Changing the Subject. Women's Discourses and Feminist Theology. By Mary McClintock Fulkerson. Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 412. £13.50 (original) (raw)

1999, Scottish Journal of Theology

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Mary McClintock Fulkerson's "Changing the Subject" critiques feminist theology's treatment of language and representation, advocating for a poststructuralist approach to women's discourse. The text emphasizes the importance of respecting women's diverse faith practices and the need for a representation of women's experiences that eschews simplistic categorizations. Through the lens of intertextuality and social coding, Fulkerson argues for a rethinking of feminist theology that recognizes the ambiguity of meaning and encourages a dynamic interaction between scripture and community.

Making Sense of Feminist Theology Today

Religion Compass, 2008

Feminist theology today denotes a widening field of scholarship that shares historic, pragmatic concerns about gender justice in diverse cultural and racial contexts, but that increasingly differs in approach. In this essay, we discuss internal, creative challenges surfacing in (largely Christian) feminist theologies and review the historical social movements that have shaped them up to the present. Theologians who use race, queer, and postcolonial theory to assert the co-constituting dynamics of gender with race, class, sexuality, nationality, and religion are muddying the waters of older feminisms that focused exclusively on gender, rendering the future of feminist theologies more ambiguous, broad-reaching, and fluid.

Fragments for Fractured Times: What Feminist Practical Theology Brings to the Table

2020

Link to publication in VU Research Portal citation for published version (APA) Slee, N. M. (2017). Fragments for Fractured Times: What Feminist Practical Theology brings to the Table. Vrije Universteit. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ? Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.

Spiritualising the Sacred: A Critique of Feminist Theology

Modern Theology, 1997

Though this paper is critical of feminist theology, it is not written out of any long-standing or deep-seated antagonism towards the feminist theological enterprise. Indeed, far from growing out of hostility, it grows out of much more positive feelings, out of the high hopes and expectations of feminist theology which I once held. For when I first became aware of feminist theology in the early 1980s it seemed to me, as to many of my fellow students of theology, like water in the desert. It was enormously refreshing to hear women's voices in theology, voices willing to identify themselves as women and to claim their right to do theology. For almost two thousand years, the study and writing of theology had been an almost exclusively male preserve, and the self-conscious and unapologetic emergence of women into this world was truly a momentous thing. So I felt-and I still feel-a debt of gratitude to those pioneering feminist theologians whose courage made me feel a little more courageous and whose presence made me feel a little less like an intruder into a world which was not my own. Despite this continuing gratitude, my positive feelings about feminist theology have over the years changed to disappointment and frustration. The burden of my complaint is that feminist theology has failed to be sufficiently theological. I believe that this is the result of a failure to engage in any serious and sustained way with the realities of Christian faith and tradition. This failure mars both the critical and the constructive projects of feminist theology: the former is marked by a tendency to ignore the more complex realities of the Christian faith, past and present, and by a preference for a rather simplistic modern construal of Christianity, whilst the latter Modern Theology 13:

Living the Contradiction: Life Histories, Feminism, Theology

2003

This essay compares the life narratives of American and German feminist religious thinkers, exploring significant interconnections between theological and autobiographical narratives in these two cultural contexts. On the American side of this comparison, the essay focuses on the intellectual autobiographies of two of the most prominent American feminist religious thinkers, Mary Daly’s Outercourse (1992) and Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Disputed Questions (1982). These two texts use similar discursive strategies to create an emphatically female presence while at the same time tapping central figures of masculinity to endow their speaking subjects with power. However, they also weave their stories into American cultural narratives of individual and national independence and expansion. The autobiographical element in this discourse does not, as is often claimed, so much provide a link to a general “women’s experience” but it rather serves to authenticate the theological vision by grounding it in the divinely ordained voice of the prophet. As a point of reference, I draw on the writing of German feminist theologians of roughly the same generation and equivalent status as intellectual and spiritual leaders, specifically Dorothee Sölle’s Gegenwind (1995) and Elisabeth Moltmann-Wendel’s Wer die Erde nicht berührt, kann den Himmel nicht erreichen (1997). The autobiographical writing of all four of these theologians combines the power of politics, spirituality and aesthetics to formulate a vision of women’s place in religious ritual and myth that does not aim for a piece of the pie but for a wholly new recipe. The analysis explores three major aspects of feminist autobiographical writing: First, a comparative analysis of the authorial Self, in other words of the narrative voice in the text, reveals a fundamental difference in the source and shape of this voice between the American and German texts. Second, a look at the structure of the autobiographical narrative itself discloses another fundamental cultural boundary: The autobiographies by Ruether and Daly create coherent and cohesive personal narratives of liberation; Sölle and Moltmann-Wendel to the contrary significantly present episodic texts that resist the pull of plot coherence. Therefore, a narrative voice with an apparently culturally specific subject position foregrounds gender discontinuities and authority for the American authors and personal accountability for the two German writers.

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Redemptive Feminist Exegesis

in Feminist Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Retrospect. Vol II;Recent Research in Biblical Studies in Honor of Feminist Biblical Scholars. Edited by Rachel Magdalene, Susanne Scholz, Alan J. Hauser. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press., 2014