That every child who wants might learn to dance.

Does willing the good for all mask demanding that all conform to our particular concepts of the good?

Before she married, Polly Miller Cooey, my mother, was an accomplished dancer. During the late forties, when I was about three years old, she began to teach dancing and baton twirling. She traveled throughout rural north Georgia, holding classes in the public schools as an itinerant dancing teacher. She charged a dollar per student per hour for classes in ballet, tap dancing, and acrobatics. For those who wanted private lessons she charged two dollars for half an hour. For baton twirling she charged fifty cents for half-hour classes. Every spring she held a recital, and all the students performed.

My mother believed that every child who wanted lessons should have them and that every child, no matter how poor, should be encouraged to want them. She never let lack of talent exclude a potential pupil. She reasoned that knowing how to dance and actually performing gave one confidence in public, no matter how clumsy and graceless the performance. She also choreographed elaborate productions, my most vivid memory being her production of the "Nutcracker Suite," performed in the sweltering presummer heat of rural Georgia. She spun fantasies of fairies and elves like no one I have ever known since, and she lured even the most cynical little boy and girl into participating in her illusions. I grew up pirouetting, tapping, tumbling, whirling, and twirling to all kinds of music, while immersed in frothy nets, satins, taffetas, laces, tassels, and feathers. I grew up surrounded by children, some of whom could leap through the air like gazelles and whirl like dervishes; others lumbered and flopped about like beached whales, with big toothy grins on their faces.

Most of these children came from lower middle class, working class, and rural families. Until the sixties, all were white. The working class and rural kids often came from large families with more than one child wanting lessons. With some exceptions, their parents worked as farmers, mechanics, clerical and secretarial staff at Lockheed, factory workers in Atlanta, school teachers, and support staff for Dobbins Air Force Base. Though most came from families with two parents, some of them, including me and my sister and my brother, were reared by single working mothers. Contrary to popular nostalgia about "stay-at-home morns" in the fifties, most of the mothers, whether with their husbands or without them, worked outside the home. Even at a dollar an hour, once a week, most parents could hardly afford to pay for one child, never mind two or more. So my mother and the other mothers worked out a barter system, trading home grown produce, transportation, hair care, and an array of other services in exchange for lessons.

The most elaborate example of this system was Ola Thomas and her four children. Ola was married to an independent truck driver who was often out of work. Ola herself worked as a seamstress on the assembly line for the Lovable Brassiere Company in Atlanta. Ola wanted dancing for all four children and baton twirling for three of them; she further wanted private lessons as well as classes. My mother and she worked out a deal whereby Ola fed my sister and me one night a week, supplied us with "seconds" in undergarments, and on occasion made me and my sister absolutely beautiful party dresses from undergarment taffeta and satin out of remnants. In exchange, Ola's children received both private and class lessons in dancing and baton, and Ola also made many of the costumes for mother's recitals. Without such a barter system there would have been far fewer, sometimes very talented, students taking lessons.

My mother and the mothers of her students understood that children needed confidence and that this confidence could be acquired through bodily discipline and practice. They knew well this confidence was much more important than talent. They also valued the experience of enjoying one's physicality for its own sake and sharing that joy through performance with one another and an audience of doting parents. So my mother inspired confidence in gawky children and spread joy like an epidemic across north Georgia for about two decades. Some of her students grew up, prospered, and brought their children to her for lessons - still at a dollar an hour and so forth. And my mother would work out payment with anybody, in some cases just plain giving lessons away - when so-and-so got laid off at Lockheed, was ill and had to quit work, or was wiped out by flood or drought. We ourselves had, mostly, a succession of extremely lean years.

My mother was not wild about the poverty, but she loved her work with a passion I used to suspect was reserved only for her work, to the exclusion of the rest of us. Now, looking back, I think, so what if it was! So what if she loved her work as much as life itself. Her work was one long sustained act of extraordinary generosity; in her imaginary world, every child who wished for it might learn to dance. And all of this work took place against a backdrop of rural poverty, economic instability for working class and lower middle class people, and the personal family tragedy of my father's alcoholism.

What makes this story more than simply a nostalgic memory? I have no doubt that the collusion of these women around dancing lessons for their children, a collusion of joy, was necessary to their own survival, as well as for the future betterment of their children. Furthermore, this community of women, conspiring to link children's bodies to dance, food, and clothing, in its own small way and in its own small location, temporarily subverted oppressive social structures.

I have now reached a point in life where I focus on the question of what sustains, transforms, and propels me, and maybe others like me, back into the world each day. Though I have discussed pleasure as well as pain throughout much of my work, virtually all of what I address is at least tinged by the horror of physical abuse, the grimness of poverty, and the shadow of death.

It would be unrealistic, to say the least, to expect to live to see a transformation of the world commensurate with my hopes, though my hopes are not utopian. I am hardly alone in either respect; women have worked together for justice, as sisters known and unknown for centuries, a work that is never done. So the question of what sustains us as we work toward imagined futures we do not expect to live is not simply a question of individual or social psychology, but of politics and theology. There are of course many contributing factors, over almost all of which we have little or no control, but I wish to explore here the theoretical and theological implications of one particular feature - namely, a certain quality of joy. I hope to illuminate how joy works as a strategy for survival that has profound, subversive possibilities in how gender, corporeality, and religion play out in relation to one another. This joy aids the survival of a people of faith and subverts the unjust and oppressive systems and structures that dominate human life today.

A Theoretical Consideration

Joy is a learned, culturally variable response, necessary to survival, for which sentience - the capacity to feel pain and pleasure - forms the bedrock.(1) Joy is learned in that it is interpretive - a cultivated response to an object of cognition (for example, a thought, an image, a person, an action, or a thing). For example, I learned as a child not to express (and preferably not even to feel) joy in the failure of others when I triumphed over them in various intellectual and physical competitions; as a child who loved to win, I found this lesson was hard. Later, I grew to loathe almost all forms of competition, precisely because they necessarily made the losers feel bad. This shift reflects the triumph of my specific religious tradition that stressed justice for the outcast, compassion and cooperation, over the norms of a wider capitalist culture. It also probably reflects successful socialization along gender lines. In any case, as this example indicates, just as the objects of joy vary across time and space, depending on the context of some culturally specific symbol system or set of systems, so the feeling of joy itself is nuanced along cultural lines and within specific cultures along developmental lines.

Feminist theorists have augmented social scientific theory by exploring the significance of gender. Feminist theorists, theologians, and theologians detected early on that joy is gendered, particularly in regard to sexuality and sexual taboo.(2) In many, if not all cultures, males and females alike are restricted from taking sexual pleasure in the genital manipulation of their own bodies. In addition, both male and female bodies are highly regulated by religious and social codes specifying what sexual practices are and are not acceptable. Comparatively speaking, the restrictions placed on the female body and female sexuality in Western Anglo-European culture have functioned to subordinate women to men and to force heterosexuality upon both genders.

Theorizing and practicing female pleasure in the female body, both one's own and that of another, became for many feminists of the second wave a politically liberating, spiritually uplifting, socially subversive act. Audre Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Mary Daly's deconstruction and reconstruction of ecstasy and lust, Emily Culpepper's film Period Piece, Carol Christ's theological celebration of menstruation, and Rita Nakashima Brock's constructive, theological appropriation of eros in Journeys by Heart come to mind. During this same period, in Europe, the French feminists and Luce Irigaray, aided by psychoanalytic methodology, expanded previous conceptions of women's sexuality by rendering erogenous the entire female body. Feminite, the celebration of female eros, and jouissance, the orgasmic delight or joy experienced through celebration, provided a liberating alternative to the phallogocentrism and androcentrism of male hegemony.

From culturally variable, learned behavior, crucial to survival and well being, to gender-differentiated strategy for social subversion, these social scientific and feminist conceptions of joy go a long way in accounting for the joy I find in much of my mother's work and many of her relationships. Certainly we learned as students that joy was an acceptable response to the discipline and performance of dance. This feeling was driven by physical exertion - ironically sometimes quite painful; at the same time performance itself could and often did produce an ecstasy that bears a family resemblance to jouissance. Our parents, mostly our mothers, learned to take pleasure, to feel joy, in our accomplishment. For many of us were provided an opportunity that few of our parents had as children, an opportunity that might give us polish, helpful to the upward mobility to which our parents aspired in this heavily classed society, in which class difference was masked by a rhetoric of democracy, but never absent. Both performers and observers learned joy; the effect was liberating.

The dance and the joy it evoked varied. While the culture in which I grew up for the most part found dancing socially acceptable, some of its communities prohibited dance altogether, never mind taking pleasure in it. To my Southern Baptist friends, for example, dancing meant eternal damnation. Both my mother and I had to contend with the evangelically exuberant concern of some of my schoolmates and their parents for our future state. Dance (both its performance and the observation of performance), as an object of cognition, cultivated joy as an appropriate affective response, where culturally accepted, but fear for the future, where unaccepted.

Because much of the culture of the time regarded sexuality at best with ambivalence, even the appropriateness of joy depended to some extent upon not acknowledging the full implications of the sensuality of dance, especially in regard to the younger children. It further depended upon "gendering" the bodies of the dancers: While the culture accepted teaching dance both to female and to male children, dance itself was feminized and most males moved on to other kinds of physical activity by the time they reached adolescence. Thus, little girls of my generation were taught early on that it was acceptable to want to be ballerinas when they grew up; little boys, however, were discouraged from pursuing dance as a career. Feminized, the world of dance created by my mother and her friends and clients provided a serious, if not unambiguous, female-centered alternative to the aggression of male sports. One could celebrate femininity, within certain fixed restrictions; one could experience joy with relatively little male intervention and dominance.

All the same, there is much left unaccounted for by theory as I have represented it here. Both social scientific and feminist theoretical accounts are limited by the neglect of issues of class difference. I attribute this neglect in part to the relative invisibility of class markers in an ostensibly democratic society. Whereas social scientific theory tends to oversimplify "culture," feminist theory oversimplifies "gender."

Ballet, for example, is viewed in this country as "high art" - in contrast to tap dancing, which originated in African and European folk dancing. Acrobatics, until gymnastics, was associated predominantly with the circus - hardly high art. Baton twirling, comparatively new to the world of performance, has never achieved the status of ballet or tap. That my mother put them all together reflected her own rural working class status. That she would make lessons readily available to the rank and file, outside the context of the dance studio, for almost two decades, was remarkable. That the public school system thought nothing of allowing her to pull students out of class to teach them a nonacademic hodgepodge of physical movement, for which their parents paid her directly, is a tribute to her astonishing powers of persuasion. As far as I know, it had never happened before, nor has it happened since in the school systems in which she taught. As she bent these systems to suit her goals, she extended the context in which students might encounter a range of arts to whole classes of people to whom such advantages had been previously unavailable. In short, my mother simply didn't know she was transgressing class-defined aesthetic categories.

Theoretically, then, feelings occur in relation not only to objects of cognition, but these objects of cognition occur in relation to wider, complex, politicized social systems of education and economic exchange that ultimately condition the feelings as well. As a response, joy is learned in relation to an array of objects, usually accompanied by regulations and values, further contextualized by the cultural and socioeconomic circumstances determining the subject who experiences joy. Gender as a category of analysis is neither the dominant nor even necessarily salient distinction by which to construe the world. In this instance, class is as significant as gender to understanding how such joy could have occurred.

This little world of dance, however feminized, blurred gender definition. Though most of the males left as adolescents, some did not. Of those who remained, some later identified themselves as gay, but most did not. Among the female students, their relationships with each other and with the male students reflected an amorphous sexuality. We touched one another and expressed affection without reservation, though not in overtly sexual ways. We openly appraised one another's bodies, yet never, as far as I know, engaged in genital relations. We were without sophistication, yet erotically aware. That such a world was culturally marked "feminine" illuminates how power is asserted and maintained by the use of gender distinction to regulate status - an issue often masked by naturalizing the social construction at work in concepts like gender and feelings like joy.

In short, joy is more complex than most theories of feeling allow. For example, for ethically mature adults, if not for everyone, joy cannot be experienced innocently. It is experienced instead against the backdrop of the knowledge of the suffering and violence that characterize much of human life. Thus, while one can imagine, however hideously, what it might mean to experience sustained pain in the absence of joy, it is almost impossible to imagine experiencing joy while ignorant of the coexistence of suffering. Tragedy and joy coexist.(3)

In spite of, perhaps because of, the knowledge of pain that subtly informs experiences of joy, joy is distinctively generous. It expands the self in relation to its objects, driving the self outward in relation to others.(4) Even in solitude, joy is so thoroughly dialogical as to drive the heart to sing out to nature, to a deity, to an imagined other, to the furniture, to whatever or whomever saturates the imagination. In short, joy virtually demands communication of one's pleasure. Thus, whereas many social scientists and theoreticians of sentience give primacy to pain in the making of culture, Suzanne Langer in Philosophy in a New Key makes a forceful case for joy in the sound of the human voice as the first impulse toward language and therefore culture and the communities that arise within it.(5)

This generosity is not ethically unambiguous, however, for one who experiences joy may seek to control her circumstances at the expense of others in order to inoculate against pain or boredom or indifference, a possibility rarely addressed by feminist theory. Concomitantly, those who experience it may "adjust" to it, developing a sense of entitlement.(6) This impulse to control, however illusory, can, when acted upon, create havoc in human communal and personal life.

Last, joy is complex in that it coparticipates in the social construal of reality. Because joy is tied to distinctive symbol systems - religious, political, economic, and socio-cultural - those who seek, explore, and cultivate various forms of joy, directly or indirectly, are, wittingly or unwittingly, engaged in legitimating and delegitimating the objects presented them by their cultures. They reciprocate in making and dismantling specific cultures.

A Theological Consideration

I now want to consider the theological implications of joy from a more specific, Reformed Protestant perspective - a tradition not exactly known for its great outpourings of joy - even as I inhabit the multiple worlds of feminism, academic life, citizenship in a secular, religiously pluralistic, republican democracy, heterosexual family life, and Anglo-European ethnicity. Or, better these multiple worlds inhabit me, creating no small tension in their often conflicting values and claims. It would, therefore, be misleading, if not impossible, to presume to develop a complete theology that reduces solely to joy as the central feature of human-divine relations or of human faith lived in response to a multiplicity of claims upon one's existence. Rather, I wish to illuminate how joy aids the survival of a small community and subverts unjust and oppressive systems and structures that dominate much of human life.

Joy is revelatory in ways that are less explicitly religious than, functionally speaking, parable-like. By "functionally speaking" I mean that the narrative of the dancing lessons performs as a parable, even though the narrative itself is not, strictly speaking, the same literary genre.

The story of my mother's dance classes, for example, though peopled mostly by families that identified themselves as Christian, has little, if any, conventionally religious meaning. But then neither do the parables attributed to Jesus in the gospels. They tell of commonplace, ordinary events in an agrarian society - farming, cooking, shepherding, losing money, mending, throwing dinner parties, family conflicts, squabbles over labor and wages, even assault and robbery. What makes them revelatory lies not in their reducibility to a single ethical or religious teaching, but in a constellation of features and interactions, chief among them an inversion of political power that further subverts conventional expectations. This characteristic of inversion and subversion may produce in the hearer a mature joy, that is, a joy that is not innocent of pain.

How does this transaction take place? The inversion of power ("the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed ...") generates surprise, a surprise that usually depends heavily on foiling the expectations of the hearers, compelling them to wonder, creating a disturbance to their conventional ways of thinking about God, the world, and themselves. Good parables turn the hearer upside down, inside out, and backward. So, many gospel parables depend for their richness of meaning upon an inversion of the ordinary relations of power, both secular and religious. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, for example, rather than working through control from the top down, God takes on the life of a despised ethnic and religious minority ministering to an elite and thus works in and through human life from the bottom up. Similarly, in the case of my mother's classes, poor families get dance lessons that are usually reserved for the more affluent, because powerless women infiltrate a public school and organize a barter system.

These inversions are disturbing, and as such are not innocent of pain. Consider the implications of the seed that falls upon the rocks or the dismay of the prodigal son's good brother, or ponder the host's rejection of the guests who refused his invitation. In the case of the dancing lessons, consider the backdrop of poverty and family tragedy, for which all the dancing lessons in the world could not ultimately compensate.

Nevertheless, these inversions and disturbances are also at bottom an occasion for joy. A host gives a dinner party and ultimately invites outcasts, the maimed, the poor and the reprobate; likewise a teacher finds students who want to learn to dance, without concern for whether they have talent or their parents can to pay for the lessons. Thus joy - over finding a lost coin or a lost sheep, or that a single seed could grow and flourish, or over arranging dancing lessons for four children - the joy of a character in a parable signifies for a hearer that what has occurred, however ambiguous, unexpected and disturbing, is good.

Parables do not depend on a conventionally religious context for their revelatory significance. Quite the contrary, they are subversive in confounding such expectations. They are stories meant to produce, among other things, joy. Parables detour from the conventionally supernatural, and this detour is good news. They exhibit undeviating concern with physicality and physical well being, even as they reflect and refract metaphorical significance. There is a party going on - here - now. God is in the flesh, among us - as host, as guest, as healer, as healed, as dancer, as loved one, as stranger, as outcast. Rejoice!

This revelatory transaction lures us to recognize the party wherever we find it in human life, however grim the circumstances that surround it. Far beyond scripture, one may seek and find parables, not only in a text, but also in a childhood memory, or for that matter, in relationships with others, in work, a visual image, a film, indeed throughout life. Thus, to my mind, the narrative of my mother's career as a dancing teacher performs as a parable. It reveals God's grace at work in the details of mid-twentieth century southern U.S. rural and working class life, sustaining an oppressed people who sought to be faithful to a vision for their children - a vision that in its execution subverted some of the economic and educational structures of oppression. Their joy, moreover, in all its corporeality and generosity, shared in the midst of an often grim existence, discloses a deep and abiding good will that identifies their work as God's ongoing work in human existence. It reveals God repairing a world through human joy - God's love compounding itself from the bottom up.

Creation and repair through joy challenge conventional theological conceptions of ethical love. Throughout much of Christian tradition, theologians have articulated ethical love as good will toward all, best exemplified in self-sacrifice directed universally without reference to the particularity of those whom we love.(7) Feminist critique of the damaging effects on women of idealizing self-sacrifice has been ongoing from Valerie Saiving's early work in the late 1950s to Bonnie Miller-McLemore's Also a Mother.(8) The last decade has seen increasing feminist critique of universalism on two counts: (1) universalism elevates Eurocentric elite male experience, values, and norms as a single standard for what is human, a pressure to conform disguised as inclusiveness; and (2) it elevates Eurocentric Christian and secular feminist experience as normative, creating an all-inclusive woman at the expense of actual women's ethnic, class, sexual and religious diversity.(9)

Joy suggests the falseness of the alleged dilemma of self-fulfillment vs. self-sacrifice. Joy is ethically ambiguous. It may be generous, selfish, both, or ecstatic, though it tends to direct the self outward toward others in some way. Thus, the context in which joy occurs largely determines its ethical implications.

In the case of the dancing lessons, the mothers took joy in part because they enjoyed watching their children dance. My mother the teacher and Ola Thomas the seamstress found joy in their work of teaching and sewing and the beauty both produced. We children, their beneficiaries, enjoyed learning to dance and perform in recitals, although practicing was another matter. In short, the mothers' good will toward their children produced a reciprocal delight in the children that refracted back as further delight for the mothers. Thus, we see joy compounding and reverberating.

What strikes me about this joy is how little it was explicitly focussed either on self-sacrifice or on self-fulfillment. Surely both were involved, but selves were not at the forefront of consciousness. Rather the focus was on the dance - taught, learned, staged, costumed, performed, watched, and usually paid for in some fashion. Looking back, I now see dance as a profound metaphor for love, both human and divine, for which the language of self-sacrifice and self-fulfillment is impoverished at best. While I think it extremely important not to be seduced by moralizing on the purity of self-sacrificing love, especially as this relates to central cultural myths like the nobility of motherhood or Jesus' substitutionary self-sacrifice for human sin, I find the psychology of the human potential movement as the justification for self-fulfillment every bit as troubling in its ideology of self-interest and individual autonomy. To my mind, the fundamental character of a shared joy that is not focused on selves per se has much to teach us about love that moves beyond measuring self-sacrifice against self-fulfillment, indeed, beyond measuring the self at all.

A similarly false dilemma is posed between the universal and the particular in feminist as well as traditional rhetoric. In the context of the dancing lessons we see joy linking corporeality with community in ways conducive to its survival and temporarily subverting of the wider systems that oppress it. The narrative captures particular lives in community during a brief time in a highly specific locale. Nevertheless, the event has implications far beyond the confines of its particularity.

For example, one of my mother's primary motives was to give dancing lessons to as many children as she possibly could, irrespective of talent. It was so important that she went to great lengths to make it as available as possible. The joy she experienced further fueled her generosity. Furthermore, her joy was contagious in ways, unforeseen at the time, that would enrich future generations. Her commitment - that every child who wanted might learn to dance - carried it a trajectory toward universalizing.

I see this trajectory as a universality of intent, as distinguished from a universality of origin or of end. My mother, for example, did not assume a universality of origin, that is, that all her pupils shared the same circumstances. Had she done so, she might have insisted that all families pay in cash. She did not assume a universality of ends, or she might not have accepted the untalented. She took her students as she found them in their range of skills, encouraging them to do their best for their sakes. Her aim was to share her own gifts with everyone. She further assumed that everyone else should share their own unique talents. She became a particular manifestation of a universal love.

The generosity of joy, in this context, bears witness to the relation between the universal and the particular. This necessary relation is for me at the heart of the claims of the Incarnation and at the center of a theological ethic of love. How to conceive this relation theologically while respecting the distinctiveness of particular persons and communities is, of course, a troubling question. Whereas previous theologians asked: Can we will the good for all if we take joy in the particular, I think feminist theologians have asked: Does willing the good for all mask demanding that all conform to our highly particular concepts of love and the good? This is a good question, leading to further questions: Do our particular loves and joys call upon us to honor the particular loves of others and to seek to honor those loves, precisely in their differences from our own? If so, is this not an impulse toward universal love, albeit conceived quite differently from the universality of self-sacrificing love? Therefore, can we will the good for all as agnostics and pluralists with respect to the precise nature of the "all" and the "good?" That is what feminist theologians and theologians assume when we claim to seek justice for oppressed people from a feminist perspective.

I have traveled quite a distance in this investigation of joy, as it relates corporeality, through imagination, to the wider world. From a childhood memory, to a critical analysis of theories of joy, to an exploration of a few of the theological implications of joy as revelatory and as a sign of ethical love, I have sought to show that joy might bind us to one another and feed us, as we seek to be agents of healing and transformation. In tracing some of the contours of joy, I have tried to perform that of which I speak. I have often raised rather than resolved fundamental questions and often been more suggestive than systematic in my response. In addition, I want to emphasize that, although joy is crucial to survival and carries within it enormous potential to subvert oppressive structures, other profoundly important qualities of embodied imagination interact with joy, sending us into the world day after day as well - among them, courage, hope, faith, righteous anger, and the memory of suffering. I also want to stress that joy guarantees no happy endings, no absence of pain. Nevertheless, to paraphrase an ancient poet, while weeping may tarry for the night, joy comes with the morning, that our grieving might turn to dance and our souls might sing in praise (Psalm 30).

Notes

1. There are numerous empirical studies on this issue, as well as a number of books by theorists of culture and religion. The most comprehensive examples in religious studies include Wayne Proudfoot's Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) and Cooey, Religious Imagination and the Body: A Feminist Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), both of which include extensive bibliographies citing the empirical studies.

2. See Carol S. Vance, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston: Routledge, 1984) as an early example.

3. See Kathleen M. Sands, Escape from Paradise: Evil and Tragedy in Feminist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994).

4. See Richard Niebuhr's Experiential Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1972).

5. See Suzanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957). For a contrasting position see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

6. See Nico H. Frijda, "The Laws of Emotion," American Psychologist 43, no. 5 (May 1988): 353.

7. See Anders Nygren, Eros and Agape, trans. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953).

8. See Bonnie Miller-McLemore, Also a Mother: Work and Family as Theological Dilemma (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994).

9. For example, see Sharon Welch, A Feminist Ethic of Risk (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990) and Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Changing the Subject' Women's Discourses and Feminist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994).

PAULA M. COOEY teaches at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, where she is Professor of Religion. Her most recent books are Family, Freedom and Faith: Building Community Today (Westminster John Knox, 1996) and Religious Imagination and the Body: A Feminist Analysis (Oxford University Press, 1994).