href="#ulink_6f8e58a7-e18f-58fc-afc7-fec8cfab3e19">4 while avoiding full consideration of that very anxiety. Yet the academic culture of ‘as a ___’ has enabled the emergence of ‘personal criticism,’ in which the academic writer self-consciously reflects on their own experience.
Personal criticism—variously termed “engaged,” “autobiographical,” “confessional,” “testimonial,” “reflexive,” and so on—is a form that deliberately transgresses normative conventions of academic objectivity.5 It may highlight the process of the production of academic work, thus catching “intellectual authority . . . in the act of its own construction.”6 When scholarship is “self-conscious” about its own process, it points to “the fictional strategies inherent in all theory.”7 It is a move away from the academic culture of “books written by someone who, though appearing by name on the cover, endeavors with delight to argue for the unreality of his own existence.”8 In personal criticism the unique, embodied reality of the writer is not bracketed off, but given a central role in the text, with reference to their experiences, interests and desires. Personal criticism may use detailed or lengthy autobiographical material, but more significantly it involves “a certain intensity in the lending of oneself,” in the words of Mary Ann Caws.9 Anecdotes employed to illustrate a concept or argument are not necessarily personal in the same sense, even if drawn from real life experience, whereas personally engaged academic writing expresses a real sense of care towards the subject matter, saying ‘this is important to me, and here is why.’
Autobiography in Feminist Theology
The use of the personal voice has not been as widespread in feminist theology as one might have expected, with its emphasis on ‘women’s experience’ often not going hand in hand with detailed autobiographical reflection. It is more common for feminist theologians to give a perfunctory statement of their social location—ethnicity, nationality, class, and so on—and perhaps give some mention of their experience within the church or university, or involvement in a particular political struggle. There are some exceptions to this generalization, for example Carol Christ has written from an increasingly personal standpoint—something she considers in the preface to the second edition of Diving Deep and Surfacing—and in Rebirth of the Goddess she entwines her systematic thealogy with autobiographical reflection. Carter Heyward’s When Boundaries Betray Us explores issues of intimacy and integrity in friendship and love through an account of her troubled relationship with her therapist. Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker wrote together Proverbs of Ashes, which relates their experience of suffering and how this has affected their theology. They claim that “[o]ur theological questions emerged in our daily struggles to teach, minister, and work for social change, and from personal grappling with how violence had affected us. The mask of objectivity, with its academic, distanced tone, hid the lived character of our theological questions and our theological affirmations.”10
I have found Proverbs of Ashes somewhat disappointing as a representation of “the lived character of theological questions and affirmations.” This is partly a matter of taste—the writing style, as with Christ and Heyward, is sometimes akin to that of the popular books categorized in bookshops as either “self-help” or “painful lives”—but, more importantly, because it is not always successful at striking a balance between theology and life-writing. Rebecca Parker’s harrowing descriptions of recovered memories of child abuse do have much to say in addressing profound theological questions. Yet Rita Nakashima Brock does not fully develop how her experience of fragmented identity, growing up in the US with a Japanese mother, discovering late in life that her biological father was a Puerto Rican soldier, has affected her theology.
The same criticism can also be applied to a pseudonymous article in the journal Theology and Sexuality, “Anonymity Desirable, Bibliography Not Required,” published under the name Nema McCallum. She writes vividly and powerfully of her experience of psychiatric institutions as a young woman, asserting at the close of the article that her theology is thus “terminally post-psychiatric.”11 She suggests that the contextual theologies of the contemporary academy run along lines of “metacontextual variables, such as gender, race, sexuality and class,” but lack “the insider-theologies of experience which involve the personal and private unsaids of which it rarely seems safe to speak.”12 McCallum’s argument is that “each of our experiences, perhaps more than our contextual identities, influence our theologies more than we know”; in her case, “[m]y experience of psychiatry, not my identity as a woman, is far more potent in affecting my sense of justice, style of theology, understanding of other people and thinking about God.”13 It is a shame that McCallum does not go on to explain further the ways in which her theology is molded by her experience of psychiatry. This is not the only aspect I find problematic: while I agree that our unique life experiences will shape our theology to a great extent—especially deep traumas such as those narrated by McCallum or Rebecca Parker—I am uncomfortable with the placing of individual, personal “experience” over and above the social contexts of race, gender and class. Like Christ, Brock and Parker, and Heyward, McCallum’s theological life-writing seems to ascribe a certain authority to the experiences of the individual, and upon their ability to directly recall and recreate those experiences in narrative.
There are some instances of autobiographical theological writing that do not suffer from these same weaknesses. Marcella Althaus-Reid reflects on her own experience throughout her work in liberation and queer theology.14 For example, in The Queer God her childhood memory of being reprimanded at her first confession for kneeling in front of the priest, imitating her male cousins rather than follow the convention for girls and kneel at the priest’s right-hand side, is related to “the liturgical symbolic geography relating to gender and sexual positions in the church’s structures.”15 The practical theologian Stephen Pattison draws on his own experience of child abuse and neglect in his analysis of how theological doctrine compounds the sense of shame common to victims of abuse, but his discussion is more theologically-focused than is Rebecca Parker’s on the same theme.16 The feminist biblical scholar Ingrid Rosa Kitzberger has led the way in autobiographical criticism in biblical studies.17 Much feminist theological thinking has taken place outside of traditional academic discourse, in poetry, liturgy and preaching, and these forms often draw on personal experience: for example, the poems and prayers of Nicola Slee.18
Apart from certain exceptions, including those mentioned above, the use of the personal voice in academic writing has been more sophisticated and skilful in literary criticism than in theology. This is perhaps unsurprising, as literature scholars are concerned on a daily basis with choice of words and sentence structure in a way that theologians are not; they will also be more attuned to the conceits of narrative, and the artifice of “the autobiographical I.”
Out of the Shadows: Autobiography in Literary Criticism
The emotions that literary scholars feel about the books they study, but have traditionally set aside in academic discourse on literature, is captured in Sandra Gilbert’s distinction between “the Critic” and “the Reader,” in an early example of personal criticism in the wake of feminist literary theory:
The
