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Critical Religion and Female Genius

10 Monday Dec 2012

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What are some of the implications of the discussion of critical religion for feminist and gender theory making?

If part of the rationale for critical religion is to explain the ways in which the terms ‘religious’ and ‘religion’ frame and perpetuate forms of colonialist or western-centred thinking and acting in the world, then there is a clear connection: the nature of colonial discourse and the manner of its practices, have commonly been aligned with forms of Christian theological authority, carried in wide ranging missionary activity throughout the world.  The gendered binaries of spiritual/material or spirit/flesh, derived from or supported by Christian theologies, still haunt us in the tendency to regard women and the female as better fitted for certain roles that tend to be less well rewarded in terms of money and influence.  Recent analyses of the colonial subject/other strongly resonate with feminist and gender analyses of the hegemonic, patriarchal subject/other; woman like the non-westerner continues to be viewed as hostile, constantly in need of control or repression as they threaten the structures and boundaries that colonial, heteropatriarchal societies set up to maintain their privilege and security.  The force of male normativity, often still difficult to detect, continues to hinder and hamper attempts to level the playing field.

In this context, it seems that a sizeable proportion of western feminists have also found the binary categories of ‘religion’ and ‘the secular’ – i.e. what is critiqued within discussions of ‘critical religion’ – useful, on the grounds that it allows women to dissociate themselves from powerful ‘religious’ – i.e. arbitrary – justifications of male authority. In a hopeful manner, they have  put their faith in the autonomous exercise of reason that produced this distinction at the beginning of the European enlightenment, because here at least in the realm of so called ‘secularity’ they believe there is some chance of proving themselves the equal of men.

But of course forms of hegemony are resilient and deeply rooted.  Even when the idea of a divine warrant for female culpability – and thus for the blameworthiness and moral inferiority of all women as daughters of Eve – began to lose its hold  on the popular imaginary, there were still plenty of other ways to challenge a woman’s free access to what might be called equitable female subjectivity.  In my book, Because of Beauvoir, I look, for example, at the notion of ‘genius’ as one way in which the idea of male superiority has been sustained from the earliest years of European Romanticism right down to the 2010 Channel 4 series, Genius of Britain.  In this series about key British scientific figures, four male and one female commentator – physicist, Kathy Sykes  – present the ‘genius of Britain’ in relation to a series of exclusively male figures: Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke. Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and Edmond Halley.  The fact that such an obvious gender imbalance provoked little if any disquiet at the time – are there really no British women in the field of science worthy of the title, ‘genius’? – seems significantly to support my argument; male hegemony cannot be neatly isolated within so-called ‘religious’ entities like ‘the Christian Churches.’

At the same time, is it just or fair to represent all women who call themselves Christians, for example, as either victims of, or collaborators with patriarchy?  In my book I focus on four women writers, who might qualify as female geniuses all of whom have strong connections with English Christianity; drawing on ideas proposed by Julia Kristeva and Christine Battersby amongst others, that our western idea of ‘genius’ has been overwhelmingly gendered as male in the past and that this needs to change.  Kristeva boldly claims that the achievement of an equitable subjectivity within the context of an unavoidable male hegemony, is itself a matter of genius.  She herself nominates three notable women – philosopher, Hannah Arendt, psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein and writer, Colette – but her definition of genius in each case, stresses the sense in which they bring their creative ideas and actions to birth without denying those things that make them female – pre-eminently in the value they apportioned to the desire and embodiment of the non hegemonic fe/male which are discounted in definition by the male.

In other words, this redefinition of genius, opens the title up to a much increased range of women and forms of creative activity by going beyond the disembodied and god-like, and frequently also melancholic and isolated configuration of  towering masculine genius, whose work contributes to a normatively male culture and economy; it can include both women scientists working with mixed gender teams and women giving birth to children and educating them.  And of course, it can include women who are inspired as visionaries as well as by revolutionary or highly critical movements of all kinds.  What comes into being as a result of this female genius can have just as profound an impact for one person or many of different genders, but more significantly, it is, above all, the joyous achievement of forms of female subjectivity in unpromising circumstances that are not usefully divided up and evaluated as either ‘secular’ or ‘religious’.

Book launch: Alison Jasper’s “Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius”

28 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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Dr Alison Jasper, Prof. Ann Loades

Dr Alison Jasper, Prof. Ann Loades

Eighty people came to Glasgow University Chapel for the launch of two books on 21. November, one by our own Alison Jasper, Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius, the second by her husband, David Jasper, The Sacred Community: Art, Sacrament, and the People of God, both published by Baylor University Press (Waco, Texas), 2012.

Prof. David Jasper

Prof. David Jasper

David introduced a number of speakers, beginning with Professor Nigel Leask, Regius Professor Of English Literature at the University of Glasgow, who welcomed all.

Prof. Nigel Leask

Prof. Nigel Leask

Right Rev. Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh, then spoke of David’s book, commending it for its careful examination of the liturgical community and the place of the community in the church and the world.

Rt Rev. Richard Holloway

Rt Rev. Richard Holloway

Right Rev. Gregor Duncan, Bishop of Glasgow and Galloway, spoke in similarly warm terms of David’s contribution to contemporary theology.

Rt Rev. Gregor Duncan

Rt Rev. Gregor Duncan

Professor Ann Loades, CBE, Professor Emerita of Durham University, and Prof. Richard Roberts, Visiting Emeritus Professor at Stirling and a member of the Critical Religion Research Group, both addressed the publication of Alison’s book.  Professor Loades commented:

I have read the book with admiration … it is beautifully organised and written, and entirely original both in its conceptual framework (female genius) and in the examples you use… the fight for the recognition of what women have and continue to do is no joke, as we wll know.

Prof. Ann Loades

Prof. Ann Loades

Professor Roberts placed Dr Jasper’s book in the wider context of Simone de Beauvoir’s argument, picking up particularly on de Beauvoir’s description of the male lack of empathy for the situation of women (‘It is… a difficult matter for man to realize the extreme importance of social discriminations which seem outwardly insignificant but which produce in woman moral and intellectual effects so profound that they appear to spring from her original nature’; The Second Sex, 1953/1988 edition, p26).  Marriage, motherhood and sacrifice became reified metaphors in this context.  And yet it is precisely this context that enables ‘female genius’ to achieve being and creativity.  She describes,

… the surprising complexity of many singular lives in which female genius is achieved in the pleasures of a courageous and creative dialogue with the problematic structures created as a consequence of male-normative perspectives. (Jasper, p41)

Prof. Richard Roberts

Prof. Richard Roberts

There is, therefore, a world of female achievement to be explored before the past sixty years, and Jasper does this using a variety of approaches, but with a particular emphasis on Julia Kristeva’s thinking.  Using four women as case studies – Jane Leade (b. 1624), Hannah More (b. 1745), Maude Royden (b. 1876) and Michèle Roberts (b. 1949) – she shows how they have ‘all been formed in some way by Christianity, its praxis, its beliefs, or its ethical and aesthetic sensibilities’, and all can be regarded as examples of female genius: ‘the struggle to avoid being objectified within male-normative contexts while seeking to engage genuinely with “the other”, including men.’ (p. 75)  This approach to female genius, Jasper argues,

tries to do justice to the full complexity of the lives of women who struggle against the consequences of male-normative frameworks of value while also managing to create new relationships and think in new ways that keep the temptations and perilous dangers of that framework itself clearly in focus. (p. 75)

Professor Roberts cited Jasper’s closing lines from the book:

…contemporary feminist discourse needs to recognise that we do have a past that informs a present and our ongoing discussions with each other, globally, in much more complex ways than merely in terms of a negative – for example, Christian – legacy, thankfully disposed of.  To ignore the challenging and insightful ways in which women have shown themselves able to engage with the Christian imaginaries of the past is, once again, to diminish and trivialize their capacity to survive, to struggle to contest, and thus to flourish even in the most inauspicious circumstances. (p. 158)

He praised Jasper for not letting go of de Beauvoir’s original question: ‘What is a woman?’, lauding her contribution in this book to the ongoing emancipatory discourse and the clarity with which questions of ‘religious women’ were discussed.

Professor Loades summarised her thoughts: ‘Dr Jasper’s new book is… refreshing to read in its attention to overlooked examples of ‘female genius’ – we look forward to more.’

Alison Jasper has written a short blog posting about Female Genius that you may wish to (re)visit.  Warm thanks to Professors Loades and Roberts for help in writing this update.

Visitors to the Jaspers' books launch

Visitors to the Jaspers’ books launch

Note that Heather Walton has also commented on Because of Beauvoir on the International Society for Religion, Literature and Culture website.

Female Genius

16 Monday Apr 2012

Posted by in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

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“Women today are far better off than women in the past. It’s time they shut up and stopped making so much fuss!”

Many things have changed for the better over the last couple of centuries, but the evidence that women are especially at risk simply because they are women is still available on a daily basis: In 2009-10, for example, about 9 incidents of domestic violence a day were recorded by the Central Scotland Police Force. Of these reported incidents – to say nothing of those that remain unreported – 88% were perpetrated by men against women.

A common response to this kind of evidence is to shift the discussion into comparisons. The suggestion is that much worse violence against women exists in “war-torn Africa” or “Islamic communities” or with people in “fundamentalist sects.” The thought that sexist structures that can breed violence on this scale, continue to characterise even so called progressive societies is quickly displaced, in this example, by a convenient connection between ‘religion’ and patriarchal oppression. In other words, progressive societies are seen to be essentially secular.

Of course, this represents a genuine dilemma for feminist theologians and critical scholars of religion because the case against Christianity is compelling and as feminists, they generally have no desire absolutely to deny this. And yet, dismissing Christianity simply as something to be thankfully consigned to history, means consigning all the achievements of women who have identified themselves as Christian alongside it; from this perspective, all Christian women are victims if not collaborators. Yet in its effects, this approach hardly differs at all from previous attempts by men to deny the achievements of women because of their gender.

To address this dilemma we first have to go back to the relationship between feminisms and the Western Enlightenment. This movement, celebrating the power of human reason to explain and harness the forces of nature, gave a powerful impetus towards feminist thinking by severing the connection between social order and a patriarchal God; without God the Father to give a warrant for the whole hierarchical order of being including women’s subservience to men, there was no reason why women should any longer buy into the myth of male supremacy. On the other hand, the key architects of the Enlightenment were far less successful in taking the divinity out of the human male and all things masculine, including a masculine distain for Christianity as a dangerous and irrational (feminine) superstition.

Moving back to the 1970s and 80s, feminist biblical critics, were still struggling to resolve the dilemma even as they worked to apply second wave feminist theory to Christian scripture. They were stll caught up in the double bind; struggling to draw attention to biblical women and women readers in a positive way, whilst at the same time trying not to let either patriarchal texts or the guild of (male) biblical scholars that interpreted them off the hook. Thus their readings of the bible recorded the presence of biblical women, yet very often these accounts focussed on the Bible’s “texts of terror” – its stories of casual violence, its reduction of women to mere objects or to the empty “otherness” that defined a real male presence. In other words they often ended up playing more strongly on the sense in which Christianity was unsympathetic to women than on the sense in which women might justly take their places as its crafters, sustainers and reformers. Yet, looking at the situation more positively, this was exactly what those scholars were doing in trying to address a complicated set of issues that didn’t respond easily to one approach. Sometimes in the hard-won pleasures of dialogue with these problematic structures they did manage, as writers and readers, to overcome all the built-in disadvantages with which they began as women in the male normative context of Church and academy.

In the last sixty years, there has been a vigorous growth in the kind of work that focuses on the lives of women. And, having so many more narratives about women to draw on, our imaginations are fed and our view of what women can do is dramatically widened. In this way, the scenario with which this piece began is also sharply challenged because we can begin to show that the contrast between the situation of women in the past and in the present is nothing like as polarised or final as this suggests.

Arguably, over the centuries, women have found many ways to negotiate problematic structures such as Christian patriarchy, crafting courageous, creative and at some level, pleasurable forms of engagement without necessarily rejecting it outright. Following the philosopher Julia Kristeva, I would call these women ‘female geniuses’ and have written about four such female geniuses in a forthcoming book Because of Beauvoir: Christianity and the Cultivation of Female Genius to be published this year by Baylor University Press. Look out for it!