Editors' Introduction

The topics in this issue range from nineteenth-century U.S. to contemporary global feminist biblical interpretation, and from Mesoamerican indigenous spirituality to the history and meaning of hijab in diverse Muslim societies. In the midst of this variety, it is interesting to note a repeating theoretical concept characterized by words like ambiguity, undecidability, and polyvalence. The frequency of these kinds of words in contemporary scholarship marks out the epistemological shifts that have taken place within feminist studies in religion and the feminist movement more broadly away from essentializing categories and absolute meanings and toward far-reaching recognition of difference and its complex relationships to wo/men's knowing, activity, and identity. Concepts like intersubjectivity, inbetween spaces, and the impossibility of radical alterity in this issue also reflect the alternative understandings of identity and experience that continue to expose a singular, bounded, and centralized universal human identity as a mythic, kyriarchal, and anthropocentric norm. In our view, the result for feminist work of the diverse recognitions of the elusive flexibility of meaning and the permeability and imbrications of boundaries has not been the much dreaded specter of relativism or political paralysis. Rather, as the articles in this issue attest, these very concepts of instability, polysemy, and interconnectedness characterize the fluid and contested spaces in which wo/men claim agency and history, resist oppressions, articulate a feminist politics, and seek opportunities for critical reflection and collaboration.

The issue begins with "Feminist Forerunners and a Usable Past: A Historiography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's The Woman's Bible," by Emily R. Mace, winner of the Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza New Scholar Award for 2009. Mace traces the reception of Stanton and The Woman's Bible in feminist theology and biblical criticism since the 1970s. Noting the initial enthusiastic recuperation of Stanton from a footnote in history to a forerunner of contemporary feminist theological work, Mace describes the growing ambivalence regarding Stanton's legacy that came in the 1990s with the recognition of her inattention to inequalities based on race and class. An analysis of Stanton's place in feminist histories exposes the selectivity of historiography. Following this lead, Mace explores the implications of the selection of Stanton over two other white suffragists of the time—Frances Willard and Matilda Joslyn Gage—arguing that neither provided as usable a history to contemporary feminists, the former because she may have been seen as too theologically conservative and the latter as overly radical. Calling for an inclusion and contextualization of the full range of feminist thought, Mace concludes by asking what is at stake for today's feminist theologians and biblical scholars when we construct a historical narrative that divides feminist thought along the lines of amateur and professional. We note that in this issue's roundtable, interest in the material locations and realities of feminist biblical scholars' work as well as in the level of communication between scholars and everyday biblical readers may begin to suggest a context in which to explore Mace's question.

In her article on the meetings and materials emerging from the First Indigenous Women's Summit of the Americas held in December 2002, Sylvia Marcos explores the prominence of "indigenous spirituality" and the reclamation of ancestral traditions in a developing worldwide movement for change among indigenous wo/men. Identifying "cracks of epistemic differences," Marcos characterizes this movement as a "de-colonial" effort to both preserve and transform indigenous culture. This ambiguous position emerges not only from the history of colonial violence but also in a context where indigenous religion has been driven out of sight—masquerading in the symbols and significations of the dominant Christian Catholic culture—and where "the people incarnating living indigenous traditions have played almost no part in the formation of academic theories" (37). Reversing the typical one-directional flow of instruction and authority, argues Marcos, these wo/men "proclaim that their feminist vision has contributions to offer to other feminist approaches" (39). Marcos outlines how concepts from indigenous spirituality such as fluid duality, equilibrium, and intersubjectivity provide powerful traditional theological resources for deconstructing imbalance and stratification and emphasizing the interrelatedness of all existence, while also always being subject to...