Transforming Vision: Explorations in Feminist Theology

2: Feminist The*logy between Modernity and Postmodernity

39 2 Feminist The*logy between Modernity and Postmodernity Modernity” and “Postmodernity” are ambiguous, shifting concepts that are often set over against each other as dichotomous.1 For example, it is not clear when modernity begins and when it ends, whereas postmodernity is said to have reached its high point in the 1980s, so that today one speaks of late postmodernity .2 While the notion of the “modern” is characterized by sociopolitical developments such as capitalism, industrialization, liberal democracy, colonialism, and globalization,3 the understanding of postmodernity is determined by language and symbols.4 As feminist and postcolonial discourses have shown, modernity did not realize its promise of liberty, justice, and equality for most people but instead excluded them from democracy through kyriarchal discourses of dominance and 1. This is a revised text of a chapter that has appeared in my book Grenzen überschreiten, and I want to thank Linda Maloney for the translation on which my revision here is based. I also want to express my sincere thanks to Prof. Herta Nagl-Docekal and Dr. Friedrich Wolfram of the Catholic Academy Association of the Archdiocese of Vienna as well as the interfaculty working group on philosophy of religion for the invitation to participate in the lecture series on “Religion, Theology, and Churches under the Conditions of the Modern/Postmodern.” 2. For a discussion of the critical interrelation between postmodernity, psychoanalysis, and feminism, see Jane Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 3. See Saskia Sassen, “The Excess of Globalisation and the Feminization of Survival,” Parallax 7/1 (2001): 100-110; Diane Austin-Broos, “Globalisation and the Genesis of Values,” Australian Journal of Anthropology 14/1 (2003): 1-18. 4. See also Hedwig Meyer-Wilmes, “Tirzia oder—durch einen Spiegel in einem erzählten Wort . . . Zur Entfaltung Gottes in einer gottlosen Zeit,” in Die widerspenstige Religion: Orientierung für eine Kultur der Autonomie?, ed. van den Hoogen, Küng, Wills, Baumann, et al. (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1997), 249-67. 40 | Transforming Vision submission.5 Postmodernity, on the other hand, suppresses feminist critiques of existing sociopolitical structures of domination by understanding power as diffuse , productive, local, multiple, and fragmentary, by locating it on the level of representation and the symbolic, and by emptying concepts such as oppression, marginalization, and equality of their oppositional expressive power, whereby social movements for emancipation lose their language of protest and their vision of justice.6 Moreover, the “post” in “postmodern” is disputed. Does postmodern mean that modernity has been overtaken and superseded by postmodernity, or does it mean that the postmodern critically examines the modern in order to change it? Whereas modern and postmodern are often understood as mutually exclusive, and the playful-aesthetic postmodern tends to fall back into the premodern,7 I want here to relate modernity and postmodernity as political enlightenment discourses correctively to each other in a critical feminist way. If it is not clear how modernity and postmodernity and their “in-between” are to be defined, it is even less clear how the notion of “feminist,” which modifies the word “the*logy,” is to be understood. In postmodernity the term “feminist” has been qualified with a great variety of meanings, all of which have developed different theoretical frameworks: Latina,8 womanist, mujerista, Africana,9 sexual-difference, queer, third-world, Western, equal-rights, multicultural, interreligious , Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Black, critical, postmodern—to mention only a few. In light of this plurivocity of feminist the*logy it is necessary to begin by first briefly characterizing my own theoretical-feminist approach. In a second step I will look more closely at the debate on whether feminist the*logical discourses should be assigned either to modernity or to postmodernity, and I want to do so by critically reflecting on the discussion of equality and difference. In a third step I will argue that the anthropologically defined theory and the*logy of gender difference must be seen as multiply interwoven with other sociopolitical structures of domination such as race, class, colonialism or age. Finally, I want to address briefly the uniqueness of a feminist political the*logy. My own theoretical approach of a critical feminist the*logy of libera5 . Wendy Brown, “Women’s Studies Unbound: Revolution, Mourning, Politics,” Parallax 9/2 (2003): 3-16. 6. For the discussion of the postmodern from a “black feminist” perspective, see Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press...