rshapiro@bbn.com (Richard Shapiro) (06/30/89)
In article <12326@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> mls@mhuxu.ATT.COM (michael.l.siemon) writes: >In article <42102@bbn.COM>, rshapiro@bbn.com (Richard Shapiro) writes: >> Replacing the patriarchal notions of, for instance, Christianity, by >> matriarchal ones does not seem to me to be a step in the direction of >> feminism... A feminized Christianity or Judaism is not feminist. >This sounds plausible, and there is a definite point you've made, but >neither is a neutered Christianity going to be feminist. It seems to >me that one wants a PLAY of gender attributes, possibly a dramatic and >unstable one. The ellipsis of the quote above expands as follows: Just as we have to give up some comforting certainties about our own sexual/gender identities (all of us, male and female) it may be that we have to give up on religions which attempt, intentionally or not, to reinscribe those certainties and thus undo a lot of hard, but essential, work. A "neutered" Christianity is not at all what I had in mind, as the omitted portion of the quote makes clear. The point I was making was that categories like "feminine" and "masculine" should be highly suspect whenever they're offered as transcendentals; and that so-called "feminist spirituality", at least as it was described by one contributor, offers precisely this, and is potentially or actually anti-feminist for exactly this reason. My own feeling is that ANY personalized deity will be just as gendered as we humans are (gender being a large part of what makes a god "personal"), and that the very notion of an eternal, gendered being is profoundly opposed to the crucial concept of contingent, historical, socially specific gender which feminists have developed. Giving a gender to a god, implicitly or explicitly, is a way to eternalize and naturalize "feminine" and "masculine", which should be the last thing any feminist would want.