4 – 5 August 2017, the Australian Collaborators in Feminist Theologies curated a symposium to explore feminist theological perspectives on dialogue, disagreement and conflict, as well as the intersections of theology with ethnicity, race, and cultural “norms”. Welcoming international keynote speakers M. Shawn Copeland (Boston College, Boston), Ruth Duck and Cynthia Wilson (both Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Chicago).
Elizabeth Boase
Came up with the topic of this session/panel through an open process of listening… counter-cultural and subversive. How can our medium be our message?
Katherine Massam
“If you persist in your efforts to influence the official church, to become part of its decision-making, you will only break your heart and lose hope. What you must do is go around to the back and CREATE A GARDEN. Some day they will look out and see its beauty and marvel at its life.” – Anne Thurston
See the reality. Patriarchy is real. We can become socialised and complicit. Benefit ourselves from the patriarchal system. It is a personal (individual) and systemic (collective) task to change this. Need to create a new ecosystem that’s collaborative. The top-down systems are easier, faster, feel more efficient… than being collaborative, must choose not to want to replicate or reinforce existing structures.
God comes to us disguised as our lives. #mystics #incarnation.
We must reflect on our experience. While this can be seen as “pooling our ignorance” or becoming “stuck”. Transformative education should see everyone in the room learning. Teachers and student.
Ref: Pedagogy of the Oppressed – Paulo Freire
Ref: “Aint I a Woman?” speech by Sojourner Truth
4 touchstones:
- experience, shared
- reflection, deepended
- faith, expressed
- insights, reinforced
Stand and stretch: Open posture = strength and confidence, closed posture = stress.
Tania Wittwer
As a member of committees or commissions work to have more female members. Not merely top-down leadership but appeal and create opportunities for mediation and consensus decision-making. Create sub/small working groups as an opportunity to develop trust. Coach and support up and sideways. Whiteboard ALL the ideas, then ask: What’s worth fighting over? Headship/submission >> connection to domestic violence.
Deidre Palmer
As a young adult participated in life-giving community and unjust structures.
Ref: In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins – Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza
Ref: The Church and the Power of the Spirit – Jurgen Moltmann
Church as a liberation community. Non-hierarchal. Acknowledge. Affirm. Name power balances. Job titles reflect the role your play, NOT status.
Changes forged out of pain.Movement of the Holy Spirit, moves toward equality. Apart from and despite the church. Need to partner, be active learners and work with God to mend Creation. Justice is integral to the gospel. The political is personal. We must raise up those whose voices have been silenced or diminished.
In the Uniting Church, the power is shaped by Councils – not individual but collective. Rotating and reviewed leadership. There has been a resistance to structures… making decisions as ‘synods’ and ‘assemblies’ instead of small groups, power-concentrated and speaking for others. There is a commitment to keep our foundations broad and have full participation. Individual voices and gifts are affirmed within the collective.
Look around and ask: where are the places and spaces where things are working well now? What makes them different? How do you resist? What does formation look like there?
In-table discussions: We extend the metaphor – first woman makes a garden (outside patriarchal systems), second woman dwells in the house trying to renovate it while it’s inhabited (working within patriarchal systems) third woman describes open-plan design with indoor/outdoor flow (something that combines both elements)… sometimes easier to know what your role is, to resist/advocate/speak-up when working within the patriarchal system.
Poem: I put my piece of truth – Talitha Fraser
People of Colour @ Australian Collaborators in Feminist Theologies – Seforosa Carroll
Yesterday there was a separate gathering for Aboriginal and those identifying as People of Colour. Acknowledge the paradox of this: the need to have a gathering separate from this one (not participating) and being allowed to gather separately (so valued that this is resourced however is needed).
Last year was the inaugural gathering of this group and there were perhaps 3 POK here. This year that is more like 20. Want to acknowledge what has gone into that increase. While there is interest in our theologies and our feminist theologies – this is not the platform where we can discern what that is for us – we want other space. We want to encourage and mentor POK women to do papers. We think our creativity and cultural epistemology have something to contribute. We want to do our own work to grow, to develop our confidence and voice… down the track we hope to then be able to share that in this space. To come together and find comfort en masse.
We each have a uniqueness in God – that uniqueness celebrates and glorifies God. We don’t meet separately to ‘keep ourselves apart’ but to move from what is common to what we can say about our difference – in this way we can learn from each other and keep our identity – Adele Ventris
Africana Womanist Theology: A Hermeneutic of Suspicion and Hope – Rev. Cynthia Wilson
The marginalised bring their hermeneutic to their marginalised space.
Born in New Orleans: black, woman, pastors kid, one of six children (only girl). Had to figure it out for myself. This was in some ways insulated because my brothers and father were protective but I feared for the men’s lives daily in the bayou and cypress trees where black bodies swung. I sang because I wanted to cry out for life for my brothers. The dark cloud hanging overhead was overcome through song… Holy Ghost will not descend without a song. African proverb: When you sing, you pray twice.
- Womanist Theology confronts the demons of race, womanhood, and political capital that ravage the lives and spaces of Black women. At the same time, it vigorously affirms their God-likeness.
- Womanist Theology acknowledges, affirms and critiques the attributes of their faith community, the church and beyond.
- Womanist Theology seeks to call into question forces that suppress Black women’s voices while investigating certain epistemological presuppositions.
- Womanist Theology interrogates the theology of Black males, replacing it with more inclusive, liberating reconstruction of knowledge and authority.
- Womanist Theology utilizes an anthropological and dialogical method utilizing the following sources: personal narratives, domestic violence, psychological trauma, womanist ethnography, and syncretistic religiosity, real life stories of poor/Africana women, and other women of colour throughout the world.
- Womanist Theology turns up the volume of voices that are illiterate, economically deprived, that hold the environment in high regard, and that are typically ignored by this 21st century capitalist world.
- Womanist Theology re-kindles AND validates Africana women ancestors through Ritual “Re”-membrance.
UBUNTU “I am because you are.”
SAWABONO “I see you.”
Personal pronouns don’t function he/she, me/you but are grounded in the universal “we”.
Eschatological hope, although sometimes I wish my eyes hadn’t been opened, “my heart says yes and my feet say Go!“…someday we will be the free people we were created to be.
Veiled Resistance: The Cognitive Dissonance of Vision in Genesis 38 – Carolyn Alsen
Helpful if you read Psalm 38 for context
Wearing a veil is seen as touching on two issues gender domination/headship and ethnicity. Wearing a veil is carrying these dual layers and wearers are doubly ‘colonised’. Who is the ‘ideal reader’ that Genesis 38 is written for? …white, Israelite, male?
Tamar, through choosing her clothes, can identify as “foreign woman” or “Israelite woman” and as widowed or prostitute. There are social and cultural norms about how she is seen and not seen according to what she is wearing. Reading through the passage: who sees and doesn’t see her? In this story Tamar employs the conforming veil as an act of resistance.
Woman using perceptions of the veil as a weapons is still happening now > suicide bombers in Nigeria.
To wear a veil meant you were upper-class and married. If you wore them when you weren’t these things > punishable offence.
The Bible mistranslates “temple officiates” as “temple prostitutes”
zonar (gendered) social position of women (or subordinated men) when they sell sex.
hatas’if, veil (non-gendered) take off, wrap up, cover, put on.
Is it to be punished for the wrong use? Or is it normative use?
Licit – accepted socially but not morally vs. deviant.
Remove widows garments :: have meeting in veil :: put on widows garments again.
could get in trouble
(tribe)
what is seen and not seen?
‘gaze’ and ‘identity’
– what is going on between how others see Tamar and how she sees herself?
Law-keeping ? Law-breaking?
Israelite? Canaanite?
Solidarity/priest Othering “zonah” fetishcised
Unresolvable. Ambiguity of identity contrasted with public visibility.
Hera and Judah have different opinions of Tamar – who’s right or who’s wrong? Is Tamar both?
“Because of the Angels”: The Unveiling of Women and the Body Politic – Sally Douglas
Helpful if you read 1 Cor 11:1-10 for context
Paul gives three reasons why women should have their heads covered:
- inferiority
- cultural norms
- “because of the angels”
“The angels” refers here to those evil angels fallen from the Heavenly Court who rape and wreak havoc. (Gal 1:8) Enochian angels fell from heaven for women “going to them”. The consequences of this rape ruined men, women and the earth… > gave birth to giants >responsible for evil in the world. Killed in the Flood but spirits stay on the earth. Rise up against women and children because they come from them >>climate change.
Veiling is a source of conflict.
Try saying it’s down to individual choice but that seems insufficient. Still perceived that it stops a woman’s flourishing and personhood. The “malevolent constructed male gaze” exists to the detriment of women AND men. As objects of male desire we can reduce the risk from male gaze by altering our dress/wearing veil.
Irony – genital mutilation – advocate in the east but it’s happening in the west.
Commodity either way. A woman might well feel liberated by wearing a veil or genital mutilation, not arguing that, but dehumanising malevolent constructed male gaze needs to be named and called out. What might safe-guard women now?
If the gaze of Christ is given precedence. Not the white skin, blue eyed, blond, pretty Jesus but the One, Cosmic, Sophia… that nourishes. 2 Cor 3: Veiling and unveiling of Moses. Collective language, shared experience and ongoing.
13 We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to prevent the Israelites from seeing the end of what was passing away. 14 But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away.15 Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. 16 But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. 17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.18 And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit. (2 Cor 3)
2 Cor 4: Mystical gaze of Jesus, we are gazed upon, encounter Divine, are changed.
3 And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. 4 The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 5 For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. 6 For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ…. 18 So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
The same lens through which we see God, each other and ourselves can give us freedom. In this gaze we can be liberated from the power of all other gazes. There is an invitation and provocation in that.
We are given a choice – not controlled or influenced by nor in resistance to. We are all beloved subjects of the Divine.
Exorcism is for victims. Not much about evil spirits in the Old Testament but then in the New Testament – boom!
Hillary, Shame and Psalm 71 – Michelle Eastwood
Hillary Rodham Clinton 1975 m. Bill Clinton, 1980 had daughter Chelsea, 1993 First Lady.
BA and Yale Law. Awarded “Most Admired Woman” 20 times altogether and 14 years in a row.
Moses vs. Aaron and Miriam – cloud makes, only, Miriam leprous. Only woman is affected. Author trying to minimise her leadership.
Abortion reduces both maternal and infant mortality. Hillary grilled for her position. Evangelical Christian Right’s perception is that bible gender roles are under attack (by feminists for their own power and glory), values compromised, slippery slope to decline of the world as we know it.
Bill’s infidelity held against Hillary… didn’t handle it well, misogyny, sexism…
Helpful if you read Psalm 71 for context
Psalm 71 is a song of lament and a cry for justice. Women are shamed a lot in the Bible. In this passage shame is shifted to dealers. v7 I have been a portent (faithfulness) v18 grey hairs (Hillary still stands, a testament to those who have tried to shame her). The shame is not destroyed but displaced. Evangelical Christian Right their own undoing > Trump. In the gospels Jesus is shamed – a sense we become more godly through experiencing shame.
We sit in silence – holding space for brief moments to acknowledge all the complexity arising from these topics and texts…
