Rod: Ain't He a Womanist?

Ain't I a woman?

--Sojourner Truth

Man cannot speak for her.

--Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Woman, where are those thine accusers?
[stoning the sinners by tweeting "Farewell"
quoting my translators as if proving "Hell"]

hath no man condemned thee?

--Jesus

What is written in the Torah [Law]?

How do you read it?

--Jesus

Somehow, I hope you will find in this post some encouragement for yourself.

(Is this my Rob Bell post?  Heck no!)

With this post, I'm hoping to review somebody who's influenced how Rod of Alexandria reads the Bible and to get at some how she's influenced him.  I'd also like to review someone else who's influenced how J. K. Gayle reads the Bible and just how she has influenced him.  That "she" for Rod is Dr. Katie Cannon.  That "she" for me is Dr. Krista Ratcliffe.

Then I'd be absolutely delighted and encouraged if you'd take a moment to consider who has influenced how you yourself read the Bible and how she has influenced you to do so.

Just do it.  But first...

First, read Rod's post for yourself.  (Don't worry yet that Suzanne, in her admittedly "Scattered Thoughts," calls it Rod's "exemplary post on Rob Bell."  If you also read her post for yourself, then you'll get all the rest of what she sees in "Katie’s Cannon(ization): Inerrancy As White Evangelical Folklore.")

Now, how do you read it?  Did you get "the shackles of the hermeneutic that comes with affirming the Chicago Statement of Inerrancy"?  Did you see the "body in the [Sunday School] classroom who didn’t belong?"  Did you follow the block quote with Rod's own underlinings?

“The doctrine of infallibility reinforced and was reinforced by the need for social legitimization of slavery.  Thus racial slavery was accepted as a necessary fulfillment of the curse of Ham This had the effect of placing the truthfulness of God’s self-revelation on the same level as Black slavery and White supremacy.”

Do you see Rod's modifiers of this "inerrantist hermeneutic"?  Can you look up the words pro-slavery?  Are you able, moving forward, to get past Rod's borrowing of other adjectives for a few "women for women" (whom the pro-slavery, pro-kyriarchic ones once considered to be heretics)?   Are you able to get past Rod's reading of them as "courageous" and as "Christian" and as women "preachers"?  

Are you reading this?  Rod is reading Katie Cannon reading Mae Henderson reading the Bible.  And she is reading "bodies as texts."  And "[b]lack women’s bodies as texts."  So Rod reads the Bible, the book of Colossians, the book of Ezekiel, 1st Corinthians 1, and the translating gospel's Christ, the Son of Mary and the Son of God, who is our Perfect Bio-text.

"I'm not sure I'm a womanist," we hear somebody say.  Is it Rod?  Is it Dr. Monica A. Coleman, the founding Director of Womanist Religious Studies at Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, NC, the first undergraduate religious studies program to focus on the spiritual experiences of women of African descent?  Yes, it's Coleman expressing uncertainties, not about some dogmatic construct of "hell" to keep some out and others in, some above and others down.  Yes, it's Coleman asking questions:

Just as the field of womanist religious scholarship has grown in convergence with and departure from [Alice] Walker's life and definition, so the term womanist may now be larger than the women who initially claimed it. Can womanists reclaim the term? Do they even want to? Is this commercialization a sign of advancement? Or have hierarchical (often white and male) entities co-opted it, as yet another way to brand and classify black women and our thoughts?  ....We can identify ourselves as male and female [can't we?]

[see page 93 of her "Must I Be Womanist?" (Lead Roundtable article) Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 22.1 (Spring 2006): 85-96.]

So it's not just "hell" but it's also "bible" and "body" and "womanist" that are terms used "to brand and classify."  And we see that Rod is not so using these terms, is not so using the words this way.  He's rejecting the "hierarchical," is casting off "the shackles of the hermeneutic that comes with affirming the Chicago Statement of Inerrancy," is listening to and is reading from, a woman with a body that is black and free because of the Son of a Woman with a Body, a text.  See how?

Now, briefly let me say again how Dr. Ratcliffe has influenced how I read the Bible.  When I met her, she was listening to and reading from women with bodies that are black while we were being served lunch by others with black bodies.  (I wrote about that some here once).  What Krista Ratcliffe does and has done is recovery work in rhetorics, recovery of listening with intention as a hermeneutic.  She's made clear (and this is one of my own areas of research) how Aristotle robbed women and men of this "rhetorical listening."  (He left us to guess why he didn't listen to women.  And still Maya Angelou, who was raped by a misogynistic gynophobe when she was an 8-year-old girl, listens rhetorically to Aristotle and insists:  "One needs to know Aristotle.... One needs it desperately....  Must! I mean desperately... if one is to be at ease anywhere.")  Ratcliffe has herself recovered and practiced such listening, such rhetorical listening, by hearing and by overhearing and by eavesdropping, as an outsider, on the contention between black feminist Audre Lorde and white theologian feminist Mary Daly.  Ratcliffe says it's "hearing what we cannot see."  It's a "A Trope for Interpretive Invention and a [much needed] 'Code of Cross-Cultural Conduct'."  My friend, Dr. Jason King, has rendered "rhetorical listening" as follows:  "Rhetorical listening is not a refuting of but a rendering of the ones I hear. I may choose a stance of openness towards any person, text, or culture in cross-cultural exchanges."  I like that.  Whether it's the contentiousness of Lorde and Daly, or the rhetorics of disagreement of various experts and parents and "affected" about autism (which is King's research); whether it's Rob Bell's hell or Jesus's or some kyriarchical preacher's; whether it's somebody's co-opted "feminism" or Walker's first or Coleman's third-wave "womanism"; whether it's Colossians or Christ - I'm listening rhetorically.  I may choose a stance of openness toward any body, openness toward "any person, text, or culture," especially openness toward the one Rod says is "our Perfect Bio-text, ... in [whose] body are the marks of all of the world’s suffering."

Can you find here something to encourage you?  How do you find yourself outside what other people tell you is the Bible?  How do you read it?

Aint I a Womanist Too?

Womanist theology is a response to sexism in black theology and racism in feminist theology.  When early black theologians spoke of “the black experience,” they only included the experience of black men and boys.  They did not address the unique oppression of black women.  Feminist theologians, on the other hand, unwittingly spoke only of white women’s experience, especially of middle- and upper-class white women.  They did not include issues of race and economics in their critiques.  Many womanists also feel that feminist theology operates in opposition to men and is anathema to the church.  Womanist theologians want to maintain their connection to black men and remain faithful to the church traditions from which they come.  The term womanist allows black women to affirm their identity as black while also owning a connection with feminism.  Employing Alice Walker’s definition of womanist in her 1983 collection of essays In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, womanist theology makes significant contributions to the fields of black and liberation theologies.

----

above, an excerpt from the Introduction to Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology, by Monica A. Coleman.

This evening, Coleman gives the opening lecture - “Ain’t I A Womanist Too?: Third Wave Womanist Religious Thought” - for the Third Wave Womanism Conference at Claremont School of Theology.  (HT Rod of Alexandria)

Women, Africana Reality, and the Bible

      What immediately comes to mind when I ponder further my connectedness with my sisters and the Bible is my encounter with the latter at the Elminah Castle in Ghana in 2000.  I stood in one of the rooms, angered by a poster with a quotation from Psalm 132:14.  The core of the poster's message was that God was in the place of slavery!  There, at the western corner of the African continent, I remembered how this book, which has come to be valued and shunned by many African peoples, functioned to sanction all forms of oppression that were to become their painful legacies.  Some were hurled from that same location to the Americas, which some remained to be subjugated and colonized.  I remembered how the Bible was systematically used to sanction racial segregation in South Africa.  As sons and daughters of Africa bore, and still bear, the brunt of their Blackness, the daughters have been, and still are, at the receiving end.  The latter are connected in their struggles against a variety of life-denying forces in their local contexts and globally....

     I first encountered the Bible in early childhood at home (ga-Mphahlele), in the church, and later at school.  My family formed part of a group designated majakane, a church-going African people who supposedly (that is, mainly in public) shunned African traditional customs.  The majakane stood in contrast to the so-called heathens (bahedene) who openly rejected Christianity.  They freely engaged in African traditional life.  In that setting, the Bible was successfully used to divide kindred peoples!  I later came to embrace it in my teen years when I got attracted to Pentecostal theology.  Later, I encountered it as a university student in biblical studies classes, as a graduate student of Hebrew Bible, and now as a bosadi (womanhood) Hebrew Bible scholar.

--
a couple of paragraphs from a chapter with the title I've borrowed here as the title of my post.  It's in the book The Africana Bible: Reading Israel's Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora.  (HT David Ker, who may now regret giving it to me.)  The excerpt above is from Madipoane Masenya (ngwan'a Mphahlele).

Woman, Black: the Double Whammy of Inequality in Your Neighborhood

"When Black women are beaten, raped, or otherwise exploited we are not understood as victims because our bodies are understood to exist for the purposes of exploitation."

"There are few rushing to her defence because these constructions uphold not only the black white binary but the crushing dominance that patriarchy has established over women."

--Renee at Womanist Musings
gets at a huge problem of in-equal-ity in (y)our neighborhoods,
showing those Nude Photos of Rihanna and Prejean
[asking] Which One Is The Slut?

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?

Aristotle's logic vs. Alice Walker's womanism: What does this mean for your writing?

Nancy Mairs, a feminist academic writer, gets at the abstract and oppositional male shape of Aristotle’s masculinist logic. She also illustrates what such logic would silence: the kind of powerful womanist agency that someone like Alice Walker would use.

The procedure of Aristotle's logic depends on the binary, the separation of what a defined thing is from what it is not. Mairs explains that:

The fundamental structure of patriarchy is thus binary: me/not me, active/passive, culture/nature, normal/deviant, good/bad, masculine/feminine, public/private, political/personal, form/content, subjective/objective, friend/enemy, true/false. . . . It is a structure, both spatial and temporal, predicated upon separation, not relation. It demands rupture, the split into halves engendered by the abrupt erection of the phallus: those who have and those who have not. It speaks the language of opposites. (Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer 41)

Mairs has started into this description of the logical binary by saying that it is motivated by the male attempt to control the other. Mairs explains, “In order to get what he wants, then, the father must have power to coerce those around him to meet his demands. To have power is to alienate oneself, however, because power is always power over and the preposition demands an object” (41). Logic here is not presented simply as abstract rationality but rather also as a very personal means for the male logician to secure his position hierarchically over the female and any other who threatens his desires.

Mairs illustrates the effect of Aristotelian logic on composition studies. She points to one way that logic has dominated rhetoric, especially the rhetoric of a minority woman. Logic, Mairs shows, has led to the development of one straightforward convention for writing called, “the five-paragraph essay”; and yet there are other more-rhetorical more-complex forms that an African American woman writer, such as Alice Walker, may use in contrast to the standard convention of logic: “In this day of nearly universal education, with handbooks for writers proliferating . . . the five-paragraph essay has achieved the status of a cultural paradigm, which Walker blows to smithereens” (93). Mairs examines Walker’s essay entitled, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”:

In this essay, as in many of her other writings, Walker remakes the definitions of Art and the Artist . . . which have [except for such remakings] resided from time immemorial in the patriarchal domain, so that they describe the African-American woman. To do so, she must so subvert the conventional meanings that they no longer have the power to exclude her [i.e., by the binary, definitional logic that separates females from males and even rhetoric from logic itself]. In the process, she employs and thereby validates many of the cognitive modes—indirection, associative reasoning, anecdotal development, reliance on folk wisdom and intuition—which patriarchal [i.e., binarying] critics have traditionally devalued by ascribing them to women and other primitive thinkers [and not to men, who would be especially logical thinkers].

The essay [by the African-American woman] is a structural anomaly. I would hate to teach it in a traditional [i.e., logic structured] freshman composition course. After reading their textbooks, my students would go nuts trying to find the thesis statement and the major points of support for a formal outline, much less figure out its method of development and analyze its logical devices. (Interestingly, in the rhetorical index to The Contemporary Essay, [a traditional textbook] where [Walker’s] “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” is reprinted, it is listed only under “narration”—not even “description” or “example”—despite, or perhaps because of the complexity of its rhetorical strategies.) (bold font added; 93)

In tracing the structure of Aristotle’s patriarchal logic, Mairs has identified the effect of male binarying on writing: the college composition course separates the logical form of the essay from other more-rhetorical and less-male ways of communicating.