Taking Sides on Severed Heads: Kristeva at the Louvre

The theorist and philosopher Julia Kristeva is invited to curate an exhibition at the Louvre in Paris as part of a series-Parti Pris (Taking Sides)- and to turn this into a book, The Severed Head: Capital Visions. The organiser, Régis Michel, wants something partisan, that will challenge people to think, and Kristeva delivers in response a collection of severed heads neatly summarising her critique of the whole of western culture! Three figures dominate, providing a key to making sense of the exhibition: Freud, Bataille, and the maternal body. Using these figures, familiar from across the breadth of her work over the last half a century, she produces a witty analysis of western culture’s persistent privileging of disembodied masculine rationality; the head, ironically phallic, ironically and yet necessarily severed; the maternal body continually arousing a “jubilant anxiety” (Kristeva, Severed Head 34), expressed through violence. Points of critique are raised in relation to Kristeva’s normative tendencies-could we not tell a different story about women, for example? The cultural context of the exhibition is also addressed: who are the intended viewers/readers and whose interests are being served here? Ultimately, however, this is a celebration of Kristeva’s tribute to psychic survivors

Reflections on Reading the Bible: From Flesh to Female Genius

Looking back over a couple of decades, the author recalls her appropriation of theoretical tools from the French poststructuralist philosopher, Julia Kristeva: first to read women and the feminine-identified flesh back into biblical texts and to resist older readings that viewed these presences as inferior agents or contaminants. Secondly Kristeva’s idea of female genius gives theoretical support to the case that women continually challenge established, orthodox biblical readings in inauspicious male-normative circumstances by reading the Bible for themselves. Illustrating the concept of female genius, the article returns to Jane Leade, a seventeenth century visionary. She exemplifies the capacity of women to bring something singular and authentic – such as her electrifying descriptions of the biblical figure of Wisdom as female and her dream-visions of bodily restorations - to their readings of the bible. Leade’s vivid reflections energise the community of Philadelphians for whom she provides leadership and inspiration. The author continues to pose the question in the light of these reflections as to whether or not women (and other genders) can continue to profit from reading the Bible

Michele Roberts: Female Genius and The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene

Since Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex in 1949, feminist analysis has tended to assume that the conditions of male normativity – reducing woman to the merely excluded ‘Other’ of man - holds true in the experience of all women, not the least, women in the context of Christian praxis and theology outside its critical purview. Beauvoir’s powerful analysis – showing us how problematic it is to establish a position outside patriarchy’s dominance of our conceptual fields - has helped to explain the resilience of sexism and forms of male violence that continue to diminish and destroy women’s lives because they cannot be seen as questionable. It has also, I would argue, had the unintended consequence of intensifying the sense of limitation or even erasure within masculinist structures so that it becomes problematic to account for the work and lives of effective, innovative and responsible women in these contexts. As a result, there is an uncritical tendency today, on the one hand to cite the individual accomplishments of women as ‘proof’ that feminist critique of our shared cultural discourses is now outmoded, unfair and even counterproductive, or on the other, to remain silent about the role of women in bringing about change, not least through their work within feminist theory and activism. In order to address this problematic issue, I want to use the life and work of novelist Michèle Roberts, as a case study in female genius within an interdisciplinary field, in order to acknowledge the conditions that have limited a singular woman’s literary and theological aspirations but also to claim that she is able to give voice to something creative of her own. The key concept of female genius within this project is taken from the work of Julia Kristeva and rests on a notion of subjectivity that draws on elements of embodiment and female desire excluded in traditional and normatively masculine theological accounts, or from notions of genius derived from the conceptual repertoire of European Romanticism. I argue that Roberts’ work as a writer qualifies her as female genius in so far as it challenges aspects of traditional Christianity, bringing to birth new relationships between theological themes and scriptural narratives through the mediation of her singular female desires and pleasures as a writer. This paper – as part of a more inclusive, historical survey of the work of women writers crossing the disciplinary boundaries between literature and Christian theology over the last several centuries asks whether, in order to do proper justice to the real and proven limitations imposed on countless women in these fields across global and historical contexts, we need, at the same time, to reduce the Christian tradition to something that is always antithetical or for which women can take absolutely no credit or bare no responsibility

Womanspirit Still Rising? Some Feminist Reflections on ‘Religious Education’ in the UK

It is a complex and sometimes frustrating business to effect change that is in accordance with recognizably feminist principles in the world as it is and we inevitably risk confrontation, misunderstanding and compromise. In this paper I consider some of the complexities and obstacles to effecting feminist-friendly changes in educational spaces with specific reference to the field of teaching most familiar to a majority of us – Religion/Religious Studies or Theology and Religious Studies (TRS). I suggest an approach to change based on the mobilization of spirituality – characterized as becoming – as one metaphor that has been grasped to effect in the past by pioneers such as Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow to bring about changes in the western theological academy. This imaginative work has itself generated resistance and critique from scholars of religion and some feminists, but remains, I believe, one fruitful starting point for thinking through what needs to change in educational spaces identified as ‘religious’, and how to avoid the gendered traps that are laid for us in the process. Primarily these are traps that frustrate our abilities to explore the widest possibilities of difference/s and lead us back into the constrictions of sameness – here, that state of being tied either to a historical view of Christianity that privileges a disembodied, masculine, monotheistic God or to a post enlightenment view that privileges a disembodied, so-called ‘secular’ masculine rationality that just as fearfully excludes the Otherness of the feminine and all she represents

'The past is not a husk yet change goes on': Reimagining (feminist) theology

‘Feminism’ is still often dismissed as an outmoded or discredited concept; out of touch with the feelings and desires of real women and men or antithetical to any proper vision of Christianity. So for the feminist theologian it is as important as ever to find ways of discriminating between truth and falsity and discerning a future path. In this piece I have begun to try articulating one possible feminist approach using insights from the work of philosophers Deleuze & Guattari – particularly on assemblages - and from the work of poet and theorist Adrienne Rich on revisioning. It is my sense that these tools may be able to help provide feminist theologians with the support we undoubtedly need if we are genuinely to be able to acknowledge the weight of our pasts and the risk of our futures without becoming overwhelmed or immobilised in a context which remains decidedly challenging

Word and body

First paragraphs of Introduction: The Word became flesh In the twenty-first century scholars increasingly approach body and embodiment as a critical theme or discursive category and in this context it is clear that Christianity is not the first or only ideology to use, shape and exploit the perceived pleasures, needs and shortcomings of the body and embodiment to its own ends. Nevertheless Christianity appears to have been the source of some very powerful ideas about the body in European societies, at least since Constantine adopted it as the ‘official’ religion of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the fourth century. There is today something of a common assumption that Christianity has always been implacably hostile in respect of the body or human embodiment. But theological sources reveal a story with a different, and perhaps more predictable emphasis. The evidence suggests that the prevailing theological attitude to the body throughout this long period has been one, not so much of unrelieved negativity, as of equivocation. In words attributed to John Climacus, the seventh century Syrian Abbot of Mt Sinai, for example, the body is viewed as both a helper and an enemy, an assistant and an opponent, a protector and a traitor. And this Christian equivocation about sexual enjoyment, health and fitness, longevity, beauty, adornment, physical cruelty, gender, sexuality and the training of the body is clearly also reflected in the work of writers of English poetry drama and literature to a significant degree for well over a thousand years. Even in its earliest debates, in formulating the extraordinary doctrines of incarnation and bodily resurrection, Christian leaders and theologians have been strongly divided on the subject of body and embodiment, moved by both extreme reverence and by an equally notable anxiety. They have provided innumerable authors since that period with a palette of very strong colours with which to enrich their own varied texts and narratives about embodied, human existence, revealing a characteristic ambivalence about the value of human incarnation in the context of longings and hopes that often appear to transcend it

Collaborations and Renegotiations: Re-examining the 'Sacred' in the Film-Making of David Gulpilil and Rolf de Heer

In this article I address some of the themes raised at the conference ‘Grounding the Sacred’ held in July 2015 under the auspices of ‘The Sacred in Literature & the Arts’ (SLA) at Australian Catholic University (ACU) Sydney, Strathfield Campus. First of all I discuss the term ‘sacred’ in relation to the work of nineteenth century sociologist Émile Durkheim for whom the word denoted the objects, practices and assumptions that sustained communal solidarity and fostered dynamic energies whether or not they were conventionally described as ‘religious’. In reference to the work of more recent scholars of ‘critical religion’ however, I go on to suggest that the terms ‘religion’ and ‘the sacred’ derive from a predominantly western, patriarchal and colonial context, forming part of a complex network of interconnected categories that represent a distinctive and dominant discourse of power constructing a privileged identity through hostile Othering or exclusions. Arguably, in the Australian mainstream a discourse of ‘religion’ imported largely by Christian settlers from the west over the last two hundred years has been employed to exclude Aboriginal ways of understanding the world, for example by promoting the category of ‘land’ as an exploitable, God-given human possession. Nevertheless, drawing on the work of Julia Kristeva I understand that an encounter with the Other—whether the Aboriginal or the balanda—can be viewed differently: as a zone of properly disturbing but also creative possibility. However, it remains very important to acknowledge the power imbalances that are still embedded within such encounters and the consequent risks to indigenous Australians of further dislocation and dispossession. This idea is explored through a consideration of the collaborative film-making of David Gulpilil and Rolf de Heer and, in particular, of two films: Ten Canoes (2006) and Charlie’s Country (2013)