Editorial

The female body has long been the site for a range of social and individual anxieties.

It can come as a shock to realise the extent to which the female body causes such consternation. Beverley Clack, one of the editors of this edition, remembers vividly the affect of reading the Early Church Father Tertullian’s words, addressed to women, in his sermon from the third century, ‘On Female Dress’. Styling all women as ‘daughters of Eve’, his words bear testimony to the disgust felt by ‘spiritual men’ down through the ages when confronted with the female form.

‘You are the devil’s gateway’, he rages, ‘you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him who the devil was not brave enough to attack.’

Realising just how troubled a ‘father’ of the church could be by female bodiliness was a deeply unsettling experience which raised a host of new questions for someone studying theology for the first time. How did Eve achieve the monumental outcome of the Fall of Humanity? When Tertullian directs our gaze to female dress, it is plain that he believes it was not Eve’s words or arguments that persuaded Adam to disobey God, but her desirable and dangerous body. Why else his worries regarding what women should wear? And rather than hold Adam responsible for his own failings, it is Eve’s physical form that Tertullian holds responsible for the Fall, just as the bodies of all her daughters, down through the generations, are responsible for distracting men from the ways of God.

In theological misogyny, Tertullian ploughs a familiar furrow. Woman is that which stands in opposition to spirituality. She is body, and Man is spirit or mind. An overlap emerges with philosophical misogyny, with the male being equatable – in the writings of figures like Pythagoras and Aristotle – with reason and integrity, and the female with matter and sexuality. The repository of male anxieties concerning materiality, the female is connected to the physical world in ways that, supposedly, the male is not. The role of the female in reproduction has been employed to support such conclusions, as the image of Woman as Life Giver given a far less positive rendition when that ‘life’ is seen as ultimately connected to death. The female body is not just subject to the changes of menstruation, pregnancy and menopause, but those very experiences are the source of dangerous, corrupting and disgusting fluids. To escape the world – to escape death – one must escape the female.

The contested nature of the female body continues into this day, albeit in rather different ways. Questions now proliferate around the question of the body and its role in constructing identity.

What is the role of the female body for defining ‘Woman’? Moreover, what should it be?

How significant is biology for identity?

At times, contemporary discussions about the female body – its nature and significance – can become as bad tempered as the words Tertullian uses in his centuries-old rant on the problematic female.

Is it possible to have a more constructive discussion on female embodiment? What does it mean to consider ‘embodied knowledge’ in the twenty-first century? What role might there be for feminist theology in enabling a more illuminating discourse?

Lisa Isherwood, whose article begins the edition’s journey into these questions, is an important foremother in the development of body theology. Isherwood describes presenting her body in her work as a challenge: a challenge to tidy definitions of embodiment, to somatophobic traditions in religion and philosophy and, ultimately, to the weight of patriarchy itself. She claims the right of radical incarnation – flesh becoming words – and thus directs us to the continuing significance of the theme of this edition of the journal: ‘The Female Body and Embodied Knowledge’.

This edition emanated from a day-long symposium on this theme at Oxford Brookes University in June 2023. At the symposium, six women met together to discuss in a quiet and supportive context some of the contentious issues surrounding the female body and what renewed reflection on it might contribute to claims for embodied knowledge. It was an interdisciplinary event, with the disciplines of theology, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies reflected in the contents of the discussion. Four of the contributors’ articles appear here. Two will appear in future editions of the journal. These articles are supplemented by others that reflect in different ways on our central theme.

Not surprisingly, a thread of autobiography weaves its way through many of the articles. To write about ‘embodied knowledge’ is to alert the reader to the significance of the concrete and the personal for critical and theological reflection. While most of the articles presented here include some reflection on personal experience, those of Susan Pickard and Megan Clay most explicitly mine this terrain.

Pickard writes evocatively of the liberation that comes with menopause. At the same time, she considers the complexities of the mother/daughter relationship through reflecting on her lived experience and by reading her experience through the ancient myth of the Mother Goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone. Given the often fraught conversations between older and younger feminists, Pickard directs our gaze to the power myth and religion has for shaping possibilities in surprising ways.

A sense of the difficulties attending to this conversation between generations and how it affects feminist theological discourse is found in Eilidh Galbraith’s challenging article. Galbraith highlights the ‘trouble’ with white feminist theologians, arguing that important theological foremothers like Mary Daly fail to escape their own white privilege even as they critique patriarchal forms of religion. Galbraith’s article demands that we consider ways of addressing how the feminist past is read in order for feminism to have a bright future.

Megan Clay suggests a possible way forward, exploring her work as a theologian and artist through conversations with feminist artists. Clay, who set up and runs the Feminist Theology and Art Forum, shows how art or ‘ART/THEO/LOGY’, ¹ a term coined by theologian and artist Silvia Martinez Cano, theologising A/R/Tography, Art Based Research, which opens up fascinating dimensions for theological enquiry. Clay’s work emerges from personal experience, reading and listening to women. It is the conversations and the creation that comes out of that method that make possible new futures. Thus, Clay describes the possibilities of creativity, while resisting attempts to ignore the threat and violence posed by the female body just being there. In the theology that informs and is shaped by her art, and in that of those with whom she is in conversation, there is both a challenge to that violence and a way of reframing the possible sources of flourishing for the female body.

Mary Ann Beavis further explores the possibilities of art for reframing theology and theological themes by considering the work of contemporary artist Lilian Broca. Broca’s attention is drawn to the contested bodies of biblical women, and her paintings and mosaics suggest alternative renditions of familiar stories when viewed from the perspective of women themselves.

How to conceive ‘the body’ returns us to Lisa Isherwood’s article. Isherwood details the complexity of ‘the body’, framed as it is by the personal, the political and the societal. As she points out, the body is shaped by ‘learned discourses’ about it and what it demarcates. These discourses can be challenged and transformed by exploring the radical possibilities of ‘the divine body’: We live in the world but are not chained by its definitions. The image of spiralling becomes important for thinking creatively about embodied existence, and, as a Christian theologian, Isherwood sees Jesus as the process of divine becoming in which we all share. The divine is to be found, not apart from the body, but in ‘every body’ that we meet.

Ozan Can Yılmaz develops this theme of the divine body by reflecting on Marian spirituality and its role in shaping the identity of Catholic women. By taking us inside the experience of faith, Yılmaz suggests an intimate connection between the transcendent body of Mary and the immanent bodies of those women who find her helpful for reading their lives and experiences.

Yılmaz’s article is shaped by the theories of Luce Irigaray. Another theorist, with a rather different way of reading the body, is Judith Butler. Different attitudes to the usefulness of Butler’s account of the body for feminist theology emerge in the articles of this edition. While Lisa Isherwood and Beverley Clack agree on the nature of divinity as in process, they disagree on just how liberating for women is Butler’s claim that Woman is a becoming, rather than a being. For Clack, the problem with Butler’s discourse is that she proffers a form of knowledge detached from the realities of the physical body: most notably, the postmenopausal body. For Isherwood, Butler is helpful precisely because she is developing and extending the language of materiality.

Similar disagreements can be felt between Clack and Pickard and their respective approaches to menopause. Clack reads menopause through the lens of pessimistic philosophy: It reveals the extent to which optimistic ideas of individual control are constrained by the fact we are beings formed by and inhabiting a physical universe. For Pickard, menopause is less about the physical problems that attend to it and more about the liberation felt when one loses the constricting constructions formed by the male gaze where female identity is shaped through obsession with the properties of the youthful female body.

The strength of feminist theological debates should be that they are not monolithic. There are different ways of reading texts, and the application of ideas can be as different as the theologians applying them. We should not seek to curtail discussion in the hopes of establishing one ‘feminist’ position on the body and how to embrace it. And here, in these articles, which often disagree and reflect the very real disagreements of feminist theological and philosophical scholars, there is both challenge and promise. Challenge, because the fragmenting of feminism should give us a cause for concern if we desire to create the conditions that will enable all women to flourish, and promise, for seeking after genuine conversation and collaboration must be central to our feminist theological future. The articles presented here will, we hope, encourage as much as they infuriate and sow seeds for the future, as much as they demand reflection on our feminist past. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we did!

Beverley [e-mail] Michele [e-mail]