Feminism (More Reading Notes)

Here's some more notes from my readings, this time taken from Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza. These are responses to her work in Prejudice and Christian Beginnings and Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation.

Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza invites us to consider religion (in this case, Western Christianity) from a socio-historical feminist perspective. Rather than operate out of a purely dualistic male/female system, she proposes that we function out of the schema of the Kyriarchy. Based on the ancient Greek and Roman system of social hegemony, the Kyriarchy allows us to view systems of oppression not only in terms of male/female, but also in terms of race, age, social position, etc and the way all of these attributes coalesce in modern (or postmodern) society. She delineates between these groups that one is placed in by virtue of birth (structural positions) and the way that one fulfills the role expected of their structural position by society (subject position). She proposes an emancipatory social movement (informed by Liberation Theology) where an Ekklesia of Women functions to bring about social change that does not bring women up to the level of men, but dismantles the entire Kyriarchal structure, while also living as if the Kyriarchal structure does not exist. (As I like to call it, realized feminist eschatology).

I rather enjoyed these readings, because I thought that Fiorenza does a good job of illuminating that fact that women are not exclusively oppressed in the American democratic hegemony. She attempts to construct a worldview that incorporates all systems of oppression in both the ancient and modern world. However, I feel as if she is unintentionally limiting herself by couching everything in the language of antiquity. "Land-owner," and "freeborn," have no real relevance to us today, even if they did inform our current social structures, I fear that by using this rhetoric she unintentionally may obscure modern issues. I liked this reading, and I'm interested to see how we expand it to non-Judeo Christian faith systems.