JFSR VOL. 19, NO. 2
EDITORS' INTRODUCTION

The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion seeks to give recognition to emerging new scholars in the field and to acknowledge their important work for shaping the future of the field of feminist studies in religion.  If, as Dale Spender has pointed out in Women of Ideas, feminist thought and knowledge has been co-opted, suppressed, or trivialized by malestream institutions and scholarship over and over again during the last 400 years, then it is important in these reactionary times to pay attention to and foster the research and insights of new scholars. We are also aware that much mentoring of feminist work is necessary, since academic institutions still do not pay as much attention to the thought and work of feminist scholars as they do to that of the “great men” in the field.

We are pleased in this issue to have three contributions of such work by new scholars, and we want to congratulate Jeannine Hill Fletcher for being the recipient of this year’s New Scholar Award. Congratulations also to Benjamin Zeller and Meredith Fraser, who have received honorable mention for their articles.  We are very grateful to editorial board members Naomi Goldenberg and Margaret Miles for giving much time and careful thought to the evaluation of these emerging scholars’ work. We hope that many new feminist scholars of all religious persuasions and academic fields will be encouraged to submit their work to JFSR in the coming years. 

The issue opens with Jeannine Hill Fletcher’s article, “Shifting Identity.”  Hill Fletcher critically surveys the discussions on religious pluralism in Christian theological work and argues that interreligious dialogues have not yet fully engaged feminist religious thought. She also points out, following Rita Gross and others, that feminist theology has not paid sufficient attention to religious diversity in its discourses. Hill Fletcher argues that when discussing religious identity in a religiously pluralist context, Christian theologians tend to employ strategies that either stress sameness and inclusivism or defend differences and exclusivism.  In order to overcome this dualistic alternative, she turns to the fundamental feminist insight that identity is constructed and the rich feminist theoretical work on the social construction of identity as multiple and hybrid. A “hybrid” religious identity, according to Hill Fletcher, is internally diverse and rooted in communities “created through solidarities in diversity where both sameness and difference are valued.”

In her article, “The Case of the Missing Goddess,” Kathryn Rountree addresses issues of plurality, power, and prejudice. She critically investigates the controversies surrounding the history and interpretation of prehistoric religions in the field of archaeology, taking as a case study the complex of temples built more than 5000 years ago on the island of Malta. Rountree argues that the range of competing, contradictory, or coexisting interpretations is determined by particular agendas, values, and discursive contexts, and she investigates the ways in which archaeological, local, and feminist Goddess discourses interact with one another. She finds that while there is a plurality of interpretations on the local level, and while the tourist business is bolstered by Goddess feminists who also financially support archaeological research, the decisive authoritative voice is androcentric and belongs to the archaeologists as the experts. She concludes that archaeological scholarship seems to be “determinedly blind to the possibility of encountering the sacred feminine,” and that Goddess feminists need to be skilled in different ways of understanding, in order “to preserve what space they have.”

The third article in this issue complements the first in its concern with theological hermeneutics and identity. In “Reading the Raced and Sexed Body in The Color Purple,” Margaret Kamitsuka critically investigates the hermeneutical uses of literary work in feminist theological construction. She uses Alice Walker’s book The Color Purple as a test case for showing how womanists and white feminists read texts differently, leading them to emphasize or not mention markers of race, sexuality, and other structural differences. Kamitsuka proposes that a postructuralist theory and reading, such as that developed by Judith Butler, would allow feminist theologians to interpret sexual identity not as a “natural identity” but rather as “constructed and performed in relation to discourses of race, family, religion, and so on.”  Such a performative approach, she argues, would compel feminist theologians not to ground their hermeneutical claims in some supposedly self-evident women’s identity, be it racial, sexual, or national.

In this issue we introduce a new format of publishing an article with responses in order to continue discussion on key issues in the field.  We are very fortunate to have a response to Margaret Kamitsuka’s essay by womanist theologian Stephanie Mitchem.  While Mitchem supports Kamitsuka’s call for further discussion among womanists and white feminists, she questions how to define mutual goals.  Highlighting the difficulties of dialogue between black and white feminists in the U.S., particularly around theory construction, Mitchem issues a cautionary warning against leaving key terms, such as race and sexuality, uninterrogated.  She also argues that it is important to recognize that the sources and aims of womanist and white feminist theories are often quite different.  Kamitsuka, in turn, sees the failure to critically analyze white privilege as a first-wave white feminist problem, one that white feminists today can avoid repeating by entering carefully and self-critically into dialogue with women of color, keeping in mind the warnings Mitchem raises, and also by employing theories like poststructuralism.  Kamitsuka notes that “poststructuralism is not a panacea,” but can be a useful tool for understanding how identity is shaped by multiple discourses of power/knowledge.  We hope that this important exchange will stimulate much more dialogue between womanists, white feminists, and other feminists of color on the issues so ably raised and articulated by Kamitsuka and Mitchem.     

We are grateful to Kathleen Sands for writing the editorial for this issue.  She focuses on the clergy sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, asking, “Where are the women?”  Through careful analysis, Sands demonstrates that while the crisis has come to light mainly as a problem affecting males who abuse children, in fact the sexual exploitation and abuse of women by the Catholic priests has been systematic and is linked with the hierarchy’s patriarchalism, anti-sexualism, and clericalism.  She sees increased homophobia and clericalism as possible negative outcomes of the crisis, and argues that only if the feminist aspect of the crisis, in its full history and complexity, is taken into account can positive results, such as an increase in the power of the “laity” and a more mature sexual ethic, be achieved.  

In the next section we have an essay by JFSR International Board Member Maria José Rosado-Nunes, who reflects from her social location as a Brazilian Catholic feminist sociologist of religion on the topic of women and religious authority.  Rosado-Nunes is particularly concerned with the rise of religious fundamentalism in the current climate of increasing globalization and deepening poverty in Brazil and Latin America, and with the effects that this combination of factors may have on the lives of women who are struggling for self-determination in matters of religion, morality, and sexuality. 

In an energetic way, Esther Fuchs continues the critical political analysis of the previous contributions in her essay “Men in Biblical Feminist Scholarship.” She questions why feminist biblical criticism seems to depend on the support of male scholars, and helps us to face the fact that despite all post-feminist claims to the contrary, the university, theological schools, and the media are all still under elite white Western male control. She shows how feminist work is still often thoroughly diluted, trivialized, and misrepresented. Her analysis does not bode well for emerging scholarship in the field, and it demonstrates the need to articulate a feminist agenda and criteria in a right-wing religious climate and a politically reactionary context. Since the issues raised in this “Cutting Edges” article are of relevance not only for biblical scholarship, but for all areas of scholarship in the study of religion, we hope that it will provoke a rich array of responses.

The poem “On the Road North” by Jill MacLean imaginatively works through the violence inscribed in the biblical text. By exploring the violent fate of the nameless concubine mentioned in Judges 19 from various agent perspectives, MacLean is able to name her Shelomith and to give her suffering presence and voice.

We end with two New Scholar Award contributions in our “Living It Out” section.  Both essays reflect on Christian experiences of struggle, but do so in two different confessional and national contexts, one Catholic-North American, the other Pentecostal-Australian.  In “‘We’re the Other Catholic Church,’” Benjamin Zeller chronicles the bitter struggle of a Roman Catholic parish in Rochester, New York, to become and remain a socially active, feminist, democratic, radically inclusive, and self-determining community, a struggle that is signified ultimately by the change of name from “Corpus Christi” to “Spiritus Christi” community.

The second contribution to this section is a critical exploration of violence and struggle for self-determination. Meredith Fraser concretely details the violence experienced by white Pentecostal married women in Australia, a violence that is legitimated by and internalized through religious discourse. She focuses on the mechanisms of the androcentric silencing of women by male Pentecostal leaders and doctrine, and on women’s collaboration with them, doing so not as a detached scholarly observer but as an agent-participant who writes from a feminist theoethical perspective.

We hope that this rich harvest of emerging and established critical feminist thought will encourage readers to continue the struggle against all forms of violence and for feminist agency and voice. We are very grateful to all of those who have contributed to this issue. We thank the authors for submitting their work, our reviewers for their careful critical reading, the New Scholar Award judges, and especially our managing editors Deborah Whitehead and Sarah Sentilles for their “labor of love.”

Over the last five years Deborah Whitehead’s generous, untiring, and extremely competent work has sustained the JFSR in manifold ways, and we are greatly indebted to her. While we will miss the generous spirit and great expertise of our favored and foremost emerging scholar in the day-to-day work, we count on her support as an editorial board member in the future.   

Finally, we thank Sister Joan Chatfield for her kind assistance in storing a large number of back issues at Maryknoll over the past few years and for helping us with the daunting project of shipping sets of back issues to institutions and organizations around the world that train or support women in religious studies and theology.   We are very grateful for her work, and we extend our deep appreciation and warmest wishes on the occasion of her retirement later this year.