Reading the raced and sexed body in the color purple: Repatterning white feminist and womanist theological hermeneutics

Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion

Volumn 19, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 45-65

  Kamitsuka, Margaret D ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 63449119637     PISSN: 87554178     EISSN: 15533913     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. Carol P. Christ, Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest (Boston: Beacon, 1980)
2. Katie G. Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta: Scholars, 1988). A note about terminology is important from the start. The term "womanist" is now widely used by African American women scholars who call attention to how "feminist" has long functioned as an unmarked code for white feminism. To help break this code, some white feminist theologians, myself included, are calling for an intentional naming of white feminist theology, which could clear the way for "feminist" to function as a neutral, uncoded term - if care is taken by hegemonic positionings to self-name
3. See Ellen T. Armour, Deconstruction, Feminist Theology, and the Problem of Difference: Subverting the Race/Gender Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)
4. and Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1973)
5. See, to name but a few, Jacquelyn Grant, White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (Atlanta: Scholars, 1989)
6. and Carter Heyward, Touching Our Strength: The Erotic as Power and the Love of God (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1989)
7. See Sheila Greeve Davaney, "The Limits of the Appeal to Women's Experience," in Shaping New Vision: Gender and Values in American Culture, ed. Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1987), 31-49
8. and Mary McClintock Fulkerson, Changing the Subject: Women's Discourses and Feminist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994)
9. Katie G. Cannon et al., God's Fierce Whimsy: Christian Feminism and Theological Education (New York: Pilgrim, 1985)
10. Black literary critic Valerie Smith's discussion of race and rape is pertinent to the submerged racial subtext in the Cannon-Heyward correspondence. See Smith's "Split Affinities: The Case of Interracial Rape," in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990), 271-87
11. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, tr. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990), 85
12. See also Laura E. Donaldson and Kwok Pui-lan, eds., Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse (New York: Routledge, 2002)
13. For debates between feminist proponents of identity politics and postmodernism, see Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990)
14. Susan Stanford Friedman, "Making History: Reflections on Feminism, Narrative, and Desire," in Feminism beside Itself, ed. Diane Elam and Robyn Wiegman (New York: Routledge, 1995), 15
15. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 23
16. Katy Taylor, "From Lavender to Purple: A Feminist Reading of Hagar and Celie in Light of Womanism," Theology 97 (1994): 355
17. For more on the subject of whiteness and women's experience, see Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1988)
18. and Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
19. Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Pocket, 1982), 1 (Walker's emphasis). Subsequent references to this edition appear parenthetically in the text
20. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, Sex, Race, and God: Christian Feminism in Black and White (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 4
21. Hampson, Theology and Feminism, 149-50
22. See Thistlethwaite, Sex, Race, and God, 60-76, 110-25
23. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, "'Mother to the Motherless, Father to the Fatherless': Power, Gender, and Community in Afrocentric Biblical Tradition," Semeia 47 (1989): 61
24. Along these lines, for an excellent introduction to how "ecowomanism" differs from white ecofeminism, see Shamara Shantu Riley, "Ecology Is a Sistah's Issue Too," in Ecofeminism and the Sacred, ed. Carol J. Adams (New York: Continuum, 1993), 191-204
25. Delores S. Williams, "Black Women's Literature and the Task of Feminist Theology," in Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, ed. Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles (Boston: Beacon, 1985), 88, 97
26. Emilie M. Townes, In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), 71
27. For more on the issue of the intersection of racial and gender formation, see Howard Winant, Racial Conditions: Politics, Theory, Comparisons (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 95-98
28. Karen Dugger, "Changing the Subject: Race and Gender in Feminist Discourse," in Racism and Anti-racism in World Perspective, ed. Benjamin P. Bowser (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1995), 138-53
29. and M. Brinton Lykes and Amelia Mallona, "Surfacing Our-Selves: ¿Gringa, White - Mestiza, Brown?" in Off White: Readings on Race, Power, and Society, ed. Michelle Fine et al. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 312-21
30. Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1999)
31. Lisa Isherwood and Elizabeth Stuart, Introducing Body Theology (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1998)
32. and Kathy Rudy, Sex and the Church: Gender, Homosexuality, and the Transformation of Christian Ethics (Boston: Beacon, 1997)
33. The sexual component of Walker's definition has made the term controversial, and some African American women theologians do not accept it. See Cheryl J. Sanders et al., "Roundtable Discussion: Christian Ethics and Theology in Womanist Perspective," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5 (1989)
34. Mary Catherine Hilkert, "Experience and Tradition - Can the Center Hold?" in Freeing Theology: The Essentials of Theology in Feminist Perspective, ed. Catherine Mowry LaCugna (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992), 60
35. See Mary E. Hunt, Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship (New York: Crossroad, 1991)
36. Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, "Gender, Violence, and Transformation in The Color Purple," in Curing Violence, ed. Mark I. Wallace and Theophus H. Smith (Sonoma, Calif: Polebridge, 1994), 266
37. Williams, "Black Women's Literature," 100
38. Delores S. Williams, "The Color of Feminism: Or Speaking the Black Woman's Tongue," in L. Daly, Feminist Theological Ethics: A Reader, 55
39. See Williams, "Black Women's Literature," 106
40. For an insightful study on black women's body image, see Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, "The 'Loves' and 'Troubles' of African American Women's Bodies and the Womanist Challenge to Cultural Humiliation and Community Ambivalence," in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1993), 232-49
41. Townes, In a Blaze of Glory, 77
42. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, quoted in Butler, Gender Trouble, 8
43. Butler, Gender Trouble, 7. Butler argues that Beauvoir's views were too linked to a modernist view of a subject as "a cogito" (8)
44. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993), 17
45. Butler, Gender Trouble, 22. A number of other feminist theorists have questioned the givenness of the binary of male and female bodies, tracing historically the rise, around the eighteenth century, of the discourse of men's and women's biological differences as "polar opposites."
46. See Linda Nicholson, "Gender," in A Companion to Feminist Philosophy, ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Iris Marion Young (Maiden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998), 290. Feminist scholars in religion have noted the Greek-influenced theological tradition of viewing the female binarily as a deficient male
47. See Elizabeth Clark and Herbert Richardson, eds., Women and Religion: A Feminist Sourcebook of Christian Thought (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), 78-82
48. Adrienne Rich, quot;Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,quot; in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 227-54
49. Judith Butler, quot;For a Careful Reading,quot; in Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, by Seyla Benhabib et al. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 134, 135
50. See the debate encapsulated in Susan Hekman, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1996)
51. See bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End, 1990), 24
52. and Paula M. L. Moya, quot;Postmodernism, 'Realism,' and the Politics of Identity: Cherríe Moraga and Chicana Feminism,quot; in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (New York: Routledge, 1997), 126
53. See Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church, 19-25, 137
54. See also Kelly Brown Douglas, quot;Daring to Speak: Womanist Theology and Black Sexuality,quot; in Townes, Embracing the Spirit, 235
55. For other uses of Foucault by African American women scholars, see Evelynn M. Hammonds, quot;Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality: The Problematic of Silence,quot; in Alexander and Mohanty, Feminist Genealogies
56. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, quot;African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race,quot; Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17, no. 2 (1992): 251-74
57. Mary McClintock Fulkerson, quot;Gender - Being It or Doing It: The Church, Homosexuality, and the Politics of Identity,quot; in Que(e)rying Religion: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gary David Comstock and Susan E. Henking (New York: Continuum, 1997), 199