own experience rendered into narrative form. As with my use of theology and literature, my plundering of my own stories does not result in a satisfying and complete composition, and there is no more authenticity or integrity to my reading of the texts of personal experience than there is to my reading of the texts of others.
This book is based on my doctoral dissertation; it has its origins at the beginning of my twenties and is in the stages of completion in the months before I turn thirty. As such, the book is something of a Bildungsroman, or a coming of age theology: I draw a lot on the experience of my teenage years and the earlier part of my twenties, and some of the particular issues that I chose to focus on no longer feel as personally or theologically resonant as they once did. Perhaps this is a result of having written about them; these beliefs, concept, words, and images that I spent so much time grappling with are now fixed down into a mosaic of bones. While it may not inscribe certainties or a narrative that works as a successive whole (there is no satisfying conclusion to this book), just having these things set out in a distinct form has lent a sense of closure.
The theological themes that form the core of this book are intimated in the title, Sex, Sin, and Our Selves, a nod to the classic feminist texts Sex, Sin and Grace by Judith Plaskow, and Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. This book discusses the gendered issues of selfhood, redemptive suffering, theologies of sin, and sexuality inherent in spirituality.
Chapters 1 and 2 are concerned with what it means to do theology through reading Roberts and Maitland’s “stories beside my own.” Chapter 1 explores the practice of bringing one’s autobiography into theological reading, contextualized with a critical survey of the use of the personal voice in recent academic discourse. I explore the issue of ‘narrative selfhood’ as it pertains to women’s life-writing and the telling of my own stories. I then give an overview and discussion of the ‘narrated selves’—as disclosed in their writing and interviews—of the novelists Michèle Roberts and Sara Maitland, utilizing the image of self-narration as ‘annunciation.’ Chapter 2 turns to the biblical visitation of Mary and Elizabeth as representative of the creative power of encounter with other women. My theological reading of Roberts and Maitland’s writing is a ‘visitation’; in turn their writing is generated from multiple and interrelated visitations. I consider this in terms of the communal context of feminist writing practice, feminist revisioning of women encountered in myth and history, and the relationships that readers have with books. The following four chapters put into practice the method of theological reflection envisioned in section 1 as ‘annunciation’ and ‘visitation.’ In chapter 3 I explore the tension between women’s need for autonomous selfhood and feminist emphasis on connectedness and relationality. I then turn to psychoanalytic accounts of subjectivity as explanatory narratives of the conflicting human desires for separation and connection. Chapter 4 considers how the themes of sin and self-sacrifice in the Christian tradition have been radically critiqued in feminist theology, whilst arguing that feminism tends to privilege ideals above reality in its contention with issues of suffering. In chapter 5, I revisit the discussion of eros and loss of self taken up in chapter 3, via the interplay of sexuality and religious experience in ‘erotic asceticism.’ The final chapter brings together these theological fragments, looking to the sea for a metaphorical way of thinking about the divine that does not reinscribe idealized notions of purity and certainty.
1. IS, 2–3.
2. Rich, “When We Dead Awaken,” 91.
3. Rich, Poetry and Prose, 54.
4. Ostriker, Stealing the Language, 211.
5. Loades, Searching for Lost Coins.
6. See Christ, “Why Women Need the Goddess”; Jantzen, “Feminism and Flourishing”; McFague, Metaphorical Theology; Morley, “I Desire Her”; and Soskice, “Turning the Symbols,” for feminist theological thought on symbol and metaphor.
7. See for example Christ and Plaskow, Weaving the Visions.
8. Johnson, She Who Is, 12.
9. Chopp, Saving Work, 74–75.
10. For example Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, can be read as a systematic feminist theology.
11. See Sands, Escape from Paradise; Walton, Imagining Theology; and Walton, Literature, Theology and Feminism.
12. IS, 2.
13. Ibid., 3.
14. See Jasper, “Study of Literature and Theology”; Walton, Literature, Theology and Feminism; and the essays collected in Walton, Literature and Theology.
15. Sands, Escape From Paradise, 167.
1
Annunciation
Autobiographical Fictions
Writing the Self
“The Waltz of the ‘As A’s”: Autobiography in Academic Writing
Feminist theology’s (not untroubled) faith in the authority of women’s experience is far from alone in feminist discourse in asserting that what we see depends on where we stand. A central aspect of academic feminist theory—be it in philosophy, sociology, political science, literary criticism, and so on—is the argument that abstract and universalized accounts of knowledge serve to obscure the perspective and interests of those of the dominant social classes. Early feminist theorists such as Carol Gilligan and Nancy Hartsock (who coined the term “standpoint epistemology”) claimed that women’s social circumstances entail that they see and know differently from men.1 This, in light of postmodern thought and the critiques of black and postcolonial criticism, led to an emphasis on the particular situation of the critic, researcher, or theorist. This is neatly summarized in the words of Margaretta Jolly: “[i]n today’s pluralist culture, individuals assert that knowledge is by definition conditioned by its context, embodied and relative to its speaker. For them, the job of an academic is not to argue until we arrive at some final objectivity, but to find ways of understanding and living with our differences.”2
Thus in the last three decades it has become standard, at least in certain academic discourses, for an author to open a piece of work with a statement of their own social location; for example “as a white, western, middle-class woman.” This convention, which Nancy Miller terms “the waltz of the ‘as a’s; the obligatory dance cards of representivity”3 does not always entail that the academic writer will continue throughout their work to discuss the ways in which their own circumstances have influenced
