"My/Our" Comfort Not at the Expense of "Somebody Else's": Toward a Critical Global Feminist Theology

Asking what it means to do theology in "my" or "our" context when we find that wo/men's lives are closely interrelated to one another across national borders through the process of globalization, this article attempts to reconsider both critical and global characteristics of Asian feminist theology rather than maintaining it as a theology that speaks only for or to "Asian women" from the "Asian women's perspective" in the "Asian" context.¹ Although the use of the unitary category "Asian women" was indispensable to a certain extent in the earlier processes of formulating Asian women's/feminist theology, it has since rendered wo/men in and from Asias a monolithic group irrespective of varied sociocultural, religious, political, and economic differences among them.² As Asian American theorist Laura Hyun Yi Kang puts it, both "the shifting geographical terrain of transnational sex work in Asia" and that of transnational labor migration in Asia as well as across the Asian Pacific demand a critical reconsideration of the category "Asian women."³ Feminist theologians Wai-Ching Angela Wong and Namsoon Kang have also criticized the unexamined use of the homogeneous category "Asian women."⁴ Current transnational market economies, cultural exchanges, political interventions, and military expansions also illustrate how difficult it is to retain a unifying category "Asian" along with the category "Asian women."

Challenging the unexamined use of the homogeneous category "Asian women" and the unifying category "Asian," this article aims to articulate Asian feminist theology as a critical global feminist theology. A critical global feminist theology is an attempt to respond to the increasing forces of globalization under which "my/our comfort" is often maintained at the expense of "somebody else's" and vice versa. It is also an effort to form global resistance against ongoing injustice and global solidarity among wo/men in and across national borders. Building on a critical feminist theory that stresses the importance of a systemic social analysis to explicate how social differences have been systematically produced and continue to operate within the social structures, a critical global feminist theology seeks to investigate how differences among wo/men are produced across the different socioeconomic and religio-cultural locations. ⁵

Calling attention to the limits of identity politics, a critical global feminist theology claims that feminist theologies cannot and should not be ghettoized as if they were relevant only to "their" own context, when "my" or "our" context is inextricably interconnected with "other" contexts under global capitalism and the military hegemony that underpins it.

However, articulating Asian feminist theology as a critical global feminist theology does not mean discrediting or discarding the prior theological works and struggles made by Asian feminist theologians. Nor does it mean developing another "megafeminist" theological discourse that conflates "wo/men's experience" with the experience of a certain privileged group of wo/men. Rather, the articulation of a critical global feminist theology should be done through the ongoing dialogue between and interaction with existing Asian feminist theological works, the legacies of which should not be underestimated. In this sense, this article is only a first step in rethinking some of the challenges feminist theologians face in this era of globalization, thus opening the floor to discuss concerned issues among feminist theologians, especially among those who are from/in Asias.

Although this article addresses some methodological and theological issues that feminist theology needs to reconsider, it also reflects a personal and political concern that has led me to question identity politics. My "outsider within" position in the United States—first as an "international student" and later as a "resident alien" who had become part of the "Asian Pacific North American community"—pressed me to look critically at how the category "Asian women" has been constructed as a homogeneous group irrespective of differences among wo...