Feminism – Page 101 – Feminism and Religion

Does Masculine Have to Be the Opposite of Feminine? by Carol P. Christ

“Furthermore, like Obama, [de Blasio] projects a masculinity that is empathic and introspective — anathema to the patriarchal attitudes that dominate hierarchal institutions like the police.”

I wish the analysis that accompanies this quote had been mine, but maybe I should be glad that it comes from an insightful young man who goes by the name liamcdg. He argues that the real beef the New York police have with Bill de Blasio is his challenge to their definition of masculinity as dominance, or shall we say white male dominance.

As noted by liamcdg, in the NYPD version of reality, parents should teach children to comply “to comply with New York City police officers even if they think it’s unjust.” In terms of competing definitions of masculinity, the NYPD version is that men in power should be respected simply in virtue of their position, even if they are acting or appearing to act unjustly. In other words we should respect the powerful because they are powerful.

To be empathetic is to be able to put yourself in another person’s place, and in its literal meaning, to feel the feelings of another. In the recent public conversations about race and the police, both Obama and de Blasio have invited white Americans to put themselves in the place of a black man stopped by the police for little or no reason and to ask themselves how they would feel in that situation.

In so doing, liamcdg asserts, Obama and de Blasio were not only trying to explain the feelings of those on the other side of the racial divide, but they were also redefining masculinity. We all know that according to traditional stereotypes, the realm of feeling is the realm of women. And of course we also know that real men don’t cry. Yet what is happening to black men is enough to make anyone who feels their feelings want to cry.

The conflicts between de Blasio and the police and between Obama and a large segment of the older white male voting public may have as much to do with the challenge to white male privilege as it has to do with any particular event or issue. White male privilege involves a complex interconnection of race and sex. It is about the power that comes or is expected to come to one simply by virtue of being born into a white male body.

In recent weeks I have been asking myself why the police are so upset. After all there is room for improvement in any profession. Over the past few years I have also struggled to understand why some people object so strongly to the idea that women have a right to control their own bodies, to choose birth control or abortion. I am coming to the conclusion that the vehemence of the protest is rooted in the perception that the patriarchal edifice is crumbling.

Forty years ago, inspired by the feminist movement, men began to speak about redefining masculinity. This was easier said than done. It is so easy to accuse men who criticize male power as domination of being “sissies,” “girls,” or “gay.” Even men who might want to discuss the subject may be afraid of being labeled.

I say the fact that the NYPD is turning its back on de Blasio is one measure of how far we have come. I suggest that the NYPD recognizes that a different definition of masculinity and male power is being born right before their eyes. And it is this that they cannot bear to see.

We have been taught that feeling and feeling the feelings of others belongs in the feminine realm. What if it doesn’t? What if in the end male power and female power are much the same? And what if they both begin with empathy?

Perhaps we really have “come a long way baby.”

According to Heide Goettner-Abendroth, whose work I am fond of discussing on FAR, matriarchal societies defined the power of males and the power of females similarly.

What if Freud got it wrong? What if males do not have to differentiate themselves from their mothers by becoming “not like” women and girls? What if masculinity and femininity are not polar opposites? What if all any of us has to do is to learn to embody the qualities of those who nurture us?

We are beginning to glimpse a different world. Any thoughts on how to bring the NYPD and other older white males into a new world along with us?

Carol leads the life-transforming Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete (facebook and twitter) spring and fall–early bird discount available now on the 2015 tours. Carol can be heard in interviews on Voices of the Sacred Feminine, Goddess Alive Radio, and Voices of Women. Her books include She Who Changes and Rebirth of the Goddess and with Judith Plaskow, the widely-used anthologies Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions and the forthcoming Turning to the World: Goddess and God in Our Time. Photo of Carol by Michael Bakas.

What is the F-word Anyway? by Kile Jones

Social justice. Progressive politics. Improper media depictions. What exactly is the F-word (feminism) about?

I have always understood feminism as a project that casts a very wide net, the goals and values of which can keep quite a few people dry under the shade of its umbrella. But more and more, I see a narrowing of who can count as a feminist. There are a few reasons for this constriction. First, the more the F-word becomes a pejorative in contemporary society, the greater the need is to circle the bandwagons and set up camp. Second, when a particular group has elevated levels of in-fighting occurring, it makes sense to start psychologically splitting people into “feminist” and “not feminist.” Or, on a spectrum, “strong feminist” vs. “weak feminist.” Third, there is a pragmatic need for groups to find an optimal tension with society. When social groups are too counter-cultural or revolutionary, they get branded extremist and fanatical, but when they are wishy-washy and lukewarm, they become another extension of the status quo and lose their prophetic fire.

As an atheist, I see all of this occurring in non-believing circles as well. And I’m not really sure how to navigate it. There is also no shortage of men in this social group–from Dawkins to Boghossian–who think of feminism in the negative. All of this has to do with what they think the F-word amounts to. Continue reading “What is the F-word Anyway? by Kile Jones”

Great Hera! Wonder Woman and Taking Women’s Power Back from the Mainstream Media by Carolyn Lee Boyd

Carolyns new look When I was a teen in the 1970s, Wonder Woman was everywhere. A feminist cheerfully determined to right the world’s wrongs, especially against women, she boldly sprinted onto the cover of Ms. Magazine’s 1972 inaugural issue. Her tv series spun off toys, t-shirts, action figures, lunch boxes, and more. Now she’s back. Jill Lepore’s new book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman, tells of her bizarre 1940s creation and subsequent history. In 2016, a revamped Wonder Woman will be sword-fighting her way into movie theaters worldwide in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Wonder Woman is just one of many currently popular women warriors or superheras, including the X-Men series’ female super-mutants, the Hunger Games’ lead character, the women warriors in the Avatar tv series, and many more, whose power comes from the ability to fight. Even Snow White became a martial arts expert in 2012’s Snow White and the Huntsmen. Like Wonder Woman’s recent regeneration, however, these characters seem grimmer, and more deadly, violent, and dystopian than the earlier Wonder Woman with her optimistic, colorful comic book style, and an innocence that would now seem naive. Continue reading “Great Hera! Wonder Woman and Taking Women’s Power Back from the Mainstream Media by Carolyn Lee Boyd”

Reading “Women” by Laury Silvers

My friends make my life difficult. They make me see what I could not see before. Kecia Ali, Aisha Geissinger, Karen Ruffle and Kathleen Self taught me how to read for gender in the classical texts I use for my academic work. It’s a way of doing close readings by paying attention to the way gender shows up in the text. Aisha sat with me one afternoon and walked me through my own sources pointing out references to gender in the sources. She showed me how the sources I was reading used gender to express social norms. She kept asking me, “What work is gender doing in the text?”

Don’t laugh you been-reading-gender-forever-and-a-day people! Okay laugh. I was a bit slow to pick up this gender thing at first, but I caught up okay. Now I cannot unsee it. I see it everywhere. For instance, I was heading to the stairs at work after a long day and was brain tired. I saw this sign at the stairs:

I nearly kept walking past the stairs thinking for a second that it meant they were for people that society designates as having “male” bodies only. I actually thought that. Then I started laughing at myself. I took a picture and posted it on social media with a story complaining how my friends have absolutely ruined me! Continue reading “Reading “Women” by Laury Silvers”

Awake! Awake! A Reflection on the Awakening of Conscience and Advent by Elise M. Edwards

‘Tis the season to be…?

For me, this has not been a season to be jolly. I teach at a university, and again, I’m in the midst of the most hectic time of year of grading and exams and wrapping up projects due at the end of the calendar year. There have been moments of joy and rest. But I’ve been more reflective and sorrowful. This year, my heart and mind and soul have been opened up in new ways and I feel more urgency and need for social change. I’ve been experiencing “conscientization” during the time of year many Christians refer to as Advent.

I was introduced to the concept of conscientization in the work of Christian feminist and womanist ethicists like Beverly Wildung Harrison and Stacey Floyd-Thomas. Other feminist and liberationist thinkers had already convinced me of the vital role that critical thinking, consciousness-raising, and action occupy in ethical reflection and social change. In a chapter on “Feminist Liberative Ethics” in a textbook on liberative approaches to ethics, Michelle Tooley explains the meaning of conscientization:

“Activists speak of conscientization as waking up to the injustice in the world—or seeing it for the first time. It is not that the injustice is beginning; it is that you encounter oppression, injustice, violence yourself or you see it in a person or situation. You may have seen the same situation many times before, but for some reason you begin to connect the event with a deeper recognition that the injustice is wrong.”

(p. 185, Ethics: A Liberative Approach, Miguel A. De La Torre, Editor)

I was conscientized the night I heard that a grand jury did not indict Darren Wilson for killing Mike Brown, an unarmed black man. I was horrified to learn that this police officer doesn’t even have to stand trial for his violent and deadly act. Now it wasn’t like before grand jury’s decision I thought that black lives were given equal value in the US justice system. After all, for months I have been researching and preparing a paper called “When the Law does not Secure Justice or Peace” about artistic and religious responses to the dishonoring of black male personhood. I have been mourning the loss of Trayvon Martin and others as I write. But this decision left me sobbing in a hotel room as I watch the events unfold in Ferguson, Missouri. I gained a deeper social awareness about the depths to which the demonization and disregard of the lives of black women, men and children are entrenched in American life and the institutions within it.

I gained deeper self-awareness too. One reason the tragedy of the grand jury’s decision became so palpable to me is that just hours prior, I witnessed former president Jimmy Carter address the American Academy of Religion. He spoke passionately about the proliferation of violence, mistreatment of women, climate change, and other social concerns. To put it plainly, I was floored to see a white man in his 90s who was raised in Georgia and was a Southern Baptist until his 70s state without any qualms that people in power intentionally misinterpret religious texts to support the domination of women and nonwhites because those they do not want to lose their privilege. Yet he also called himself, like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a “prisoner of hope.” He believes that things will change, and draws from his Christian convictions to sustain hope and motivate his work to fight injustice.

I was electrified by his words. I, too, had hope. In the days prior, I had gotten a break from my daily life, connected with friends, and conversed with like minds. I had been thinking about art and love. I had learned strategies for de-centering dominant narratives in the classroom and I was hopeful that I could use them to make a difference in my students’ lives. But mere hours later, while watching the news, the self-awareness I came to is that my hope is more fragile than I wish it to be. Futility consumed my hope.

A few weeks later, I can assert that my faith in God is not shaken, but my hope in humanity’s goodness has as much stability as a house of cards. In my present state of mind, I’m grateful that we are at a point in the church year that provides me with an opportunity to mourn the brokenness of our world. Christmas is approaching, but that doesn’t mean I have to sing merry carols. Advent is a season when Christians reflect on why the world needs God’s miraculous action and what it means to wait for light to emerge in the darkness. In the church calendar, it is a time when Christians re-enact and re-experience the anticipation of Jesus’ coming. Advent songs have a different character than Christmas carols. Many of them have a haunting tone or an eerie, sad, or mysterious sound. The lyrics of these songs place exhortations to “Rejoice!” next to pleas of “O come, o come, Emmanuel!” Emmanuel, also spelled Immanuel, means “God with us.” Christians draw this name from the Hebrew prophecies in Isaiah that are cited in the Gospel of Matthew’s account of Jesus’ birth. Matthew describes Jesus’ birth as the fulfillment of prophecy.

My conscientization allows me to hear these prophecies anew. They are familiar to me, as they are repeated often this time of year in Christian settings, but I hear them in new ways. I hear Isaiah 9:6 quite differently: For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

“The government will be upon his shoulders” likely means that this child will have authority. But as I hear those words this year, I imagine the Prince of Peace in the choke-hold of a law enforcement officer. I think of a little baby who are welcomed into the world with joy but who grows up only to be killed at a young age by threatened authorities and crowds of supporters. This is the story Christians tell about the God who is with us, the God who is also fully human. And this is the story we tell about Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Alesia Thomas, Aiyana Stanley-Jones and far too many others.

This Advent, I’m making a real effort to hold hope and despair together. I don’t want to become hopeless. I don’t want to think that my work in the classroom, in my church, in my community, on this site and in the printed page have no meaning. Hope is what sustains us to work for justice. I want to believe in that transformation of hearts and minds and souls is possible and immanent even when it emerges through sorrow and struggle. Suffering, sorrow, and killing without consequences must not be acceptable. With my new eyes, I see just how terrible they are.

Elise M. Edwards, PhD is a Lecturer in Christian Ethics at Baylor University and a graduate of Claremont Graduate University. She is also a registered architect in the State of Florida. Her interdisciplinary work examines issues of civic engagement and how beliefs and commitments are expressed publicly. As a black feminist, she primarily focuses on cultural expressions by, for, and about women and marginalized communities. Follow her on twitter, google+ or academia.edu.

A Women’s Mosque: An Interfaith Space for Feminist Spirituality by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente

If you thought that all I could do in regards to feminism and religion is challenge Patriarchy and tease around ladies and gentlemen of good temper and better reputation with my corrosive comments, this post may change your mind.

As I said in a previous article, this year I started, with a small group of people, a social project called Imaan, whose goal is centered on inter-faith dialogue and better visibility of the actions and contributions of women in Islam (and religion in general,) plus critical thinking on religion from a feminist and progressive perspective.

As part of the activities of Imaan, we are developing “A Women’s Mosque” project; an initiative that aims to create a meeting place for women and our spirituality. The idea came after a reunion to talk on Islam and inter-faith dialogue with women from different denominations. At one point in the discussion, they asked me about sex segregation in mosques, which led us to a broader reflection on the position of women in the religious space, both material and symbolic, and how uncomfortable we were with that.

We realized that, in a variety of ways, places of worship displace women. Whether they relegate us to separate rooms, or refuse to allow us to speak, limiting our participation to “strictly female” issues such as maternity, caregiving, the role of wife and – of course- clothing, these prohibitions are always from a patriarchal “canonical” perspective.

So we decided to join together to create our own space. Continue reading “A Women’s Mosque: An Interfaith Space for Feminist Spirituality by Vanessa Rivera de la Fuente”

Reclaiming the Feminist Beginnings of America’s Thanksgiving by Michele Stopera Freyhauf

For those who are unaware of my research focus and methodology, I try to use history to reconstruct or reclaim the feminine voice through more of an exegetical lens rather than an eisegetical or ideological lens. When it comes to Thanksgiving, I have yet another opportunity to restore credit to or at least bring visibility back to a woman who fought for Thanksgiving to be recognized as a national holiday on the last Thursday of November. Her works, though plentiful and sometimes known only by title, are largely forgotten to history; Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (1788-1879) is responsible for Thanksgiving becoming a national holiday in the United States.

Certainly, I do not have to go into the disparity that befell women during the 1800’s when it came to education and overall fundamental rights – that is a history with which we are all well familiar. Hale was educated through her brother, Horatio Gates Buell, who shared his education while attending Dartmouth College and “seemed very unwilling that [Hale] should be deprived of all his collegiate advantages,” and through her husband, David Hale, a lawyer who helped her cultivate her writing skills in the evenings. They even established a small literary club with their friends that allowed her to write. Hale was left a widow at a very young age with five children, the oldest age 7. Hale, like so many women during that time period, had to find a way to support herself and her family.

After authoring a book of poems with her sister-in-law, The Genius of Oblivion and Other Original Poems, Hale, in 1827, published her first novel called Northwood – a book published the same year as Uncle Tom’s Cabin that also challenged slavery. From fame gained through this novel, Hale obtained a job as an editor of a women’s magazine, Ladies Book (later Godey’s Ladies Book then American Ladies Magazine), where she worked for about 40 years. She wrote about half of the material contained in the magazines, as a means of helping to educated women. Hale helped to discover and promote such authors as Edger Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, Catherine Sedgwick, Lucretia Mott, Emma Willard, Susan B. Anthony, Henry David Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

She is credited for helping to establish Vassar College for women and wrote the familiar child’s poem “Mary had a Little Lamb” in 1830 (Poems for Our Children, republished in Juvenile Miscellany), Traits of American Life, which contained the story of “The Thanksgiving of the Heart:”

Continue reading “Reclaiming the Feminist Beginnings of America’s Thanksgiving by Michele Stopera Freyhauf”

Is it a Feminist Act to Stay in a Patriarchal Tradition? by Gina Messina-Dysert

Should women (or men) maintain a religious identity within a patriarchal tradition? Is it a feminist act to stay? Or is it only a feminist act to leave? These are questions that regularly surface in conversations related to religion and are often the center of dialogue here on Feminism and Religion.

I have often thought that change can only take place from within. Certainly we can see the progress made by foresisters who have struggled within their traditions for change; Rosemary Radford Ruether, Mary Hunt, Amina Wadud, Judith Plaskow, and the list goes on. These women have greatly impacted our understanding of misogynistic practices within their respective traditions and have educated us on how religions need to live out their teachings. Continue reading “Is it a Feminist Act to Stay in a Patriarchal Tradition? by Gina Messina-Dysert”

Are We Living in a Rape Culture? by Carol P. Christ

rape in the military rape in war rape in sports rape in the university rape in fraternities rape at parties rape on the way home rape in the car rape on the street rape in the park rape in the home rape on the couch rape on the bed rape on the floor rape in a closed room rape in the dark rape in the light rape in marriage rape on the job rape in the bible rape on tv rape in great works of art rape by a friend rape by a neighbor rape by a friend of the family rape by a member of the family rape by men with power rape by men without power rape by someone you know rape by someone you do not know rape as power rape as domination rape as humiliation rape as violation

silence Continue reading “Are We Living in a Rape Culture? by Carol P. Christ”

Responding to Human Suffering by Elise M. Edwards

In the past few weeks, there have been renewed debates throughout the US about death with dignity laws and the role of government is providing or securing access to health care. The tragic story of Brittany Maynard and the incessant election-year politicking about the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) have made issues about human suffering more visible and volatile than usual. These are topics I deal with in two courses I am teaching this semester–one about Christian ethics and the other about bioethics.

I truly admire those who work in the presence of suffering daily by caring for others. It’s difficult to even talk about suffering in the classroom day after day. My intention behind doing so is for my students to resist simplistic responses by either valorizing human pain and suffering or retreating to escapism. I caution them about using religion to legitimize suffering when it accompanies from evil, yet encourage them to see the meaning in suffering as well. We try to maintain the fine line of affirming the experiences of those who claim to gain strength or some other good from their pain without crossing into discourse that names the pain itself as something good. We debate whether there can be any way of discussing suffering as redemptive. We discuss disparities in medical treatment and health care along economic, racial, gendered, cultural, and international divides and what the responses of clergy, medical providers, and everyday people to remedy them.

Through these heavy debates, I’ve gained more clarity about the ways that suffering is often a result of human injustice and I’m deeply saddened by it. Continue reading “Responding to Human Suffering by Elise M. Edwards”