A Critical Feminist Spirituality of StruggleE1

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza

I am honored and delighted to contribute to this Festschrift for Gabriele Dietrich whose commitment to peoples’ struggles, critical scholarship and feminist-liberationist work I greatly admire. Her work is of immense significance not just for the articulation of a critical Christian Indian feminist theology but also for an emerging transnational and inter-religious planetary one.  Since Gabriele’s life and work have been dedicated to emancipatory struggles in India and around the world, I want to sketch, in the short space available, the contours of a feminist spirituality of dissident global struggle.
    Since feminism is still, or again, a “dirty word” in most of the world, I will first   explain how I understand the “F-word,” feminist, and how I use the expression “wo/men.” I will argue, secondly, for understanding feminism as a spirituality of struggle. Thirdly, I will discuss kyriarchal systems of domination—including, racism, hetero-sexism, class-exploitation and colonialism—as types of structural sin. I will end, finally, by pointing to an envisioned radical democratic space that I call the “ekklesia of wo/men.” As such a democratic space, the ekklesia of wo/men is a sign of hope and possibility for a radical egalitarian future.

Feminism as a Radical Democratic Movement
The expression "feminist" not only evokes in many audiences a complex array of emotions, negative reactions and prejudices, but also a host of various meanings. Since there are many divergent forms, and even contradictory articulations, of feminism today,  it is appropriate to speak of  “feminisms” in the plural. Most agree, nevertheless, that contemporary feminism is not merely a  political movement, akin to other emancipatory movements. It is also an intellectual methodology for investigating the experience and theorizing the structures of wo/men’s exclusions and oppressions.
Diverse theoretical articulations of feminism, I suggest, come together in their critique of kyriarchy. Kyriarchy denotes structures of domination by Lord, emperor, slave-master, father, husband—that is, rule by elite, white, male supremacy. Feminists hold that gender, like race, class and nation, is socially constructed rather than innate or ordained by G*d. In its variegated forms, feminism is a movement of those who seek to transform kyriarchal structures of subordination. Such structures not only perpetrate dehumanizing sexism and gender stereotypes but also other forms of women's oppression, such as racism, poverty, religious exclusion, and colonialism. Feminism, in my view, therefore, is best understood as a theoretical perspective, and historical movement, for changing socio-cultural and communal-religious structures of  kyriarchal domination and exploitation. 
    My preferred definition of feminism is expressed by a well-known bumper sticker, which asserts, with tongue in cheek, “feminism is the radical notion that wo/men are people.” While this definition accentuates that feminism is a radical concept, at the same time it ironically underscores that, at the end of the 20th century, feminism should be a common sense notion. Wo/men are not ladies, wives, handmaids, seductresses, or beasts of burden, but rather full decision-making citizens. This definition alludes to the democratic motto, "We, the people," and positions feminism within radical democratic discourses that argue for the rights of all the people who are wo/men. This definition evokes memories of struggles for equal citizenship and decision making powers in religion and society. According to such a political definition of feminism, men can advocate feminism just as wo/men can be antifeminist.
    Here it is necessary to explain, briefly, why I write “wo/men” with a slash. I do so in order to indicate that wo/man is not a unified category. Because wo/men are not defined  by gender, merely, but also by race, class, ethnicity, or religion, there can be no “feminine essence” common to all, and diverse, wo/men.  I use the term “wo/men,” rather than “men,” in a rhetorically inclusive way, moreover, in order to lift into consciousness the linguistic violence inflicted by male-centered language. Feminist studies of language have elaborated that Western language, being grammatically masculine, functions both as generic and as gender-specific. Hence, wo/men always must think at least twice, if not three-times, in order to adjudicate whether we are intended, or not, by so-called generic terms, such as “men,” “humans,” “Indians,” or “Christians.” A wide area of study, which has barely yet been touched upon, opens up here for those feminist scholars in theology whose “mother tongue” is not a gender-based language. Since the limits of our language are the limits of our world, such a study is a very important step towards the realization of a different feminist consciousness.

A Spirituality of Struggle
    Feminism is not, and never has been, merely a political movement but it is rather, also, a religious one. Theologically, feminism understands wo/men as “the people of G*d” and indicts the death-dealing powers of oppression as structural sin and life-destroying evil. Hence, feminist theologies, and studies in religion, have the goal not only to alter, fundamentally, the nature of malestream knowledge about G*d, the self, and the world, but also to change institutionalized religion which has excluded wo/men from leadership positions. Re-claiming the authority of wo/men to shape and determine biblical religions, feminist studies in theology ask new questions and employ new ways of seeing, in order to re-conceptualize the formation of religious identity as a moment in the global praxis for liberation.
Although it has indicted organized religion for its oppressive tendencies, feminism has always articulated itself, also, as a spiritual-religious movement insofar as it seeks a “coming-into a different consciousness” and struggles to change internalized kyriarchal relations of inequity and oppression.  The second wave of feminism began with small consciousness-raising groups, which reflected on personal experiences of discrimination and asserted that “the personal is political.” Many women’s groups in religion continue this practice.  However, unless such groups remain rooted in a spiritual politics of struggle, they are liable to degenerate into self-help groups, to be co-opted by the status quo and integrated into dominant kyriarchal structures. A feminist spiritual politics of struggle is vital, moreover, lest such groups become paralyzed in internecine struggles or balkanized along the dividing lines of race, class, sexuality, culture, or religion.  If vision and knowledge are determined by their socio-political location and function, then knowledge and vision for the future must remain situated within a feminist spirituality of struggle that seeks to overcome kyriarchal oppression. Feminists in religion are uniquely positioned to articulate such a spirituality of struggle.
In distinction to fundamentalist and liberal-modern theology, feminist liberation theologies, of all colors, see the greatest problem for faith today not in the threat of secularization, but rather in the threat to human life posed by powers of dehumanization, exploitation and extinction. Feminist liberation theologies shift the question from, "How can we believe in G*d?," to the question, "In what kind of G*d do we believe?" Does religious vision make a difference in the struggle for the well-being of all in the "global village”? How are Scriptures and religious traditions used in this struggle for liberation and transformation? Which religious teachings legitimate the status quo and which promote G*d's intention for the well-being of all? In short, as liberation theologies insist, salvation is not possible outside the world; G*d's vision of a renewed creation entails not just a "new" heaven but also a "new," qualitatively different earth. A feminist spirituality of struggle explicates, further, that such a world must be freed of all forms of  kyriarchal domination and dehumanization.
The need for such a feminist spirituality of struggle has been forcefully articulated, more than 100 years ago, by the African-American thinker Anna Julia Cooper:
Woman...daring to think and move and speak,-- to undertake to help shape, mold and direct the thought of her age, is merely completing the circle of the world’s vision. Hers is every interest that has lacked an interpreter and a defender. Her cause is linked with that of every agony that has been dumb—every wrong that needs a voice..... The world has had to limp along with the wobbling gait and one-sided hesitancy of a man with one eye. Suddenly the bandage is removed from the other eye and the whole body is filled with light. It sees a circle where before it saw a segment.E2

Feminist theology seeks to rethink malestream knowledge about the world, Christian identity and G*d, in order to correct and complete the world's and the church's one-sided vision. This vision is one-sided to the extent that it continues to be articulated in the interest of elite, white western men. However, it is impossible to restore fully the world’s spiritual vision if one does not also correct the fragmentary circle of religious vision and seek to change narrow and biased formations of religious identity, perceptions of the world and of the Divine. A different understanding of religion, in turn, leads to the articulation of a feminist politics and spirituality that can empower wo/men to bring about further change in society and culture.
In distinction to malestream spirituality, a critical feminist spirituality of struggle is not just concerned with the well-being of individuals but also with a spirituality of justice and well-being for everybody, especially those who struggle for survival at the bottom of the kyriarchal pyramid of exploitation and dehumanization.  Such a spirituality asserts the infinite dignity of every human being, as the image of G*d, and the integrity of the earth and our planet as G*d’s creation.
Malestream spirituality can be understood in various ways. In the traditional Christian sense, malestream spirituality  promotes both a separation of soul and body and that of religion from everyday life. Spirituality, in this traditional sense, has cultivated prayer, asceticism, transcendence, other-worldliness, self-denial and world-rejection. Today, by contrast, spirituality is most frequently understood in an opposite sense: New Age spirituality has the goal to “make you feel good,” to give meaning to banal lives, and to assure, or reassure, that “you are O.K.” The “world is still in order” as long as you know how to dress for success and how to protect your own turf.  There is an abundance of self-help groups, and self-help books, that promise inner peace and happiness. They teach you how to find your inner child, how to enter your inner space, and how to meet your future self. Spirituality has become a commodity in the global market place.
    A third form of spirituality is determined by nostalgia, a longing, at once, for the simplicity of a bygone world and for the greatness of the Christian religion, or the national culture, of the past.  Its politics of meaning appeals to traditional family and its values, to the small-town ethos of self-sacrifice and self-sufficiency, and to the capitalist dream that anyone can make it who tries. Not only the Religious Right in the U.S. but fundamentalist and nationalist political movements around the globe preach such a  conservative spirituality, characterized by nationalism, nostalgia, and cultural romanticism. An other-worldliness, encouraged by such a spirituality, promises security rather than fostering critical consciousness of  structures of dehumanization; a rhetoric of hate projects evil and sin upon the despised “other,” whether in the form of so-called “secular humanists,” feminists,  terrorists, or other demonized groups.

Domination as Structural Sin
Confronted by global exploitation and impoverishment of wo/men, together with the control and subordination of wo/men in and through fundamentalist religion, a feminist spirituality of struggle enunciates a different spiritual vision. A spiritual vision of  justice and well-being, it argues, must also theologically name what is wrong and articulate, as types of structural sin, our implication and participation in systems of domination and exploitation.
However, feminists have long been hesitant to use the category of sin because of the concept of sin that is prevalent in malestream theology. Judith Plaskow, for instance, showed, quite some time ago, that the understanding of sin and grace that prevails in modern malestream theology has been formulated in individualistic, masculinist terms. For instance, one of the most elaborated and condemned sins is pride. However, while pride may be a great temptation for educated men, even privileged wo/men often lack self-esteem and a sense of accomplishment. Hence, pride should not be considered a sin for wo/men and for other subordinates but rather understood as a virtue that needs to be cultivated by wo/men as a spiritual practice.
Yet, this notion of sin as pride is not the primary reason why feminists in religion have been reluctant to use the notion of sin as an interpretive theological category. The main reason has been the overwhelming evidence that biblical tradition and malestream theology have viewed and represented wo/man as a source of sin. Malestream biblical and theological thought maintained that wo/man introduced sin into the world and that she is the source of all evil. 1 Tim 2:12-15, for instance, clearly teaches that sin was brought into the world by a woman. This traditional theology of sin results in a theology of “blaming the victim,” which makes the victims of domination responsible and accountable for their own exploitation and oppression.
Such a gendered, malestream theology of sin is not able to name, or to expose, oppression and dehumanization as life-destroying powers of structural sin; nor can it speak about emancipation in theological terms. An articulation of structural sin in theological terms is, therefore, necessary if biblical religion and spirituality are to serve as a tool of conscientization and hope rather than one of further self-alienation and despair. 
In distinction to the anthropological notion of individual sin, the social notion of structural sin does not ascribe evil to individuals, be it Eve or Saddam Hussein, but rather to socio-political structures of domination. Biblical mythological language suggests a structural notion of sin when it ascribes the generation of wrong and evil not to people but instead to entities such as demons, evil spirits, or the devil. Humans stand at the site of a cosmic struggle; they stand permanently at a cross-road where they are challenged to decide either for or against participating in structural sin. Human beings can even become embedded in structural sin, and absorbed so much by it, that they may become veritably “possessed.”
In short, critical feminist liberation theology understands sin not primarily as personal, individual failure or guilt but as the institutional and structural embodiment of life-destroying power. Sexism, racism, colonialism, and imperialism are theologically best understood as just such structural sin that implicates everyone, in different degrees and ways. While individuals can either resist or collaborate with such structural sin, they are never free and innocent of it. Such structural sin consists of the following practices:
Structural sin is realized in and through institutional injustices, collective discriminations, and dehumanizing ideologies and prejudices.
Structural sin is not recognized and acknowledged as injustice and wrongdoing  because it is legitimated, naturalized, and represented as “common sense,” again and again, through cultural ideologies, religious symbols, ethical systems, and public educational discourses.
Structural sin produces an individual and collective consciousness that is self-alienated. This self-alienated consciousness is accepted because it is seen as natural and as  “common sense.” It convinces people that situations of oppression and dehumanization are normal or divinely ordained. It sees these situations as evidence of individual failure and weakness.
This alienated consciousness compels people to accept their own exploitation and dehumanization as natural, normal, and willed by G*d, and therefore to internalize and to make as their own the values and mindsets of oppression. Education, the media, public and scientific discourses, as well as cultural and religious socialization, are the means for internalizing such structural sin.
Such a self-alienated consciousness also compels women to collaborate with their own kyriarchal exploitation and oppression insofar as we do not resist our own dehumanization, in and through discourses of femininity, race, class, or nationalist consciousness, and insofar as we, as teachers, pastors, or mothers, even participate in their re-inscription.
Since not only religious but also cultural discourses serve to internalize socio-cultural values and sinful structures, which promote life-destroying oppression and dehumanizing prejudice, a process of feminist conscientization and conversion is not just a religious but also a political-spiritual practice. Such a transformative, spiritual praxis, which seeks to change internalized structures of dehumanization, is made possible by social and religious movements for justice and by a different self-understanding and vision of the world. This praxis understands emancipatory struggles, theologically, as the space where Divine presence is at work in our midst.

Emancipatory Struggles as Promise and Hope
In the past, as in the present, feminist movements have emerged from  the participation of wo/men in emancipatory struggles in society and religion. Struggles for change are engendered and renewed by women’s participation in emancipatory democratic struggles, a participation that leads to a different self-understanding and  systemic analysis of “common sense” perceptions and  visions of the world. Such a different  understanding, in turn, leads to the articulation of a feminist politics and spirituality that can empower us to bring about further change in society and religion. 
In modernity most of the social movements for change have been inspired by the dream of radical democratic equality and equal human rights. Although the Western democratic ideal has promised equal participation and equal rights to all, in actuality power and rights have been restricted to a small group of elite, propertied Gentlemen. As a result of this contradiction, those deprived of their human rights, and their dignity, have struggled to transform their situations of oppression and exclusion. However, such radical, grassroots democratic struggles for self-determination, rights, autonomy, dignity, and radical-democratic equality are not just a product of modernity, nor is their ethos and vision of radical democracy a product restricted to the West.
The context for a critical feminist spirituality of hope lies in these variegated feminist struggles of both the past and the present. These struggles aim to change kyriarchal structures of domination and dehumanization by articulating ever new sites of struggle, by developing ever more sophisticated categories for analysing structures of domination, and by fashioning ever new visions of a radical democratic society and religion.
As social liberation movements, feminist movements in society and religion keep alive a promise and hope for change in the midst of  backlash and failure. They renew hope in a different future by continuing the struggles for wo/men’s full citizenship in society, academy and religion. By articulating both structures of injustice and visions of hope, they serve to change internalized kyriarchal mindsets and consciousness. Hence, explicitly antifeminist arguments cannot destroy the step-by-step gains achieved by these feminist struggles. For instance, the feminist anti-capitalist-globalization movement, the anti-fundamentalist and the reproductive rights movements have provoked the Religious Right to produce, in their turn, militant, antifeminist political and religious discourses. Yet, despite and even in virtue of their oppositional stance, these discourses still tacitly acknowledge, and consolidate, the achievements of  feminist struggles at a previous stage. Hence, antifeminists today are no longer able to repeat antifeminist arguments that had high currency in the past, such as the argument that wo/men’s physical constitution does not allow for intensive intellectual work or the argument that wo/men should not speak in public. Similarly, theological arguments advocating a second-class citizenship for wo/men in religion can no longer resort to the blatantly misogynist or racist arguments that were persuasive in the past. Rather than developing arguments which claim that wo/men are, by nature, deficient and subhuman, religious fundamentalist arguments resort, today, to a dual nature theology that elaborates femininity as essentialized complementary difference and submission as a liberatory value.
A spirituality of struggle that inspires social movements for change and transformation need not rely on the modern dream of revolution nor despair in the face of postmodern skepticism towards all regimes of truth. In the process of changing structures of dehumanization, it seeks to realize ideals of justice and well-being, in limited and concrete, practical steps. In the midst of struggle, feminists in religion articulate a different, ethical and religious emancipatory imagination that is able to sustain a radical democratic space of vision and hope. Christian spirituality has named this space of vision and hope   basileia of G*d,  the realm and vision of  justice and life in abundance. 


The Ekklesia of Wo/men: A Radical Democratic Space of Hope
Wo/men’s grassroots movements around the globe have initiated processes of democratization that allow wo/men to determine their lives, participate in decision making, and contribute to the creation of a just civil society and religious community. When I use the word “democratization I do not mean, however, representative formal democracy.  In fact, three broad understandings of democracy and democratization can be distinguished: liberal democracy, Marxist/socialist democracy and direct participatory democracy. Liberal democracy entails a shift from the direct rule of the people to representative government that protects individual rights, equal opportunity, constitutional government and separation of powers. Marxist/Socialist democracy argues that effective participation of citizens in the political process is prevented by class and other inequalities. Human emancipation is only possible with the overthrow of the capitalist system under the leadership of the Party. However, socialist democrats increasingly seek to incorporate pluralism and multiculturalism into their theory of democratization.
    In the last centuries, emancipatory struggles for equal rights as citizens have achieved national independence, voting and civil rights for all adult citizens. Yet, these movements have not been able to overcome the kyriarchal stratifications that continue to determine modern constitutional democracies. They were only able to create liberal democratic forms that simply made the democratic circle coextensive with the kyriarchal pyramid, thereby reinscribing the contradiction between democratic vision and political kyriarchal practice. In turn, liberal theorists of democracy have sought to reconcile this contradiction through procedures such as periodic voting, majority rule, representation and procedural resolution of conflicts.  In the process, democratic liberty is construed merely as the absence of coercion and democratic process is reduced to the spectacle of election campaigns. 
Radical democracy, in turn, insists on the literal understanding of democracy as decision making of and by the people. It distinguishes itself from other forms of democracy by the conviction that such “people democracy” is actually realizable. It envisions equal opportunities for all to take part in decision making in matters affecting not only the political realm but also the workplace, the religious and political community, and interpersonal relations. It encourages people to take control over the course of their lives and supports structural arrangements that encourage citizens to exercise self-determination, to respect the rights of others, to take part in debates about the “common good,” and to create new institutions that are truly participatory and egalitarian. Participatory democracy recognizes that -

Democracy needs to continue to undergo a process of re-creation and that a more active and substantial participation can only take place as a result of experimentation with new and different ways that seek to enhance citizen involvement and discussion. In a sense, democracy can never be achieved in any final form – it has to be continually re-created and renegotiated.E3  

Grassroots movements are the embodiment of such ongoing democratization processes. They show the variety of ways in which wo/men struggle for more control over their daily lives, while simultaneously creating and extending opportunities for greater participation and well-being in the future. They are community-based initiatives, base groups, or peoples’ organizations that address practical everyday problems, committed to improving living conditions in a particular location, and promote values associated with local, decentralized democracy. They redefine the form and content of politics by seeking to create and to expand spaces for democratic decision making, consciousness raising, individual self-development, group solidarity, ritual practices, and more effective public participation in society and religion. Wo/men are and have been at the forefront in creating and shaping such global processes of democratization.  
In order to name such an alternative emancipatory spiritual process, and theoretical space, in radical democratic terms, I have coined the oxymoron “ekklesia of wo/men.”  Ekklesia, which literally means the democratic assembly/congress, must be qualified with “wo/men,” since ancient and modern democracy has, for a long time, excluded wo/men and subjugated people from democratic self-determination. This conceptualization of a radical democratic spiritual space clearly derives its inspiration and nomenclature from Western ancient and Christian notions of radical equality. However, I would submit that such a conceptualization is not exclusive but invites feminists from other cultures and religions to envision and construct such a radical egalitarian inclusive space of justice and well-being, in terms of their own cultural and religious traditions. 
Historically and politically the ekklesia of wo/men, in the sense of the democratic assembly of all the people or the people’s congress, is therefore an oxymoron, a combination of contradictory terms for the purpose of overcoming the exclusions inscribed in democracy and for articulating a feminist political discursive space and horizon. With ekklesia of wo/men I have a heuristic construct in mind that is similar to what Chandra Talpade Mohanti has called the "imagined community of Third World oppositional struggles.” She envisions such a community as the kind of space that provides a political, rather than biological or cultural, basis for alliance among wo/men of all colors and moves away from essentialist notions of Third World feminisms.
Within the context of worldwide social movements for change, one can theorize the ekklesia of wo/men not only as a virtual, utopian space but also as an already partially realized space of radical equality and as a site of feminist struggles for transforming societal and religious institutions. Emancipatory movements, including the wo/men's liberation movement, do not struggle for equal rights in order to become masculine and the same as elite white men. They engage in political and religious struggles in order to achieve the rights, benefits, and privileges of equal authority and citizenship which are legitimately theirs but which are denied to them by the kyriarchal regimes of most societies and of the major World religions. They respect particular struggles while, at the same time, forging complex solidarities in global struggles against interlocking systems of domination.
The notion of the ekklesia of wo/men conceptualized as a radical democratic horizon  and “subaltern counterpublic” (Nancy Frazer), finally, seeks to overcome the division between societal, so-called secular movements and religious-social movements. The translation “wo/men-church,” however,  is in danger of losing the radical democratic meaning of  the Greek term ekklesia. The reduction of ekklesia to “church” overlooks that the linguistic roots of church are not ekklesia but kyriake, which means belonging to the Lord, emperor, Slave-master, father, gentleman. The reduction of the meaning of ekklesia to “church” also introduces an opposition between church and synagogue, an opposition that is represented, traditionally, by two antagonistic female figures.   
In sum, at the intersection of a multiplicity of public feminist discourses and as a site of contested sociopolitical contradictions, feminist alternatives, and unrealized possibilities, the ekklesia of wo/men requires a rhetorical rather than a scientific conceptualization. Feminist discourses, then, are best understood in the classical sense of “deliberative rhetoric” that seeks to persuade the democratic assembly and to adjudicate arguments, in order to make decisions for the sake of the welfare of everyone. Such a radical democratic spirituality of struggle, that is articulated and lived everyday by wo/men in religion, I submit, is able to sustain hope in our variegated struggles for a different, radical democratic future of our planet.  Ad multos annos, Gabriele!