Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Reflections on the study of gender

Victoria Falls from the Zambian side - August 2022

When I was looking for an image to depict what it’s like to write about gender in these turbulent times, I thought of these two photos of Victoria Falls taken by me last year. The waterfall and the foaming gorge far below suggest the well-worn metaphors that might describe what navigating this topic feels like—between the Scylla and the Charbides, between a rock and a hard place, between the devil and the deep blue sea. On the other hand, that fisherman making his way across the rocks at the top, just a few feet from the edge of the Falls, suggests the endeavour to find precarious footholds upon which to balance as we try to avoid being swept away in the midst of a furious debate.

The study of gender, feminism, and theology has been a major focus of my academic research and writing. In the last few years, this landscape has become perilous terrain for a scholar—an ideological battleground over issues that strike at the very heart of our identities, with a paucity of reliable research upon which to rest our claims and counterclaims.

The study of gender is derided by those who see it as a major contributory factor to the current confusion around issues of gendered and sexual identities. Yet I believe it is more rather than less important for those of us who have committed ourselves to academic research in this field to rise to these new challenges. In order to do this, I hope in this site to revisit some of my publications, reflecting on whether I would qualify them in any way or whether they still represent my current position.

The first piece I’m sharing is a blog that I wrote for Catholic Theological Ethics in the World Church (CTEWC) in July 2019, when the Congregation for Catholic Education (CCE) published a document on gender theory:  ‘Male and female he created them: Towards a Path of Dialogue on the Question of Gender Theory in Education’. My blog is available on the CTEWC website, but I’m posting the text here to save cross-referencing.

If I were writing this today, would I change anything? Possibly not, in the context in which it was written—as a critical commentary on the Vatican document. I do however think that some of the cautions in the document would be valid if they were not issued in such a didactic and absolutist way. This is not how one goes about engaging in dialogue, which the document claims to do.