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X 134 X CHAPTER FIVE Republication of Moral Discourse Compromise and Censorship as Political Freedom ) This chapter explores how Catholic and Shi‘i women produce and reproduce religious moral discourse within national and global political forums. Although male clerics envision women’s proper participation in public debates about secular politics to be based on the articulation of official dogma, I consider how women apply the logics of this participation to pluralistic and democratic contexts. In doing so, they are able to intervene in the public production of knowledge in ways unanticipated by the clerical rhetoric. They thereby construct new visions of the proper role of religious citizens in secular politics as well as the role of all religious believers as public theologians. Although all the creative conformers discussed in previous chapters of this volume are to some extent public intellectuals, I have focused so far on how their discourse shifts conceptions of the ideal woman within the family, before God, or within a particular religious community. I have intentionally postponed discussion of the ways in which their discourse is political insofar as it is situated in the pluralistic public sphere of global and national debates about a just state. I hope that by this point the reader’s conception of what sort of discourse counts as feminist politics has been sufficiently expanded that I can safely address politics in a more traditional sense, as discourse aimed at public participation. This discussion of public intellectuals is closely related to the subject matter of chapter 4 in that this is also an ethical “performance beyond the pulpit.” My concern here, however, is not with religious leadership or moral guidance, but rather in what ways individuals participate in discourse at the public level, whether that public is defined as the family, the local community , the nation-state, or the world. What forms do women’s voices take Compromise and Censorship as Political Freedom 135 in public debate? How are these voices ethically or religiously conceptualized ? What is their effect on the construction or maintenance of public ideology? How does this engagement form political spaces? Do religious women become full citizens by creating a nongendered political identity through gendered discourse? Unlike those in previous chapters, the themes of the discursive practices I consider here, abortion and free speech, do not appear immediately to line up. However, the issues have several dimensions in common. Within the U.S. and Iranian contexts, both entail public debates in which religious arguments engage with more secular ones. This sort of public deployment of “God-talk” may be more familiar to the reader in the case of abortion in the United States. Free speech debate in Iran, though, involves similar arguments about the religious morality, particularly the morality of expression aimed at critiquing aspects of the Islamic Republic. These are also issues on which both men and women are assumed to have opinions. In other words, both are to some extent nongendered political issues within discourse (even if, of course, abortions are an action by women). These two themes allow us to consider when feminist politics moves past an assumed gendered subject, even if it does so through acutely gendered discourse. Finally, the feminist ethics of the women’s responses to clerical rhetoric on these two issues will be shown to demonstrate a similar tactic of engagement that I am calling the feminist tactic of republication. The word republication signals the many ways in which women construct new visions for public participation such as through conceptualizing new publics, creating publications, and redefining what it means to be a republican all through the republication or reproduction of theological arguments within secular national or global political context. The chapter begins with a rhetorical analysis of a message by John Paul on women’s participation in the Fourth World Conference on Women. This message is used as clerical context for Frances Kissling’s argument for compromise in the U.S. debate about abortion. Next, I consider a speech by Khomeini on ideological unity, which entails a logic of public engagement that Shahla Sherkat draws on in her argument for the virtues of selfcensorship in the Iranian press. In the clerical rhetoric we see attempts to influence how women intervene in public dialogue as well as strong suggestions about what the specific ends of such dialogue should be: stability of the Islamic Republic and the eradication of abortion and contraception. The women’s responses to the clerical rhetoric envision a different public role...

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