Carol P. Chist – Feminism and Religion

All female Bay Area film crew. Photo credit: William Buzbuzian

An email with a video titled “Hal’s Backyard Hustle” and a short introduction came into our inbox recently. The video is meant as comedy but with the serious intent of inspiring younger adults to vote. It made us (the behind-the-scenes FAR co-weavers) chuckle a couple of times. We’re delighted that people are creatively finding ways to encourage voting and, with that, protect our rights.

As the imitable Carol P. Christ started writing and teaching us so many years ago, the underlying purpose of patriarchy is to control women’s bodies and fertility.

We are seeing this taken to the extremes in our own country here in the U.S. Women who can’t access the most basic standards of care are left traumatized and some are dying. Police forces have been pressed into the duty of policing women’s bodies. Legislatures are writing laws for maximum cruelty. Exceptions (for rape, incest, blah, blah, blah) are nothing more than gaslighting projects to make the law makers seem more compassionate because in practice they are meaningless. Just how close to death does a women need to be before she can be treated? Does the rapist have to be convicted before a pregnant rape-survivor can access care? Because, really, according to patriarchy, you can’t trust women. Nor doctors.

As the results from America’s Super Tuesday election primaries came in, I found myself feeling disoriented. I could not focus on any task and found myself obsessively reading the news and checking my Facebook timeline. Many of my friends who had supported Elizabeth Warren were embracing Biden as the next best hope to defeat Donald Trump. Sometime on Thursday, I came across Starhawk’s Facebook post on the grief and disappointment so many of us were feeling following the latest primary results.

In the post, Starhawk spoke of her disappointment that Bernie and Elizabeth did not do better and that Biden did so well. She spoke first of her grief that Elizabeth’s campaign never took hold. No doubt she, like me and many of you, had heard feminist friends express the fear that a woman could not win, saying that as much as they wanted to vote for her, they probably would not. Starhawk said that we simply do not have enough archetypes of female power to enable people to imagine a woman as President. Continue reading “Grief, Disappointment, and the Big Comforting White Guy Who Can Make It All Right by Carol P. Christ”