Sex, Sin, and Our Selves. Anna Fisk

feminist theological discourse has not been a rebuilding of a systematic theology. I myself do not believe that it is possible, or desirable, for feminist theology to rearrange the torn-apart symbols of Christian theology into a new harmonious whole. It has to go too far in the work of deconstruction for reconstruction to be achievable. The image of the quilt may hold this: the necessary destruction, the incongruity. But for me, as a metaphor it is too cozy and comfortable: worn-out clothing is altogether too pleasant to represent the harmful symbols of patriarchal religion. The finished object, a quilt, is one that symbolizes safety and solidity, and thus the use of this metaphor also represents a tendency for which feminist theology has been critiqued. In their groundbreaking, dedicated, meticulous, and profoundly valuable work, the more well-known voices of feminist theology resound with hope and certainty. While they may be conscientious in self-critique and honest about moments of doubt, they hold fast to a faith that goodness and justice are the essential truth and reality and will ultimately prevail.11 I do not share this faith. In my feminist theological reflection, the finished products of feminist repatterning of symbol and story are more strange and discomforting than a quilt.

The feminist theology of this book is envisioned in terms of an image from Michèle Roberts’s novel Impossible Saints. It is a macabre image which preserves a sense of the horror of women’s existence within patriarchy, that the revisioning of old symbols and stories is not safe, soft, warm, or comfortable. The image is based on the Golden Chamber attached to the Basilica of St. Ursula in Cologne, said to hold the remains of Ursula and eleven thousand virgin martyrs. As well as containing the relics of named women saints in wooden cupboards and gilded statues, the bones of the nameless saints, whose bones have got mixed up together, are formed into a mosaic, “constructed of square wooden frames, each packed tight with a particular arrangement of bones” around the upper part of the chapel’s wall, reaching up to the vault’s arches.12 In Impossible Saints, this bizarre piece of interior design is imagined in terms of the domestic work of women, “busy cooks inventing recipes, sorting and arranging,” their piecing together of a bone collage a “braiding,” “like crochet.” As a symbol for feminism and literature, the goods of women’s communal work and creative endeavor are combined with the horrific and the tragic. The end result is not a complete and harmonious composition that can be easily assimilated and understood: “[t]he patterns were severe and mysterious. No one could say what they meant. What you saw was the overall dance of shapes. The beauty of the bones.”13

      As a feminist theological bone collage, this book pieces together fragments of feminist discourse and the broken shards of Christian theology. The violence inherent in the image of human bones is apt: in my engagement with the tradition of feminist theology I have simplified a diverse movement and body of work; I have made things fit to my own design, and not always fairly acknowledged the complexity and fluidity of the thought of the feminist theologians that I critique. To shift the metaphor from one of collage to painting, my brush strokes are broad ones. Perhaps all academic writing involves an appropriation of the work of others that can be described as violent, but it is important for me to acknowledge that I have made a composition from the pieces of my own reading of feminist theology, and that it should not foreclose other meanings held by other authors and readers. As this is my own composition, the issues often so central to feminist discourse today—such as intersecting oppressions gender, race and socioeconomics, differences between feminisms, and critique of gender-essentialism and assertion that the category ‘woman’ is not an unproblematic given—have been barely touched on. In part, this is due to the particular authors I have chosen to work on; I have also simplified in order to ensure that the discussion does not become unwieldy. Despite this, as a, white, Western, middle-class, able-bodied, and cisgendered woman, I am uncomfortable when I notice which particular issues I have neglected to discuss, and hope to redress this in future work.

This book is a work of “literature and theology,” in which my feminist theological bone collage is created not only from my reading of theological texts but also the literature of the British feminist novelists Michèle Roberts and Sara Maitland. My method of doing literature and theology follows the thought of David Jasper and Heather Walton, which emphasizes not theology through literature, or literature as the handmaid of theology, but the ways in which literature forms a renewing challenge to theological certainties.14 Yet I cannot claim to be taking the literature on its own terms, as if such a thing were possible; my readings of Roberts and Maitland’s work are my own. Both writers have a large and complex body of work, and there is perhaps a certain violence in the way I have chosen some elements to focus on at the exclusion of others. The image of a collage made from women’s bones to represent my theological engagement with literature is particularly unsettling when the authors I work on are still alive and still writing.

As well as the image of the golden bone collage, this book is also envisioned in terms of a phrase Kathleen Sands uses to describe her own theological method: “[r]eading these stories beside my own, I find no answers to be believed in, but challenge and insight, delight and strength, that are fragile and finite but real.”15 This describes not only my sense of producing a “fragile and finite” theological composition rather than a solid and harmonious construction, my resistance to an eschatological optimism that lacks reality for me, and that this theology comes through engaging with the “stories” of women’s literature, but also the importance of “reading these stories beside my own.” In this book, the pieces of my readings in theology and literature are placed alongside fragments of autobiography, of my 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