Reflection: Postmodern Theories Offer Christians New Avenues to Pursue Gender Justice
As Christians, we are called to “to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed” (Isaiah 1:17). By our own system of ethics, as demonstrated by the ministry of Jesus Christ, Christians ought to actively seek justice for all oppressed and marginalized groups, including, but by no means limited to, women. Feminism, particularly within a postmodern context, has much to offer the church in terms of conceptual tools with which to address deeply rooted systems of inequality and a spirit of willingness to reexamine even our most basic assumptions about who we are and how we ought to treat each other. Though postmodernism is often viewed with hostility or fear by popular Christianity, the postmodern concern with increasing inclusiveness, diversity, and equality offers the church a much needed political edge. Within postmodern theory, postructuralism, specifically Derridean deconstruction, offers Christian feminists tools to help to dismantle longstanding systems of inequality that are inconsistent with Christian ethics.
In her article “Third Wave Feminism and the Need to Reweave the Nature/Culture Duality,” Colleen Mack-Canty discusses how three types of feminisms within postmodernism: youth feminism, postcolonial feminism, and ecofeminism, help to reclaim the female body from the oppressive assumptions of the nature/culture dualism developed by the Greeks and reinforced by the 18th century Enlightenment. Mack-Canty explains that the female body is often associated with what is “natural” like “disorder, physical necessity, darkness, and passion” whereas the male body, as representative of the culture aspect of this binary, is the opposite (155). Youth feminism, postcolonial feminism, and ecofeminism help to reclaim the female body through dismantling the basic assumptions that have historically secured this binary/dualism as a social norm. Mack-Canty explains 1.) youth feminists are concerned with the stories women relate with feminism today; 2.) postcolonial feminists are interested in the interplay race and gender within a postcolonial context; and 3.) ecofeminists are focused on “[extending the values of diversity and interconnectedness to other species and the natural world” (156). Mack-Canty, as an ecofeminist within a postmodern context, questions the validity of dualism as a epistemological approach.
Though Mack-Canty is not interested in the implications of her argument for Christians, her awareness of the influence of Greek thought on gender is useful and should be considered. Particularly, her insights as an ecofeminists utilizing deconstruction are useful to Christians in not only redeeming our relationship with the female body but with nature as a whole. As ecofeminists point out, the nature/culture dualism, as a product of the Greek milieu, devalues the natural world and everything associated with it—this is in direct violation of God’s command to “tend the garden” (Genesis 2:15). The appropriation of Greek epistemological assumptions (i.e. oppositional binaries) by the early church fathers (who, to be fair, wholeheartedly believed they were making the gospel more accessible) has resulted in 2000 years of systemic gender inequality within the church as well as a dismal attitude toward creation. The deconstruction of the nature/culture dualism allows Christians to aid in the efforts of reclaiming the female body and the “natural” world, as whole.
Like Mack-Canty, Marilyn Gottschall is interested in deconstructing oppositional binaries that, unjustly and unreasonably, promote systems of inequality. In her article “The Ethical Implications of the Deconstruction of Gender,” Gottschall utilizes Judith Butler’s understanding of the connection between gender binarism and the formation of the self. In order to understand Gottschall’s argument, it is important to understand the theoretical ground work on which she builds. Judith Butler’s scholarship is sympathetic to the theories of Derrida, employing Derridean deconstruction in order to expose constructed and hierarchical nature of gender, sex, and sexuality as well as other socially inscribed identities. For Butler, identity is entirely performative—a true self does not exist underneath the façade of performance. It is interesting, I think, for a self-professed Christian ethicist to ally herself with Judith Butler, given Butler’s stance on identity performance, though Gottschall admits her reading of Butler is “rather unorthodox” (279). (One would suppose an acceptable Christian response to Butler is that the true identity is in Christ.)
Gottschall uses Butler’s theories in order to “combine the potential of a poststructural analysis of subject formation with a feminist preference for egalitarianism” with the goal of reevaluating “who we are as moral subjects and how we operate in the world” (279; 280). Gottschall, as an ethicist, is interested in how deconstructionism can dismantle the “epistemological power of binarism” that limits our potential for moral action and reflection (280). (For the reader’s own interest: within feminist discourse, the concern for the negative and limiting effects of gender binarism on the moral state of both men and women stems as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft’s 18th century manifesto: A Vindication of the Rights of Women. It is only within our current postmodern context that we have the intellectual tools to address the gender binarism at the core of this issue.) When we understand that gender identity is a social construction that is inherently unequal and unjust, we have the valuable opportunity to reevaluate our ethical assumption for the sake of moral improvement. Our postmodern insights into the construction of the self help us to reevaluate (with the hope of improving) the epistemic assumptions (including our assumptions about gender identity) on which our ethical systems are built. This is particularly useful for Christians who are commanded by God to “act justly and to love mercy” (Micah 6:8).
Like Gottschall, Susan F. Parsons is interested in reevaluating Christian ethics within the context of postmodernism, especially in terms with how the church interacts with gender. In her book The Ethics of Gender Parsons seeks to “investigate the interface of gender with ethics, and to consider the ways in which a Christian theological ethics informed by gender might come to be shaped” (4). Parsons explores in the impact of the Enlightenment on the Christian understanding of gender and ethics that supports hierarchical gender binarism and rejects such thinking as unethical within a Christian framework. In order to repent from a dark and violent history, the church must do away with systems of inequality, such as gender binarism, promoting a vision of the church a cohesive body through faith, hope, and love. Like Gottschall, Parsons uses Butler as a way to examine sexual difference and inequality within the church. In her article “Conceiving of God: Theological Arguments and Motives if Feminist Ethics,” Parsons explores the unique opportunities offered the church by way of “new theological possibilities opened up in postmodernity for the conceiving of God” (365). Parsons writes,
The tendency to assume theology to be the more widely comprehensive perspective has pressed upon modern theological ethics the burden of demonstrating its hold upon a universal set of norms, applicable to all everywhere and sustained by the divine will, or of establishing a foundation for morals in a concept of natural law, into which theologians have some special but not exclusive insight. To accede to the demand for a wider vision is to participate in a dialectical reasoning that is concerned in the end to win the argument, and thus it is to leave unexamined the loss of the horizon it seeks to resolve. (367)
In a Derridean move, Parsons argues that the hierarchical authority that church claims, as a European, male, educated, affluent perspective, over our understanding of ethics is detrimental because we all lose the opportunity for alternative perspectives to that of the established authority. (Authority, by the way, comes is directly related to the word “male.”) Parsons, like Gottschall and Mack-Canty understand the potential for increased justice and equality that postmodern thought allows us in terms of our understanding of what it morally good.
Colleen Mack-Canty, Marilyn Gottschall, and Susan F. Parsons utilize Derridean deconstructionism in order to disassemble gender binarism that has historically privileged the male body and perspective in Western culture. Though Mack-Canty is not concerned with Christian ethics, her article helps to flesh out our understanding of how deeply rooted Western society (and Christianity as an extension of Western society) is with Greek dualism. Her article is useful to Christian feminists because she extends her concerns beyond reclaiming the female body to reclaiming the environment—something that Christians have, in more recent years, started to realize is a necessary part of our faith as stewards of creation. Gottschall and Parsons, as Christians, feminists, and ethicists, seek to reevaluate the assumptions upon which the system of inequality within the church and theological discourse is built in the hope that we might truly know what it means to “love our neighbor” (Matthew 22:39). Instead of treating postmodernism with suspicion, Gottschall and Parsons view it a valuable opportunity for growth. With the use of deconstructionism, feminism offers the church an opportunity to dissolve oppositional binaries that inhibit the vision of the church described by Paul in which “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female” but “[we’ are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3: 28).
Works Cited
Gottschall, Marilyn. "The Ethical Implications of the Deconstruction of Gender." Journal of the American Academy of Relgion70.2 (2002): 279-99. Web. 5 Nov. 2013.
Holy Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994. Print.
Mack-Canty, Colleen. "Third-Wave Feminism and the Need to Reweave the Nature/Culture Duality." NWSA 16.3 (2004): 154-79. Web.
Parsons, Susan F. "Conceiving of God: Theological Arguments and Motives in Feminist Ethics." Ethical and Moral Practice 4.4 (2001): 365-82. Web. 7 Nov. 2013.5 Nov. 2013.
Parsons, Susan F. "The Ethics of Gender." Signs 30.4 (2001): 2247-50. Web. 7 Nov. 2013.