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DOI: 10.1177/20503032134761122013 1: 43Critical Research on Religion

Elisabeth Schssler FiorenzaCritical feminist studies in religion

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Article

Critical feminist studies

in religion

Elisabeth Schussler FiorenzaHarvard University, USA

Abstract

Critical feminist studies in religion seek to articulate a theoretical analytics not in terms of genderand feminine identity but in socio-political terms. They understand wo/men as socio-politicalsubject-citizens who are producing cultural knowledges and religious discourses in situations ofdomination and alienation.

Keywords

critical, feminist studies, religion

A range of different feminist socio-political directions and theoretical frameworks exists.

Critical feminist studies in religion, as I have sought to develop them,1 seek to articulate their

theoretical analytics not in terms of gender and feminine identity but in socio-political terms.

They understand wo/men2 as socio-political subject-citizens who are producing cultural

knowledges and religious discourses in situations of domination and alienation.

Feminist theory has proposed two different social analytics for exploring wo/mens pos-

ition in society and religion: one is the analytics of gender; the other is the analytics of

intersectionality3 of oppressions, which I have spelled out as an analytics of kyriarchy/

kyriocentrism.4 This critical analytics must be judged in terms of its heuristic power to

investigate and deconstruct relations of domination as well as to articulate alternative reli-

gious visions for personal and societal change and transformation. Such critical feminist

studies in religion and the*logy5 have as a dialogue partner critical theory, not of the French6

variety but of the Frankfurt school.7

I understandcriticaltheory in terms of the Frankfurt Schools (Bohman, 2005) argument

that a theory that is critical must meet three criteria at one and the same time:

(I) It has to be explanatory; that is, it must develop a theory of society that explains

what is wrong. According to Max Horkheimer, (1982: 244) a theory that is critical

Corresponding author:Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Harvard University, 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.

Email: [email protected]

1(1) 4350

! The Author(s) 2013

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aims to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them. I have

developed such a theory by explicating the structures of domination not just in terms

of kyriarchal gender but also in terms of kyriarchal intersectionality.

(II) Such a critical theory must secondly be practical, i.e. it must identify the agents that

seek to bring about change. With Habermas, I see the new social movements(Edwards, 2004) in general and the global womens movements in particular as such

agents of change. Critical feminist studies in religion not only seek to understand and

explain religion but also to change its kyriarchal formations.

(III) Finally, a critical theory must be normative, i.e. it must clearly articulate practical

goals, ethical norms, and theoretical visions for a different future free from domin-

ation. Critical feminist intersectional studies in religion articulate such a normative

theory and practice whereas gender hides its theoretical normativity in and through its

naturalizing discourses. Hence, critical feminist studies in religion must be careful not

to take over critical theorys gender analysis.

In her very significant study of critical theory, Marsha Aileen Hewitt has amply documented

the sexist moments within Critical Theory that surface in its idealization and reification of

women (Hewitt, 1995: 4). Despite this result, she argues that critical theory is significant for

articulating a critical feminist theory of religion, although its credibility is questionable in

feminist terms. The*logical discourses, in her view, are, however, so intertwined and

embedded in the status quo (Hewitt, 1995: XI) that they can no longer formulate emanci-

patory feminist visions but must be left behind.

I would argue to the contrary, that critical feminist studies which seek to address the ques-

tions and oppression of wo/men in religion, that is of wo/men who are committed members

of religious communities, must be religiousthe*logicalif they should be able to mobilize

wo/mens internalized religious convictions for doing the critical work of deconstructing reli-

gious-oppressive identity formations. Critical feminist studies in religion have both a critical

deconstructive task of denaturalizing hegemonic religious kyriarchal relations and a recon-

structive the*logical task of envisioning a different world, society, and religious community in

which wo/men can exercise their birthright of fully entitled and responsible citizenship.

One has not only to theorize kyriarchy as an analytic heuristic concept that can articulate

the multiplicative intersectionality of the discourses and structures of domination but also to

envision a positive alternative, which I have called the ekklesia of wo/men, i.e. the con-

gressthe coming togetherof wo/men as an alternative socio-religious theoretical and

practical vision. Such a feminist religious world-making which seeks to articulate a radical

democratic alternative space to kyriarchal relations of domination has been, and is again and

again realized in and through emancipatory movements in religion.

Insofar as the radical democratic vision of the congress of wo/men annunciating the

equal dignity and power of the many (Hannah Arendt) has been realized historically and

practically only within and despite of kyriarchal democracy, it is necessary to qualify the

democratic Greek term ekklesia, the assembly of full citizens, with wo/men. Such an

oxymoronic marker is necessary as long as wo/men are not full decision-making citizens

in academy, society, and religion. In short, critical feminist studies in religion, I argue, have

to work with a radical democratic, feminist political rather than just an anthropological or

cultural theory of society and religion.

A critical theory of religion must be aware of its rhetoricality and articulate its social

location, epistemic interests, and practical functions for changing relations of domination.

44 Critical Research on Religion 1(1)



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In order to sustain such a critical theory of religion, I submit, feminist studies in religion

must remain religious or the*logical in the broadest sense of the word. Feminist inquiry

needs to locate itselfwithinreligion rather than just deconstruct and objectify religion as the

other, making it an object of the scholarly, allegedly value-neutral gaze.

A radical criticism of religion, i.e. one going to the roots of the tradition, has to comefrom within a particular religion if such a radical critique should not lead simply to the

rejection of wo/mens religiosity as false consciousness or to provoke an apologetics of the

kyriarchal status quo rather than engendering the transformation of kyriarchal societies and

religions. In short, I agree with Hewitt that critical feminist and liberationist studies in

religion need a critical theory of religion that is explanatory, practical, normative, and

self-reflexive. However, they need not only break through the established boundaries of

the*logy (Hewitt, 1995: 3) but also through those of the study of religion.

A critical feminist analytic needs to conceptualize the study of religion as a site of struggle

over meaning, ethics, and the*logy. Insofar as such a critical approach exposes and indicts

structures of subordination, exploitation, and oppression in society and religion, it under-

mines the structures of othering, silencing, and exclusion inscribed in religion so that the

ethos of religious studies is transformed. Critical feminist scholarship in religion, I argue,

may neither subscribe to a scientist disciplinary ethos nor advocate parochial the*logical

interests but must critically study and evaluate religion and the*ology as public discursive

sites of struggle over meaning, visions, and values with respect to all wo/mens wellbeing.

Consequently, such a critical approach to the study of religion and the*logy has to

re-conceptualize the discourses of the discipline in terms of a critical rhetoric8 rather than

in terms of positivist science.

Religious and the*logical studies, I argue, need to develop an ethos of inquiry that is

able to critically display and reflect on the rhetoricality of all knowledge, be it scientific

or otherwise. Because scholarly discourse always works with probabilities rather than

certainties and speaks from a particular social location to an interested audience, it is best

understood in rhetorical terms. In order to bring about change in the ethos and ethics of

the discipline the academic study of religion and the*logy needs to develop a rhetoric

of inquiry that is not only able to critically and systematically reflect on the discursive

practices of religious communities, but also to foster communication and respect between

them.

Critical feminist studies have sought to contextualize the academic discourses on religion

historically and politically as well as to bring to the fore their gendered, class, national, and

racialized character. In particular, feminist scholars have challenged the scientist object-

ivist and value-free ethos of religious studies as serving colonial interests.

First: Critical feminist scholarship has shown that, in modernity, religion has been fem-

inized. Religion has been conceptualized as belonging to the private feminine, emotional,

esthetic sphere over and against which the public rational, culturally authoritative masculine

sphere of progress, rationality, subjectivity, and modernity has been defined.

Since the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America, institutionalized religions have

been relegated to the private sphere of individualistic piety, charitable work, and the culti-

vation of home and family. The culture of silencing and exclusion that has marginalized all

the others of elite Western Man has also configured the public location and social position

of religious studies. Just as woman in modernity, so also has religion been relegated to the

private sphere and has been made an affair of the heart. Consequently, engaging religion

has become a private matter restricted to individual spiritual edification and ecclesiastical

Schussler Fiorenza 45



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use, because the*logy is not considered to be a science and reason is defined in contradis-

tinction to religion.

In modernity the concept of religion was invented to operate within the limits of reason

alone. It was feminized insofar as European Christianity was dislodged from its hegemonic

role, restricted to the private sphere and turned into a civilizing project of colonialism.

9

Religion, just as wo/men and primitive peoples, belonged to the childhood of man-

kind, which in modernity has progressed to masculine adulthood. In the process of religious

privatization and cultural feminization, the clergy and the*logy lost their privileged intel-

lectual status and came to be treated like wo/men in polite society. This feminization of

religion has led both to the emasculation of the*logy and clergy in society and to the

reassertion of their masculine roles in the*logy, church, and the home.

The discourse on the Eternal Feminine or the Cult of True Womanhood, which I have

dubbed the discourse on the White Lady, was developed in tandem with Western colon-

ization and romanticism that celebrated Christian white elite European women/ladies as

paradigms of civilized and cultured womanhood. This ideology functioned to legitimate

both the exclusion of elite wo/men from positions of power in society and church and at

the same time to make them colonial representatives who mediated European culture, reli-

gion, and civilization to the so-called savages.

This identity-politics of the Eternal Feminine and the cult of the White Lady is a

projection of elite, Western, educated gentlemen and clerics who stress the complementary

nature of wo/men to that of men in order to maintain a special kyriarchal status for upper

class white wo/men. This construct does not have the liberation of every wo/man as its goal

but seeks to release the repressed feminine in order to make men whole.

Associated with this cult of the White Lady was and is a spirituality of self-alienation,

submission, service, self-abnegation, dependence, manipulating power, backbiting, power-

lessness, beauty and body regimen, duplicity and helplessnessfeminine behaviors that

are inculcated in and through cultural socialization, spiritual direction, and ascetic discip-

lines such as dieting and cosmetic surgery. In and through traditional spirituality, wo/men

internalize that they are not made in the Divine image because G*d is not She but He, Lord/

Slave-Master/Father/Male. They are told that if they fulfill their religious and cultural call-

ing to supplement and complement the Divine Masculine Other, they will fulfill their Divine

feminine calling, albeit in a subordinate mode. In both cases cultural and religious structures

of self-alienation and domination are kept in place in and through spirituality and the

the*logical articulation of the Divine as Lord in masculinist and imperialist terms.

Second: Critical postcolonial feminist studies, moreover, have argued that the study of

religion has its roots not only in the European Enlightenment university but also in the

history of Western colonialism. Like the White Lady, Christianity functioned to both

spread Western culture and to ameliorate the horrors of imperialism. Its task was to civil-

ize the savages, who were understood as untamed nature. The Western discourses on

femininity and female nature have their socio-political contexts in this colonial exercise of

power. Both anthropology and comparative religious studies have their origin in such a

colonial context (Chidester, 2000: 430432).

Because gender and religion/the*logy are not separate discrete discourses but inform and

construct each other, the modern construction of religion and the feminine has also shaped

colonial discourses on gender relations; colonial discourses constructed colonial man and

his culture as effeminate, emotional, superstitious and primitive. Cultural decolonization

discourses have rejected Western feminism and called, for example, on the black man to




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reclaim his manhood. Whether they are politically conservative or emancipatory, many

nationalist and fundamentalist movements, therefore, use religion and woman both as

identity- and as boundary-markers.

As Nira Yuval-Davis (1997: 67) has pointed out, female figurations such as mother

India, lady liberty, or mother church symbolize in many cultures and religions theidentity of the community or collectivity. Fundamentalist movements are political move-

ments who use cultural and religious traditions as symbolic border guards. Gender symbols,

control of wo/men, and the wellbeing of the patriarchal family, appeals to religious laws,

specific cultural codes of dress and behaviorall these become central to the maintenance of

traditional values and the construction of national identity. Such rhetorical identity con-

structions can be articulated both in the name of emancipation and in the interest of the

hegemonic order and the control of wo/men.

Third: Although, like wo/men, religion has no public presence in the Enlightenment uni-

versity, both religion and wo/men are crucial in maintaining public interest in the antithetical

other and in shaping cultural and communal self-identity. Whereas postcolonial scholars

have underscored the colonialist conceptualization of religion and the imperialist functions

of the positivist study of religion, feminist religious and the*logical studies continue to

remain critical of the positivist articulations of the academic study of religion as hard

science that is gendered in masculinist terms. As Randi Warne has observed:

Unacknowledged in this version of scientific objectivity is the male gender- embeddedness of the

vast majority of practitioners and their thoroughgoing implication in the prescriptive gender

ideology of androcentrism in its specific nineteenth and twentieth century cultural form of

separate spheres.10

The political context and rhetorical situation in which feminist as well as malestream

research takes place today is constituted by the resurgence of the religious Right around

the world claiming the power to name and to define the true nature of religion.11 The

interconnection between religious antidemocratic arguments and the debate with regard to

wo/mens proper place and role is not accidental or just of intra-religious significance.12

If one asks why critical feminist, postcolonial, or LGBT scholarship not taken seriously

but often evokes violent public reactions, one is justified in suggesting that the reason is the

refusal of such emancipatory scholarship to shroud its work in the cloak of disinterestedness.

William Arnal (1997: 317) has pointed out that the reactions to feminist or postcolonial

scholarship reveal what is ultimately at stake in thedesirefor objectivity: a desire to view the

object of ones inquiry through the lens of things-as-they-are. The distinction between a fact

and a value is itself not based on fact, but on a dichotomy between things as they are and

things as one wishes them to be; the removal of so-called value from scholarship is really the

removal of hopesomething that is not central or necessary to the daily ideological work of

the privileged.

If academic scholarship in religion is to overcome the tendency of the general public to

feminize religious discourses as privatized religious practices, it needs to investigate the

structural and ideological constraints that in modernity have prohibited not only wo/men

but also religion from effectively speaking in public.

Fourth: Critical feminist and postcolonial theories have problematized and unmasked the

discourses of the science of religion as ideological operations that ontologize, essentialize,

reify, authorize, valorize, naturalize, normalize, or pathologize relations of domination such

as gender, race, or class. The notion of sui generis religion has been studied and critically




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evaluated by Russell T. McCutcheon. He argues that such a conceptualization has been used

not only to constitute and institutionalize the field of religious studies but also to define its

research object as an apolitical, fetishized, and sacrosanct area of study (McCutcheon, 1997:

26)excluding or peripheralizing both the subject of inquiry and the social and political

contents in defining what really counts as religious or constitutes the uniquely religious.Such malestream discourses on religion represent the homo religiosus or the biblical

hero as a collective subject, which is undifferentiated by race, gender, class, ethnicity, or

age. This view from above is underscored not only through the sui generis nature of

religion but also through the emphasis given to religious texts and the privileging of scholarly

elites. Wo/men who have been excluded from the articulation, proclamation, and interpret-

ation of religious classics such as the Bible or the Koran were thereby excluded from the

higher levels of religious authority.

Rather than essentializing and masculinizing the notion of religion, religion and

the*logy must be redefined in critical liberationist feminist terms. In Rosalind Shaws

(2000: 73) words: By re-conceptualizing power as integral toas opposed to a detachable

dimension ofreligion, feminist religious studies has the potential to generate conceptual

change and renewal.

In sum, critical feminist studies in religion have greatly contributed to a different self-

understanding of religion and the discipline of religious or the*logical studies by insisting

that both academic feminist and religious/the*logical studies must remain accountable to

social movements for change. An explicit connection between feminist critiques and social

change has been made in critical feminist studies in religion from its very beginnings. Critical

feminist studies in religion and the*logy have consistently argued that we need to study

religion because it has played, and still plays, a key role in both wo/mens oppression and

liberation (Jasper, 1999). Hence, a central task consists in understanding the implication of

religion in continuing political exploitation of wo/men as well as its power to inspire wo/men

for active participation in socialpolitical feminist change.

To a much greater extent than feminist scholars in other areas, feminists in religion and

the*logy have sustained strong connections to wo/mens communities outside the academy.

Much work of critical feminist studies in religion has been generated and challenged by wo/

men in and outside organized religions who search for a feminist spirituality and politics of

meaning for their lives. Conversely, feminist scholars are also involved either in traditional

religious feminist groups or in Goddess and spirituality movements that have critically

challenged and enriched the*logical articulations and religious formations (Plaskow, 1993).

By conceptualizing religious and the*logical studies as critical rhetoricalpolitical eman-

cipatory practices, I have argued here, that one can avoid the positivist modernist snare of

identity politics and objectivist reification. Only if academic religious and the*logical schol-

arship becomes more feminist, i.e. conscious of its socio-political kyriarchal locations and

cultural functions as well as developing a critical self-reflexivity in its methods and research

programs, can it rearticulate itself as a critical emancipatory academic discipline that no

longer serves to legitimate relations of domination.

Notes

1. See my book (Schu ssler Fiorenza, 2004).

2. In order to lift into consciousness the linguistic violence of so-called generic male-centered language,

I use the term wo/men and not men in an inclusive way. I suggest that whenever you see




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wo/men you understand it in a generic inclusive sense. Wo/men includes men, s/he includes he,

and fe/male includes male. Feminist studies of language have shown that Western, kyriocen-

tricthat is, master, lord, father, male centeredlanguage systems understand language as

both generic and as gender-specific. Wo/men always must think at least twice, if not three-

times, and adjudicate whether we are meant or not by so-called generic terms such as men,

humans, Americans, or citizens. The writing of wo/men with a slash re-defines wo/men not onlyin linguistic but also in socio-political terms.

3. For the development of intersectionality as a heuristic concept, see Collins (1998), Davis (2008),

Nash (2008), and Segal and Martinez (2007).

4. My book (Schu ssler Fiorenza, 1992) argues that critical feminist theory replace the analytic cate-

gories of patriarchy/androcentrism with those of kyriarchy, which is derived from the Greek

words: kyrios (lord/slavemaster/father/husband/elite/propertied/educated man) and archein (to

rule, dominate) and kyriocentrism. In classical antiquity, the rule of the kyrios to whom disen-

franchised men and all wo/men were subordinated is best characterized as kyriarchy. Theoretically,

kyriarchy is to be understood as a complex pyramidal system of interlocking multiplicative social

and religious structures of super-ordination and sub-ordination, of ruling and oppression.

Kyriarchal relations of domination are built on elite male property rights as well as on the exploit-ation, dependency, inferiority, and obedience of wo/men, who signify all those subordinated. Such

kyriarchal relations are still today at work in the multiplicative intersectionality of class, race,

gender, ethnicity, empire, and other structures of discrimination. The different sets of relations of

domination shift historically and produce a different constellation of domination in different times

and cultures. Modern democracies are still structured as complex pyramidal political systems of

superiority and inferiority, of dominance and subordination.

5. Because G*d is neither masculine (theos) nor feminine (thea), I am writing theology/the*logy,

which means speaking about G*d with an asterisk to indicate the inability of our language to

express the Divine.

6. See Maggie Kim et al. (1993) and Joy et al. (2002).

7. See Agger (1998). For an excellent feminist critique of the Frankfurt School see Hewitt (1995).8. See my books (Schu ssler Fiorenza, 1999, 2007, 2009) for more elaborated arguments.

9. For this argument see my book (Schu ssler Fiorenza, 2011).

10. Warne (2000: 140155); see also Warne (2001).

11. See the variegated contributions in Ku ng and Moltmann (1992).

12. See especially the declaration of the Division for the Advancement of Women 1994.

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Author biography

Elisabeth Schu ssler Fiorenza, Krister Stendahl Professor at Harvard University Divinity

School, is the co-founder and senior editor of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

and was the first wo/man scholar elected as president of the Society of Biblical Literature. In

recognition of her work she has received several honorary doctorates from American

Colleges, Divinity Schools and European Universities. In 2001, she was elected to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She combines her scholarly work on biblical

interpretation with her pioneering research in feminist theology, rhetoric, and hermeneutics.

The list of her book publications is extensive. Her latest work is Transforming Vision

Explorations in Feminist The*logy.



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