altariel | Typology of feminism

Typology of feminism

So, in undergraduate textbooks and so on, you tend to see feminism taught as being one of "three types": liberal feminism, socialist feminism, radical feminism. Does anyone have any idea where this typology came from? Rough date, origin(ator), etc.?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Sorry, I live with two male theologians, both of whom find 'feminist theology' an insult to the discipline in terms of scholarship, for various reasons, not all of them sheer reactionary fervor. I don't touch the stuff with a ten foot pole, and never will, but so far as I'm concerned, feminist theology "comes in" only after you've gone through some grounding in philosophy, or it becomes a shallow, whiney, separatist endeavor.

But I know Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote a women's Bible, which is the earliest piece of explicitly feminist 'theology' that I know of. But then, I know very little.

Dwim

Well, I've read my fair share of feminist theology, including liturgical works, and while there was a lot of stuff that pushed my WTF-meter off scale, I found just as much stuff that helped me to turn my back on the institution Church only, not on God generally.

That was my last, best effort to occupy myself with theology in any form. Since then, I go my own path, and it works for me just fine.

I've studied philosopy from two diagonally opposite POVs, and in the end, found most of it makebelief, I'm sorry. Whatever philosophers try to sell us, IMO, is their personal vision of the universe, and it usually doesn't happen to match mine, so I don't see why I should follow theirs. It's like trying to walk a marathon in shoes that don't fit.

But I'm strange in my ways, so don't listen to me.

Whether or not philosophy is purely personal (hello, Nietzsche) is itself a question for philosophical inquiry. *shrug* And if philosophy is personal, and if God's relationship to me is as well, like the size of my shoes and the distance I have to cover, then it's in perfectly good company to my way of thinking. I just worry that the tendency, once this has been broached, is to then curtail any serious discussion in favor of an increasingly privatized spirituality, whether that manifests in a philosophical or a theological mode.

But in any case, the gender war seems to be especially virulent in our theology department. It's really polarized the graduate student body, on top of an already divided program, where it seems that within the three tracks, there are extremely few friends across the subdisciplinary lines. One gets suggestions from second hand reports that often, professors do a poor job presenting feminist theology and a wretched job of dealing with the philosophy informing theology, which, when added to all that, just makes for a collegial and educational disaster.

It's actually kind of horrifically fascinating to watch from a distance, but at the same time, highly depressing, to say nothing of the resulting alienation of all parties that certainly goes counter to the more communal modes of thinking and theorizing supposedly promoted by feminists of a non-separatist strand.

Dwim

Oh, now you've found the perfect example for a philosopher who'd tried to explain himself a mystery that cannot be explained -and in the end, he had no other way out then declare God to be dead. Of course, the end result shows that it's Nietzsche who's been dead for what? Two hundred years by now? While God is still alive and kicking, thank you very much, but that's another matter entirely. *g*

Philosophy and theology are a bit like linguistics. They're all disciplines that try to understand their main topic by taking it apart with surgical precision. Unfortunately, when they're done, all they have is a mutilated carcass.

Either that, or I'm way too stupid to understand the awesomeness of the whole thing. But that's okay. The world needs us, simpler minds, too.

Ah yes, God is dead-Nietzsche, Nietzsche is dead-God. At least he did not fail his cardinal test: thou shalt not lack chutzpah! ;-)

To the degree that he shed light on the (needed) death of a middle-class idol, more power to him. If he did so by claiming too much, it's not the first time and at least nobody died from his overreaching. And while I understand your objection to subjecting mystery to dissection, honestly, I get tired of "It's a mystery!" stopping analysis. We can do analysis and still have mystery; they are not exclusive when the mystery is supposed to be God, imo, or it's not God we're talking about anyway. In which case, I think there's probably some wisdom to saying "Let's kill the idol!"

My two cents as an agnostic.

Dwim

I think it all depends on the question whether or not you have an analytical mind. Me, I don't and all that dissecting and analyzing always seemed fairly forced to me. I even used to laugh myself silly on literature lessons where we were supposed to analyze poems - I never managed to see the same things in them that the poet supposedly meant.

So, I don't have any problems with other people cut everything into tiny pieces to see how they work. It just never works for me. *shrug*

I think we shouldn't clutter

altariel1's journal with this any longer. But if you want to discuss it further, you know where you find me. :)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Typology of feminism

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