Horizons in Feminist Theology: Identity, Tradition, and Norms.'

Rebecca S. Chopp and Sheila Greeve Davaney, eds. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997. 264pp. $18.00 (paper).

In recent years, feminist theology has become increasingly multi-faceted, drawing upon the diverse theories and methodologies of feminist work in other intellectual disciplines. The essays collected in this volume illustrate the diversity and complexity that have come to characterize feminist theological scholarship.

The aim of the book, according to one of its editors, is to explore the ways in which feminist theory informs, sustains, and advances the work of feminist theologians. Theoretical frameworks are understood here not as "grand schemes with universalistic pretensions," but as those (usually tacit) sets of assumptions which undergird our normative claims. The turn to theory, as Sheila Greeve Davaney points out, "is not a covert return to the grand theories of old but a commitment to a critical analysis that seeks to make clear the often implicit and unacknowledged presuppositions that shape our feminist proposals" (3).

In this regard, the book succeeds very well. The contributors analyze the use of theory in feminist theology with depth and nuance. Categories like "women's experience," canonized and unquestioned in early feminist work, are deconstructed here as products of white, middle-class feminism which have unwittingly served to exclude and silence other women. Serene Jones's essay, for example, traces the various ways in which "women's experience" is understood and deployed within feminist, womanist, and mujerista theologies. She locates (perhaps over-simplistically) several contemporary feminists within one of two camps: those who presuppose a universalizing, ahistorical framework for constructing accounts of women's experience and those who adhere to the historically localized and culturally specific for such accounts.

Similarly, Linell Cady sketches the various ways the categories of experience, identity, and subjectivity have functioned in feminist scholarship. Recognizing the problematic nature of a unified "women's experience," Cady calls for an account of subjectivity as plural and shifting. Nonetheless, she insists that such a view must maintain the coherence and concreteness of women's real identities, if it is to avoid the postmodern turn toward the radical dispersal of the self.

In her essay on a feminist history of theology, Sheila Briggs notes that feminist theory has often functioned under the "ideological shroud of male universalizations," failing to challenge the dominant theoretical models and concepts that construct the disciplines of history and theology. One problematic result is that "women end up doing all the work of gender" (170).

Paula Cooey's essay on "Bad Women" helpfully points to feminist theory's failure to fully account for the moral complexity of women. Theory has often allowed for the romanticization of women, rendering them incapable of violence and rage outside the bounds of victimization. As a corrective to this view Cooey calls for a "reconstruction of subjectivity that would take seriously the moral ambiguity of women's agency" (145).

Considering the implications of postmodern discourse for feminist theology, Catherine Keller's essay, "Seeking and Sucking," cautions contemporary feminists in their zeal to embrace the anti-essentialism of postmodernity at the expense of relational accounts of identity and selfhood. Keller appeals to cross-gendered images of the divine in early Christianity (a female Holy Spirit, a breasted Father) to argue for a current conception of "gender fluidity" that can maintain a sense of the connectedness and "ethical mutuality" which should characterize our moral subjectivities.

The essay by Thandeka echoes some of the themes developed by Keller, but diverges in its articulation of an account of the embodied self as "the felt congruence of mind and body with the surrounding environment as one moment of lived experience" (80). Thandeka's proposal seeks, with some qualifications perhaps, to rehabilitate Schleiermacher's stress on feeling and on the prelinguistic nature of religious experience. Thandeka unabashedly embraces theoretical frameworks and constructs that many feminists (including most of those represented in this volume) would categorically reject.

Where the book does not succeed so well is in its attempt to be theological as editor Rebecca S. Chopp acknowledges in the concluding essay. Preoccupied as they are with analyzing the role of theory in theology, the book's contribUtors give short shrift to actual substantive theological proposals that could and should emerge out of such analyses. Moreover, for all the attention that feminism generally pays to praxis, materiality, and lived experiences, there is very little engagement with concrete social practices and traditioned communities. In short, it all remains too theoretical. Davaney, for example, helpfully makes the case that any and all accounts of subjectivity, identity, and tradition must be radically historicized and that the "values and normative claims that emerge within [traditions] are multiple and not reducible to some common center" (210-11). Yet she does not offer the kinds of culturally specific, historically grounded examples which would give her argument more weight.

The title of Laura Levitt's essay, "Becoming an American Jewish Feminist," suggests that it is a recounting of how her Jewishness has been central for understanding and articulating her identity as a feminist. But, in fact, the essay does not recount such a process; Jewishness is constructed here as a kind of abstract "otherness," with no details or particulars to flesh out its own substance and shape. While Levitt writes poignantly about her personal experience of rape and the attempts to establish "home" and "identity" in the aftermath of such an ordeal, the promising theological implications, particularly as they relate to her Jewish heritage, are not examined.

Similarly, Janet R. Jakobsen's essay on "The Body Politic vs. Lesbian Bodies" expressly avoids theological reflection altogether, making it appear an odd inclusion in the book. Exploring the public norms by which lesbian bodies are constituted and contained, Jakobsen makes compelling claims about the ways in which bodies are constructed in the public arena - and thus rendered visible and/or invisible. She does not, however, explore the theological ramifications of such political and social constructions.

One essay that does attempt to approach a theology of bodiliness is Mary McClintock Fulkerson's feminist account of the imago Dei. Arguing that the social constructionist model of human subjectivity only perpetuates binary gender difference (that is, "the givenness of male and female sexed bodies"), Fulkerson advocates a poststructuralist account of gender which forces us to ask who is being excluded in such constructions. Poststructuralism exposes binary, gendered subjects as products of the dominant systems of discourse, not of a natural or fixed essence. Though Fulkerson's piece is clearly more theoretical than theological, she does attempt to connect this poststructuralist account of identity to the Christian understanding of the imago Dei. While feminist theology historically has criticized the tradition for failing to see women as fully participating in and reflecting the image of God, Fulkerson holds out hope that "the imago Dei entails no essential definition of the subject, characterized only by finitude and God-dependence" (108).

The essay which offers the richest possibilities for constructing substantive theological proposals is, ironically, the most controversial one in the book. Kathryn Tanner's "The 'New Social Movements' and the Practice of Feminist Theology" seeks to show how certain theories of culture (especially those of Gramsci and Foucault) are relevant to "particular forms of liberative practice." Tanner argues the poststructuralist point that all meanings, symbols, and cultural forms in a given socio-political arrangement are shifting, fluid, and dynamic, and that this is good news for feminist theologians engaged in the work of reconfiguring the church's patriarchal past.

What is controversial about this proposal is that Tanner is committed to a re-working of the normative traditions of Christianity, not to de novo inventions. "A feminist theology," she argues, "will gain wide support for its cultural and social vision only where it succeeds in organizing as many as possible of the elements incorporated in patriarchal discourse, according to a different logic" (190). But, as Chopp points out, some of the contributors to this volume would reject Tanner's position as too indebted to the formulations of the past, although it seems clear that Tanner is not arguing for a conception of the Christian tradition as fixed and final, but rather for its inherent fluidity and dynamism and its ability to be mobilized effectively for feminist ends and goals.

Finally, while the collection as a whole is rather thin on theology, it does help to clear a path for forthcoming feminist theological projects to be more attentive to the theoretical assumptions that attend their constructive work. In that sense, the book is a timely and necessary voice in the ongoing conversation that is feminist theology.

DEBRA DEAN MURPHY