin with a brief introduction to some of the key concepts in feminist theology and its use of the body, beginning with the body theologies of those who might now be called ‘second-wave’ theologians – Carter Heyward and Beverly Harrison. From here, I will consider postmodern feminist challenges to the reified and essentialised body as I examine what I call the subversive body in third-wave or postmodern feminism, both secular and theological. Finally, I shall move from these to an alternate construal of the importance of the body through the consideration of Christian bodily practices. Such an alternative will allow me to reflect upon what it is to become a specifically Christian body through church practices. I shall then endeavour to return to the critical concerns raised by feminism about the subjugation of women's bodies in the church as I consider the resources that might be available within the tradition itself for critical and emancipatory practices towards women and other strangers within the Body of Christ.

Type one: the organic body

There have been several key theorists within second-wave feminist discourse who have urged that bodies, particularly women's bodies, matter. Eschewing what is commonly generalised as the dualism of ‘The Western Tradition’, they seek to reunite soul and body, body and mind, claiming that the subordination of the material is also the subordination of women, so clearly identified with the natural world. The aim towards transcendence of our earthly conditions, so the argument goes, is, in fact, a thinly veiled desire to leave behind the fallen world of nature and women.Footnote 1 Bodiliness, in this sense, is a renunciation of transcendence, it is an affirmation of the evident, the material and the sensual. As Naomi Goldenberg puts it:

What I am calling the body stands in contrast to the notion of transcendence in traditional theology. Transcendence is a wish for something beyond the body, beyond time, and beyond specific relationships to life. Such a world of perfect safety involves negation of this world and is probably motivated by a characteristically (but not exclusively) male fear of being merged with matter. Theologians envision salvation as up, out, and beyond, and call this hoped-for state of dissociation the ultimate reality.Footnote 2

For Goldenberg, the typically masculine fear of dissolution is sublimated through the symbol of a transcendent father god. Feminist critics such as Goldenberg, Daly, Christ and others urge a return to an immanent spiritualityFootnote 3 that is grounded in women's bodily experience. This central caveat is shared by numerous Christian feminist theologians, and it will be my task in what follows to attempt to gain a clearer sense of what is meant theologically when Christian feminists speak of the alternative and liberating site for experiencing God: women's bodies.

Beverly Wildung Harrison and Carter Heyward

So far we have seen that a return to the body as a source in feminist spirituality is negation of what is perceived to be a dualistic subordination of the material in order to transcend the world of nature, matter and woman. The valorisation of spirit over body within the Christian tradition is to be contrasted with women's concern for the immanent, the natural and the bodily. Sexism within the church and society is rooted, according to prominent ‘second-wave’ Christian theologians, in the patriarchal desire to control women's bodies, and especially women's sexuality. As Carter Heyward argues:

We cannot comprehend the meaning of sexuality from a historical perspective without viewing its place in the context of power relations between genders. In particular, we must understand sexism, the oppression of women in which men are expected to play their manly roles – on top of women, enforcing the rules by which patriarchal, androcentric society is naturally and rightly ordered.Footnote 4

Whatever the body and sexuality are in such feminist theologies, they are to be understood over and against the patriarchal control that men have asserted over women's bodies, in the forms of sexual violence, abuse, objectification or diminution or denial of women's bodily experience. But what positively is the body that is to be celebrated? Feminist theologian Beverly Wildung Harrison offers a more sustained and positive account of the nature of the body that is to serve as a source for women's theological reflection.

If we begin, as feminists must, with ‘our bodies, ourselves’, we must recognize that all our knowledge, including our moral knowledge is body-mediated knowledge. All knowledge is rooted in our sensuality. We know and we value the world, if we know and value it, through our ability to touch, to hear, to see. Perception is fundamental to conception. Ideas are dependent upon our sensuality. Feeling is the basic bodily ingredient which mediates our connectedness to the world. When we cannot feel, we basically lose our connectedness to the world. All power, including intellectual power, is rooted in feeling . . . . If we are not perceptive in discerning our feelings, or if we do not know what we feel, we cannot be effective as moral agents.Footnote 5

This positive description of the nature of the body of the source as described by Harrison requires some parsing for our purposes. The body is the home of religious meaning because it is the a priori of human experience. Experience, according to Harrison's moral epistemology, begins with the sensual, the bodily, yet such bodily experience is also identified with affectivity, or in Harrison's words with feelings. Bodily experience also has a predicate, which is connectedness to the world. The individual is connected to the world insofar as she is a sensual being, but sensuality, here ‘feeling’, is already endowed with affectivity, with a kind of yearning for connectedness, a yearning that is only derivatively understood through reflection, and that exists apart from social mediation or from the grammar of concrete communities. It becomes evident to those with an interest in the genealogy of ideas that this body has been seen before. Harrison's construal of the body, although it appears radical, might be easily identified as a decidedly Romantic anthropology. That bodily experience and feelings emanating from the body should represent a novel direction in theology is easily refuted as we consider Schleiermacher's epistemological ascent:

True religion is sense and taste for the Infinite.Footnote 6

Or, again:

The contemplation of the pious is the immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things in and through the Infinite, and of all temporal things in and through the Eternal.Footnote 7

Of course, the resonance I have identified in Harrison's and others’ epistemology with that of Schleiermacher is not enough to dismiss their moral theology of embodiment tout court, but it should assist us in identifying what I think is one of the most problematic and vexing problems of understanding the body as a source in theology, while it may also reveal some of the problems that Harrison unwittingly perpetuates in her notion of the body. First of all, our bodies, which seem so self-evident, are themselves constructed. They are not, if you will, the naked a priori of pure unmediated experience. As anthropologist Mary Douglas famously put it: ‘Just as it is true that everything symbolises the body, so it is equally true that the body symbolises everything else’.Footnote 8 Harrison's body is already invested with sturdy and deep significations. First the body is good; second the body is individually experiencedFootnote 9 and not primarily socially apprehended. Third, it is a source of more than sensory experience, but also affectivity or emotion, which is also considered immediate and unmediated. Intelligence and moral judgement derive from these, while the body also finds its natural predicate among others and with nature with which it shares a deep and hidden affinity. So much for the naked body! Carter Heyward reiterates some of the themes of Harrison (indeed she draws liberally on Harrison's writings) as she elaborates upon an embodied politics of eros. Although Heyward speaks in terms far more exciting than the comparatively chaste Gefühl of Schleiermacher, she also demonstrates a clear affinity with him as she posits the existence of an innate yearning that arises from individual experience and feeling toward the other, and indeed towards the whole cosmos.

If we are to appreciate ourselves as sexual beings, really appreciate ourselves and learn more and more how to enjoy ourselves/our bodies and those of other people in ways that are mutually empowering and creative, we who are Christians are going to have to participate in articulating and offering some quite radical theological alternatives to what has been given by our fathers . . . . The power of mutual relation is creative sexual power, which is redemptive of our isolation and brokenness in its carrying us into relations with others. Sexual power not only carries us into lovemaking with our partners, but is moreover present and active in all creative, mutually empowering relations we have . . . . We are making the connections in our daily lives, in our relationships, and our work. Coming out, we are testifying to that power crossing over among us and all that lives.Footnote 10

It is interesting also to note that this sexual yearning, while not exclusively the domain of women, is nevertheless a far more prominent and vaunted theme, according to Heyward, in feminist spiritualities than in ‘malestream’ theology. Indeed, such an organic spirituality in which the individual body, which is holistically related to others and to the whole of nature, is peculiarly and especially the domain of women as they, along with nature, body, sexuality, are to enjoy a reversal of the values associated with them. That is to say, women are no longer to be understood as a subordinate and secondary creature in Imago Dei, but are instead, along with the natural world and sexuality, especially endowed with God's grace:

God reveals herself through our relationships not only to other people but also to other creatures and to nature. This faith-claim is both in continuity and discontinuity with traditional western Christianity. It shares with the Christian tradition the emphasis on the incarnation of God: its discontinuity is in stressing the sacred character of nature – flesh, dirt, wetness, woman.Footnote 11

Women's proximity to nature, dirt, flesh and so on, in Heyward's erotic theology, strikes me as a curious reaffirmation of traditional sexual dualisms; it is just that the values are now reversed. Such a view carries with it the assumption that women are especially connected to the divine and to the world of nature. It is not just in the area of epistemology that Heyward and Harrison have a deep affinity to Schleiermacher! Clearly, the Romantic valorisation of the feminine, the natural and the intuitive is carried on in these feminist writings. The concern, as commonly raised by many postmodern feminist theorists, is that such essentialist discourse not only fails to take seriously the very diversity that exists among women, some of whom perhaps share no affinity to nature or dirt or wetness, while it also reifies old stereotypes that women would do well to challenge – such as women being more emotional, intuitive, caring and so on.

Type two: the subversive body

Over and against such an idealised view of women's bodies stand postmodern critics, for whom the body is of no less importance. Such theologians as Lisa Isherwood and Marcella Althaus-Reid reject the claim that women's bodily experience is necessarily heuristic and intentional. For these women, drawing on the insights of secular postmodern feminist theorist Judith Butler, the significance of the body is not in its ability to ‘make the connections’ with others and with nature; but rather to offer bodily performances which resist the social dictates of sexual and gendered behaviour. For these theologians, the significance is the difference of individual bodily performances, and their revelatory capacity to defy definition, whether that be in terms of sexual codes of behaviour or precise gender identity. For postmodern theorists such as Judith Butler, gender is not a given, but is simply that which we perform as a result of the tacit and coercive surveillance that keeps us from defying these boundaries. The task of feminists is not to affirm staid dualities, but to engage in the free play of ‘gender trouble’ – that is, in defying social stereotypes and sexual norms. It is in sexual experimentation and play that gender roles are subverted and women gain a greater degree of freedom from gender's narrow and oppressive prescriptions, including those prescribed by essentialist feminist discourse. Butler commends subversive sexual performativity, including self-critical parodies of sexual stereotypes, such as the hyperexaggeration of gender roles in order to subvert and defy them. As difficult as it is to defy stereotypes, we are encouraged to seek acts which will rub against the grain, at least on occasion, of socially sanctioned gender practices. While Butler is rather pessimistic about the possibility of escaping gender's fatalistic performative repetition,Footnote 12 there are many feminist theorists, theologians included, who carry on the torch of subversive sexual performance with far more optimism in its efficacy. And although they lack the nuance of Butler, who is keenly aware that there is no Archimedean point from which one can assess and evaluate the body's performance, they share with her, and indeed with many other postmodern thinkers, a faith in the power of sexual jouissance, gender bending, fetishism and experimentation as a subversive and deeply political act. Reflecting theologically upon the Vagina Monologues, theologian Lisa Isherwood presents a defiant yet putatively radical response to Ensler's question ‘What would your vagina wear or say?’:

What would they say, these silenced and maligned vaginas that have borne the force of clerical and theological wrath for centuries? Now is the time to find an honest voice uncorrupted by theological niceties. The vicar is coming to tea: get out the bondage gear, not the cucumber sandwiches and let's do theology. But what would yours say? I bet it wouldn't be ‘Hail Mary’. How about ‘Hail Holy Queen’, what gender . . . lies behind those innocent words? A heterosexual woman getting close and theological with a gay man in drag or not? A heterosexual man dressed as Cleopatra for a night? A stone butch looking for all the world like Princess Di or Ivana Trump? The list is endless. What wonderful theology these people could produce if they took Marcella's [Althaus-Reid] advice and went to bed for a week and then wrote the ‘Song of Songs’.Footnote 13

There are a number of critiques that one could make of Isherwood's caustic theologising. However, I do not think marginality is one of them. If secular feminist studies are any indication, the obsession with the body, but specifically the subversive body, is far from waning. And while one wonders if such solipsistic preoccupation with sexual performance signals an end to feminist politics,Footnote 14 one is also struck by how out of step the provocative language employed here is with the language of the church (at least with most of the churches that I have attended). Indeed, one of the foremost concerns that I have with Isherwood's argument is that the context of the Christian community, surely a central feature of theology, is entirely neglected. Scriptural texts are sparsely engaged, except insofar as it is urged that Christ too displays ambiguous and rebellious sexuality. One wonders in these cases, in spite of the fairly complex evasion of essentialism that is attempted, whether the impertinent and subversive body is not also a construct. Does subversion as a political tactic, as soon as it is identified and endorsed, not become itself a fairly predictable and repetitious performance itself?Footnote 15

Beyond the organic and subversive body

Within secular feminist discourse, the debate generally falls between the two fault-lines: woman's body is fixed, an innate pre-conceptual common experience or set of experiences; or woman's body is fluid, determined primarily by the ubiquitous disciplining pressures of social control, but capable of impertinent subversion of these pressures. What are often overlooked in the endless debate between identity and alterity, or second- and third-wave feminisms, are some of the commonalities of the two typologies within feminist discourse that exist. In what follows, I shall examine the commonalities within the two types of feminist theology of the body that I have identified. First, the current preoccupation with all things bodily is a rather recent phenomenon within the history of ideas, but it is one that is rarely engaged critically. While Cartesian dualism prevails in much academic and social discourse, feminist theory from both essentialist and postmodernist camps shares with existentialism a return to the body as the repository of one's truest identity.Footnote 16 Existentialist monism regards the body as the only possible site of experiencing and understanding the world. Likewise, for feminist body theologians, the body is the singular and unambiguous self. Bodily experiences are what they are, they are subject to neither scrutiny nor critique. This celebration of body, and of eros particularly, must however undergo the process of critical revaluation from the categories in which women's bodies had hitherto been defined. Whereas within the first type of theology, which is represented by Heyward and Harrison, sexuality must undergo the purgation of elements of domination and control as exercised by patriarchal authority; within the second type of theology, it is repression itself – that is, the dictating of gender and sexual norms – that must be eradicated from the banal decency of Christian sexual ethics. As Marcella Althaus-Reid puts it:

The fact is that beyond the domesticated, shaved bodies of patriarchal theology, and the politics of limits imposed on women's theological thinking, there are armpits with glorious, rebellious chestnut bushy hair shouting out loudly their different stories. These stories make indecent, unfitting and transgressive theologies. In that sense we must remember that the starting point of our theologies are bodies, but the rebellious bodies: what Isherwood calls the body ‘as is’ before theology starts to draw demonic and divine inscriptions in it.Footnote 17

Again, one whether theologians Lisa Isherwood and Marcella Althaus-Reid have, for all their efforts to describe the body ‘as is’, have nevertheless fallen into abstraction. That is to say, the body ‘as is’ is also an embellished body, adorned in the mystique of sexual rebelliousness, posited against its designated opposite: the patriarchal, disciplined body. Furthermore, the rebellious body is described in Althaus-Reid's description as an expression of authentic feminist identity, as is clearly evident from the plentitude of wild and unruly bushy armpits. The role of individual experience and the significance of its expression serve even in postmodern theology as a privileged foundation for this type of theory. It is in such a manner that Isherwood and Althaus-Reid fail to take seriously enough the thoroughly social nature of such expression and therefore, in spite of their affinity with Butler's subversive body, are, in practice, closer to essentialist notions of the body as a fixed identity from which discrete acts of rebellion are variously expressed.Footnote 18

Christian body politics and women

What is neglected rather strikingly in both types of feminist discourse about the body is the specific location of the Christian woman's body within the body of Christ. How are women's bodies, as specifically Christian bodies, to be understood and experienced? Are there specific resources within the Bible and within the church's practices that might address the kinds of concerns that feminists have about the exploitation and the exclusion of specifically women's bodies within the church? Is it inevitable that the church is (and always has been) a place in which women's bodies have been disciplined into submission? In what follows, I shall seek to offer some propaedeutic comments on resources that might exist within postliberal theology as a means of evading the lingering idealism within feminist theologies of the body, while I shall also seek to recover some sources for understanding the significance of women's bodily experience in theological reflection.

What are Christian bodies?

Postliberal theologians would share with postmodernists an awareness of the embeddedness of our understandings of the body, denying the existence of the body as a self-evident entity without social significance. Indeed, Mary Douglas’ famous identification of the social with the individual body is one that is a central caveat for Christian theology: the individual body is to be conformed to the body of Christ.Footnote 19

What exists as prior to experience, bodily and otherwise, is what George Lindbeck identifies as the verbum externum, the external word that is the religion itself which shapes and moulds experience through its particular and discrete narrative and practices.Footnote 20 Religions, in this view, ‘function . . . as idioms for the construing of reality and the living of life’.Footnote 21 The task of church is not to speak to the unique bodily experiences of its members so much as it is to shape Christian bodies. The church seeks to conform Christians to the narrative of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christians become incorporated into the body of Christ through concrete practices, including the breaking of bread, the sharing of possessions, the preaching of the word and primarily self-offering service to neighbour.Footnote 22 Becoming part of the body of Christ requires, historically at least, a lengthy process of socialisationFootnote 23 in which one's own practices and habits came into conformity with the practices and habits of the church.Footnote 24

It is in this sense that the Christian body is a unique body, a body which is distinct from other bodies within the polis. Such description of the unique practices of the church within postliberal theology gives rise to a pragmatic ecclesiology in which the church is understood as, concretely, the people-of-God, not as an ideal type.Footnote 25 It also has the effect of understanding the individual body not as an expression of the true self, but as that which can only be understood in relation to the body's head – that is, in relation to Jesus Christ. As Rowan Williams writes:

the relation of Christians to each other is one of building up: we are engaged, in Christ, in constructing each other's humanity, bringing one another into the inheritance of power and liberty whose form is defined by Jesus.Footnote 26

Does this mean necessarily that women's bodies are to conform to a masculine norm? I do not think so. In what follows, I shall offer an account of the shaping of bodies within a particular culture by French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, whose account of habitus is very helpful for our context. From here I shall move to consider the nature of male and female bodies within the church as I examine some resources for a critical feminist theology that might take some of its cues from postliberalism.

A postliberal analysis of the body would examine the manner that church practices themselves are inscribed upon the gestures and the bodies of members in them. It is here that Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus becomes very helpful. For Bourdieu, the habitus is a generating principle or modus operandi that produces those regular improvisations that can also be called ‘social practice’. This is very close to the verbum externum of George Lindbeck. In both Lindbeck and Bourdieu, we see the manner in which rules are internalised by the individual so that they become second nature. Within this, as Bourdieu says, the complete past that has produced the person continues to have a profound impact upon the present. Ways of thinking, perspectives on the world, patterns of perception and the principles of judgement and values at work in a society have all gone into the habitus, which, in turn, becomes manifest in the behaviour and expression of individuals. For Christians, although they may be shaped by other forms of life, or fields as Bourdieu calls them, the particularity of the Christian shaping will often create bodies which are manifestly at odds with other bodies within the dominant culture.Footnote 27

The embodied consequences of this shaping are profound. It is in practices that the individual's socialisation within the church is made concrete. Saintliness, in this view, is not an interior piety, but it is skill – it is competency within one's field. Or, as Bourdieu describes, one moves from ‘social necessity turned into nature, converted into motor schemes and body automatisms’.Footnote 28 While Bourdieu speaks in terms where the gaining of a habitus seems automatic and without critical self-reflection, he does not wish to undermine the manner in which the field or form of life changes according to the distinct pressures and actions of individuals. Persons are still active producers of a field, while they are also shaped by that field's logic.Footnote 29

What this view brings to Christian theology is an awareness of the manner in which the field of Christian community bears upon the believer. This is the precise opposite of the predominant view of the church which regards church membership as characterised by individual and autonomous choice. In terms of our specific topic, the body is significant because it becomes the observable site in which one might view the effect of the Christian field upon the individual believer. Insofar as she has become incorporated into the body of Christ, she reproduces those practices in a seemingly effortless and unreflexive fashion.

The critical feminist question becomes, then, whether the subordinate bodies of women within the church are necessarily ingredients within the field of Christianity or whether these are determined by the influence of other fields. Certainly there is room for enormous debate on whether Christian practices accord a position of dignity to women. However, it is significant to note the possibilities for critique of church practices through a phenomenology of the gestures and habits of women within the church. This is done through the examination of practices, in ways that are materially suggestive of the institutional force of oppression.Footnote 30 While a postliberal emphasis upon church practices, especially when supported by a Bourdieuian critical phenomenology, is a helpful means of overcoming essentialism in feminist criticism, it also offers an account of the manner in which the Christian practice offers an alternate view of women's bodies and their significance, which succumbs neither to gender essentialism nor to rendering gender differences inconsequential. Liturgical practices become a very illuminating site for resistance, for it might be argued that liturgical practice itself can become a place where narrow and restrictive gender stereotypes are challenged. A wonderful example of this, located still within the Christian field or form of life, is Sarah Coakley's analysis of the eschatological body that is evoked within the eucharist. According to Coakley, the celebration of the eucharist allows for the displacement of traditional gender binaries. This is so because within the eschatological drama of the eucharist, we are invited to participate in the consummation of our bodily identities as anticipated in the liturgy. However, it is not through the imposition of an androgynous unity upon men and women's bodies, but through the play of liturgical celebration where the boundaries between divine and human, church and Christ, and male and female, are blurred and disrupted. As Coakley describes the significance of the female priest facing East and West alternately in the liturgy:

I was startled to discover, in celebrating east-facing . . . that far from finding myself offended by this position as a feminist, I actually found the east position curiously releasing . . . . When the priest has her back to the people, it is symbolically clear that she is adopting the position of ‘offering’ on behalf of the laity: She is facing Godwards, reprepresenting the laos. In the terms of the old ‘natural signs’ (which as Mary Douglas argues cannot be repressively obliterated, but must rather – in my view – be resummoned and strategically destabilised), the priest is ‘feminine’ in this posture . . . . But when she turns around, whether to greet (at the sursum corda), or to offer the consecrated elements, or to bless, she has moved to the other side of the divide, representing Christ, offering God to the people . . . both summoning and destabilizing the ‘masculine posture’ of the bridegroom's self-gift. Without these bodily reversals and movements in the liturgy, I suggest, something deeply significant to the enactment of this destabilization is lost. When I am stuck, fixed behind the altar west-facing throughout, I also contribute unwittingly to a gender fixing that blocks the play of liminality those older movements conveyed . . . . by moving from one role and its evocations to the other, even the male priest is ‘played’ with a destabilization of associated gender binaries. What the female priest now makes possible, in my view, in her same play of movements, is the use of this play as a reversal that merely reestablishes its opposite: her destabilization is more confounding even than the ritual of reversal, and so gestures to the endlessness of the movement of gender subversion at the gateway between divine and human.Footnote 31

Sarah Coakley's argument is a liturgical one, emphasising the appropriateness of female priests, even in the enactment of the nuptial drama within the eucharist. For our purposes, it offers an account of women's bodies within church practices that challenges the premise that has been shared by the feminist theologians that we have previously examined: namely that women's role within the church is necessarily fixed in a place of subordinate status. Coakley's depiction of the dynamic play of the female priest at the altar not only challenges the view that the church creates docile female bodies, but it might also provide a description of the female body that has incredible emancipatory potential. The eschatological body that is anticipated and participated in within the liturgy is one in which the boundaries between male and female are uncertain, but this is not a version of androgyny: rather, it is precisely through our personal identities, provisionally encoded in the categories of gender, that we are transfigured and incorporated into the kind of body of Christ that no longer knows differentiation or partiality (John 16:13). Yet this is an eschatological hope, and it is one that is participated in only through our historical and particular identity, including, for many, the specific identity that is accorded with our roles and relationships as women and men. This is not to reify these roles; but nor is it to hasten a utopian kind of gender identity. Such eschatological waiting enables us to recognize that our lives are deeply shaped, and at times, positively enhanced by those very positions, or performances, that we commonly consider ‘natural’.Footnote 32 As Rowan Williams writes:

If the Church exists, as it does, at an angle to the forms we treat as natural, the temptation is to seek to ignore or abolish these forms; to treat people as though they were not deeply and permanently moulded by their natural and unchosen belonging . . . But this is manifestly damaging and illusory. The Jesus of the gospels is not a human cipher; any attempt to pretend otherwise simply means that it is not the whole or real person who is brought before God. The persons who are invited in the community of the Kingdom are not ‘new creations’ in the sense of having all their relationships and affiliations cancelled. The question thus becomes how existing patterns of belonging can collaborate with the patterns of the new community, if at all, how the goals and priorities of these existing patterns are to be brought together with the constructive work of the Kingdom, the Body.Footnote 33

The constructive work of the kingdom is, in part, the creation of Christian bodies to bear witness to the goal and destination of human living. This is worked out precisely through our practices which may themselves serve as a countersign to the reification of women's bodies. It has been my argument that this is done best through the very logic of distinctly Christian practices rather than through a putatively neutral starting place of women's bodily experience. For Christians, ‘our bodies’ are never thoroughly our own, but exist for the sake of building up others through tangible acts of self-giving love. While there are dangers in the advocacy of such practices in a world where women's bodies are often first to be used for others, it is far more dangerous, I believe, if we succumb to the despair that is implicit in those theologies that assert that the finality of the self exists entirely within the domain of women's eros or putatively subversive acts. As Coakley has written, in terms profound and challenging: ‘Much is at stake here; and it is more – frankly – than a debate about politics, speech and homophobia, important though that is. Rather, what seems to be enacted’ (in our concern for the body) is non-paradoxically, a ‘gesturing to an eschatological horizon which will give mortal flesh final significance’.Footnote 34 While we have not worked out the full depth of that significance, I have suggested that it is through our practices within the Christian field that this depth might be already available.

Footnotes

Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.

References

1 See, for example, Warren, Karen J., ‘The Power and Promise of Ecological Thinking’, in Tong, R., Kouranay, J. and Sterba, J. (eds), Feminist Philosophies (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), p. 455Google Scholar. ‘Women are identified with nature and the realm of the physical; men are identified with the “human” and the realm of the mental. Whatever is identified with nature and the realm of the physical is inferior to (“below”) the realm of the mental; or, conversely, the latter is superior to (“above”) the former. Thus women are inferior to (“below”) men; or, conversely men are superior to women.’ Or, as Annie LeClerc writes, women's bodies are subordinated for the sake of male desire itself. The task at hand is to assert women's difference in the face of such bodily deprivation and denial: ‘You have poisoned my life. For centuries. Deprived of my body, I only knew how to love through you. Badly, hardly living. Slaving away, enduring, being silent and being pretty. My body there for work and for pleasing you; never for me. Mouth sewn up, face made up. Vagina open when you want it, closed up with Tampax. Scored, scraped, made hygienic, deodorized and re-odorized with rose-smelling perfume, it's too much, it's stifling me, I need my own body. That is what I mean by living’. Annie LeClerc, ‘Woman's Word’ in Tong et al. (eds), Feminist Philosophies, p. 438. For an explicitly theological account of the problem of dualism within Christianity, see Rosemary, Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

2 Goldenberg, Naomi R., Resurrecting the Body: Feminism, Religion and Psychoanalysis (New York: Crossroad, 1993), p. 211Google Scholar.

3 Yet even Naomi Goldenberg does not wish to get rid of transcendence altogether. Indeed she claims that there may well be resources for psychological well-being which are implicit within the symbol itself, once it is divested of its patriarchal and ‘deathlike’ content. ‘A transcendence with body, a transcendence that is life-oriented, would involve feelings of connection instead of separation. It might be possible for transcendence to refer to a state of knowing oneself to be part of other human lives – to knowing that one's life is linked with other lives. Feeling part of an enormous effort at social reform such as that of the women's movement has been an experience of transcendence for many of us. The feeling of participation in the body politic not only provides a tie to a present collective community, but also links our lives to the lives of those who lived before us and those who will live after us. Such transcendence has a quality of the here and now – a feeling that is part of the present moment and that provides a significant tie to human history and society. It fosters feelings of being alive’. Ibid., p. 212.

4 Carter, Heyward, Touching our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), p. 45Google Scholar.

5 Beverly, Wildung Harrison, ‘The Power of Anger in the Work of Love’, Union Seminary Quarterly Review 36 (suppl. 1981), p. 48Google Scholar.

6 Schleiermacher, F. D. E., On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. John, Oman (London: Kegan Paul, 1893), p. 36Google Scholar.

7 Ibid., p. 39.

8 Mary, Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2002), p. 122Google Scholar.

9 The appeal to the significance of bodily experience, like the appeal to experience itself, is not also deeply invested with meaning arising out of a nest of presuppositions that are peculiarly modern. As George P. Schner writes: ‘The rhetorical appeal to experience is thus both a maintenance of the Enlightenment desire to set aside the tutelage of any group or text so as to exercise reason in full freedom of inquiry, and also an instance of the displacement of authority from the dominant community to the individual or to particularized groups within the community. As the history of philosophical, psychological, and social criticism confirms, this form of an appeal to experience must itself be subjected to critique and is never literally a disinterested appeal. That is not to say that it is purposely ignorant, let alone ill willed. Rather, it points out that an appeal to experience as the authorization of the status of a given opinion is dependent on a theory of rationality, of human nature, of the relation of the individual to society and history, and of language and all other forms of mediation.’ ‘The Appeal to Experience’, Theological Studies, 53 (1992), p. 45.

10 Touching our Strength, p. 247 (italics added).

11 Ibid., p. 94.

12 As Butler writes: ‘To enter into the repetitive practices of this terrain of signification is not a choice, for the “I” that might enter is already inside: there is no possibility of agency or reality outside of the gender practices that give those terms the intelligibility that they have. The task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself. There is no ontology of gender on which we might construct a politics, for gender ontologies always operate within established political contexts as normative injunctions, determining what qualifies as intelligible sex, invoking and consolidating the reproductive constraints on sexuality, setting the prescriptive requirements whereby sexed or gendered bodies come into cultural intelligibility’. Judith, Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 148Google Scholar.

13 Lisa, Isherwood, ‘Indecent Theology: What F–ing Difference Does it Make?’, Feminist Theology 11/2 (2003), p. 147Google Scholar.

14 See also Martha Nussbaum on Judith Butler, ‘The Professor of Parody’, The New Republic (22 Feb. 1999), pp. 37–45.

15 Feminist philosopher Vicki Kirby identifies lapsing into essentialism even, or perhaps especially, when one attempts to escape its grasp, a perennial feminist pitfall: ‘Rethinking essentialism, then, is not a dispute about its meaning, at least not within the order of its commonplace understanding. The weight of that understanding is the burden in its lived reality is not in contention here. If anything, what is being questioned is how we can pretend to bear this burden so lightly. It is not so much the meaning of essentialism that requires further consideration, but “the how” of that meaning. How is “essence” entailed, made proper, installed “as such” and naturalized within our thought and being? How does it congeal into an already embodied reality? If we assume that when we locate essentialism we identify it and corral its dangers the better to determine the virtue of our own practice, then we have merely embraced another of essentialism's many mutations and one that finds us right inside the belly of the beast.’ Vicki, Kirby, ‘Corporeal Habits: Addressing Essentialism Differently’, Hypatia 6/3 (Fall 1991), p. 9Google Scholar.

16 Body theology's intellectual proximity to Nietzsche's valorisation of the body over mind should give pause for critical revaluation of this standpoint. Similarly, as Sartre wrote, turning Descartes on his head: ‘The body is what I immediately am . . . I am my body to the extent that I am’. Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, cited in Anthony, Synott, ‘Tomb, Temple, Machine and Self: The Social Construction of the Body’, British Journal of Sociology 43/1 (March 1992), p. 100Google Scholar.

17 Marcella, Althaus-Reid, ‘“Pussy, Queen of Pirates”: Acker, Isherwood and the Debate on the Body in Feminist Theology’, Feminist Theology 12/2 (2004), p. 158Google Scholar.

18 As Charles Taylor efficiently characterised our cultural preoccupation with expression of our authentic selves: ‘each of us has his or her own way of realizing one's own humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one's own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed from outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority’. Charles, Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 83Google Scholar.

19 Note that Paul himself does not contrast body (soma) to soul (psyche), but flesh (sarx) to spirit (pneuma). Flesh (sarx) refers to the body and soul in rebellion against God, whereas spirit (pneuma) signifies sanctified life. As Kallistos Ware helpfully reminds: ‘the terms “flesh” and “spirit” indicate, not components of the person, but relationships embracing personhood in its totality. “Flesh” is the whole person as fallen “spirit”; the whole person as redeemed. As Paul sees it, the mind can become “fleshly” or “carnal” (Colossians 2:18), just as the body can become “spiritual” (I Corinthians 15:44)’. ‘The Body in Greek Christianity’, in Sarah Coakley (ed.), Religion and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 93.

20 ‘A religion is above all an external word, a verbum externum, that molds and shapes the self and its world, rather than an expression or thematization of a pre-existing self or of pre-conceptual experience’. The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1984), p. 34.

21 Ibid., p. 18.

22 ‘Sacramental practice seems to speak most clearly of loss, dependence and interdependence, solidarities we do not choose: none of them themes that are particularly welcome or audible in the social world we currently inhabit as secular subjects. We are told, in effect, that the failure to see ourselves and find ourselves in one another kind of corporateness is a failure in truthfulness that is profoundly risky. Our liberty to choose and define ourselves as individuals or as limited groups with common interest is set alongside the vision of a society in which almost the only thing we can know about the good we are to seek is that it is no one's possession, the triumph of no party's interests. The search for my or our good becomes the search for a good that does not violently dispossess any other – and this not on the basis of rights whose balance must be adjudicated, but because of a conviction that the creative regard calling and sustaining myself is precisely that which sustains all’. Rowan, Williams, ‘Sacraments of a New Society’, On Christian Theology (Malden: Blackwell, 2000), p. 219Google Scholar.

23 ‘The postliberal method of dealing with the problem (of apologetics as translation) is bound to be unpopular among those chiefly concerned to maintain or increase the membership and influence of the church. This method resembles ancient catechesis much more than modern translation. Instead of redescribing the faith in new concepts, it seeks to teach the language and practices of the religion to potential adherents. This has been the primary way of transmitting the faith and winning converts for most religions down through the centuries.' Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, pp. 131–2.

24 Indeed, one could read the entire Pauline corpus as an extended effort to create and shape Christian bodies. As Douglas Harink writes: ‘For Paul, the spiritual and moral space created by God through Christ's triumph over the powers in the cross is also the space in which a new human community is created, a community that is called to embody the reality of the powers conquered, redeemed and reordered. In this community the new creation is announced, enacted and celebrated through Spirit-enabled practices that reveal in concrete ways that the rule of the rebellious powers has been broken in Christ – practices of identification and incorporation, of forgiveness and reconciliation, of sharing earthly goods, of building up the corporate body of Christ through gifts of service, of giving everyone a voice in the discernment of corporate direction. Through these practices the church becomes God's people, a body, a polis, that reflects the way of Jesus Christ amid other peoples, bodies and cities’. Paul Among the Postliberals (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2003), p. 149.

25 ‘The . . . church is fundamentally identified and characterized by its story. Images such as “body of Christ”, or the traditional marks of “unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity”, cannot be first defined and then used to specify what is and what is not the church. The story is logically prior. It determines the meaning of images, concepts, doctrines, and theories about the church rather than being determined by them’. Lindbeck, George A., ‘Critical Exegesis and Theological Interpretation’, in Green, Garrett (ed.), Scriptural Authority and Narrative Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987), p. 165Google Scholar.

26 Rowan Williams, ‘Incarnation and the Renewal of Community’, in On Christian Theology, p. 232.

27 See George Lindbeck, “Theories of Language and Religion and the Permanence of Doctrine.” Unpublished Saint Michael's Lectures given October 15–16, 1974, Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. Courtesy of the George Lindbeck archives, Yale Divinity School University Library, on the irreducible diversity in such shaping: ‘[I]t can be argued that the adherents of different religions do not diversely thematize the same experience; rather, they have different experiences. Buddhist compassion, Christian love and, if I may cite a quasi-religions phenomenon, French Revolutionary fraternité are not diverse modifications of a single fundamental human awareness, emotion, attitude or sentiment, but are radically (i.e., from the root) distinct ways of experiencing and being oriented towards self, neighbour, and cosmos’. ‘The Saint Michael's Lectures’, p. 13.

28 Pierre, Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge Press, 1977), p. 215Google Scholar.

29 There is some hermeneutical circularity in the relationship between habitus and field in Bourdieu's writing. As Bourdieu writes: ‘The relation between habitus and field operates in two ways. On one side, it is a relation of conditioning: the field structures the habitus, which is the product of the embodiment of the immanent necessity of a field (or of a set of intersecting fields, the extent of their intersection or discrepancy being at the root of a divided or torn habitus). On the other side, it is a relation of knowledge or cognitive construction. Habitus contributes to constituting the field as a meaningful world, a world endowed with sense and value, in which it is worth investing one's energy. Two things. First, the relation of knowledge depends on the relation of conditioning that precedes it and fashions the structures of habitus. Second, social science is necessarily a “knowledge of a knowledge” and must make room for a sociologically grounded phenomenology of the primary experience of the field or, to be more precise, of the invariants or variations of the relation between different types of fields and different types of habitus’. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 127.

30 Notice how women in this pragmatic account are not lumped together based upon the ideological canons of a ‘common nature’ or a ‘feminine epistemology’ or even by ‘women's experience’; but rather through the concrete manifestation of their bodies, still excluded from church practices and often with an internalized self-deference before male authority within church structures. It is here, within this small space, located squarely still within the common practices of the church, that it becomes possible to speak of the importance of women's bodies within the church in a manner that is not abstraction from the Christian form of life, while it does not impose an abstract unity upon the diversity of women's experiences.

31 Sarah, Coakley, ‘“The Woman at the Altar” Cosmological Disturbance or Gender Subversion?’, Anglican Theological Review 86/1 (Winter 2004), pp. 89–90Google Scholar.

32 It is for this reason that I would argue for the importance of feminist rituals that are rooted within the Christian tradition which give greater voice to the experiences of women, such as the ‘Churching of Women’, an ancient rite in which women are welcomed into the church after having a baby. Although one might wish to avoid the concern over a women's ‘impurity’ after childbirth, the significance of marking women's postpartum experience seems evident. As Natalie Knödel writes: ‘From a feminist point of view I want to argue for a new liturgical appreciation of the female experience of giving birth and motherhood. Within Christian feminist writings there are a number of examples of feminist rituals for the birth of a child, but I find most of them unsatisfying because they often lack confessional identity as prayers of a church which calls itself Christian. I maintain that the latter is necessary as the churching rites are prayers of and for the whole congregation . . . . [H]istorical evidence shows that the churching can in fact be understood as an example of women making liturgical space for themselves and their own experiences’. ‘Reconsidering an Obsolete Rite: The Churching of Women and Feminist Liturgical Theology’, Feminist Theology 14, (January 1997) p. 123.

33 Rowan Williams, ‘Incarnation and the Renewal of Community’, p. 236.

34 Sarah, Coakley, ‘The Eschatological Body: Gender, Transformation, and God’, Modern Theology 16/1 (Jan. 2000), p. 70Google Scholar.