Last week Cynthia Garrity-Bond shared a post about Michele Bachmann and the misuse of the word feminism to describe her. Commenter Kate Barker noted that Bachmann does not self-identify as a feminist, a very important point I think. It led me to wonder whether there are any women in politics who self-identify as feminist, and while there may certainly be some or even many, I cannot think of any who do so publicly.
During the Democratic National Convention in 2008, Hillary Clinton spoke of working towards women’s rights around the world, putting 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling, and being a member of the “sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits,” but did not directly identify herself as a feminist. I found Clinton’s membership to this “sisterhood” an interesting method of feminist self-identifying without employing the label.
It seems to me, to call oneself a “feminist” in the world of politics today would be to commit career suicide. This term has joined the likes of “communist” or “socialist” and is utilized to create fear. “Feminism” has become the new “F-word” and to self-identify as such, in politics, in religion, and in other spheres, often leads to marginalization. Continue reading “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuits By Gina Messina-Dysert”
The gospel story of the crippled woman healed by Jesus of her ailment in the Gospel of St. Luke epitomizes for me the values of a Feminist Liberation theological perspective. For women, Feminist Theology as a discipline has enabled us to claim our dignity and rights as women and “stand up straight” as this woman in the gospel does. In the context of a larger church tradition which has not always affirmed women, Jesus models in his ministry both compassion and respect for the wellbeing of women. For eighteen years, this nameless woman, carried “a spirit that had crippled her,” so much that “she was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight,” (13:11). Not only does Jesus heal her of her infirmities, but he also defends her dignity as a “daughter of Abraham.”
On a very intimate level I identify with this nameless woman who approached Jesus humbly seeking healing and liberation from the physical ailments that bound her. In my own life I have also experienced the same sense of bondage that this woman in the gospel is healed of. Like many women, I grew up struggling to affirm the dignity I had as a human being. Even though the church I love and grew up in stated that they value both men and women equally, in practice this was not the case. For me and the un-named woman, the relevance of this gospel in relation to Feminist Theology touches on the core of Jesus’ ministry, which was the liberation of all people from the oppressive structures that burdened them. Continue reading ““She stood up straight and began praising God”: Luke 13: 10-13 By Theresa A. Yugar”
Charlene Spretnak is one of the Founding Mothers of the Women’s Spirituality movement. She is the author of eight books, including most recently Relational Reality. She is a professor in the Women’s Spirituality graduate program in the Philosophy and Religion Department at the California Institute of Integral Studies. For further information about her books, see www.CharleneSpretnak.com.
Field-Dependent or Field-Astute?
While listening to an NPR station a few months ago, I heard a man – apparently a marketing whiz – say, “Teenage girls are a field-dependent market for us.” Hmmmm. There it is again, the long arm of Herman Witkin’s influence decades after his famous experiment in the psychology of visual perception in 1954, which found that male subjects tend strongly to focus on a foreground figure, while female subjects tend strongly to perceive figure and ground as a gestalt, or holistic totality. (These results have been replicated thousands of times since then, including cross-culturally.) However, following the experimental findings themselves, then came the patriarchal spin. Witkin assigned the positive, admirable label “field-independent” to men and the less admirable “field-dependent” to women. He and other psychologists extrapolated from his findings that women’s cognitive style is “conforming,” “child-like,” and “global,” being similar, as Witkin added in 1962, to the [supposedly] undifferentiated thought processes found in “primitive” cultures. He added that women’s “field-dependence” renders us unable to maintain a “sense of separate identity,” unlike “field-independent males,” whose cognitive style was seen as “analytical” and “self-reliant.” In more recent decades female psychologists have suggested that women’s cognitive style might well be re-labeled “field-sensitive.” But is that really sufficient? After all, it carries the connotation of women’s being supposedly “over-sensitive.”
Why does this matter now? Because the ground is shifting fast under the old view of reality as an aggregate of discrete entities (foreground figures, as Witkin would say), which may or may not relate to one another. On the contrary, numerous discoveries in recent years indicate that the entire physical world, including humans, is far more dynamically interrelated – in both structure and functioning – than had been imagined (except by indigenous cultures and Eastern philosophy). Even as someone who’s been tracking the Relational Shift for decades, I was amazed by many of the recent discoveries – as well as the fact that this shift is now decidedly mainstream. Continue reading “Field-Dependent or Field-Astute? By Charlene Spretnak”
The following is a guest post written by Kate Conmy, MA, Membership Coordinator for the Women’s Ordination Conference. Kate celebrates spiritual activism, feminism, and human rights. She currently works as the Membership Coordinator for the Women’s Ordination Conference and lives in Washington, DC. She can be contacted at Kconmy@womensordination.org.
In my last semester as a Religion student at Mount Holyoke College I sat in my Feminist Theology seminar with only one question for our guest speaker: “Why are you still a Catholic?” A question I rarely dared to ask myself as I spent most of my studies concentrating on Buddhism, traveling abroad to Dharamsala, India, interning with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in Berkeley, even learning Tibetan; by most observable assessments I had swapped the pew I grew up in for a zafu. But Mary Hunt reminded me in such a simple and smart way that Catholicism is about community building and justice seeking. She said: “This is what a Catholic looks like. We have a responsibility to speak this language.”
In that moment I realized I had been resisting something that has always belonged to me. Raised in a Jesuit-educated Catholic family in Upstate, New York I felt less confirmed within the church, and more convinced that we were celebrating a god that was too small. One of the great mysteries for me growing up in a church-going family was the personal and religious reconciliation the Catholics I knew negotiated, sometimes weekly to make sense of their faith. The dissonance between what was practiced during Mass, and what Catholicism meant at the dinner table seemed an exhausting spiritual dance of ambivalence. It wasn’t until I began to identify as a feminist theologian that my spiritual worlds converged in a moment of satori: ambivalence is a virtue! The sisters and daughters of Mary Daly gave me permission to re-claim my Catholicism with all of my questions as an extraordinary action of faith. Ambivalence means courageously engaging the sacred to foster critique, conversation and innovation in the pursuit of knowing God. Just as Carter Heyward writes, “To love God is to un-do evil,” I so strongly believe that God must manifest as an expression of creative justice whereby inclusivity, “right-relation,” and the elimination of discrimination are central on the path toward a higher liberation. I graduated feeling empowered by women, activists, and radicals who claimed their faith and the responsibility to speak a language beyond the binary in order to celebrate the wisdom of all human and divine goodness. Continue reading “This is What a Catholic Looks Like By Kate Conmy”
I love art. I especially love certain women’s art – women such as Frida Kahlo, Cathy Ashworth, Sudie Rakusin, and Alma Lopez. To me, their art is a reflection of women’s strength, creativity, and beauty. Frida Kahlo, for example, expressed so many aspects of herself and her experience through her art. In it one can glimpse her passionate love for Diego Rivera, her continuous physical pain, her search for meaning, and the unending hopefulness she maintained throughout it all. Frida Kahlo’s art, like her person, was vibrant and full of life, colorful and yet broken. She expressed the wide spectrum of her experience not in words only but in color and images, texture, paint and print. As she put it, “I paint my own reality” – her own reality is what she knew and it is what she painted.
I rely on art to do what academics often cannot do well – what I cannot do well – which is to communicate the truths that rattle our being down to its deep core in ways that connect with others. There have been times in my academic life when I have encountered new insights that changed my life forever. Moments of being shaken and awakened at my very core by a truth that until then had eluded me. But such moments can be hard to share with others because they can be hard to translate to words, even if such moments have come to me by words. Learning about feminist theology and being shaken by the truths it spoke to me is one such encounter – and it was indeed an academic one that is often hard for me to put into words and explain to others. On the other hand, encountering Alma Lopez’s artwork was also a core rattling moment, but one which I can more easily share.
“Our Lady” by Alma Lopez (1999)
Alma Lopez’s Our Lady is a digital art piece in which Our Lady of Guadalupe is depicted (embodied, really) in a more obviously female form than is traditionally expected. For this, every time her piece is on exhibit, Lopez receives a barrage of protest and harassment – as does the sponsoring institution. Accusations of obscenity, profanity, and blasphemy come her way. But, why?
When I see Lopez’s Our Lady, I do not see blasphemy or obscenity, I see a celebration of the female and the sacred. I see the beauty of God’s queer incarnation – and I remember – I remember that the word became flesh and made her home among us. From the womb of a woman’s body, her life-giving body, the divine took human shape. Boundaries of sacred and profane forever blurred.
(cross posted at the Mormon feminist blog, The Exponent)
In a couple of different conversations I’ve had with her, Mormon feminist Lorie Winder Stromberg has proposed that many Mormons commonly perceive two types of feminists within the Church.
The first are the good Mormon feminists. These are feminists, often professional women, who may question gender roles and women’s lack of visibility in texts and leadership, but are on the whole seen as faithful and dedicated to the Church.
The second are the bad Mormon feminists. These are the feminists that are regarded as dangerous, apostate, and disloyal to the Church.
Recently CNN ran a feature article on GOP presidential runner Michele Bachmann, an extreme conservative congresswoman from Minnesota, whose political ideologies are shaped and endorsed by the Tea Party [http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/27/michele-bachmann-evangelical-feminist/.] The article raised the question if Bachmann, like Hilary Clinton, could be considered a feminist icon, with the distinction of Bachmann as an “evangelical feminist.” While the article gives a brief history of evangelical feminism, starting with the appointment of Christian conservative Elizabeth Dole during the reign of Ronald Reagan, a huge assumption is made by not clarifying what, exactly, is a feminist and what makes one a feminist? This sin of omission thus renders the term “evangelical feminist” as a binary coupling that locates feminism to a 1970’s reformist notion of women’s equality with men, but men in their shared social status. While Bachmann may object to being identified as a feminist, I find it interesting that the writer for CNN has no difficulty (or sense of clarity) with the consideration of her as a feminist. What, I wonder, in Bachmann’s political trajectory is considered “feminist”?
In Feminism is for Everybody, author bell hooks takes to task what she identifies as “lifestyle-based feminism” which hooks argues, “suggest[s] any woman could be a feminist no matter what her political beliefs.” Enter Michele Bachmann and her beloved Tea Party. Admittedly the Tea Party is all over the map in their ideology, yet a few constants can be teased out. For example, they overwhelmingly disapprove of President Obama’s policy of engaging with Muslim countries. They support Arizona’s immigration laws, feel gay and lesbian couples should not be able to marry, global warming is simply made-up, the repeal of the Health Care legislation, repeal of minimum wage, and reduction or elimination of reproductive rights for women and men. All of which begs the question, can an individual who invest in a political ideology of extreme nationalism while further excluding those on the margins through racist immigration laws, homophobic fears, classist response to the poor and sick while promoting a misdirected Biblical position of dominance of the earth and its limited resources be consider a feminist?
Recall in the last post Rosemary Radford Ruether’s understanding of feminism as “a critique of patriarchy as a system that distorts the humanity of both women and men.” One form of distortion arises when patriarchy co-opts feminism as power gained through the exploitation and oppression of others. In what hooks identifies as “power feminism” of the 90’s, wealthy white heterosexual women became the icons of feminist success by appropriating feminist jargon while sustaining their commitment to Western imperialism and transnational capitalism. Which goes back to my initial point, we must clarify what we mean when we use the word feminist or feminism. Is it a chameleon-like identity or a political movement that seeks to end sexism, exploitation and oppression of women and men? Continue reading “Feminism in Disguise By Cynthia Garrity-Bond”
What is Feminism and why should we do it? Is it still relevant? Is it relevant cross culturally? Feminism basically means the affirmation of the full humanity of women. This means that all the ways women have been defined as inferior, secondary and dependent on men since the rise of Patriarchy roughly six-to ten thousand years ago are rejected. It means that women are affirmed as fully human, not partly human or complementary to the male, but with all human attributes and capacities, in relationships of both autonomy and mutually with other humans, male and female, as well as the ecosystem.
Feminism is relevant cross culturally because all known cultures presently existing have been shaped in one way or another by patriarchy, although in different ways. Thus feminism must take a vast plurality of cultural contexts and forms. What it means will be different for working class African-American women than for middle class white women; different for Jewish or for Muslim women than for Christian women. These differences do not negate one another, unless some feminists make the mistake of thinking that their feminist context is normative. Rather this diversity is precisely the wonderful richness of feminism, its capacity and necessity of being articulated in many contexts and cultural locations.
Feminism has accomplished a lot in the last hundred years since it began to reform law, culture and social relations in the late nineteenth century, but it has still only barely begun. Patriarchy is very deeply entrenched and has endless ways of reasserting its patterns of male domination, covertly and overtly. In some areas it asserts itself aggressively and violently, as in Afghanistan when women are forced to wear all-encompassing burkas, acid thrown in their face when they have uncovered heads and schools for girls are burned. In other areas such as the West women are seduced by dress and appearance to play the roles of bodily mirroring of male power. Religious is evoked to shame and enforce patriarchy; but psychiatry and biological science can also been used to claim unquestionable authorization for women’s dependency. Continue reading “What is Feminism and Why Should We Do it? By Rosemary Radford Ruether”
As a senior official for Pope John Paul II, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger envisioned a leaner, meaner church, with conservative doctrine and compliant faithful. Now that he is Pope Benedict XVI, his dream is coming true. Other senior churchmen, apparently unaware of the scandal that pedophilia and episcopal cover-ups have wrought, go blithely about their business of disciplining priests, nuns, and theologians. What used to be a large tent of a church is now a tepee—soon to be a pup tent—if these gentlemen have their way. Catholics wonder where it will end.
Last week Cynthia Garrity-Bond shared a post about Michele Bachmann and the misuse of the word feminism to describe her. Commenter Kate Barker noted that Bachmann does not self-identify as a feminist, a very important point I think. It led me to wonder whether there are any women in politics who self-identify as feminist, and while there may certainly be some or even many, I cannot think of any who do so publicly.
Feminism and Religion 