To Speak Freely at the Intersection of the Personal, Institutional, and Scholarly

This special section of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion honors the more than thirty years of work that Judith Plaskow has contributed to the field. I am not sure why I was included in this group of some of the most distinguished practitioners in the field, and I myself have quite recently resigned from the field to pursue an alternative career. However, I am acutely aware of the great opportunity this is to pay allegiance both to a field and a scholar who have been with me and informed my worldview for over fifteen years.

Some of the first assigned readings in religious studies that I had as a college student were the work of the other scholars contributing to this special section of the journal—Judith among them. At that time, as I pursued a research project in women's studies in religion, I was able to go to the library and easily look up most of the sources that existed on the topic. The "feminist" section of my Modern Religious Thought class consisted of Mary Daly's Beyond God the Father, Judith's Standing Again at Sinai, and an article by Carol Christ, and that was considered a generous treatment at the time among the all-male religion faculty at Oberlin College (Paula Richman was a notable exception in Indian studies).¹ What I didn't know at the time, however, was that the second volume of collected work in the field, Weaving the Visions, and the second edition of its earlier counterpart, Womanspirit Rising (both edited by Plaskow and Christ), were already making their mark in the field, exposing not only that there was indeed much scholarship happening in the field but also that it was rich, complex, and lively, and increasingly open to critical reflection and dialogue.² A few years later, I attended my first American Academy of Religion (AAR) meeting and found that Judith and her colleagues had been busy building a home for such inquiry—a field if you will—creating institutional space for the kinds of conversations of which I was just becoming aware. She was the true definition of foremother; but for me a foremother has never been one who initiates change and then stands only as a reference point for how far we've come. Rather, a foremother acts and continues to act, all the while changing as she learns, reflects, and grows.

Indeed, Judith has done anything but stand still in her pursuit of critical and institutional inquiry. The role she has played, the work she has done and continues to do, and the manner in which she has lived out her career so far reflect a thoroughly embodied and holistic sense of what it means to be a scholar. One of the most notable and critically important ways she has done so is in never having taken her institutional position, or anyone else's, for granted. This has kept her astute in her analysis and relevant, never buried in a progressive lineage of feminist thinkers whom those who tout the latest academic theories serially replace or occlude. Quite to the contrary, Judith has consistently interrogated the terms of power that inform institutional location and the effect of those terms on what we say and do as thinkers, where we get in our careers, to whom we are allowed to speak (and who we assume our audiences are), the fate of our published works, the size and location of our classrooms and offices, and even the spaces in which we convene at the AAR meeting. She has never fallen prey, as many feminist scholars have not had the luxury of doing, of assuming that the academy is a place of free critical inquiry for all. Rather, she has always critically located it as just one institution among many in larger society, all of which reflect and reproduce status quo structural power relations.

Judith has never failed to call out such rigorous critiques, even when she stood to gain from keeping quiet. A presentation for a full professorship in women...