The 30th Anniversary Roundtable on JFSR: “Difficult Intersections and Messy Coalitions (but in a Good Way)”
“Difficult Intersections and Messy Coalitions (but in a Good Way)”
Like so many scholars and teachers working today, I count myself lucky that JFSR exists. By the time I had become honest with myself about my interests in women and religion and came into my own feminist consciousness (as an undergraduate student in the 1990s), JFSR had been publishing for almost a decade. Once I found this work, it was both an auspicious revelation and a tremendous luxury to simply take for granted that one can do feminist work in religious and theological studies from this starting point without (on at least one level) having to justify a feminist project. JFSR was invaluable as an interdisciplinary and intersectional resource from the start, quite possibly because it was also interreligious from the start.
Of course, at far too many times, feminist scholars are asked to justify ourselves, our methods, and our commitments to other scholars and to activists, many of whom are reflexively suspicious of religion. These are difficult moments, but moments for which we are prepared by the examples provided by the journal since its history is one marked by a willingness to engage in “hard conversations.” From its very first edition in 1985, JFSR has regularly featured roundtable sections that provide a key venue for difficult conversations, conflicted and conflicting experiences, and hard truths about race and place, backlash and the past, sources and generations. As a biblical scholar currently working at the intersections of feminist, postcolonial, and queer approaches, the spring 2004 roundtable on anti-Judaism and postcolonial biblical interpretation particularly stands out as both illuminating and challenging (now and then). These previous issues of the journal are not simple illustrations of a messy past that we have learned to tidy but, rather, represent a variety of milestones that are also opportunities for continued learning and engagement.
Judging from recent experiences, this kind of work and the opportunities it presents are still very badly needed. In just this academic year, I have participated in two separate scholarly events (on two continents) where presenters claimed to do progressive and even explicitly feminist work on, with, and through the interpretation of Paul’s letters, but used their energies instead to perpetuate anti-Jewish, racially charged, and body-negating ideas and practices. Because neither interpreter was critically attentive to interlocking and reinforcing dynamics of power, it was clear that they (and quite possibly their hosts) [159] had not learned the historic lessons that feminist resources such as JFSR have taught. Feminist work, then, remains necessary, even after thirty years of this journal. Despite many who try to tell us that we have already arrived, feminisms are not just efforts of a reformist past to be celebrated and (not so incidentally) contained.
Indeed, the kinds of intersectional analysis I have learned from feminist scholarship in religious studies (and which would have likely prevented the manifest problems I encountered this year) remain a topic of lively debate, including in feminist circles outside religious studies.1 If intersectionality is a method (or even the method for feminist scholarship), then Jasbir Puar, for one, worries that such a conceptualization treats identity components (like gender, sexuality, race, and religion) as stable and discrete entities, separate and disassembled coordinates, rather than fluidly mobile and interactively mixing forces.2 As a scholar in feminist religious studies, though, the latter emphasis sounds much like what can be found in one of the best-known tools for intersectional analysis: Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s concept of kyriarchy.3 Kyriarchy stresses the intertwining and multiplying dynamics of power and privilege that are of common concern to both Schüssler Fiorenza and Puar.4
The potential of this exchange about intersectionality, then, can make a difference within and beyond religious and theological studies’ circles. Indeed, one of the founding commitments of JFSR stresses the task of “bringing critical feminist theory to bear on religious studies.”5 Such a commitment particularly resonates with and potentially describes the kind of work that I try to do and work that I think should continue in both vigorous and variegated ways. Yet as the above example hopefully highlights, the direction of these applications and conversations should also be reversed. When feminist work in religious and theological studies receives and responds to critical theories and, in turn, develops its own insights and terminologies, these should “cross back” over the too closely maintained divides between disciplines.
Of course, this might just happen more often if JFSR continues to engage messy issues and hard conversations. There are many directions these conversations can still go, but one I would relish in particular would be an increasing engagement with queer projects in religious and theological studies. I have argued elsewhere that, despite claims to the contrary, the most compelling parts of queer studies (within and outside religious studies) are specific kinds of feminist projects.6 Indeed, one can see the often tense but provocative relationship between these overlapping theoretical trajectories in many US institutions with departments and programs in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Feminist and queer studies share a range of overlapping concerns and common political and theoretical resources.7
In what ways can these overlapping trajectories still impact feminist religious and theological studies? The potential exchange, or even traffic, between Puar and Schüssler Fiorenza’s work could indicate just one possibility, particularly given the reception of Puar’s work in both feminist and queer theoretical and cultural studies. In what (other) ways can feminist religious and theological studies speak back to queerly feminist efforts and effects? When I read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reflections on paranoid and reparative modes of reading, for instance, I wonder about their potential connections to the hermeneutics of suspicion and of remembrance (also elucidated by Schüssler Fiorenza, among others).8 Are the former just versions of the latter, in different registers? Or does Sedgwick challenge the prominence of suspicion for feminist and queer interpretation? Or might Schüssler Fiorenza signal the necessity of this move (particularly with religious modes of argumentation) and flesh out Sedgwick’s reparative efforts?
Furthermore, if queer modes of analysis and critique focus especially on countering regimes of the normal and the natural, such modes raise concerns about whether, and then how, feminist and queer scholars and activists can develop norms for our work without also generating normalizing or naturalizing [161] effects. Such modes highlight that, even among similarly committed feminists, there can be conflict and dissent, differences and disagreements. Indeed, potential and historical conflicts have been the subject of previous retrospective reflections of and about JFSR. On one such occasion, Elizabeth Pritchard proposes that the work of this journal requires, “the art of balancing consent (feeling together) and dissent (feeling apart) . . . a practice not of tolerating ‘others’ but of risking and registering dissent without fragmenting the collective.”9 To engage in cutting-edge work, the difficult labor of intersectional and interdisciplinary feminist scholarship, then, necessarily involves messiness and risks, hard truths and occasionally hard feelings. The question remains, then, what coalitional work will the journal take up in the years to come and, thus, what risks will these coalitions involve? Considering the history of the journal, such efforts are most certainly worth the risks.
1. See, for instance, “Intersectionality: Theorizing Power, Empowering Theory,” ed. Sumi Cho, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, and Leslie McCall, special issue, Signs 38, no. 3 (2013).
2. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), especially 211–16.
3. Some basic definitions of kyriarchy can be found in Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Rhetoric and Ethic: The Politics of Biblical Studies (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), ix, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), 1, 118–19, and 211.
4. For further reflections on the relevance of Puar to feminist and queer religious studies (and feminist and queer religious studies’ potential relevance to feminist and queer studies, in general), see Joseph A. Marchal, “Bio-Necro-Biblio-Politics? Restaging Feminist Intersections and Queer Exceptions,” in “Terrorist Assemblages Meets the Study of Religion: Rethinking Queer Studies,” special issue, Culture and Religion, 15, no. 2 (2014): 166–76.
5. Nami Kim and Deborah Whitehead, “Editors’ Introduction: Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Feminist The*logies/Studies in Religion,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 25, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 1–18, quotation on 16.
6. See, for instance, Joseph A. Marchal, “Queer Studies and Critical Masculinity Studies in Feminist Biblical Studies,” Scholarship and Movement: Feminist Biblical Studies in the Twentieth Century, vol. 21, The Bible and Women: An Encyclopaedia of Exegesis and Cultural History, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014), 304–27.
7. For one recent (and very particular) expression of the connections between feminist and queer theories, see Lynne Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
8. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Reading in Fiction, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 1–37; and Schüssler Fiorenza, Wisdom Ways, 175–77, 183–86.
9. Elizabeth Pritchard, “JFSR: A Dissenting View,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 25, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 217–20, quotation on 220.