Empowering Memory and Movement: Thinking and Working across Borders

4. On Becoming a Feminist Biblical Scholar

4 On Becoming a Feminist Biblical Scholar I am grateful to Prof. Dr. Eve-Marie Becker for inviting us to contribute autobiographical reflections on how we became biblical scholars.1 Everyone knows that until recently women were excluded from authoritative ecclesiastical and scholarly interpretations of the Bible, both by law and by custom. True, women have read Scripture throughout the centuries, but they were disqualified until the twentieth century from engaging in official and scientific interpretation of the Bible. Only because of the struggles of the wo/men’s movement for admission to university studies and ordained office in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did this situation change somewhat, although this change was not complete because the admission of wo/men to the*logical studies, office, and scholarship still largely takes place only under conditions of marginalization and second-class status. How can a woman who works in a kyriocentric discipline and society be heard as a scholar at all if her scholarly marginality is grounded in her gender? Is her marginality not further reinforced if she speaks autobiographically, since personal style signals femininity but not scholarship? It is doubtful that a woman can be heard as a scholar at all if under the cover of value-free objectivity the ethos of scholarship serves to sustain already existing kyriarchal structures and refuses to problematize the subjectivity and social locatedness of kyriocentric scholarship. 1. First published as “Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft als kritisch-emanzipatorische Wissenschaft,” in Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft: Autobiographische Essays aus der Evangelischen Theologie, edited by EveMarie Becker. Tübingen: Francke, 2003. I am grateful to Rev. Dr. Linda Maloney for a first basic translation of this article. 75 Autobiographical Models In her book When Memory Speaks, the literary scholar Jill Ker Conway has investigated this problem area very thoroughly.2 She shows that the cultural standard for male autobiography is the classical Greek hero, whose epic story of adventures, testing, conquest, and success constitutes his odyssey. Ker Conway explains how this hero-myth became an internalized odyssey in Christianity and, in modernity, a romantic struggle against social conventions or a colonial frontier battle to cultivate the wilderness and foreign lands. It is also told as the story of a self-made entrepreneur who overcomes all economic obstacles to acquire a fortune, produce technical innovations, or make scientific discoveries. This male hero is independent, competent, active, aggressive, self-determining, and interested in achieving a good life for himself. Wo/men’s autobiographies, even those of successful professional wo/men, however, cannot use this cultural mirror of the hero if they want to be heard and understood. Western culture and religion do not permit this, insofar as classical antiquity and, in its wake, the modern self-concept, have excluded wo/men from full democratic citizenship rights and Christian tradition has condemned them to silence. The cultural mirror for wo/men’s autobiographies does not call for a self-aware actor, but for a woman who loses herself in a romantic love relationship or becomes a self-sacrificing, loving mother. Wo/men are not independent actors but passive recipients. The acting is done for them. Their lives must remain controlled by a master- or father-figure, be it G*d, spouse, dissertation director, or boss. If a woman wants to break out and become independent, other wo/men often see to it that it does not happen. The counterimage to the woman surrendering herself in love is that of the scheming, loud, dominating, unfeminine woman. The warlike Amazons serve as a negative warning, along with hideous witches, intellectual bluestockings, and masculinized emancipated wo/men. How can wo/men communicate the scholarly importance of their lives and creativity through autobiography in such a cultural context in which the kyriarchal image of wo/men demands that they remain selfless and dependent, when linguistic conventions subsume the feminine under the masculine, or when wo/men by marrying not only lose their own names but the meaning of their lives as females is culturally and religiously determined as a feminine call to family, raising children, and service vocations? To the extent that in Western cultures wo/men are understood not to be independent agents who actively 2. Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). 76 | Empowering Memory and Movement shape their own lives, but always are understood in relation to husband and children, it is a matter of common...