href="#ulink_0b6825a2-53df-5ee2-b90b-a470f9a8dc6a">4 Ann Loades uses the metaphor of “searching for lost coins,” from the parable of Luke 15:8–10, in which God’s care for sinners is likened to a woman sweeping the house, diligently seeking the one drachma she has lost.5 Feminist theologians find few whole and untarnished objects amidst the fundamentally androcentric Christian tradition, and thus a large part of their work is to remodel into new shapes the symbols and stories from which that tradition is made.6 The task of feminist critique and reinvention of a cultural heritage that is fundamentally patriarchal is not just a matter of scavenging and rebuilding; first there has to be the dismantling and deconstructing.
Both the constructive and reconstructive task of feminist critique are represented in the image of quilting. Drawn to material metaphors that pertain to the domestic arts, “women’s work,” feminist theology has often described itself in terms of spinning and weaving,7 but it is the image of quilting that encapsulates the feminist project of seeking “to articulate new patterns from bits of contemporary experiences and ancient sources.”8 As an often communal activity that makes a new object from scraps of old cloth, quilting provides a symbol of women constructing together something new from fragments of experience and scraps of doctrinal and textual traditions. Rebecca Chopp writes that metaphors of quilting “underscore the history of women’s lives in western culture, but also . . . locate the very identity of theology in the context of functional warmth, of common beauty, of daily practices.”9 Quilting can serve as a symbol for feminist piecing together of the religious symbols that it has torn apart, but also of the process of tearing apart itself. There is pleasure to be had in playing with the pieces, in making something new from the old. In the metaphor of quilting there is an appropriate violence to the cutting up and stitching together of fabric, and it is an act of re-creation that does not try to conceal the origins of its constituent parts, nor the differences between them, when in the early days of feminist theology there seemed to be the hope that feminist theology could rebuild patriarchal religious tradition into a new and systematized construction.10
The general emphasis of more recent feminist theological discourse has not been a rebuilding of a systematic theology. I myself do not believe that it is possible, or desirable, for feminist theology to rearrange the torn-apart symbols of Christian theology into a new harmonious whole. It has to go too far in the work of deconstruction for reconstruction to be achievable. The image of the quilt may hold this: the necessary destruction, the incongruity. But for me, as a metaphor it is too cozy and comfortable: worn-out clothing is altogether too pleasant to represent the harmful symbols of patriarchal religion. The finished object, a quilt, is one that symbolizes safety and solidity, and thus the use of this metaphor also represents a tendency for which feminist theology has been critiqued. In their groundbreaking, dedicated, meticulous, and profoundly valuable work, the more well-known voices of feminist theology resound with hope and certainty. While they may be conscientious in self-critique and honest about moments of doubt, they hold fast to a faith that goodness and justice are the essential truth and reality and will ultimately prevail.11 I do not share this faith. In my feminist theological reflection, the finished products of feminist repatterning of symbol and story are more strange and discomforting than a quilt.
The feminist theology of this book is envisioned in terms of an image from Michèle Roberts’s novel Impossible Saints. It is a macabre image which preserves a sense of the horror of women’s existence within patriarchy, that the revisioning of old symbols and stories is not safe, soft, warm, or comfortable. The image is based on the Golden Chamber attached to the Basilica of St. Ursula in Cologne, said to hold the remains of Ursula and eleven thousand virgin martyrs. As well as containing the relics of named women saints in wooden cupboards and gilded statues, the bones of the nameless saints, whose bones have got mixed up together, are formed into a mosaic, “constructed of square wooden frames, each packed tight with a particular arrangement of bones” around the upper part of the chapel’s wall, reaching up to the vault’s arches.12 In Impossible Saints, this bizarre piece of interior design is imagined in terms of the domestic work of women, “busy cooks inventing recipes, sorting and arranging,” their piecing together of a bone collage a “braiding,” “like crochet.” As a symbol for feminism and literature, the goods of women’s communal work and creative endeavor are combined with the horrific and the tragic. The end result is not a complete and harmonious composition that can be easily assimilated and understood: “[t]he patterns were severe and mysterious. No one could say what they meant. What you saw was the overall dance of shapes. The beauty of the bones.”13
As a feminist theological bone collage, this book pieces together fragments of feminist discourse and the broken shards of Christian theology. The violence inherent in the image of human bones is apt: in my engagement with the tradition of feminist theology I have simplified a diverse movement and body of work; I have made things fit to my own design, and not always fairly acknowledged the complexity and fluidity of the thought of the feminist theologians that I critique. To shift the metaphor from one of collage to painting, my brush strokes are broad ones. Perhaps all academic writing involves an appropriation of the work of others that can be described as violent, but it is important for me to acknowledge that I have made a composition from the pieces of my own reading of feminist theology, and that it should not foreclose other meanings held by other authors and readers. As this is my own composition, the issues often so central to feminist discourse today—such as intersecting oppressions gender, race and socioeconomics, differences between feminisms, and critique of gender-essentialism and assertion that the category ‘woman’ is not an unproblematic given—have been barely touched on. In part, this is due to the particular authors I have chosen to work on; I have also simplified in order to ensure that the discussion does not become unwieldy. Despite this, as a, white, Western, middle-class, able-bodied, and cisgendered woman, I am uncomfortable when I notice which particular issues I have neglected to discuss, and hope to redress this in future work.
This book is a work of “literature and theology,” in which my feminist theological bone collage is created not only from my reading of theological texts but also the literature of the British feminist novelists Michèle Roberts and Sara Maitland. My method of doing literature and theology follows the thought of David Jasper and Heather Walton, which emphasizes not theology through literature, or literature as the handmaid of theology, but the ways in which literature forms a renewing challenge to theological certainties.14 Yet I cannot claim to be taking the literature on its own terms, as if such a thing were possible; my readings of Roberts and Maitland’s work are my own. Both writers have a large and complex body of work, and there is perhaps a certain violence in the way I have chosen some elements to focus on at the exclusion of others. The image of a collage made from women’s bones to represent my theological engagement with literature is particularly unsettling when the authors I work on are still alive and still writing.
As well as the image of the golden bone collage, this book is also envisioned in terms of a phrase Kathleen Sands uses to describe her own theological method: “[r]eading these stories beside my own, I find no answers to be believed in, but challenge and insight, delight and strength, that are fragile and finite but real.”15 This describes not only my sense of producing a “fragile and finite” theological composition rather than a solid and harmonious construction, my resistance to an eschatological optimism that lacks reality for me, and that this theology comes through engaging with the “stories” of women’s literature, but also the importance of “reading these stories beside my own.” In
