Toward a Feminist Postmodern and Postcolonial Interpretation of Sin-1

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Toward a Feminist Postmodern and Postcolonial Interpretation of Sin^*

Margaret D. Kamitsuka  /   Oberlin College

     Over the past forty years, feminist theological writing about sin has been an ongoing locus for doctrinal innovation in Christian theology.¹ Feminist theologians persist in viewing sin talk as a crucial way to address human failings and structural evils and to envision how to live hopefully and productively in light of them. Valerie Saiving madea ground-breaking proposal in 1960 to reformulate sin in light of women's experience of diffuseness or lack of self.² In this same vein, the 1980s saw a number of feminist attempts to break free of the male-oriented Niebuhrian paradigm of sin and highlight women's experience, most principally in Judith Plaskow's Sex, Sin and Grace.³ In her 1983 Sexism and God-Talk, Rosemary Ruether addressed the social sin of sexism in light of an analysis of the consciousness and practice of evil.⁴ These early discussions of sin were influential but were also challenged from a number of sectors. Delores Williams criticized the inattentiveness to race in those predominantly white feminist writings and contributed to a new area for feminist discussion of sin that would speak to "the racist-gender oppression" experienced by African American women.⁵ Sallie McFague's writings have challenged anthropocentrism in many feminist theologies by situating sin in terms of ecotheology.⁶

     In just this short representative list, we find a breadth of theological and philosophical perspectives and contextual orientations. From my reading of feminist doctrinal reflections on sin, I see great strides in exposing various systemic evils and in attending to women's suffering. I support the important agendas, values, and principles that these and other feminist writings on sin have expressed, such as the scriptural appeal to women created in the image of God, healing what separates men and women, valorizing women's ways of being, and rejecting subjectivized views of sin that ignore systematic oppressions suffered by women in minority communities. Nonetheless, I also detect a number of insufficiencies in feminist theology's formulations on sin. As I will argue below, in an effort to name and protest systemic sins against women, some feminist theologians inscribe potentially restrictive essentialisms about women as victims. Or, the ways in which other feminist theologians speak of sin and androgynous selfhood or creation in the image of God entail a male/female sex binarism that workshowever unintentionallyto reinforce privileged heterosexuality (the notion that heterosexuality is normative, natural, or God given). I would like to suggest an approach to women's sin that (1) avoids essentializing women as victims by reformulating how we speak of oppressed selves in relation to discourses and structures of power and (2) avoids the assumption of binary male/female differentiation that (as I will explain below) lies at the root of heterosexism. The payoff of this approach is hopefully an understanding of selfhood that enables us to name evil, appreciate differences in women's experiences of sin, and assess women's moral agency.

     Methodologically this proposal engages certain key concepts from postcolonial and poststructuralist theoriesespecially as they are currently appropriated by feminist thinkerswhich allows me to nuance the concept of selfhood that a doctrine of sin either implicitly or explicitly presupposes. Postcolonial and postmodern feminist theorists have carved out a framework for understanding the various ways women say "I" in their personal and sociopolitical interactions. Using technical terms that will be explained in the following two sections, I will discuss the strategically essentialized subaltern "I" that invokes a provisional identity politics for a conspicuous political purpose (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's postcolonial theory) and the performative "I" that is constituted within a nexus of disciplinary cultural conventions (Judith Butler's poststructuralist theory). I will bring Spivak's notion of strategic essentialization to bear on discussions of social sin in an effort to retain the ethical and political force of appeals to oppressed identity, but without essentialisms. Butler's poststructuralism, which deconstructs notions of natural binary sex differentiation, will be used to reformulate sin situated within theological anthropological discussions of (gendered) human failings and sin situated within a doctrine of creation.⁷ Central to the entire project is Michel Foucault's theory of the disciplinary and productive effects of power. I test my thesis that approaching sin from these postcolonial and postmodern perspectives is politically and theologically illuminating by applying this approach in a situation of injustice and moral ambiguity, as found in the biblical story of Sarah and Hagar. Hopefully, my proposal will serve women's needs and contribute to a general theological discussion of sin that is sensitive to differences within and among women's and men's experience, theologically balanced (in terms of accountability to tradition and context), politically attuned, and intelligible in light of current modes of critical reflection.

DECONSTRUCTING STATIC ESSENTIALISMS IN DISCUSSIONS OF SOCIAL SIN

     Many feminist construals of sin have insightfully focused on social hierarchies, power imbalances, discriminatory attitudes and practicesand how all of these are factors in women's exploitation. A problem affecting some of these discussions is a tendency to imply more or less static oppressor/oppressed categories that essentialize women as victims in relation to some totalizing domination. One finds this tendency in Ruether's classic first-wave white feminist construal of sin as the projection of "group egoism," in particular, "the dominant male group ego" that manifests itself in the social sin of sexism.⁸ Ruether emphasizes that women are not just oppressed but can passively cooperate with forces of domination and oppress others by being "racist, classist, ... manipulative ... , dominating toward children," and so on. However, she adds, when women become oppressors, the real culprit is the "overall system of distorted humanity in which ruling class males are the apex."⁹ Under this patriarchal system, women are not really oppressors but rather are misguidedly "cooperating in their own subjugation."¹⁰ In other words, women are cast in an essentialized role of victim in relation to hegemonic structural evils such as sexism, even when they sin by degrees of participation in this androcentric group egoism. Ruether toys with some notions that could lessen the essentialism of women as exploited victims when she comments that oppressed women can also engage in "covert resistance"; however, she suggests that covert resistance is an undeveloped feminist consciousness and falls short of "real feminist thought and practice."¹¹

     A more subtle essentialism is suggested in Delores Williams's appeal to "demonarchy," a term she coined in order to highlight that black women's oppression in "white-controlled American institutions" is different from "patriarchally-derived-privileged oppression," where white women are subjugated but also receive certain privileges (albeit male controlled) because of their race.¹² "Demonarchy" is a complicated term. It is extremely effective rhetorically for emphasizing the overt and insidious workings of white supremacy as well as for breaking through white feminist scripts of evasion of racism ("my ancestors never had slaves," "some of my friends are womanists," "my parents were discriminated against because of their ethnicity," etc.). However, as a term of analysis, "demonarchy" runs the risk of essentializing African American women in the role of oppressed in relation to a hegemonic structure viewed too univocally. Analogous to what Williams says of the term "patriarchy," it "leaves too much out."¹³ For example, demonarchy does not have the nuance to address class differences and hierarchies among women of color.¹⁴ Or it may bring attention to the structural sin (in the tradition of black liberation theology) of the "defilement of Black women's bodies" but is less effective for understanding the dynamics of what Williams calls "individual sin"that is, the agential ways in which "Black women also participate in sin when they do not challenge the patriarchal and demonarchal systems in society."¹⁵ When she invokes demonarchy, Williams runs up against the problem (as we saw with Ruether) of how to theorize morally accountable personal agency in relation to what are presented as inescapable, hegemonic social structures.

     There are vital insights in both Ruether's white feminist account of the social sin of sexism and Williams's womanist account of the social sin of black women's oppression. My critique is not directed toward their claims that evil as a social reality "transcends us as individuals" and that liberation from such evil must entail a communal struggle against structural oppression.¹⁶ However, those claims will, in many cases, be better served by decentering oppressor and oppressed positionalities and by relying on a nontotalizing view of power. In arguing below that Foucault gives us poststructuralist theories pertinent to both tasks, I am not suggesting that poststructuralism should be the only tool the theorist uses for analyzing the nature of power and oppressed identities. For example, some womanist theologians make use of Patricia Hill Collins's sociological theories of black women's modes of survival and resistance in order to analyze the nuances of racism in America, which does complicate the category of "oppressed" in relation to African American women's experience.¹⁷ Other theoretical tools can and often should also be used in tandem with poststructuralist onesa methodological approach illustrated in Kelly Brown Douglas's multidimensional analysis of the disciplinary effects of white racist sexual stereotypes, in which she combines a Foucauldian analysis of power with other nonpoststructuralist historical, sociological, and hermeneutical investigations of the roots of heterosexism in the black church.¹⁸