Life of a Gender Activist
I was recently assigned the most exciting project in graduate school! My professor asked us to complete a Wikipedia stub that was related to either gender, sexuality, or technology. I, of course, went with gender, as I am a self-proclaimed feminist. After scrolling through the gender stubs, I came upon a feminist theologian. She would rather not be named, so for the sake of this blog post we will call her, C.R.F. It was very difficult to find biographical information on her, and since she has recently retired, it was also very difficult to locate her. I put on my detective cap and within two days of research, I found her personal email. Because she inspired me so much, and I believe she deserves all of the recognition in the world, I would like to share our email correspondence with anyone who may be interested.
My name is [omitted] , and I am a current graduate student at the University of [omitted].
I am taking a class titled "Gender, Sexuality, and Technology". One of our assignments this semester is to publish an incomplete Wikipedia stub. I saw your name, and read your article titled, "Queen of Sheba". You immediately intrigued me. I grew up Catholic, and still practice my religion today. Your intersectional views on Christianity and feminism are wonderful.
I was curious if you would be able to, or would like to, give me any information that you would like to see on your Wikipedia page? I have found information on a few sources, but coming directly from you would assure me that it was not only credible, but something you would enjoy having written about you.
The assignment is due Friday, and nearly complete, but anything you would like for me to add that isn't readily available on the internet would be magnificent.
Thank you for all the inspiring work you have done!
How nice to hear from a current student! First, let me congratulate you on your resourcefulness: I am not an easy person to locate since I retired to the Berkshires, and no longer have an institutional affiliation!
I recently published an article in an open access online journal, Religions, whose links I am listing below.
Website: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/15/9/1121
PDF Version: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/15/9/1121/
(There is also some biographical information attached to it somewhere in a database called ORCID)
This is my most recent (and perhaps last) article written since the death of my husband in 2023, after a grueling 3 year stint as a full time caregiver for him. I think this article on Genesis and the Song of Songs is probably the best thing I’ve ever written, and best exemplifies what I try to do as an artist and theologian working in Bible. It exemplifies my multidisciplinary approach to texts, and shows the ways I have tried to introduce biblical materials into the marketplace of ideas in the modern world. In that respect, it follows in the trajectory of my last, and most favorite book, « With Eyes of Flesh: the Bible, Gender, and Human Rights » (2008). There, I took up the different representations of suffering and theodicy, but from a feminist, human-rights based methodology.
My view is that it is impossible to interpret the text and place it in conversation with modern life unless we first understand its ancient context, refracted thru the prism of overlapping methodologies. I start from a wisdom based understanding of « everyday values », NOT law codes pulled together by elites , and I privilege the body as a locus of meaning. The sufferer, Job, wonders if the punishing transcendant god sees « with eyes of flesh, as human’s see », such that the given reasons for suffering as punishment or test make any sense to those enduring raw suffering. The sufferer’s views must take pride of place in theodicy talk: Job doesn’t feel especially redeemed, despite the folktale’s classic « happy ending », and his wife’s view is barely noted. This is unacceptable, and law does not satisfy the questions of the flesh. I concluded that texts about theodicy would be better and more useful if viewed as « humanitarian narratives », that is, stories about what happens to bodies. Ultimately, this led me to a view of Jesus of Nazareth as a Human Rights Hero, whose suffering redeems humans through its radical solidarity with those crushed beneath the weight of Authority. The Human Condition will always be subject to the vicissitudes of chance and circumstance, but we are not alone in this when we proclaim that as divine connection, rather than sin which deserves to be punished, thereby foreclosing any outcry against injustice.
Since 1999, I worked in Human Rights discourse, working my way up as a theologian (not an especially valued role in HR settings), speaking of the human rights of women and other disposable humans in the Ancient Near East, contrasting legal traditions with everyday experience of the lesser valued members of society. To this end, I adopted the methodology of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen on « human capacities » which lead to human flourishing, rather than stratified patriarchal values promoted by the religions of the Book. My focus in modern societies has been on women, especially Muslim women who strain against the conventions of their societies, finding their authorization in new, collective action informed by the Quran. I have been blessed to hear the stories of many Muslim women prisoners and victims of systemic governmental abuse, always passed off as an attempt to purify society from error..as defined by men.
I also introduced there the existing methods of recording and responding to the absence of real women and children from the standards set forth United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights (UNDUHR). I serve as the Research Associate for the Women’s United Nations Report Network (WUNRN, see their website), using their schematic of the UNDUHR’s vision of economic, social and cultural rights (ESC), where we find that women’s rights and religious rights are usually seen as « cultural rights », that must defer to the economic and social well being of the whole of society. As in the Bible and Quran, women’s legal standing and rights thereof are perched precariously between property law (she is owned, like chattel) and family law (she both creates the family members by giving birth to,them, and so has some stake in inheritance law). Neither types of law have the notion of female flourishing as their goal. (You can see this played out in the lethal struggles of male politicians to reclassify women as reproductive entities whose functions must be regulated by male authorities..this is the only way to have a Pro-Forced Birth ideology that winds up executing non-performing mothers. Pro-Life, indeed!
I long for a day when women and girls are treated as well as domestic animals, and have more—or at least as many—rights as cows and chickens.
I went into human rights interpretation out of a sense of outrage at how religions were used to denigrate and dehumanize females as mere functionaries for the perpetuation of male values. I waited in vain to hear theologians and religious authorities reform themselves as true supporters of equality, or find intellectual feminisms addressing themselves to needs of women and girls in real life. The whimsies of theological deconstruction ( which is an ontological necessity!) seldom seem to make much difference to the passions of daily experience, and the whole planet suffers for it, even unto our collective death of species and ecosystems.
Some other items not usually found in public CVs:
I was raised in segregated south, in Miami in the area which later came to be known as «Little Haiti ». I lived just under the poverty line, and was lucky to learn about life in a mix of poor whites and blacks, Cuban Refugees, and sex-trafficked Haitian girls. I went to college entirely on scholarship. My Cuban guidance counselor filled
out my applications to college entirely without my knowledge, and then presented me with a ´done deal’. I had gotten to know him through my stint in punishment in the Assistant Principal’s office for my refusal to salute the flag after Martin Luther King’s assassination, and only reciting the Pledge by substituting « with liberty and Justice for some of us ». While in detention I relieved my boredom by helping « bad boys » from my neighborhood with their homework, and discovering the problem: they had never been taught to read! So I told Mr. Rodriguez.
I was one of the children that Eleanor Roosevelt rounded up in buses, and took out of our environment, to listen to our first taste of classical music, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Afterwards, the former First Lady gave us a lecture on Human Rights. Both those exposures exploded my mind, opening it to unheard dimensions of life.
I was a member of a Southern Baptist churçh, very interested because they gave us grape juice and cookies along with Bible lessons, and the first time I ever heard of Jesus was in the song « I was glad when they said unto me, « Let us go unto the House of the Lord » (because there were cookies there!). The story of the boy Jesus ditching his parents and running away to teach his elders in the Temple became a clear beacon I could follow. I left the church in 1966, during the Civil’Rights movement, after seeing the looks on the faces of the white congregants when a black family came to worship. Sitting in the choir, facing the congregation, I had visual proof of their beliefs. When I asked my Sunday School teacher about the teachings of Jesus, she told me that he was talking about how it would be in Heaven, not on Earth. Justice was for later.
A countervailing blessing against the fundamentalism of my church was the fact that my mother worked for Jews, and my best friend in elementary school was from a « mixed » family: a Jewish father whose family perished in Auschwitz, and a Southern Baptist mother who saw beyond boundaries. So, I was exposed to ways of being that cancelled out the hegemony of racism of my environment.
I was very lucky to have been influenced by wonderful male scholars in Bible: the Carmelite Father Roland E. Murphy, editor of the Catholic Bible Commentary; D. CLaus Westermann, the German form critic at the University of Heidelberg, who had been a prisoner of war in a Russian labor camp in WWII, and William Child Robinson, Jr., the Gnostic tradition history scholar, who had led a tank unit in WWII. These men freely shared their views and experiences of suffering, and encouraged me beyond measure.
I became engaged in HR work when my Baptist workplace entered into a relationship with Hebrew College in Boston in 1999. I sat next to a Pakistani feminist scholar of the Quran, Riffat Hassan. She was running an online resource for women fleeing Honor Killings, and I offered to lend my digital skills to the enterprise. From there, I met the head of WUNRN, and worked with Lois Herman, as a digital volunteer and writer of reports. This led me into the realm of Iranian Women dissidents of the National Council of Resistançe, and their stunning leader, Maryam Rajavi, the very model of a practical theologian along the lines of the Church Fathers. Since the Iraq War I was in progress, and every Muslim must be a terrorist, I came to the attention of the State Department and security services, all of whom concluded that I was merely a « dissident », but not a terrorist. I was audited, studied, shown off to Amnesty International leaders from Europe as an example of how well U.S. religion dissidents were treated and allowed freedom of speech. So, I became international, speaking in Paris, London, Toronto, Berlin, and maintaining many mentoring relationships, and writing reports on Iranian women and girls being held in Erin Prison in Tehran. While the HR world might not have known why a theologian was
involved in their work, they were glad to have a writer on board, so eventually I spoke to women’s groups at the UN, and wrote reports on Muslim women for Department of Public Information of UNWomen.
All of this trained me for analysis of things happening to women and the poor in my own country, and shaped my biblical scholarship to hold itself accountable to the world of sufferers. As an artist and poet, I used those modalities to cope with pain from a TBI in a car accident in 1969, and to remain sane in the struggles. With Roland Theresa of Avila, and John of the Cross as teachers, I practiced a Carmelite Zen form of meditation that dulled the pain, and kept me from death many times.
Librarians, school counselors, professors, activists, and artists gave me a life I never imagined or planned. One day in a cool, calm library in Miami where I hid out from gunfire, I came across a small, intriguing book as I read my way through the Dewey Decimal System (I was very bored as a teen), called « What is to be done? » by someone called V. I . Lenin. Flipping through it, I felt like one of the fleeing Christians after the Crucifixition, meeting a strange man by the sea, « Do you remember how our hearts were opened and set aflame when he opened the Scriptures to us? » they asked themselves ». And so it was for me, as this dead, reviled Russian described the sufferings of the very world around me! I was transformed by the potential power of collective action.
I like to think my haphazard life is my answer to What is to be done?
Thanks for asking! I made this long and biographical so you could finish your paper on time without any more bibliographic detective work.
So: this is Eleanor, Roland, Claus, Bill, Maryam, Riffat, Lois and yes, even Vladimir Illyich, and the rest of the world, reaching out to you, [omitted] , as you ask yourself, What Is To Be Done?
In Zen meditation, we say « If you meet a warrior on the road, show him your sword; if you meet a Zen person on the road, show her your poem. »
Here’s my riddle poem that sums it all up:
Traveling into the silence of God,
How loud the cries of the world become..
Til « Come to Me! » and « Go to them! »
Together merge, to be heard as One.
The scholars on the soup kitchen street
Read a living text etched out in crow’s feet,
Hear the Exile’s tale on every tongue.
I am sorry it has taken me so long to get back to you. I believe it is because I am at a loss for words. All I can say is ‘wow’. I cannot thank you enough for letting me know so much about you. You are an incredibly intelligent and brave woman. I hope you are taking this time to heal and find solace after the passing of your husband. I am a fairly new bride and that is one of those things that aches my heart to even imagine.
I feel, as a feminist myself, that your story has to be told. You are a courageous activist, a highly intelligent academic, and from what I've heard, an upstanding professor. This is becoming something worth more than a good grade to me. I would like to ask your permission to post our conversation on a blog post so that I can properly cite it. I could cite an email; however, I fear that it would be immediately removed due to other's inabilities to access the information. Would you be okay with this?
Once again, I appreciate you and your story so much.
I hope you have a magnificent day! 🙂
Yes, I think what I have written could have a broader, helpful impact, but also don’t want to shake up unsuspecting communities.
Post on Blog, with intro explaining your project. Entitle it “ Life of a Gender Activist” or some such thing, and maybe conceal my address, name, whatnot. How about just using my initials instead of full name... [multiple paragraphs omitted due to privacy concerns]
How does that sound to you?
dededos
kaledo-art
2087
jacobvanloon
yousharknotpass
