JFSR
Vol. 17, No. 1
EDITORS’
INTRODUCTION
The woman’s body—whether living or dead—is often the site for the inscription of religious teachings, moral exhortations, and patriarchal control in both religious and political discourses. Feminist scholars in religion have investigated the myriad ways that the female body has been materially and discursively constructed according to complex social determinants by religious pundits, theologians, philosophers, mystics, sexologists, psychologists, and anthropologists. They have also debated vigorously on epistemological and political issues underlying feminist interpretations of the female body. The three articles in this issue of JFSR excavate how the female body has been used for various purposes in three diverse religious and historical sites: the contest of scriptural authority and colonial control and the reinscription of colonialist feminism in interpreting sati; the conflation of suffering with sanctity for women in medieval Catholicism; and the construction of the body of the male bodhisattva in Buddhism.
According to Sharada Sugirtharajah, the word sati has multiple meanings: a virtuous woman, the practice of widow immolation, and the name of a goddess. The practice of sati assumed cultural and political importance during nineteenth-century colonial India, when the British wanted to demonstrate their cultural superiority and justify their civilizing mission to save beleaguered Indian women. Sati has been contentiously debated among the British colonialists, Hindu fundamentalists, and Indian reformers on the one hand, and among Indian feminist critics (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Lata Mani, and Uma Narayan) and European and Euro-American women (Katherine Mayo, Mary Daly, and Julia Leslie) on the other. As a scholar of Hinduism and a postcolonial critic, Sugirtharajah charts the pluriphonic debate, focusing on the constructions of sati by Mary Daly and Julia Leslie.
In Gyn/Ecology, Daly cites the practice of sati as an example in her transcultural and transhistorical survey of patriarchy. Using the colonialist text Mother India by Katherine Mayo, Daly universalizes sati as a pervasive and unchanging Hindu tradition and portrays Hindu women as victims of such cruel religious practices. Although Leslie agrees with Daly that sati is an act of violence against women, she contends that those women who have voluntarily chosen it are “active agents of their own constructs.” Sugirtharajah examines the patriarchal Hindu text used by Leslie as her warrant and challenges how volition is constructed for women. She contests Leslie’s interpretation using a two-pronged approach. First, she presents other Hindu texts and especially liberating female texts and voices, which have more positive views on women. Second, she uses postcolonial theory to argue that white feminists often construct an active, self-determining female subject and impose this construct on other women, whereas the voice and subjectivity of colonized women are difficult to recover and interpret. As such, her richly textured article contributes to our understanding of the diversity of Hindu scriptures on sati, as well as to postcolonial critique of white feminists’ misrepresentation of Third World women.
While Indian women who practiced sati have been put on a pedestal as “virtuous women,” women in Europe who silently suffered the blows of their husbands and obeyed their husbands as if they were obeying the Lord were canonized as saints in medieval Catholicism. In the second article, Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Nancy Nienhuis investigate the relationship between battering, suffering, obedience, and sanctification of women in hagiographic vitae written by men on Monica, the mother of Augustine of Hippo; Godelieve of Gistel, Dorothy of Montau, and Catherine of Genoa. Reading against the grain, the authors aim to challenge “Christian theological complicity in practices that have colluded in domestic and political violence.” They argue that the kyriarchal ideology underlying the problematic construction of holiness, patience, and suffering exemplified in the vitae of these women “saints” continues to justify the battering of women in the present, as demonstrated by the canonization of Elizabeth Canori in 1994.
From Monica in the fourth century to Catherine of Genoa, who died in the sixteenth century, the vitae of these four women focus on their acceptance of pain and suffering, even unto death, as evidence of their devotion and obedience to God as well as to the paterfamilias, naturalized as the social order. In some accounts, their suffering was seen as parallel to or a re-enactment of the passion of Christ. While the sufferings of these women were glorified, the abusive behaviors of their husbands were scarcely condemned or only slightly admonished. Similar to Sugirtharajah, Kienzle and Nienhuis raise the question of how these women’s volition has been constructed to serve the religious and political interests of the time. Once again, women’s agency is limited to the acceptance of self-sacrifice and suffering, as if there were no other options. Moreover, these exemplary lives have been held up as models for women to emulate in the Roman Catholic church even today. This article provides important historical data for the contemporary feminist debate on the relationship between victimization and suffering of women and the sacrificial understanding of the atonement of Christ.
The third article investigates the construction of the body of the male bodhisattva in Indian Buddhist narrative literature. Reiko Ohnuma argues that “the body of the male bodhisattva occupies a fluid and versatile position in between the bodies of a woman and a Buddha.” On the one hand, female images such as the prostitute and the mother are used in connection with the male bodhisattva’s gift of his body to sentient beings. But the negative characteristics associated with the female body are reversed and resignified when they are applied to the male bodhisattva. On the other hand, the bodhisattva’s bodily self-sacrifice is construed as inferior to the Buddha’s gift of Dharma, which is implicitly gendered as masculine. The body of the male bodhisattva, thus, can be seen as occupying a position somewhere between the denigrated female body and the body of the Buddha in relation to how gendered imagery is activated in these stories. Ohnuma challenges us to think of gender symbols in multivalent and polysemic ways and argues for a fluid understanding of the female body, which can be deployed in new contexts, acquiring new values in the process.
Stephanie Y. Mitchem’s review essay on womanist constructions of salvation provides the transition to the contemporary North American context. Since Jacquelyn Grant’s important work White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus (1989), womanist theologians and ethicists have refined the interpretations of the pain and suffering of black women and their search for salvation. Mitchem helpfully reviews the nuances in theological constructions advanced by Katie Geneva Cannon, Delores Williams, Jacquelyn Grant, M. Shawn Copeland, and Emilie Townes and includes newer womanist voices at the end of her essay. Although womanists have accentuated the suffering and survival of black women because of race, class, and gender oppression, they have tried to avoid essentalizing black women’s experience by analyzing various types of oppression. Mitchem disagrees with the black male critics who criticize the womanist theologians for following the myth of ontological blackness or for glorifying the oppressed and accepting suffering passively. For Mitchem, womanist articulations of the pain and suffering of black women are foundational to their constructions of salvation, and the process is always unfinished as new voices emerge, adding vigor and substance to the continuing conversation.
In the Living It Out section, Margaret R. Miles uses her experience to trace the changing landscape of women in theological education in North America from the 1950s to the present. With honesty and wit, Miles discusses her metamorphosis from a seminarian’s wife to becoming the first female tenured professor at Harvard Divinity School, and moving on to be the academic dean of the Graduate Theological Union. Miles observes that in the past two decades, the increasing number of women, people of color, and students from the Third World in theological schools and seminaries has created diversity in many of the schools. Yet the curriculum and pedagogy of these schools have seldom caught up with the demographic change in the student body.
Instead of lamenting the slow process of change, Miles challenges qualified women to consider becoming administrators to lead theological and religious studies institutions in the twenty-first century. Breaking the glass ceiling for women is not an easy task, and Miles outlines the emotional and intellectual work required to adjust to an administrative position. In order to provide a forum for all voices to be heard in the decision-making process, she proposes a “modified town meeting” model as an alternative to the confidentiality model and the grassroots model. She is hopeful that women’s experiences and insights can inform the commitments and politics of the institutions they lead and make them more freeing and inclusive for all.
Beginning with this issue, Kwok Pui-lan joins as the co-editor of JFSR and assists in the editorial work and the production of the journal. We thank Thomas Eoyang, Pui-lan’s research assistant who has many years of experience in publishing, for his help in the production process. We welcome your suggestions and comments and we are grateful for your support of JFSR and for promoting it among your friends and colleagues.