JFSR VOL. 20, NO. 2
EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

On May 17, 2004, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts allowed same-sex couples to marry. Although the Netherlands, Belgium, and some parts of Canada have already recognized same-sex marriage, Massachusetts is the first state in the United States to accord same-sex couples the same rights as heterosexual couples. As expected, the decision has stirred up spirited debates on the meaning of marriage, sexuality, family, and nationhood both in the United States and abroad. While this controversy was raging, the United States was preparing for the return of sovereignty to Iraq, although the American military continues to play a significant role in that war-torn country. With the United States emerging as the sole superpower in the new geopolitical configurations, feminists in the United States and other affluent societies, especially those of us working in academia, need to rethink how we can be accountable to the world’s majority women, many of whom survive on less than two U.S. dollars per day. The two roundtable discussions in this issue help us analyze the multifaceted arguments on same-sex marriage and feminist solidarity across class difference.

We are also pleased to publish two contributions by newer scholars: we congratulate Rosemary Hicks and Jasmin Zine, the co-winners of this year’s New Scholar Award. The New Scholar Award was established to promote newer voices in feminist scholarship in religion, which are critical to the development of the field. We are grateful to Judith Plaskow, Ellen Umansky, Margaret Miles, and Nayereh Tohidi for taking the time to evaluate and comment on these emerging scholars’ work.

This issue begins with an article by Katharina von Kellenbach, which scrutinizes counsel that prison chaplains offered to the wives of Nazi perpetrators. We have heard a good deal about the perpetrators of Nazi crimes, but we have heard relatively little about how wives coped with the situation when their husbands were prosecuted and put into prison as a result. Through a careful reading of the letters of German Evangelical prison chaplains and pastors involved in counseling inmates’ wives, von Kellenbach documents how religious ideology was mobilized in counseling these wives, such as submission to their husbands, God’s love and forgiveness for sinners, and the sanctity of the marriage union. These wives received little support for divorcing or distancing themselves from their husbands. Von Kellenbach shows that the religious requirement of the submission of women serves as a prism through which to look at the hierarchical structure of German society, the demand for loyalty to the state, and the complicity of the church in the face of genocide and violence.

In the next article, Rosemary Hicks reevaluates the legacy of Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Science movement through challenging the rigidity of the construction of “separate spheres” for the sexes, using a performative understanding of gender and space, and through placing Eddy’s movement within the professionalization of medicine in nineteenth-century America. Eddy’s commitment to feminism has been questioned partly because of some of her controversial statements and partly because of the fact that she appointed many men as leaders of her church, though the parishioners in her day were overwhelmingly women. Yet Hicks contends that Eddy strategically used male leadership to avoid giving the impression that Christian Science created a separate religion for women. Hicks further argues that Christian Science offered women opportunities for education, medicine, and ministry that were denied them in an era steeped in the Victorian cult of domesticity. Taking class into consideration, Christian Science offered poor and underprivileged women social mobility and public access that they previously could only dream of. Her article not only rereads the archive of a controversial woman, it also challenges the way feminist historiography has been done, by questioning some of its basic constructions of “women’s sphere.”

In the last several years, there has been a proliferation of introductory texts, readers, and companions to feminist study of religion, feminist thealogy, and feminist theology. The editorial board of the JFSR has devoted some time to discussing the representation and codification of knowledge in the field. We are particularly concerned about how this body of scholarship is taught and transmitted to the next generation. We are grateful to contributing editor Carol Christ for writing an extensive review essay on eight of these texts. Christ begins by elaborating the risks facing feminist religious scholarship: the need to reinvent the wheel, institutional backlash, lack of support, and distortion of history by both male scholars and feminists. She raises a number of issues that should be of concern to feminist scholars working in the field. For example, she stresses that Christian dominance in research and publishing may lead to a skewed picture of the history of the development of the field. Related to this point is the narrow usage of the term theology in only Christian contexts, excluding Jewish, Buddhist, and Goddess traditions. Christ opposes a linear and successional construction of the history of the field, because it implies that the newer generation of scholars are more sophisticated than their foresisters. While pointing out the marginalization of the Goddess tradition in institutions of higher learning, she also calls attention to the danger in the way feminist scholarship is split between those working in religious institutions and those in secular universities. In the end, Christ raises the thorny question of how women can maintain a hermeneutics of suspicion while reading feminist texts and at the same time treat feminist theorists with empathy and respect, so that each generation will not need to reinvent the wheel but can build on the foundation of those who have gone before.

The first roundtable, on same-sex marriage, could not appear in this issue without the kind cooperation of the contributors, who promptly sent us their reflections even during their summer break. We are grateful to Mary Hunt for bringing to our attention the many issues involved in the same-sex marriage debate. Although she supports the right for same-sex couples to marry, she encourages us to use the ethical framework of relational justice to think through many of the questions involved. For example, she is concerned about the continued struggle for inclusivity of all kinds of relationship, the stigmatizing of those who refuse to marry, the historical link of marriage with patriarchy and the status quo, and the connection between social benefits and marriage status. These are admittedly difficult issues to raise when friends and colleagues of ours waited outside Cambridge City Hall the whole night of May 16 to get their marriage licenses and as champagne corks are popped and celebrations planned. But they have to be raised nonetheless. Respondents Marvin Ellison, Emilie Townes, Patrick Cheng, Martha Ackelsberg and Judith Plaskow, and Angela Bauer-Levesque deepen the conversation by elaborating on the relation between religious and civil marriages; racial, class, and sexual justice; religious discourse on sexuality and commitment; the sacramental dimension of marriage; and the integral link between the personal and the political. We thank especially Angela Bauer-Levesque, who brings an international perspective to the topic, for sharing her thoughts on her recent marriage and for using it as a concrete example to illustrate the complex politics surrounding the issue in Massachusetts and beyond.

The “Living It Out” section provides an inspirational cross-cultural perspective on same-sex marriage from the Hindu context. Ruth Vanita, who has done research on same-sex love in India for two decades, responded to our request to share her current work. She highlights the different meanings of marriage in India and the different roles the state plays in comparison to the U.S. context. She describes incidences of same-sex marriage in India and her own marriage in New York, and further argues that sanctification of same-sex love and commitment between women can be found in canonical Hindu texts. Noting that the relation between text and practice is multifaceted in the diverse Hindu tradition, she introduces us to some of those texts, rituals, and practices which affirm the “wedding of two souls” but which are not widely known to our Western readers. Toward the end, she suggests some interesting comparisons between the Bible and Hindu texts on same-sex love to enlarge our religious imagination and thinking about sexuality.

In the second roundtable discussion, Mary Elizabeth Hobgood issues a clarion call to academic feminists and church activists, given their relatively privileged social and institutional location, to reexamine their solidarity with what she calls “typical (world-majority) women.” She uses as an example a recent trip with church activists to Honduras to illustrate that many people with goodwill still think of solidarity in individualistic terms without engaging the systemic and global roots of oppression. She also cites incidences in academia to illustrate that academic feminists are not more astute or sophisticated in their social analysis of the ubiquitous exploitation than the church activists. She poses very hard questions to all of us: How are academic feminists co-opted or compromised by the neoliberalism that penetrates the ethos and structures of academia today? How can our highly abstract feminist theory be of service to the struggles of poor and disadvantaged women? What are the possibilities of our working with grassroots activists, given current hiring, tenure, and promotion procedures? How can academic feminists work collaboratively and not be divided by the church or the authority of academic institutions? We are indebted to respondents Daisy Machado, Jane Schaberg, Mary Churchill, and Christine Gudorf, who affirm many of Hobgood’s arguments yet add to the discussion by raising issues such as ethnicity and women living in the borderland; the challenge of teaching students who are not middle-class like us but who more closely resemble typical (world-majority) women; the struggle to create institutional space for feminist progressive work; and reexamining our thoughts on solidarity, learning from non-Western women and simultaneous translation of feminist work.

Echoing some of the concerns of the second roundtable, Jasmin Zine, in the “Cutting Edges” section, discusses creating a critically faith-centered space for antiracist feminism. As a Muslim scholar-activist in Toronto, Zine delineates the issues she and other Muslim activists face: a monolithic construction of Muslim women as victims, the intersection between racialized and gendered politics, and the schism between secular and religious feminism. A central concern of her essay is negotiating the boundaries of faith and feminism. Although secular feminists in general are suspicious of religious feminists, lamenting that they remain yoked to patriarchal and authoritarian traditions, such criticism is much more acute when it comes to Islam. Zine charges that white liberal feminists are sometimes unaware of their racist and classist biases when they uphold a dichotomy between “tradition” and “modernity,” seeing the latter in only secular terms. She uses the issue of her wearing the hijab to debunk and destabilize a fixed and simplified notion of identity, and regards the hijab as a situationally specific symbol through which to navigate within particular and complex terrains. She also offers her thoughts on a critical faith-centered epistemology, one that does not separate spirituality and faith commitment from the struggle for social justice.

Although the intention and contents of the essays in this issue vary a great deal from each other, together they touch on two of the important debates in feminist scholarship in the study of religion. One has to do with what we know and how we know it: the construction of the memory or heritage of feminist scholarship in religion, the foundation of a faith-based epistemology, the limitation of institutional location on scholarship and teaching, and the blinders of our race, class, or sexual orientation. The other has to do with how feminists apply religious insights and bring religious resources to bear on contemporary issues, from the horror of the Holocaust to same-sex marriage, economic disparity, and discrimination against Muslims. These essays call for feminist frameworks of analysis that are rooted in their historical matrix yet are mindful of the transcultural and transnational forces that are shaping our world today. We thank the contributors for advancing our discussion, and we hope that they will stimulate your thinking on these debates.

We are grateful to Lawrence Wills for his response to the roundtable discussion that appears in the preceding issue. That roundtable discussion touches on many important issues, and Wills has helped us continue the critical dialogue. We would also like to hear from other readers to further the conversation.

Kwok Pui-lan
Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza