Running in Order to Stand Still

The Challenges Facing Feminism in Times of Radical Change

Even as I pursue the ephemeral object of the incarnate and sacramentally significant female subject, she slips away and loses herself amidst the proliferating discourses that evict her from the house of language and occupy the place she vacates in order to claim the position of “woman”, whether through nuptial ecclesiology or trans identities. It remains as difficult as it has ever been to ask what it means to find a language fit for female habitation. There is so much work to be done, and we have barely begun. It seems that we must keep running in order to stand still, lest we lose even the small piece of ground we might have gained.

As I gather together past conference papers, lectures, articles, essays, and book chapters to share here, I realize that I have the makings of a substantial book on theology and gender, in the context of a rapidly changing and challenging discourse with profound ethical and existential implications. For this reason, I have decided to limit full posts here to paid subscribers, since I hope in the near future to collate and edit these posts for publication. I welcome comments and critical insights that will help me to refine and polish my ideas. Free subscribers will be able to read previews and extracts but not the full posts.

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The following is the draft of an essay I have submitted for publication in a collection of conference papers. The conference in Münster in October 2022 was on the theme of “Theology: Biographical—Contextual—Intersectional”. It was organized by the Centre for Theological Gender Studies of the Catholic Theological Faculty at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münsterat, in collaboration with the Akademie Franz Hitze Haus. I was asked to reflect on questions of gender, intersectionality, and Catholicism in the context of my own story, exploring how my academic development has been influenced by my personal life. In posting it here, I welcome comments that will act as part of an informal peer review process.

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Running in Order to Stand Still:

the Challenges Facing Feminism in Times of Radical Change

Introduction

The social, ethical, religious, and linguistic significance of the female body is an elusive subject for scholars. It is like trying to pin down a bubble of mercury, for as soon as one reaches towards it, it slips away. Source of contempt and inspiration for western thinkers from the ancient Greeks to postmodern theorists, the idea of woman has been plundered for metaphors, colonized as man’s sexual other, fantasized as the maternal feminine source of tenderness and nurture, demonized as the sexual temptress who brings death through seduction and desire, and is now designated a free-floating signifier for any body that wants to claim “woman” as an identity—but who is she?

Heidegger (1993: 217) famously described language as “the house of being”: “In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home.” But Luce Irigaray argues that there is no house of language fit for habitation by the female body, because in the western canon the language of the maternal feminine is a house built by and for men, as a projection of the fears, fantasies, and desires that are repressed in the formation of the masculine subject. According to Irigaray, language is severed from materiality through the denial of representation to the sexual female body and the maternal relationship, “that first body, that first home, that first love”. These are, she suggests, “sacrificed and provide matter for an empire of language that so privileges the male sex as to confuse it with the human race” (Irigaray 1993: 14).

In what follows, I reflect on these questions of gender, feminism, and language from the intersectional entanglements of my autobiography. I begin by briefly setting out the relevant aspects of my personal story, and I then explore my intellectual development as a Catholic theologian, feminist, and gender theorist, in light of the questions I bring from this autobiographical interweaving.

Who am I?

The first way in which intersectionality influences my feminism is through my experience as a white postcolonial diasporic African Scot. The eldest of three daughters, I was born in Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) to Scottish colonial parents in 1955. My parents were from poor working-class backgrounds, they had both left school at fifteen, and they had emigrated to the colonies in the early 1950s in search of a better life. This background means that I have no strong sense of national identity, and I am suspicious of any attempt to gloss Britain’s shabby history of empire-building and slave-trading, because I have seen some of it from the other side. I am married to an Englishman and we live in England, but since Brexit I feel even more of an outsider than I did before.

Then there is the question of gender. My mother taught her three daughters to treat our father as head of the house, but her personality was far from submissive and theirs was a tempestuous marriage. She advised us always to be pleasing to men and attentive to their needs, and yet she herself rebelled against such ideas. As a result, I grew up in a turbulent domestic atmosphere with conflicting and confusing messages about what it means to be female.

From the age of eleven to fifteen, I attended the Dominican Convent School in Lusaka. Those Dominican sisters made an enduring impression on me, as a Presbyterian child encountering Catholicism for the first time, and being exposed to a community of independent, intellectual women who did not conform to any of the stereotypes I had grown up with. At that time there were no opportunities for higher education in Zambia, so to continue my education would have meant going to boarding school. My parents were ambivalent about that option, and so was I. I overheard my mother telling my father that she wanted a better education for her daughters than she had had, but she also used to say that if we had been boys they would have had to leave Zambia for the sake of our education. In other words, only sons needed higher education. So again, there were mixed messages about what kind of aspirations and ambitions were appropriate for a girl. In the end, I left school at 15 and became a secretary. I did not go to university until I became a mature student in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Bristol in 1991, the same year that the youngest of our four children started school. We had moved to Bristol from Harare in Zimbabwe three years earlier. That is another factor that affects my receptivity to and engagement with feminist theology—beginning my studies when I was a married woman with four small children.

The last significant influence in this intersectional autobiography is my religious background. I was born into a Presbyterian family. During my teenage and early adult years, I had no particular interest in religion, other than a suppressed curiosity about Catholicism that had been awakened during my Convent school years. When I had children I returned to my Christian roots, joining a fervently evangelical white church in Harare. I was increasingly drawn to Catholicism, partly because of the Catholic Church’s work for justice and peace, but also because I yearned for a more sacramental and liturgical approach to worship. I was finally received into the Catholic Church in 1986, and we moved to the UK two years later.

So I began my academic studies during a time of personal adjustment to a new and challenging social and religious environment, against a background of epochal changes in the global order. In the three years since our arrival in Britain, the Soviet Union had collapsed, apartheid had ended, Nelson Mandela had been released, and Robert Mugabe had plunged Zimbabwe into tyranny. Some former communist states were descending into internecine violence and war. The politics of Thatcherism and neoliberalism were kindling in me a raging sense of injustice, and the casual consumerism of western culture appalled me.

I owe my feminist initiation and much of my academic and personal development over the last thirty years to Professor Ursula King, who arrived in Bristol’s Department of Theology and Religious Studies during my first year of studies. She eventually became my PhD supervisor, and she remains a close personal friend – though our theological perspectives are quite different (cf. Beattie 2018).

I now track my intellectual development through various stages of theological research, making visible the ways in which this autobiographical hinterland has influenced my responses to feminist theology and intersectionality.