Tuesday, September 23, 2008

What Makes a Woman?

Since the beginning of my Ph.D. program, I have been struggling to integrate my faith commitments with my commitments to feminist and liberation theologies. I have been drawn to confessional approaches to practical theology because they seem to see God as an active part of congregational life. I have been drawn to feminist theologies for their emphasis on gender and an analysis of patriarchy. I have been drawn to liberation theologies for their attention to race and class and their structural analysis that moves beyond the local congregation. The next few blogs will give you a bit of insight into how I am trying to pull of these together.
Feminist approaches to practical theology see gender as the central sight of socio-analytic and theological reflection. Their main purpose is generally to seek the flourishing of all humanity through the dismantling of patriarchy. For feminists in practical theology, all knowledge is located and interested. Analyzing power dynamics is essential. Practices become the main sight of reflection and are seen both as reflective and constitutive of beliefs and identity.
Elaine Graham has published a significant work on the meaning of gender in theology and congregational practices entitled Making the Difference. In this work she seeks to move beyond gender as an essential category (as fixed and never changing) or as socially constructed (how we are formed by society). Rather, she emphasizes gender as a performed reality. As such, it is in performance, in practices, that gender is constructed and maintained. For Graham, bodies are sites of discourse, sites of injustice, and vantage points from which to view reality. Gender is not something socially constructed outside the body and then mapped onto passive beings. Rather, gender is something both received and constructed by the individual. Graham emphasizes the intersection of structural influences as well as individual agency and sees material practices as mediators of these two acts. Our gender is both formed by forces outside ourselves and by the choices we make in living out our gender.
Graham’s emphasis on gender as performed reality becomes a central aspect of her pastoral theology in Transforming Practice. As with many feminist theologians, Graham’s pastoral theology shifts away from the actions of the ordained clergy to that of the congregation as a whole. (Feminist want to emphasize the work of the laity since the hierarchical structures of the church have often marginalized women) Graham’s pastoral theology seeks to create pastoral communities, communities that empower the flourishing of all humanity. In order to create such a community, Graham focuses on the creation of practical wisdom grounded in the practices of the church. The practices of the church constitute and maintain such wisdom. Her emphasis is on orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy.
Graham’s work draws on both liberation theology and feminist theology, but gender is clearly the central category of her analysis. She attempts to attend to differences among women in her focus on gender as a performed reality, but in order to embrace such differences, Graham moves to a theoretical level. In doing so, she often loses sight of the material realities of women, in particular women of color. She tends to refer to a generic “women’s experience” as a source and norm for her work. In granting primacy to gender as the primary category of oppression and patriarchy as the primary oppressive discourse, she often fails to recognize the racially constructed nature of both gender and patriarchy. While the potential to address such differences is present in her work, by not referring to particular realities she leaves race and class analysis invisible in her methodology.
All this is to say that what it is to be a woman is often different in different cultures… whether different races, different ethnicities, or different classes. There are different expectations of women’s roles, different understandings of beauty, strength, motherhood, etc. Feminists have a difficult time knowing how to fight for women’s equality when there are so many different women to fight for! It becomes easier to assume that we are all the same… and that everyone is just like me… that to try and deal with all the differences among us. I want to try and make sure that the research that I do and the theologies I construct attend to and acknowledge the differences.

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