The Next Step: Making Feminist Concerns Part of the Academic Structure

I would like to thank Dora and Susanne for taking the first step and making the effort to call us together on the panel at the 2008 Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) meeting from which this roundtable sprang forth. The work of these women made the current discussion possible. Additionally, Dora and Susanne offered their ideas and experiences to spark our thoughts and conversation together.

A couple of my responses to their proposals combine my personal story with my hopes and dreams for the future. These observations and suggestions are places where I hope we can begin to think about transformation. I do not offer completely formed ideas with all of the problems and possibilities worked out. The practical and pedagogical observations are from my current context and at this point in time.

My first observation is that after forty years or so, a general malaise exists in the academy about feminist study. No longer perceived as new or cutting edge, a "been there, done that" feeling seems to permeate the academy, which seems to have moved on to other things. Feminist study has matured and just like canonical, narrative, and rhetorical criticism, it is no longer in the spotlight.

At the same time, however, we women in the field know there is a massive amount of work left to do, both in the classroom and in the academy. For example, each year, a new group of students enters the seminary from across the denominational spectrum using the same old exclusive language. Rarely does a student cross our threshold with an understanding of inclusive language, male or female. If inclusive language is one of the benchmarks of the impact of feminist studies, then we have failed to transform the church or the society. Inclusive language is cast as yesterday's battle.¹ Like the civil rights movement and the women's movement of the 1960s, women's equality is no longer front-page news; and while there was an uproar for a while, the church for the most part is back to business as usual.

In the academy, feminist studies, even with all the books and articles published over the past thirty to forty years, remains a boutique discipline. By boutique, I mean just that. Feminist studies is a specialty populated by a certain subset of the academy. The ugly truth is that many women are fearful of being labeled a feminist, believing that the title will prevent them from being recognized as serious scholars. I have to admit that I too have made sure that I was seen as something more than just a "feminist," fearful that if I did not, I would be seen as less of a scholar. We have all had to negotiate this territory, deciding how much of the academic game to play. What is clear from my and others' efforts to negotiate the academy is that the pillars of Western post-Enlightenment ways of doing things still hold up the building and guide the way things are done. In other words, we as feminists have yet to alter the center—the heart and soul of biblical studies—in ways that make women's ways of teaching and studying part of the structure. Rather, we are women who in large part have had to adapt to the world of men, often for academic survival.

Susanne and Dora asked what we see as the next step. To me, the task for feminist work is to aim for the center and work to change the foundations. Our task is certainly easier than it was for our foremothers in this work. We owe a great debt to the women who have worked their entire careers to make our presence here possible. Their effort to make feminist focus a part of biblical studies was a great and often lonely endeavor. It was only twenty-eight years ago, as the SBL celebrated its centennial, that Phyllis Trible pointed out that women were mentioned neither in discussion of the society's past nor of its future.² I do not...