Feminism hasn't won until you stop throwing like a girl.

On International Women's Day, it seems appropriate to think about what it means to be a woman in our society. And for all the ways that women's status has changed, it's interesting that you can still, often, recognise a woman by the way that she moves. If I asked you to show me what 'throwing like a girl' looks like, you could probably give me a rough demonstration without having to think too hard about it.

In Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility and Spatiality, Iris Marion Young argues that looking at the different ways that men and women move can tell us a lot about the different status of men and women in society. She says that when men move, they tend to use their whole bodies, to move expansively, and to adopt open postures; women tend to use less of their bodies (they throw from the hand and the wrist rather from their shoulders), to move as if they're in a restricted space, and to adopt defensive postures. Men swing their books by their sides; women carry them in front of their chests, like a shield.

But the difference doesn't come from some mysterious feminine or masculine essence. Not all women throw like girls. It's a generally true phenomenon because of the way that women are generally socialised into seeing and being in our bodies. There's a fundamental contradiction in women's existence in patriarchal Western societies: on the one hand, as human beings we are autonomous and creative; but as women we are treated as objects rather than subjects, passive rather than active. And, Young argues, you can see this tension in the way that women move: our bodies are constantly stuck in the tension between transcendence and immanence.

We move as if the space available to us is restricted. In ball sports, we wait for the ball to come towards us and react to it; our movements are timid, uncertain, hesitant, we don't fully trust our bodies, and we focus on what our bodies are doing, rather than what we are trying to do with our bodies. We are taught to see our bodies as things, whereas men are taught to treat their bodies as capacities. Our bodies are burdens, which must be dragged along, protected and prettified. We move as though we are always being watched, wondering how we look to other people. We are encouraged to play quietly, and discouraged from risky physical activity, from sport, and from lifting heavy things, and so we underestimate our bodies' capacities. We are taught to see ourselves as fragile and delicate, and to treat our bodies not as extensions of ourselves and as ourr own power but as objects. It is more difficult to concentrate on the task at hand because we're constantly looking back on our bodies which we've been taught to see as things which are looked at and acted on rather than that which enables us to look and act. As a result, we're never fully in our bodies. We walk like girls, we throw like girls, we run like girls.

Photo credit: Macomb Paynes

Bataille, Balthasar, and sexual violence

Georges Bataille is a French philosopher and novelist who thinks that we need to go so deeply into mystical experience (he prefers 'inner experience', which doesn't have such theological connotations) that we go beyond any dogmatic ideas about God existing or being trinitarian or good or whatever. He rejects the idea that self-denial or chastity are routes to this inner experience: instead, we get there by plumbing the depths of anguish, by going to extremes of laughter, eroticism, sacrifice and poetry.

He says this:

Access to the extreme limit has as a condition the hatred not of poetry but of poetic femininity (the absence of decision; the poet is woman; invention, words rape him).

Hans Urs von Balthasar was a Swiss theologian and priest who also thought we should go deeply into mystical experience, though he was much more of a good Catholic, who believed in the Trinity, in Jesus, that God was good and so on. He thinks that the Church is exemplified by the figure of Mary, who gives us a model of 'active reception' which we should all imitate in our relationships to God.

He has Christ say this to the Church:

I dared to enter the body of my Church, the body which you are ... my Spirit has overpowered my unruly and recalcitrant flesh ... (Never has woman made more desperate resistance!) ... our blood-wedding, the red wedding of the Lamb - is, already, here and now, the white bridal bed of divine love.

As Tina Beattie points out, this basically compares the love between Christ and the Church to an act of rape.

So, both Bataille and Balthasar present women as essentially rapeable. Bataille thinks this is a reason to reject femininity; Balthasar thinks it's a reason to imitate it. Which is worse?

A theology of breastfeeding

Two months later, we finally have the internet in our house. Woop!

And what better way to re-start blogging than with a post about boobs? Boobs boobs boobs boobs boobs. Ah, that's better. They are, in case you hadn't noticed, political, especially when they're involved in the rearing of children. Does bottle feeding your baby mean you're a slave of capitalism? Does breastfeeding limit your ability to take equal place with men in the world of work? Or does it mean that you've been sucked into unhealthy ideals of the 'perfect mother', who is always implicitly white – might bottle feeding be a form of resistance to racist ideals of what it means to be a good mother? Whenever you read about breastfeeding though, it's almost always portrayed as a decision made by the mother as an individual. Does breast or bottle feeding make that individual woman a good or a bad mother?

Rachel Muers' article 'The Ethics of Breast Feeding' asks, what if motherhood is about a more complex set of relationships? What if the decisions mums make about how they feed their babies are about the networks of relationships to which they belong? What if the role of children within breastfeeding isn't simply passive? What if the Christian images of breastfeeding used to talk about the way that we learn from and are nourished by God or by other people gives us a more complicated model of what it means to feed and be fed?

We sometimes talk as though the role of the mother is to protect her child from every bad thing in the world. But vulnerability can be a strength: mothers pass on their acquired immunities to their children, and through the imperfect shield of their mother's body, a child slowly becomes acclimatised to their environment. But the vulnerability of mothers also means that bad things get passed on: HIV/AIDS, poor nourishment.

What, asks Muers, might a feminist theological ethics of breast-feeding or infant feeding look like? Mothers know how hard it is to ignore their babies' cries; they learn how much human beings depend on one another and feed off one another. To think theologically about breastfeeding, says Muers, is to think about what it means to apply these lessons to thinking about all of the relationships that a mother and her child are involved in: with their immediate family, with their social context, and with God.

Photo credit: Lawrence OP

Mary and Catholic Women

Michelle Spencer-Arsenault (Ponder for a moment the possible meanings of 'Arsenault') published an article in the journal Sociology of Religion in 2000 called Mother Mary: the (Re)Construction of a Female Icon. As a woman who had grown up in a Catholic family, though no longer considering herself a Catholic, she was fascinated by the role of Mary in relation to the way that women in the Catholic Church understood themselves.

Various sociological studies have suggested that not only does religion have an important role in shaping the way that men and women understand their gender, and in maintaining gender differences, but that women and men actually have different experiences of religion. Spencer-Arsenault (every time I write her name I giggle a little, which is of course terribly rude, but I just can't help it) wanted to answer some of the following questions: How do Catholic women construct their identities within a religious context in which Mary is held up as a role model? Can the image of Mary, which often represents so many patriarchal ideas, really be relevant for modern women? While Mary is often held up as a model for all Christians within Catholic teaching, there's often a particular emphasis on devotion to Mary for Catholic women. The Catholic church tends to particularly emphasise Mary's role as virgin, ideal mother, and an example of quiet obedience. To understand how Catholic women related to these ideas about Mary, Spencer-Arsenault spent time interviewing Catholic women in Eastern Canada.

Mary, an image of ritualised awe
Spencer-Arsenault describes the annual May crowning of Mary in which many Catholic women participate. Young girls dress up in white and blue, and parade through the streets to the church, where they process down the aisle to the altar, where there's a statue of Mary which the girls crown before leading the congregation in the Hail Mary.

Spencer-Arsenault says that, for most of the Catholic women she interviewed, this ritual was at the heart of their understanding about Mary, and they'd often describe their experiences of the May crowning whilst trying to explain the importance of Mary. Many of the women she interviewed saw the high value that Catholic church placed on Mary as representing a high value of women in general, especially of women as mothers and as people responsible for transmitting their faith to their children. Because of motherhood, many women saw Mary not only as an object of awe and reverence, but also as a friend, who they could relate to through their own motherhood. Like them, Mary often experienced difficult things during her time on earth, and this helped Roman Catholic women to feel that there was someone who understood their own struggles, and could act as a bridge between heaven and earth.

I found the questions that Spencer-Arsenault asked more interesting than her answers, to be honest (I got to the end of the article and thought, 'Oh. Is that it?' I had to scroll to the end of the bibliography just to make sure there wasn't any more). Even in the Catholic church, not all women use contraception, some are infertile, and some never even get married: what happens to women who never become mothers? Still, some interesting insights.

Photo credits: May-crowned Mary by Clare O'Hagan; Catholic girls by webchicken on Flickr.

Thomas Aquinas: not a feminist

Question: should woman have been made as part of the original creation?

Point: 1. It would seem not. Aristotle says that woman is a less good version of a man, and the original creation can't have included anything defective, right? (Thanks, Aristotle). 2. Subjection and inferiority are a result of sin, and without sin, we'd all be equal. But women are clearly crappier than men because the 'active' is always superior to the 'passive.' 3. We should get rid of things that tempt us to sin, and women tempt men to sin.

On the other hand: The Bible tells us that God said 'it is not good for man to be alone.'

Reply: Man needed someone to help him (not as a friend, or a co-worker ha! Obviously if it was about having a friend or someone to help with practical stuff, God would have just made another man. Women? Friends? Partners? Don't make me laugh) with the work of procreation. 1. Women are defective as individuals, but that doesn't mean the whole species of humanity is defective. A healthy male seed will grow into a healthy male baby, and women are only born when the seed's not quite right, or when there's a damp south wind, or something like that (thanks, ancient biologists!). 2. There are two different sorts of subjection: the bad sort, where the ruler manages his subject selfishly - this is a result of sin - and the good sort, where the ruler manages his subject for their own good, and this would have existed even without sin because men are more rational than women, who need ruling over for their own good. 3. God couldn't just take away everything from creation that might lead him into sin, and women add value to creation as well as temptation.

It's tempting to make allowances for Thomas, because I really do love him, but having seen 2. deployed as an argument for why women shouldn't be allowed to be leaders, in a book by the wife of a prominent Christian leader (though mightn't her emotions be clouding her judgment? Let's hope a man checked it first...), and having just read an excellent book by Grace Jantzen about the way that our ideas about gender and power are at work in all sorts of surprising areas of Christian theology, I think this matters, quite a lot. I think it should change how we read Thomas as a whole, knowing that this is there underneath it, and I think that seeing how much his weird ideas about men and women are bound up with weird ideas about biology, and yet are still pretty close to some of the ways people talk about men and women now should make us think a bit more carefully about what it is we really mean when we talk about the difference between men and women.

Photo credit: 'Lawrence OP' on Flickr

The Death of Christian Britain

I was all going to stop talking about gender for a while, but then I went to a seminar yesterday with Callum Brown, a Scottish cultural historian, and he was so interesting that I thought I'd serve him up fresh for your delectation.

Brown's argument goes a little something like this: historians often talk about the secularisation of Britain as a slow process which took place over several centuries. They are wrong. Actually, the 1870s-1890s saw a high point of church attendance and of the Church's integration into popular culture. At this point, there was a change in the way that people understood piety – where before the archetypal pious person was male, there was a dramatic shift, with piety becoming understood instead as distinctively feminine. The characteristics of femininity and piety came to be seen as basically the same. At the same time, masculinity was conceived as religiously vulnerable: while women were devoted mothers, good Christians, and pure of heart, men were easily tempted by the dangers of drink, drugs and sex. Men were the problem, and women the solution.

This gender world broke down in the 1960s, with the beginning of free love, sexual liberation, the Pill, and second-wave feminism, and as it fell apart, so did Christianity's dominance in popular culture. Piety and femininity were uncoupled, and so began the long decline of Christianity in Britain over the rest of the 20th century.

Brown is unusual among historians in using Foucault's ideas about discourse as a tool for doing history – to understand the changes in the relationship between Christianity and popular culture of the last few centuries, he looked at the way that people's language about religion, piety and gender changed over the period he focuses on. This was a dramatic change for him – as recently as the mid-90s he was sitting in pubs bitching to fellow historians about this pesky postmodern history; a few years ago he wrote a book about postmodernism for historians. He's got quite a lot of flak for this, but he's tough enough to take it, and is about to rerelease his original book with an extra chapter explaining why he's right and his critics are wrong.

Gender Trouble

Judith Butler is an American theorist who has written about lots of things including gender, queer theory (which is about deconstructing ideas of gender and sexuality), politics and ethics.

The question at the heart of her book, “Gender Trouble” is this: if we take on board Foucault's critique of the way that sexuality is constructed by discourse, and recognise that both gender and even biological sex are at least partly social constructs (see my post on Laqueur if this all sounds like nonsense to you), what does this mean for feminism? How can feminists take political action on behalf of “women” when the category of “women” is constructed by the very same society which oppresses women? Not only is the category a construct, but by constructing the categories of sex and gender, society excludes people who don't fit neatly into those categories – transgendered people, gay and lesbian people, hermaphrodites - it refuses to acknowledge their existence, and so forces them either to conform to categories which don't fit them, or to be classed as non-people. Does feminism become another form of oppression by fighting for “women”'s rights, and how can it avoid being just another form of oppression?

Butler argues that identity politics (i.e. taking political action on behalf of a particular group of people, united by some aspect of their identity e.g. feminism, civil rights, gay rights) tends to assume that identity exists outside of society's discourses, that identities are separate to the stories we tell in society about who people are. But, she says, even if anything exists outside of discourse, we can't ever get to it without going through discourse to get there. People might be physically male or female, but we can only ever understand maleness and femaleness through the stories we tell in society about what it means to be male and female. She argues that there isn't a “doer behind the deed”, but that actually every individual is constituted by the discourses they take part in. We can't get to a “prediscursive” self - we can't find out who we are before and behind the stories we tell about ourselves and each other, because it's those stories and the way we enact them in our relationships within society that constitute our identity. Identity is a practice - it's something we do, a way we engage with the stories around us and reshape them. But stable identities are created by repetition – I think of myself as a woman because people tell me that I am repeatedly, and I participate in behaviour which reinforces that identity like wearing skirts, growing my hair long, buying lots of shoes, wearing make up. Butler calls this “gender performativity”: gender is a role we play for ourselves and other people. The fact that our performances need to be constantly repeated (one chick flick does not a woman make) means that they aren't necessarily stable – we can retell them and reenact them in ways which subvert them and subtly alter their meaning and therefore the definition of different categories.

Butler argues, therefore, that political action on behalf of any particular identity should consist in retelling and reenacting stories of identity but in a way which subverts and therefore radically alters them. She argues that gender parody – gender performance but with subtle differences which undermine existing ideas of what gender is – is the way to take political action to change oppressive ideas of what gender is. The more different stories we tell and enact about what it means to be male and female, the harder it will be to hold onto existing stories which oppress and exclude people. As examples of the sort of parody she is talking about, Butler uses drag as an example. Drag makes fun of the notion of an inherent gender identity by saying that gender is really just an appearance and an act – the outside is feminine and the interior masculine, but it also says that, for the person in drag, while they may be physically (i.e. externally) male, they're female on the inside. They're masculine and feminine both interiorly and exteriorly, and so any ideas we might have about absolute gender identity start to stretch at the seams and hopefully get a bit more spacious and a bit less oppressive.

I'll talk about this more some other time, as I'm reading a lot about gender at the moment, but the sort of ideas Butler talks about are really interesting from a theological point of view. On the one hand, the Bible says that God created humankind “male and female”; on the other hand, “in Christ there is no...male or female.” A lot of theological discussion at the moment seems to argue either that gender is something intrinsic to us, and part of our being made in the image of God, or that actually, Christian eschatology suggests that gender is not something which will carry over into the new heavens and the new earth, that our Christian identity as the body of Christ relativises all our other identities, and that subverting gender identities is deeply Christian and part of our call to live out the values of the kingdom of God on earth.

Janet Soskice - Blood and Defilement

Ready for some talk about periods? I thought so. Janet Soskice is a (amongst other adjectives) Catholic feminist theologian. She taught at Cambridge when I was there, and used to wear a lovely green suit. She has written a bit about feminism and Christology, on which more below:

The Problem
Jesus was a man – perhaps surprisingly, no one has yet suggested that, on that point at least, the Bible got it wrong. But why did God choose to become incarnate as a man rather than a woman? Theologians have given various answers, but until recently, they've mostly gone with Aquinas who said that: “because the male excels the female sex, Christ assumed a man’s nature.” Both conservative and post-Christian feminists have often, as a result, assumed that the language of maleness and hence of patriarchy are inextricable from the biblical text. Uh oh.

The Assumptions
"Antifeminist” and “post-Christian feminists” share some assumptions. They tend to assume that religious symbols are unchanging through historical theology and through the biblical texts, so that words like “father” have a static meaning, that our understanding of the differences between genders are unchanging throughout history and that gender symbolisms are always connected to biological sex. All of these assumptions are problematic – actually, biblical texts and the writings of theologians are often happy to use a whole range of sexed images when talking about God, sometimes in deliberately contradictory ways in order to disrupt the idolatrous idea that God is male or female.

The Application: Blood and Defilement
Can we find the feminine in the story of Christ, then? The cross is a good place to start. Traditionally, the piercing of Jesus' side and the outflow of blood and water has been read as an image of the crucifixion as childbirth (that is, Jesus giving birth to the Church), and the blood of Jesus poured out as feeding us, connecting Jesus' body with the female body. Between the 12^th and 15^th centuries, women were seen as much more physical than men, and while this was often used to argue that they were rubbish, it also meant that they were seen as closer to Christ, the physical side of God.

In the medieval period, it was generally assumed that everyone was male in one sense (see [link] Aristotle on the female as defective male), but female in another sense, because the soul was always seen as female in relation to God (this is probably where CS Lewis gets it from). Jesus was often discussed using female language because the physicality of mothers – bleeding, feeding, and giving birth – was connected with his saving role. The imagery of blood, death, food, birth and milk is often found in various places in the New Testament.

But what, then, do we do about the Levitical emphasis on blood as a source of uncleanness and defilement, which often excludes women, as the more bleedy gender, from the holiest places and greatest closeness to God? Let's take the story of Jesus' healing of the woman with irregular bleeding, which goes with story of Jairus’ daughter being raised from the dead. Both stories deal with issues of defilement and death, of fertility and new life. Jesus restores fertility and wholeness – a new creation. The impurity that comes from bleeding isn’t because bleeding is sinful, but because of the holiness of blood and birth and life. Women are excluded by bleeding which should be to do with fertility but doesn't yield life (e.g. menstruation). Early Christian legend and art identifies the bleeding woman with St Veronica who wiped Christ's brow on his way to Golgotha: there's a parallelism between the cloth of Christ’s garment, which stopped the flow of the woman’s blood, and Veronica’s cloth which stops the flow of Christ’s blood. As woman’s flow of blood is stopped and her fertility restored, so Christ’s flow of blood is turned from death to “new life.”