to hear Arcangela Tarabotti

Arcangela Tarabotti was a feminist ahead of her time. Though forced into a convent in 17th century Venice, she wrote blistering attacks on patriarchal repressiveness in the family, the state and even the Church....

Tarabotti's story, and in large measure her daring, may have been exceptional in European Christendom (until the 14th century, generally only nuns were taught reading and writing ). However, the Renaissance era was marked by additional female - and also male - voices that rebelled against the conventions and sought to prove that women were not, as described in the Italian translation of Aristotle, "defective males." The female writers were from the upper-middle class - aristocrats, nuns and courtesans. They wrote fiction, poetry, philosophy and satire, and availed themselves of every literary style of the time. In Venice, too, Tarabotti was not the only defiant - and successful - female writer. Already in 1600, four years before she was born, two books were published there which are still considered milestones among women's works on gender issues. They are "The Worth of Women," by Moderata Fonte, who died eight years earlier in childbirth; and "The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men," by Lucrezia Marinella, a contemporary of Tarabotti's who was a prolific and very popular writer.

[Tarabotti's] family was of Jewish origin, and had resided around Modena before coming to Venice as "conversos." (Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity during the Inquisition).
--- Michal Levertov, "Get thee to a nunnery," haaretz.com

Today, Levertov announces a new edition:

The new annotated English version of "Convent Life as Inferno" is the work of two Italian-born scholars who teach in England: Dr. Francesca Medioli (introduction and notes ) and Dr. Letizia Panizza (translation ). Medioli, director of the Center for Italian Women's Studies at the University of Reading, rescued Tarabotti's manuscript in 1990 and brought about its publication in Italy. Panizza lectures in the Department of Italian at Royal Holloway College, University of London. Her annotated translation of Tarabotti's "Paternal Tyranny" was published in 2004 in a University of Chicago Press series about women's writing in the Renaissance called "The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe." The series now appears under the imprint of the University of Toronto Press, which will publish "Convent Life as Inferno" in 2012.

From it, you'll be able to read Panizza's translation and to hear Tarabotti's insight.  Listen to her a bit now, from her Paternal Tyranny:

After the Lord had created the universe and all the animals - as I have just said - it is written, "And God saw all the things that He had made, and they were very good" (Gn 1:31). He then set about shaping the proudest animal of all; but when He had finished, He did not deem His work perfect and so did not recognize it as good. For this reason, Genesis does not add the same words as before; but foreseeing that without woman man would be the compendium of all imperfections, God said after some thought, "It is not good for man to be alone, let us make him a help like unto himself" (Gn 2:18). Thus He willed to bring forth a companion for man, who would enrich him with merits and be the universal glory of the human race (46).

As soon as His Majesty said the word "help," He immediately added, "like unto himself," implying that woman is of just as much value as man (50).

If he alone had the grace of free will and was superior to Eve, she would not have sinned at all, despite the serpent's promptings and insinuations, for the simple reason that she could not have made choices without her husband's consent (51).

Eve is deceived by the serpent's cunning, and you place all the blame on her. Adam falls for a charming request, and you excuse him. He knew he was offending God; he was not deceived by cunning, but beseeched by an innocent and sincere creature. Have you ever heard of greater wickedness than shielding yourself against your own faults with another's innocence (52)?

Our ancient mother set us a true example: as soon as she was created, she used her free will given by God; her first act was to gaze upon the tree that would bear the fruit of knowledge. Desire pursued her eye; overcome, she aroused the same desire in Adam. It was his excessive gullibility that deprived the whole human race of the happy state of innocence (109).

Adam alone, not Eve, was commanded not to eat the forbidden fruit - which means that his sin, not hers, brought ruin to the world. [...] and for that reason the apostle Paul says, "Through one man sin entered the world [...] (122)."

 [sources:

http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/get-thee-to-a-nunnery-1.383496

http://sojourness.blogspot.com/2005/04/not-guilty.html

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo3625872.html

http://crrs.utoronto.ca/pdf/pubs/OVpromo.pdf ]

My affinity to feminism

"My affinity to feminism (or postcolonialism or liberation) has always been based on that call to live faithfully as the body of Christ."

Now how often do you hear somebody say something like that?  Well, it's Julie Clawson speaking up. 

And she links to a blogpost where Jos Truitt is saying something similar about something larger than herself and saying it, perhaps, to a larger audience: 

"My feminism [is] ... about recognizing the existence of gendered systems of oppression and working for justice, working to change these systems, which often involves government taking action against injustice."

I really like that.  So today I'd like to make this observation again:

"My affinity with feminists is more profound perhaps than mine with bible bloggers because feminists tend more generally to be much more inclusive (both personally and methodologically)."

Proverbs 14, Part II

There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.

In Part II of this series on Proverbs 14, I'd like us to get to the Hebrew, the Hebraic Greek, and to various translations a bit later in the post.  The questions I'd really like to start with are these:  "What's the right way to read the Bible, to read the Proverbs?"  and "What is the worst consequence of just reading in a way that seems right?"  You see how I'm immediately riffing off of Proverbs 14:12, the epigraph above.  My own father used to quote this one often, often in his daily life but as an outgrowth of his Southern Baptist evangelical Christian missionary preaching.  He used this proverb not only to justify his work; but he used it also as a metonym for the entire mission of the gospel.  As far as I know, he never ever gave a second thought to whether this was the right way to interpret the proverb or not.  What seemed right to him was right.  And so I'd like us to consider this:  there's a bit of irony here in really believing what this proverb means, for any of us.

But let's skip back to verse 1 of Proverbs 14.  There are some, I've noticed, who read Proverbs 14:1 as justifying a woman's, particularly a wife's, being sub-ordinated to a man, to her husband.  For example, here and here are two bloggers who self-identify as Christian women, as helpmates of their respective husbands; both of these wives quote the proverb not only to justify their sub-missive position to their husbands but also to suggest that this complementarianism is the universal and timeless norm for all wives in every place.  The way these individuals are reading Proverbs 14:1, are claiming their reading as right not only for themselves but also for others, certainly seems the right way for them.  But then we find Jared, and Bob, and Kristen, all reading this proverb differently in comments here from Part I of this blog series.  So what's the right way?  What seems right?  And what about the big fat but the end (that's so plain to see in Proverbs 14:12)?

Today, I see that yesterday the Associated Baptist Press reported that representatives for the denomination made clear:  "Southern Baptists ‘cannot commend’ [the] new NIV Bible translation."  It's the way that seems right to these Southern Baptists that's at issue:

The Southern Baptist Convention went on record June 15 saying it “cannot commend” the 2011 New International Version Bible translation and its use of gender-neutral language. “This is as big as it gets....  This is the word of God. The best-selling Bible translation in the United States is now gender neutral.”  ...[T]he NIV retains 75 percent of gender-neutral language included in a Today’s New International Version translation denounced by the Southern Baptist Convention in 2002....  “As Southern Baptists, I don’t think we have the luxury of not speaking to this important issue....  People are buying this translation unaware of what’s happening. We are the anchor of the evangelical world.”

So sure enough, we see this:

The old 1984 NIV, which was not "gender-neutral," had Southern Baptist language that seemed right.  And 1984 NIV Proverbs 14:12 reads in this way:  "There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death."  But in the end, the 2011 NIV Proverbs 14:12 goes this way:  "There is a way that appears to be right, but in the end it leads to death."  Now it's not just "a man's" Bible version, like the right NIV was, and the KJV, the NASB, the ESV, and the "Holman Christian Standard Bible, released in 2004, ... considered [by many Southern Baptists to be] among the most accurate translations" all still are.  And the new NIV's explicit omission of a man, that obvious gender neutrality added so inaccurately to the Bible, just appears to be wrong here in this proverb.  So what's the right way?  What seems right?

Well, let's get to the Hebrew and the Hebraic Greek in just a bit.  I'm going to inflict a little feminism on us blog readers for just a bit first.  Please, by all means, feel free to skip right over this paragraph.  This is my reader's advisory to you.  This paragraph contains references to radical, activist and not-just-academic feminism.  If such does not seem right to you, if its end is death somehow for you, then please do skip the white space to the paragraph immediately following.  Now, I've been following with great interest how bloggers are covering (either promoting or dissing) the Slutwalk movement.  Here's the background:  It seemed right to a man, Michael Sanguinetti, a Toronto police officer, a Constable with considerable authority, to announce publicly that it's not seemly, it's not right, for females to dress provocatively, or else they're setting themselves up for abuse, even rape.  Some of  Mr. Sanguinetti's actual words to the wise were these:  "women should avoid dressing like sluts."  And so feminists, worldwide now, are taking to the streets in protest of this victim-blaming wisdom.  They're dressing like sluts to show that there is a way that seems right to a man but in the end for the woman it can mean abuse, rape, death.  There's a growing entry at wikipedia for any who are just getting up to speed on all of this.  If you want to be impressed, however, with how feminists who disagree are talking, then see this set of blogposts:  Meghan Murphy's conversations with Hugo Schwyzer; and Jessica Valenti's conversation with Meghan.  At stake is what seems right.  And then what appears right to somebody else.

Now, let's get to the Hebrew (Masoretic Text) and the Hebraic Greek (the so-called Septuagint):

יֵ֤שׁ דֶּ֣רֶךְ יָ֭שָׁר לִפְנֵי־אִ֑ישׁ וְ֝אַחֲרִיתָ֗הּ דַּרְכֵי־מָֽוֶת׃

ἔστιν ὁδὸς ἣ δοκεῖ ὀρθὴ εἶναι παρὰ ἀνθρώποις τὰ δὲ τελευταῖα αὐτῆς ἔρχεται εἰς πυθμένα ᾅδου 

What doesn't really seem so right to translator Robert Alter is the repetition of a Hebrew word, which he gives in his English translation as "a straight way" (in the first part) in comparative contrast with "the ways of death" (to end the proverb).  In his footnote, Alter says:

The repetition of "way" from the first verset is a little awkward.  That effect might be at least mitigated if one adopted Tur-Sinai's proposed emendation of 'aharit to 'orhotaw, yielding "its paths are ways to death."

Alter, I'm sure, is not intending just to be pedantic here.  What do you think?  What I'm noticing is how little he needs to appeal to the Septuagint here (which he does so often elsewhere) even though the Greek would help his case, as the awkwardness that seems not right to him is avoided in the Hellene.  Oh well, I just finished reading Rob Bell's book that talks so much about Hell and such and noticed how he keys in on the Greek word Hades as one of the few references to this place in the Bible.  (A friend who bought the book and was also given a second copy lent it to me to read because there is a way that seems right to a man but in the end it's not.  My friend wanted me mostly just to look at what's right, or just seemingly right, in Bell's way of looking at the biblical language.  Well, he himself uses the word Hades four times.  So I got a free meal out of my book review for noticing things like that.  So did you notice how this LXX Proverb 14:12 ends in Hades?)

What way seems right? What's the end?

the Prostitute...

the Prostitute, Post-Pentateuch Persuasion, and Play in Bible Translation

Joshua is an important book for many reasons....  But what makes the book of Joshua overwhelmingly important is that it stands as a bridge, a link between the Pentateuch (the writings of Moses [i.e., "the Law," Torah]) and the rest of Scripture.
--Francis A. Schaeffer

We assume that the Homeric poet had a number of stories about Odysseus to draw on, but that he judiciously selected those stories that went together to transform what might have been merely an elaborate travel tale into an epic that explores the dimensions and facets of a larger-than-life heroic character....  A literary text, ...with stories and tales intricately linked into a single unitary document, seeks to explain, to bring meaning and order to paradoxical events of human experience.  In this sense, Joshua... approach[es] the Odyssey.
--Kenneth R.R. Gros Louis and Willard van Antwerpen, Jr.

Shortly after the translation was achieved, the Greek text of the Law would have been read and studied in Jewish synagogues in Alexandria....  With time, familiarity with the text grew.  Alexandrian and Egyptian Jews would slowly come to hold the LXX as sacred -- at least as sacred as the Hebrew original....  [T]he collective translators are part of the Homeric paradigm.
--Sylvie Honigman

You see what I'm doing, don't you?  I'm starting a post entitled "The Prostitute, Post-Pentateuch Persuasion, and Play in Bible Translation" with three epigraphs.  The epigraphs are to help us get to what I call "feminist rhetorical translating" of the Bible. They're to help us to uncover, to recover perhaps, some early and likely resistances to Aristotle.  The first epigraph is to emphasize that "the book of Joshua" comes after Torah, just as post-modernism comes after modernism but just as much as midrashim come after the oral-then-written tradition of Moses.  The second epigraph is to emphasize that "Joshua" is literary history.  The third epigraph is to emphasize that the little bit of Joshua in Greek that I'm going to post on (below) is midrashic, Homeric, Aristotle-defying stuff.  It's not the way we typically think of translation today, and that's the point of most translators who follow after Aristotle, isn't it?  But why not remember what the first translators of the Bible did?  Maybe we'll learn something.

This post has three main chapters.  They are:  I. Hebrew Wordplay, II. Aristotle's Word, and III. Opening Pandora's Pentateuch.

Chapter I --
Hebrew Wordplay

In the Hebrew version of Joshua, there's plenty of wordplay before translation.  By "wordplay," I mean both playfulness with words and wiggleroom in their interpretation.  For example, the name Joshua (יְהוֹשׁוּעַ) is playful and is ambiguous.  According to bəmidbar Sinai (aka Numbers 13:16), Moses nicknamed or renamed his assistant who had been named Hosea; and the former renamed the later the name Joshua (יְהוֹשׁוּעַ), and he did so by mixing the younger person's name (הוֺשֵׁעַ) with a contraction of the unspeakable Name (יהוה).  But the observed wordplay does not stop there.  According to a later Joshua (יְהוֹשׁוּעַ), perhaps, this littlest letter י -- in the name and in the Name -- is declared to be significant when he says (through the Greek translator Matthew):  "ἰῶτα ἓν ἢ μία κεραία οὐ μὴ παρέλθῃ ἀπὸ τοῦ νόμου" (i.e., Mt 5:18, "neither the littlest letter י nor some serif stroke will go away from Torah").  But the observed wordplay does not stop there.  According to midrash after Torah, there comes more interpretation of the name Joshua (יְהוֹשׁוּעַ); it is a name born of G-d from the name of the woman Sarai (שָׂרַי) who, as a mother, gives up her letter (י) which becomes his "letter yud."   But the observed wordplay does not stop there.  According to the freshest of rabbinic teachings of 2009, we should be able to see something:  can't we see it, whether Moses writing Torah intended it or not, that "one's two eyes are the two yuds"?  There is Hebrew wordplay in the name Joshua (יְהוֹשׁוּעַ), the name of certain people and the name of the first post-Pentateuch parchment.

In Hebrew, likewise, the name of the prostitute is playful and is full of illustrative possibilities.  Rahab (רָחָב) is a playful name with lots of interpretive play (or hermeneutic wiggle room in it).  She's a maid and she's a monster.  "Broad" might be a fair English language translation, since she's a woman and is wide like land where women can be gotten.  You really have to see the Hebrew of Genesis 34:21 to get this:

הָאֲנָשִׁים הָאֵלֶּה שְֽׁלֵמִים הֵם אִתָּנוּ וְיֵשְׁבוּ בָאָרֶץ וְיִסְחֲרוּ אֹתָהּ וְהָאָרֶץ הִנֵּה רַֽחֲבַת־יָדַיִם לִפְנֵיהֶם אֶת־בְּנֹתָם נִקַּֽח־לָנוּ לְנָשִׁים וְאֶת־בְּנֹתֵינוּ נִתֵּן לָהֶֽם׃

These men [are] peaceable with us; therefore let them dwell in the land, and trade therein; for the land, behold, [it is] Broad (רַֽחֲבַ) enough for them; let us take their daughters to us for wives, and let us give them our daughters.

Beyond the wordplay in names, then, there's play in the narrative, in "book" of Joshua itself.  The book of Joshua follows the closed books of Moses and thereby opens up a new library of books in Jewish history after Moses.  God has spoken to Moses, who has nicknamed Joshua and has written down everything God said, and put what's written in a box to be re-read.  Looking into that Torah box of Moses, says Hebraist Rachel Barenblat, "it can seem that the point the writer is trying to make is deliberately obscured beneath layers and levels of allusion and allegory."  Looking beyond that Torah box of Moses, says Christian linguist David Ker, one sees "more about humans than God...  that revelation comes in the context of a long trajectory of God’s dealings with humanity... a metanarrative... a long train wreck of the nation of Israel through apostasy and rejection of God’s covenant....  Ethnic hatred. Religious conflict. Revenge culture."  The first hero, right out of the box, is not even from the nation of Israel, and is not even a male, and is not even a clean female.  Rather, the very first hero is a foreigner, a woman hero, a prostitute for men, a dirty goyish heroine.  And, in Hebrew, there's a point in the story where the heroine, the prostitute, is left behind.  The story starts with her but, in order to get on with purifying the promised land, the story continues without her.  There's more than enough wordplay stuff in the Hebrew story (after Moses) to do a Ph.D. dissertation on and to blog and to teach and to publish on for years.

Aristotle despised such wordplay (as barbaric) and decided to shut it down (at least in Greek).  This is what makes the Jewish translation of Hebrew into Greek so fascinating.  As we'll get to in Chapter III, the translating Jews seem to want to open up meanings, rather blatantly playing with Aristotle's own words.

Chapter II --
Aristotle's Word

The Jewish-Greek translation of the book of Joshua is just as full of wordplay as the Hebrew original.  The wordplay of the translators, however, seems intentionally to spite Aristotle.  To get a good look at that in the next chapter, it's useful in this chapter to review Aristotle's project with the word.

Aristotle developed "logic" (λογ-ική) to box up the overdetermined, ambiguous slippery and playful Greek concept of "logos" (λόγος).  (Never mind that Aristotle himself is engaged in wordplay here.)  He railed against ambiguity, against parable, against hyperbole, against sophism.  He called "rhetoric" (ῥητορ-ική) a counterpart to "dialectic" (διάλεκτ-ική) -- both lesser than logic the way a female is lesser than a male.

Rhetoric, of course, is what Gorgias the sophist did.  And dialectic is what Socrates and Plato did.  The question is whether they could get to absolute reality, to pure knowledge, to certain truth.  Aristotle did sympathize with his teacher Plato, and his teacher Socrates.  They understood how Parmenides had separated "aletheia" (ἀλήθεια) or true truth from "doxa" (δόξα) or mere opinion.  They similarly understood how Gorgias, the mere rhetorician, had mixed "aletheia" and "doxa" in his "praise" of the prostituting Helen.  But Aristotle, when he wrote of rhetoric, used logic and got to true scientific knowledge (or ἐπιστήμη aka episteme) with the central concept of the "enthymeme" (ἐνθυμημα) or the "rhetorical syllogism" as the "body of 'pisteis' (πιστεις)" -- which has become known by rhetoric scholars today as the body of proofs or the body of persuasion.  (If you click on the previous link, then do notice how Aristotle boxes up "doxa" as the safer "endoxa.").  Aristotle taught his logic to elite Greek boys like Alexander the Great.  And Aristotle's project of a pure male logical elite Greek empire was nearly achieved by Alexander.

When we look at the Greek translation bit from the book of Joshua in the next chapter, the words to pay attention to are episteme, doxa, aletheia, enthymeme, and pistis.  Aristotle had a clear and pure and unambiguous and intentional meaning for each of these important words of logic (to avoid womanish rhetoric).  And yet the Jewish translators seem to have other things in mind.

Chapter III --
Opening Pandora's Pentateuch

My title for chapter III is playful, an attempt to drop Pandora's name so as to get us remembering what happened when her box was opened.  Pandora, of course, is the first woman for the Greeks which makes her some like Eve, the first woman of Torah and like Rahab, the first woman after Torah.  When wordplay translation opens up stuff after the Pentateuch, well, then, you can figure what happens.

My thesis is that the 72 translators of the legend of the Septuagint worked against Alexander's and Aristotle's project.  Here they are, Jews back in Egypt, again under the rule of a kingdom not their own.  Sylvie Honigman suggests that, though in this potentially subservient position, they've rather subversively turned Alexandria Egypt into a new Jerusalem, that they've resisted the imperial impositions of Aristotle's logic.  That's not to say they are pre-logical or post-logical or a-logical or illogical.  It is to say that they see what Aristotle has done by boxing up Greek.  They get what he intends by using the little "-icky" suffix on words, by changing "logos" to "logic."  They avoid the suffix like an Egyptian plague.

Now we can look at what the Jewish translators do by rendering the Hebrew of Joshua into Hellene.  We come again to that "point in the story where the heroine, the prostitute, is left behind."  We come to a turn, to the first villain.  This guy's trouble and troubling, and so his name is Achan (עָכָן).  We've come to the point in the story where the heroine is no longer necessary, to Joshua 7:1.

The contrasts are stark.  Whereas the hero is a woman, the villain is a man.  She's a foreigner; he's a son of Israel, from the very Jewish tribe of Judah.  They both hide something, but her lying and her knowledge of God save her; his eventual truth-telling and his opinion of God destroy him.

So now we get to the Greek.  For Aristotle, females were scientifically objectively lesser than males.  Males were the ones with the science, with certainty about Nature and Reality and Truth.  Remember the words (a) episteme, (b) doxa, (c) aletheia, (d) enthymeme, and (f) pistis?  Roughly, they mean (respectively) the following for Aristotle:  (a) "sure knowledge," (b) "mere opinion," (c) "Truth with a capital T," (d) "persuasion's logical body [which is less rigorous than a pure logical syllogism]," and (f) "proof or persuasiveness."

But this same Greek for the Jewish translators in Alexandria was more open.  They seem to take a tight set of Aristotle's strictly boxed up words and open them up.   Remember the words (a) episteme, (b) doxa, (c) aletheia, (d) enthymeme, and (f) pistis?  Now, not only do they mean the very boxed up meanings Aristotle meant them to mean but they also have Jewish-barbaric meanings as well.  Respectively and roughly, these Greek words for the Jewish translators also mean the following:  (a) "a whorish woman's confession," (b) "glory to God," (c) "the truth of a man named Trouble," (d) "outlawed coveteousness," and (f) "working faith or belief in God."

Here's the text.  I'm giving both the LXX translator's Greek and Brenton's English translation (mostly).

In Joshua 2:5, Rahab the prostitute persuades.  First, she lies, saying to the men of her nation about the Jewish spies:  "I know not [οὐκ ἐπίσταμαι episteme] whither they are gone."  Then (in verse 9), the foreign prostitute says to the Jewish spies:  "I know [ἐπίσταμαι episteme] that the Lord has given you the land."  The barbarian goyish woman denies having certain scientific knowledge and then claims she has it.  The LXX translators are using Aristotle's word as dirty, womanly opinion, as mere doxa.  By her rhetoric (through the Hebrew-to-Hellene translation), this prostitute saves and is saved.

So we leave the heroine and come to the villain.  His rhetoric is poorer, is less persuasive.  But the Hellene translation by the Hebrew readers is just as playful.

In 7:19, Joshua (the story's protagonist) says to the villainous trouble-making troubler named Achan:   "Give due opinion, that is, give glory (δόξαν doxa) this day to the Lord God of Israel, and give a confession; and tell me what thou hast done, and hide it not from me."  The translators use a word Aristotle associates with lying (i.e., doxa) as something inherently owed to God.  The wordplay is ironic, is funny, is suggestive of meanings now flying out of the box.

Then Achan replies (in verses 20 & 21):   "In truth [Ἀληθῶς aletheia] I have sinned against the Lord God of Israel: thus and thus have I done:  I saw in the spoil an embroidered mantle, and two hundred didrachms of silver, and one golden wedge of fifty didrachms, and I like a Torah outlaw coveted [ἐνθυμηθεὶς enthymeme] them and took them; and, behold, they are hid in my tent, and the silver is hid under them."  The translators have Achan confessing not with mere doxa but with Aristotle's absolute Truth.  But he confesses that he broke the 10th commandment of the Ten Commandments, and the translators have him "coveting" when they have him using Aristotle's "rhetorical syllogism," which is Aristotle's "body of proof or persuasion."  It seems the Jewish translators of their own playful Hebrew into playful Greek were playing with Aristotle and his student Alexander.

IV --

an afterword

Now, I understand that many rhetoricians and many bible scholars are going to argue with me here.  They might say:

"Sometimes words are homophones -- that is, they have different meanings though they sound (and sometimes even look) the same.  'Enthymeme' in Aristotle's Rhetoric is not the same word as 'enthymeme' here in Joshua 7.  You don't understand the nature of language and linguistics, basic stuff."

But I'm going to appeal to the rhetoricians and the bible scholars to talk to one another.   I'm going to ask us to compare our histories, to see how we fit in with Aristotle's paradigm.  (There's another word, the Greek word pisteis, that rhetoric scholars and bible scholars use differently too.  The New Testament writers, like Aristotle, are very keen on getting this right, and around Rahab - a woman, a prostitute, a foreigner - it seems most important -- See Hebrews 11:31 and James 2, especially 2:25)  So I would say this, in reply:

"The LXX translators tend to open up meanings of Greek words that Aristotle shut down.  The words and the meanings were once used by Homer, by Sappho, by the playwrights, and the other poets of old.  And the Septuagint translators have the vantage, the advantage, of seeing how both Aristotle and his predecessors used language differently.  The first Bible translators, the Jewish translators of their sacred Hebrew scriptures into their sacred Hellene scriptures, were much more open to wordplay than we tend to be.  We tend to follow Aristotle in shutting down meanings of words.  But the original linguists translating the Bible originally knew and behaved better, more playfully.  I think we could call it Torah and even post-Pentateuch persuasion.  If Willis Barnstone is willing to call Eve 'the mother of translation', then why can't we imagine Pandora as another Eve?   Why can't we be more willing to open the box?"

The real tragedy is the silencing of women (whether by rhetoric studies - more muting and erasing of women than "the male bastion of philosophy" - or whether by bible translation scholarship).  This silencing happens, I'm convinced, in large measure because of Aristotle and what feminists rightly call his boxed method of phallogocentrism.  Whether you're a man or a rhetoric scholar or a bible translator, what you risk missing by following Aristotle's separationist method is hearing women.  For example, you may miss hearing "Rahab and her sisters" as noted by Suzanne McCarthy in this BBB post; and you may miss hearing what Rahab has said (as noted in another post here at this blog) which notes how, in Joshua 2:14, "The Jews [translating their own Bible] have 'καὶ αὐτὴ εἶπεν' (for which [English translator] Brenton has 'and she said') for the original, ambiguous [and wordplay] Hebrew phrase 'אמֶר'.”  I'm hoping that we can at least listen to wordplay in bible translation, that we can remember what Greek was like before (and after) Aristotle, and in the best of all worlds that we can listen to so-called "womanly" discourse that acknowledges "all men and women" as "created equal."  We may have to recover feminisms, rhetorics, and translating that Aristotle once boxed up and put away.

 

Labelling Feminists, Changing Us

Yesterday, Jessica Valenti, an Editor of the blog feministing.com writes how college education "literally changed my life." She speaks on university campuses, trying to contribute to such life changes, and in return many people on campus endorse her on the blog. And yet she remains critical of the academy, arguing "it's not as accessible as it should be, and that it makes feminism something that only folks who are fortunate enough to go to college can take part in." In many ways, Valenti's life story of change because of higher education is a story I appreciate, especially with her caution about the limitations of the academy. My own story (and my own thinking) is running parallel hers in some ways.

Without getting into my story, I do want to say a couple of related things. One - to me, the academy and feminisms within the academy and elsewhere really are about people and changes for the good. That's why you won't hear me praising "feminism" as an end in itself or championing an institution or "higher education" as a destination. Two - its the personal stories told by real people often silenced that make all the difference to me, that help me change. I don't do enough of that. And I'm glad Jessica Valenti does, yesterday, go on to say this:

While I think those criticisms [of feminists in the academy being inaccessible] do hold water, I also think we often don't give enough love to the amazing teachers and students in these departments [of women and gender studies] - the way the[y] organize, the way they teach and the way they change people's lives. So, much love to all of the teachers I've had and to all of the departments out there making a difference every day - you are all amazing.

Now, what I want to do if you're willing is to let you in on a few pages of the end of the first textbook assigned to me in my first course of the PhD program I completed last year.  (Dr. Charlotte Hogg, the prof in that course ended up chairing my dissertation committee).  Without your really knowing me, imagine how that course and these words on the page might have begun to change my life.  Imagine what difference it might make in your thinking, in your working, in your changing, in your relating.

Here's from Cheryl Glenn and her Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance (pages 173-74):

     I am gratified to be concluding this project, but I must resist closure.  A regendered, retold rhetorical tradition opens up--not closes down--investigation into rhetorical practices.  Even though gender is merely a concept borrowed from grammar, it, nevertheless, continues to have far-reaching effects on cultural notions of the relation between the sexed body and its behavior.  Gendered experiences continue to be difficult, if not impossible, to separate from human ones.  And for that reason alone, the masculine gender, just like male experience or display, has come to represent the universal.  Men have appropriated many public social practices, particularly prestigious practices like rhetoric, as universally masculine; the feminine experience (that of bodies sexed female) has come to represent exceptions, or the particular.

     In regendering the tradition [of the history of rhetoric], I have not gone so far as to "destroy gender" or even to "abolish the category of gender" (Wittig 67).  Instead, I have analyzed distributions of power along the axis of gender that have for too long been easily accepted as nature's empirical design for masculine superiority, for patriarchal representations of the universal.  This discourse of regendering has allowed me to examine gender(ed) performances within and across cultural constructions of the body, human identity, and power.

     To this end, the project of regendering rhetorical history is a feminist performative act, a commitment to the future of women, a promise that rhetorical histories and theories will eventually (and naturally) include women.  Of course, gender as a category of analysis contributes to this feminist project, but it is regendering that unsettles stable gender categories and enacts a promise that rhetorical history will be a continuous process of investigating the works of women and men rather than a final product that can be finally or universally represented.  As soon as it is written, any historical interpretation--including this regendered rhetorical tradition from antiquity through the Renaissance--becomes an anachronism, for it immediately codes its own investigative site as needing/deserving more attention....

Growing Up in the West: Women

You don't have to be a woman growing up in the Middle East or in Africa - in Afghanistan or in Mozambique - to experience the pains of sexism. The horrors of misogyny are in the West, in the USA and in Canada and in the UK. But the solutions are here too, and you and I can be a part of the solutions.

Here are reports from the blogosphere today:

With a few exceptions, the mainstream media continue to kill stories about honor killings and attempted honor killings in North America. How often did you read stories about the honor killings that took place in Toronto (07), Dallas (08), Atlanta (08), Oak Forest, Illinois (08), Alexandria (08), Buffalo (09), and Kingston, Canada (09)—on and on, until the most recent attempted honor killing in Phoenix?

--from Phyllis Chesler at Chesler Chronicles, "Spinning Out Of Control: Honor Killings and Media Bias"

[A c]rime fiction writer and reviewer for the Literary Review is refusing to review any more crime novels because of the high levels of misogynist violence, the Guardian reports.

--from Jess McCabe at The F-Word blog: Contemporary UK Feminism, "Crime fiction reviewer refusing to review any more books because of misogynist violence"

In fact, it turns out that even among the most economically privileged women, the recession has been bad! (GASP!) And not only that—women have actually fared worse than men!

Female chief executives earned just 58 percent of what their male counterparts did in 2008, and their compensation packages were slashed three times as much as their male peers, according to a survey released on Monday. 

--from Melissa McEwan at Shakesville, "Shocked, I Say!"

--

Two suspects were in custody Monday, but police said as many as five other men attacked the [15-year-old] girl over a two-hour period Friday night outside Richmond High School. “She was raped, beaten, robbed and dehumanized by several suspects who were obviously OK enough with it to behave that way in each other’s presence,” Lt. Mark Gagan said. “What makes it even more disturbing is the presence of others. People came by, saw what was happening and failed to report it.”

It is impossible for me to believe that the people who stood by and did nothing are human beings- any more than the persons who perpetrated the act. Human beings don’t act this way. Or rather, don’t stand around watching and laughing while this kind of thing goes on.

--from Jim West at Dr. Jim West, "Total Deprvity: The 12 Who Watched A Rape, And Did Nothing"

The Campaign to End Rape coalition is conducting a survey on women’s attitudes to and experiences of rape and the law.

--from Laura Woodhouse, The F-Word blog: Contemporary UK Feminism, "Survey: Women, Rape and the Law"

about biblioblogging...? Jacqueline Jones Royster's voices

I don't know why you read my blog. It's a strange mix of feminisms, translation stuff, rhetorics, and because of that sometimes often it's bibliobloggish. I know, doesn't make sense much to the pure or the purists of any sort.

So let me offer at least 2 reasons why you might read this particular post:  1 - you might have read something yesterday here about April DeConick sounding rather like Moses (moses, the male, I mean) when I was hoping she might just also speak with another voice of hers;  2- you might be holding me to my promise (sort of) that I'd say something more about why afrafeminist Jacqueline Jones Royster has very much influenced how I read the bible.

1- DeConick does not disappoint.  Look at the whole post What is it about biblioblogging...? But at least read two central paragraphs:

As for the historical-critical approach and feminism. There is nothing anti-feminist about the historical approach in and of itself. What is anti-feminist is its application which has been controlled by white (mainly European) males since only recently. So the kind of history that has been recovered and written has been the history of the dominant group, and it is the history that justifies and sustains that group. Here again we are talking about white males who are in power and who wish to remain so. When our histories, whether religious or social or political, have been written and put into text books and taught to our children, it is the history of the dominant group - their master commemorative narrative - that we are disseminating. Now this is not new news. It is ho-hum by now and I imagine you are yawning.

So what have we done about this now that we have recognized it because feminist scholarship and literary critical methods have brought this to our attention? We have gone back and added a paragraph about important women in our textbooks and we have minted coins with Anthony's face on it, coins that we never use! But we haven't rewritten our histories to reflect what we are learning about the hidden histories and the marginalized past nor have we commemorated it as a society (this is especially true of our religious histories - which is why I am writing Sex and the Serpent). Why not add a paper dollar to those we use already, and put Anthony on it? Why not make a government holiday commemorating the Suffrage movement? Why not rename important boulevards with the names of women we wish to commemorate? Etc.

Doesn't she sound wonderfully like Patricia Bizzell?  And if you're a (feminist) rhetorician you should know how she sounds.  For example, in her speech and in her writing (“Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do They Make?”), Bizzell asks,

Have [Jacqueline Jones] Royster, and other feminist scholars for whom she has now more completely articulated methodologies already in practice, departed radically from the rhetorical tradition?

So Bizzell answers:

Yes, and no. No, because their work relies upon many of the traditional tools of research in the history of rhetoric. No, because the rhetors they have added to our picture of the history of Western rhetoric seem to me to be working within this tradition and enriching it, rather than constituting utterly separate or parallel rhetorical traditions. But yes, because in order to get at activities of these new rhetors, researchers have had to adopt radically new methods as well, methods which violate some of the most cherished conventions of academic research, most particularly in bringing the person of the researcher, her body, her emotions, and dare one say, her soul, into the work.  From my [Bizzell's] perspective as editor of an anthology called The Rhetorical Tradition, contemplating the major changes in scholarship over the last ten years, these new methods have made all the difference.

2 - Now you've noticed my little segue into talking about Royster.  I don't think I can say more really than Bizzell has.  I do think Royster herself has lots to say.  The best place to start, if you're starting to read Royster, is her essay, "When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own."  There, she talks about her many voices, and she does so using her "academic voice."  She's writing (also) as a woman, as an African American, as one often talked about by other experts on african american women, experts who themselves are neither women nor african americans.

Royster, you may also want to learn, is an "English" academic professionally, not a bible scholar.  But as such she is a historian, a feminist, a rhetorician, a literary scholar.  Royster has a fabulous book she's entitled, Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women. If you haven't caught on, then you might want to understand that Royster finds herself in the historical stream of women she's researching and writing about. This is objective but subjective stuff.  Two of my favorite paragraphs are these (from pages 254-55):

     My role as researcher has been to look theoretically and philosophically at the data, to bring meaning to it.  The very first order of business by necessity has been to establish an interpretive viewpoint that clearly places African American women at the center of our own story.  The assumption is that viewpoint matters.  As Anna Julia Cooper stated in 1892 in A Voice from the South, "What is needed, perhaps, to reverse the picture of the lordly man slaying the lion, is for the lion to turn painter!"  (1988:222).  In scholarly research and analysis, the question to be addressed is more than whether African American women occupy a passive position of object or an active position of subject.  Rather, the question, at the level of interpretation, is how--as objects or subjects--we are placed on a landscape or within a material reality.

     In this analysis, I rejected images of African American women that would position us interpretively as a mirror or a reflection of others, or as a room accessed by other people's doors and windows, or even as a backdrop against which other stories are told, invigorated, or clarified.  Instead, this analysis positions African American women as the "lions" in a "lion's tale."  My intent has been to consider African American women as the embodiment of our own dreams and aspirations, our own created and re-created selves, in a world with others, certainly, but without the need at critical points in the analytical process (that is, in the initial stages) to be filtered through the experiences of others, no matter how resonant or dissonant those experiences might be.  In making such a commitment to creating a working space amid dualities, I believe I have acquired an understanding of both scholarly positioning and knowledge production in this arena from which advice to others might be abstracted.  In choosing an appropriate mechanism for sharing advice in a more direct manner, however, without suggesting the notion of easy prescriptions, I realize once again that theory, like history, also begins with a story.

Let me quote three paragraphs more, and then say something about the bible and about my reading (and some blogging about) it.  Here's from Royster's preface to Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture (page x):

     Colleagues in mainstream and not so mainstream academic circles have learned to focus more acutely on what it actually means to carry out a research agenda that is defined and substantively directed by schemata (race, gender, culture) that have traditionally been marginalized and disregarded.  We have learned to adapt and invent research and teaching strategies, and we have struggled to negotiate the social and political dynamics of academic lives that are so clearly tied to traditionally devalued interests.  In the main, there have not been road maps by which to determine appropriate and worthy pathways, since these interests actually go against the grain of many traditional practices.  We hear tales of colleagues who have worked without advocates, mentors, or champions to run interference or to keep resources enabling structures in place.  Personally and professionally, many of us have felt on our own, isolated, and struggling against the odds.  These are the facts of many lives.

And here's from Royster's preface to Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900 (page vii):

     As complements to each other, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases and A Red Record clearly state Wells's position on lynching, revealing the insight and perception with which she was able to launch the most successful of the early anti-lynching campaigns.  Wells's courageous analysis helps us to understand the told and untold story of this sinister thread in the fabric of American life.  The third pamphlet, Mob Rule in New Orleans, is a case study that dramatically details an individual incident as it escalates in the absence of law, order, and the application of justice to become yet another striking example of "southern horror."

     I have also sought to establish an appropriate framework for understanding the personal achievements of Ida B. Wells.  Born into slavery, Wells went on to garner a place of respect as a nationally and internationally prominent journalist and as a leader in the black clubwomen's movement.  Wells was one among a relatively small but growing number of "public" women in an era when public arenas were not considered the place for women.  Going against this grain, Wells earned a reputation as an outspoken and steadfast crusader for justice, and the three pamphlets presented here are testimony to her achievement.

Now it doesn't take an entirely careful reader to see how Royster, historian, finds herself in the history.  Nor does it take a woman, or an African American, or an AfricanAmericanwoman to appreciate what she's doing, and the authority with which she does it.  The marginal voices of the "traditional" history speak.  They do not demand to be heard.  They deconstruct and reconstruct their histories before an expert not in the stream of history (not that history anyway) can construct them otherwise.

So, the bible.  It is history, re-presentations.  And most today doing scholarship on the Bible come at it as lion slayers in the painting, not letting the silenced lions paint, not listening to the voices, not standing themselves in their own margins where they belong.  Since I am not a Jew of old, not even one of those who spoke for or as Thomas or Mary, then I do better, I think, to listen to the stories not always told.  Royster reminds me of the horrors of the silenced in the south.  She reminds me that rigorous historical criticism (even in biblical scholarship) is too often necessarily done "without advocates, mentors, or champions to run interference or to keep resources enabling structures in place."  There are many (yet) unheard and overlooked.  The subjective perspective is most important when "being" objective.

 

 

Tangled up in blue

We always did feel the same,
We just saw it from a different point of view,
Tangled up in blue.

--Bob Dylan

Blogger friends J.L. and Jay dropped by the last post here to make a couple of great comments.   J.L. says that from some of his friends he's "heard that feminism 'sissifies' men."  And he asks this fantastic question:  "So it is 'pink' to consider women equal?"  Jay adds this wonderful statement:  "Just because someone is bilingual (can speak both pink and blue interchangeably) does not mean they are confused."

(In the post, I was saying how a couple of friends here in Texas were using "blue" for the way men think and talk and "pink" for the way women think and talk - and "feminism" for the problem of men becoming "pink.")

What's funny to me is that we can talk together about "male" language and "female" language and never really examine whether our own conversation is "blue" or "pink."  Our talk is hypocritically immune from any critique while we're questioning - dare I say criticizing? - the talk of others.  Here's the rub:  am I speaking in manly terms (i.e., talking "blue") when talking about how "different" men and women are?

One of my friends says this:  "Men and women have different plumbing AND they have different wiring."  (I'll let you decide whether this friend is a man or a woman, whether the assertions are "blue" or "pink.")  This friend believes that genitalia AND brain functioning constitute a fundamental, inherent, natural set of differences between males and females.  Maybe this is "true" and is "true Truth" too.  (Aristotle certainly set out to prove this sort of Truth.)  The fascinating thing, to me, is how we talk about "difference" and "similarity."

We talk, we categorize.  "feel the same" / "different point of view" / "tangled up in blue" / "blue" / "pink" / "feminism" / "sissified [male]" / "equal [females]" / "man brain" / "woman brain" / "penis" / "vagina"

The conversations, the categories, get all tangled up.  I'm not talking "confused."  Rather, what I mean is that the very labels themselves order our realities as if Mother Nature or Father God were shouting out and yelling down at us.  These things - the very words made real - become threatening.

My eldest daughter, for example, declares she's not a feminist because she's feminine.  And, she quickly adds, "But am equal to any guy when it comes to making money or to intelligence.  In fact, not bragging or anything, but some men are just not as smart as most women." 

I retort that she's just not a first or second wave feminist.  But that she's a fine third-wave feminist!  (As if I have to defend "feminisms.")

We talk (she and I) about Leonard Pitts, Jr.'s daughter.  "So for the record," he announces, "I am a feminist. My daughter is too. She just doesn't know it yet."  But is he a "sissified" sissy, then? we wonder.  What we haven't done yet is read Pitts's debut novel.  The reviews say it's very good. 

And one reviewer says Pitt's first novel, Before I Forget, is actually very "blue" and not necessarily very "pink":

The message manhood: becoming a man; accepting and performing the responsibilities of a man, and teaching our sons what a man does and how a man behaves is refreshing and on point. Oh yeah, it’s that deep. The beauty of the novel is that each of the male characters in the book, not just the Johnson family, displays different levels and aspects, positive and negative, of manhood. I’m kinda stunned at how Pitts was able to accomplish this.

Now, is the reviewer a man or a woman?  Seriously.  Look at his or her language.  Is it more "pink" or "blue" - just judging by the language.  What language!:  "becoming" "accepting" "performing" "refreshing" "deep" "beauty" "displays" "different" "levels" "aspects" "stunned"  One might argue that the words tend to be "pink" more than "blue" even though the novel is about "men" and "males" and "manhood."  (In fact, the reviewer is a man.  Maybe he's just one of those sissyfied sissies.  But I don't think so.)

Black men (now I'm talking about African American males) tend, it seems, to have a particular issue with how they're talked about.  When you add "pink" and "blue" with "black" and "white," the labels get really colorful, don't they?  My wife and I just watched the wonderful Steve Harvey on BET this weekend.  He doesn't hold back with his vulgar hilarious humor, insider jokes in Ebonics!   And he's got so much to say, to his own daughters about his own kind.  There's much wisdom in his book Act Like A Lady, Think Like a Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitments.  And he's got a few things to say to young men too, about being "blue."  (One of my blogger-,  Facebook-, reallife friends cracked:  "Isn't he kinda like an Oprah for guyz?")  And yet he actually mentors the boy "in blue" himself.  Here's a video news report on his blog.  Now, I do know people who find Harvey's humor to be racist and his language about men and women to be sexist and stereotypical.  Oprah Winfrey (who is "kinda like an Oprah for girlz?") is, nonetheless, not one who is offended by this (black) man.

Somehow now, I'm brought back to Jay's wonderful comment:  "Just because someone is bilingual (can speak both pink and blue interchangeably) does not mean they are confused."  I like that alot.  Jay's statement is getting at something very personal:  our languageS, our voiceS, and our listening to one another with clarity.  When we're talking about other people, and if we can talk about ourselves too, the gendered labels can actually help.  Help, that is, if we don't get tangled up in blue.

(Now, a quick parenthetical thing:  When Bob Dylan sings Tangled Up in Blue, he's not meaning "blue" is "equal" to "male."  He's not even meaning "blue" is equal to "xanh."  He means "blue" is an emotion, a feeling, a profound "sadness" in this case in a relationship.  And none of us English speakers hearing his song "confuses" these categories.  It is fun to listen to the song, knowing Dylan's a "man" singing about a "woman."  It'd be crazy for us Vietnamese speakers to get tangled up in grue/ bleen "xanh".)

Pheminist Phooh

If the Christian bible writer Paul can dump his Star of David like far-flung doggy doo doo, then a "good" biblioblogger ought at least to be able to go beyond the concerns of gender and race and class. Right? "Amen and aMen," so say the really Big BiblioBloggers.

(But more on all that in a moment. First this:

>Never mind that this Humble Little guy named שָׁאוּל and also called Παῦλος never ever ever divorces his Joshua aka "Jesus" from his Jewishness.

>Never mind that this blogger is ever concerned with how this ever Jewish rabbi is always concerned with gender, race, and class.

>Never mind that Paul is writing "Christian politically incorrect" words like σκύβαλα - which another Joshua aka "Jesus" uses first to translate some politically incorrect Hebrew, all of which gets dumped from the bible as the unwise "Wisdom of Jesus son of Sirach" especially Chapter 27, Verse 4, in which puppy pooh remains for humans even after the canonical siftings.

>Never mind that this blogger's blog has a "Christian politically incorrect" middle name, "feminist" - which one must accurately point out is purposefully left out of all the Bible texts, especially those few "respectable" texts that "include" so-called "non-feminist alterity.")

Now, back to the point. The point is that there is a problem with "feminist" blogging in the biblioblogosphere. (And let's not mark the biblioblogosphere with maleness -- can't we all just get beyond, like God is?)

The problem was a serious problem of conviviality back in 2007 at SBL.

It is a problem now. One big problem we can all sympathize with - given our common desire for a post-sexist, post-racial, post-classist society - is that messengers (such as the word feminism) tend to get shot in church on a Sunday morning. In other words, we all tend to forget that sexism runs deep in the dark places, our own dark places, our own blogosphere, where you can't even see your compass or your mirror as if you're willing there to look at a compass or in a mirror at all.

The Biggest problem now, however, seems to be that the sure fact that little bloggers like me just really might "contribute to creating an environment in which Bible readers who do not share [my so-called] passionately chosen brand of feminism will [therefore,] feel free to ignore and even disrespect [my] particular alterity."

Alas! I myself have other concerns. Alas!

Alas! My associations with Jane Stranz and her "living, laughing, liturgical" brand of feminism have become public. Hence, I'm getting all these Pheminist Phoohy blogger awards lately. And, after reading each of Aristotle's terribly numerous works on Animals, I thought I was only working to rid the world of sexism among hippos. (Careful Suzanne, Jane just might also bring down your now-very-well-read Bookshelf.)


Alas! I haven't even come close to earning enough cash for my very own "Lingamish franchise." (I think I only get paid when David the Hippo Ker visits my blog, and there's only $6.66 in the bank now.)


Alas! John F. Hobbins keeps picking on me at James R. Getz Jr.'s Carnival. And James won't let Julia M. O'Brien sit between us. The only help he offers is "good grammar" and the imperative "don't panic!"


Alas! The Month of May made me put on my thinking cap for #1 Top Biblioblogger Dr. Jim "why does gender matter?" West, who deserves congratulations for being crowned Mr. March and Mr. April and Mr. May.

---

Coda

Lest my babbling above is not clear, I'm looking for the smile on your face. I count you all as my friends. What you say here in comments and in posts at your own blogs constantly challenges and amazes and encourages me. I'm okay when people like Polycarp pick on me for my Ph.D., a harassment which he rationalized in vain by claiming, once upon a time, [quote], "Since J.K. Gayle has stopped blogging, I have been trying to find a balance to my acknowledged masculine viewpoint which would challenge me to look through another’s eyes." I am quite alright with people like Tonya and Daniel at their Hebrew and Greek Reader looking for things that shouldn't be there, and when people like N.T. Wrong, who never really was, aren't there any more but still come around for conversation as if critical theory and the Enlightenment weren't dead. I love it when people like Jared Calaway at his Antiquitopia can advise us: "be creative, stick your head out and see what people are doing in other fields."

My sadness is that the "feminist" label in some contexts works as the "Bible" label works in others. My affinity with feminists is more profound perhaps than mine with bible bloggers because feminists tend more generally to be much more inclusive (both personally and methodologically). The awards above tend, nonetheless, to cause us blogging against sexism to be suspicious of the power afforded the many male-dominant voices. We see how many are silenced by phallogocentric interpretations and translations and bloggings of "the Bible."

My hope is that we all can listen rhetorically, translatively, feministically, biblically, playfully. Not just listening to refute but rather listening to render what the Other is saying - and thereby finding ourselves, our bodies, repositioned however differently. Otherwise, it just sounds like more Phe-men-ist Phooh and biblical Boo!

(ps:
My post title comes from the effort of one of my friends to translate Winnie the Pooh books by A. A. Milne from English into another of her languages. She rightly noted that other translators had neglected the play in the feminine name Winnie for the male bear - even though everyone knows that the author only intended originally to name his character after Winnipeg, a real bear in the London zoo. Winnie, of course, as the feminine diminutive of Winifred also plays on Whinny [as in the Whinny womanly Fred]. And now not a few writers have taken Pooh to mean what it sounds like. Thus, Frederick Crews authors The Pooh Perplex, which we all say aloud and laugh. [Didn't even chuckle? Well, say The Pooper Plex for an academic work.] This authorizes Benjamin Hoff, as if aspiring to the crap of the Ivory Tow-er, to write The Tao of Pooh. And not to be outdone, Crews goes beyond that stuff with Postmodern Pooh. The last book mentioned includes several women writers, and many feminists, not the least of which is one Ms Sisera Cathetera, whose contribution is the punny chapter, "Just Lack A Woman." I think we get the point. If we're smiling we do. Please feel free to smile, to ignore, or even to disrespect.)

(Feminist) Recovery Work

These words in this post are not responses to John Hobbins' response to me. (John, hope you'll understand that you've given me a lot to think about - although I'm sincerely humbled that you'd give so much thought to our interactions, sincerely challenged by your efforts to dialog.)
---

This weekend my family and I stopped by the Barnes & Noble bookstore on the way back to the car after walking around downtown Fort Worth on a beautiful evening together. (It was the restroom stop for some, so I peeked at the books, of course, and saw near the men's room on display was Richard B. Hays' nearly 10-year-old work, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul, in which the Christian theologian confesses to looking at the Jewish George Steiner's review of The Literary Guide to the Bible (edited by the Jewish Robert Alter and the perhaps Christian but definitely not Jewish Sir Frank Kermode); Hays, the Christian, after he's already written his book, explains, in his late-written Preface, how he is not at all happy with the view of Steiner, the Jew. Hays writes on pages ix and x: "If so erudite literary critic as Steiner labors under such distressing misapprehensions about Paul and his argument in Romans, the need for the reading of Paul offered in the following pages is perhaps greater than I realized when I began to write. 'Hatred of the Jew?'. . . . In short, although Steiner's remarks might be applied, with some justice, to the evangelists Matthew and John, they badly misrepresent Paul." Hays, of course, does not mark the positions (i.e., Christian, Jew, male) of Paul, Steiner, himself and so forth. But the male Christian theologian does wonderfully acknowledge that "Steiner labors." Just how does a Jew labor, however, when thinking about Christian thinking about Paul?

I'm telling this story just to begin to say that positions are too often unmarked. That this is dicey. That when one presumes to tell that another's position is a bad misrepresentation, that very one himself may "badly misrepresent" that other. Wow. That sounds complex.

So here's another story. When at a rhetoric conference not too long ago, a feminist scholar announced early research on the phallogocentricism of Alcoholics Anonymous. She was seeing that in the Big Book most testimonials were from men and not from women, and that of course the founders of AA are men. Mine was the first question to this line of thinking, wondering whether the collaborative and dialogic nature of "meetings" wasn't actually "laboring" to deconstruct the masculinism of addiction and whether "recovery" from the "disease" wasn't very akin to "feminist recovery work" in many other contexts. The researcher answered that my question did not address directly the male dominance of AA. But to my delight, the keynote speaker of the conference was in the room, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, and she was much more successfully able to challenge the line of research, framed itself in a male-ish paradigm, from which feminists like Beth Daniels recover on both sides (i.e., by study of Al Anon and, unfortunately also, by necessary engagement in Al Anon). How does one critique without admitting one is affected by? What's at stake except what's personal, what's also gendered?

My favorite Greek word in the "New Testament" is this ironic imperative spoken by Joshua and by the Jewish John the Baptist: meta-noia. That's another story for another time when I have more time. But these two Jews, men who are affected by the effects of a male dominant bible-reading society on their on mothers and sisters, are calling for something personal. For re-covery work, personal and gendered.

What do you see in Malcolm X?

Really, what do you see from your own perspective?

Renee at Womanist Musings wishes Malcolm X Happy Birthday by sharing his eulogy delivered by Ossie Davis. Samhita Mukhopadhyay at Feministing wonders "Where would we be without Malcolm?" and advises readers to "check out Grace Lee Boggs on knowing Malcolm X, Adrienne Maree Brown on the application of Malcolm's teaching to building power in communities around violence and Melissa Harris-Lacewell on the legacy of Malcolm X." Anna Clark at Isak remembers "Happy Birthday, Malcolm ... and Brown v. Board of Education" and gets readers looking at various posts and essays.

Zettler Clay for Clutch Magazine remembers "his rescinded views towards females" in the post "Malcolm X and Black Women: Struggling For Closure." (My biblioblogger friends are silent. And my rhetorician friends are just as mute. That says a lot, doesn't it? But Linda López McAlister had trouble remembering those rescinded views towards females when she viewed Spike Lee's biographical film when it came out 16 and a half years ago: "In the last few days--in this order--I heard a talk by the white radical lesbian separatist philosopher Mary Daly, saw 'Malcolm X' and heard a talk by black feminist theorist and cultural critic bell hooks. . . . One thought that kept occurring to me as I was watching Malcolm X give his speeches was how much his separatist rhetoric and Mary Daly's separatist rhetoric had in common. . . . And maybe, if I hadn't heard bell hooks yesterday, I would have come in here today and given a review of 'Malcolm X' that focused more on the cinematic elements of the film and what Black liberation struggles and women's liberation struggles have in common than on the troubling overt misogyny of the film." And maybe, if you remember, you were listening to somebody, from your own perspectives, when you watched the Spike Lee motion picture remembering the life of Malcolm X.)

And maybe, if you were at the Brooklyn Museum between October 31, 2008–April 5, 2009, you would have noticed history in art from your own perspective. What would you have made of "Carrie Mae Weems's Untitled (Man Smoking/Malcolm X), 1990, which explores human experience from the vantage point of an African American female subject"? The work by Weems was part of "Burning Down the House: Building a Feminist Art Collection . . . an exhibition . . . [the title of which] refers to the idea of the 'master’s house' from two perspectives: the museum as the historical domain of male artists and professed masters of art history, and the house as the supposed proper province of women." Go back, look again, at Weem's photo as you frame it. What do you see in Malcolm X?

sounds of Englishes, sights of feminisms

Earlier in the semester, I had the honor of co-presenting at a rhetorics conference with a scholar from l’Ecole Normal Supériure – Lettres et Sciences Humaines of Lyon, France. Her paper was in English, but she discussed the French gendered wordplay of a popular comedian. She noted that French children from early ages participate in observations of how (their) language works. In other words, French people don't just speak and write French but they also are aware of and practice metalanguage (or talk, thought, and emotion about talk). Maybe the French postmodernists and French feminists are so much more fun for the French than they are for us readers of them in English translation. Fortunately, my paper (a presentation of the ancient Greek language of men and women about women) was in English - and our English language audience (of Americans, Brits, Chinese, French, Italians, and Vietnamese people) was accustomed to the metalanguage of academic English.

Which brings me to the question of what English is.

Some of you know that professionally I administer the programs at a U.S. university for learners of English as an additional language. There is something called "English" that some of us teach and many of us learn. Sometimes, we'll conveniently pinpoint this thing even further by calling it "academic English" and even "American academic English." But I was taken aback the other day when the sales representative of a major publishing house came to campus to demonstrate the company's new standardized test of academic English. The test has not only "American English" but also other Englishes - for example, a lecture in South African English.

Wow. How will students learn these differences, I wonder? The sales representative confessed that variant spellings (i.e., British spellings and American spellings) are allowed in the writing portion of the test. Of course they are.

Now things are really complex. Our English students already love to bring us poems on the absurdity of English spelling, for example. And on the new test there's even more difference to master.

Now, I'm back to that question of what English is.

English writing is hardly a dynamically equal experience to English speaking. No, there's no pure sound-sight correspondence in English as between (1) pronounced ancient Greek and (2) the classic Greek alphabet. (Or, to take a contemporary, living language example: there's no direct relationship in English between speaking and spelling as there is for either European or American Spanish).

So our English students and the faculty members in our ESL department listen to me saying that English is a mixture, a hybrid, a stew of many other languages, and many stews in many different places over many different time periods. That's hardly satisfying. We want English to be what it is. We want what is not English to be something else different entirely.

This is Aristotle's game of logic. Aristotle would call English bar-bar-istic. It is impure, it messy, it is hard to learn and to teach, it is to be cleaned up by the grammar police and the spelling guardians, or else. And let's get the basic skills of unambiguous English communication before we ever teach metalinguistic wordplay.

The sounds of English are grating, Aristotle would say. Listen:

O... O god... Ooo Oh god... Oh... O... O... Oh god... Oh yeah right there Oh! Oh... Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes... O... Oh... Yes Yes Yes.... Oh... Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes... O... Oh... Oh... Oh god Oh... O... Uh...
(Sally's faking an orgasm and is using a deity's name in vain in public in an American pop movie about lovers)

OOOO that Shakespeherian Rag--
(T. S. Eliot is speaking for someone else, not even Shakespeare's Lucrece, in his "Waste Land")

My "I" seems simply not to be the male-constructed "I.": It is more fluid, diffuse, multiplex (giddy, duplicitous, and inconstant, I think men have called it). Maybe we need another sort of signifier for the female self--the "O" might be a logical choice, or rather a whole string of Os: OOOOO. That's me. The fact of the matter, though, is that when I sit down at my desk to tell a story, I can't begin, "OOOOO woke this morning to the song of a cardinal in the fig tree outside the back door."
(Nancy Mairs is struggling with writing in English, in feminine English - but isn't she playing here also with both the phallic and feminine sights of an English with such different sounds?)

Aristotle helps me understand "English." Aristotle helps me understand the "female." But he wants his male-only elite Greek students in his academy to understand barbarisms and women the way he understands them. He wants to define them (what they are and what they must NOT be in nature). He wants to categorize them, to place them in their place (below good Greek and below any male). He wants to avoid their sounds, their sights. He wants them not to make his privileged life difficult, not to bend what he wants to be rigidly straightforward, not to dirty up what he wants to be unpolluted. And he wants us all to listen to his intent (No pun intended!).

And yet. And yet if we listen with our intent we hear more.