- Introduction
I am often asked how I see the future of feminist the*logy or feminist biblical studies. Unfortunately, I do not have the gift of predicting what is to come or a crystal ball to do so. Nor am I trained as a futurist, a term that “most commonly refers to authors, consultants, organizational leaders, visionaries, foresight consultants and others who engage in interdisciplinary and systems thinking for advising private and public organizations on global trends, plausible scenarios, emerging market opportunities, risk management and future planning.”1 Since the quest for the future of feminist studies in religion is a vital question, we decided to organize a panel at the 2012 SBL/AAR meeting in Chicago and invite up-and-coming scholars who will define the future of feminist studies in religion to reflect on this question. The following description and invitation to the panel articulates the questions to which the ensuing essays seek to respond. Obviously, such a response cannot be comprehensive or systematic but is topological and personal. It provides focus points that invite further exploration and discussion.
The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion is a child of the feminist movements in religion emerging in the 1970s and 80s. Feminist Studies set out to explore the critical questions and positive or negative experiences wo/men have had in religious communities that were for centuries exclusive of but also inspirational for wo/men. As wo/men moved in greater numbers into the Academy, our work became more and more professionalized and shaped by the various academic disciplines and their questions. The panel will explore how new scholars in Biblical Studies address the problem of becoming “disciplined” and at the same time remain committed to the theoretical and practical questions [End Page 117] of wo/men struggling for justice in religion and society. What are the most important issues Feminist Biblical Studies needs to address in the future? What practices can challenge or disrupt these divisions and create new and renewed feminist connections and collaborations?
After the lively discussions the panel presentations provoked, we decided to continue the conversation in a roundtable format by posing another question: How are up-and-coming scholars in biblical studies addressing the problem of becoming “disciplined” and at the same time, remaining committed to the theoretical and practical questions of wo/men struggling for justice in religion and society? Although the responses of the panelists are quite varied and wide-ranging, all address both the disciplinary and the justice questions that each piece articulates differently.
In “Politics of Reading,” Jacqueline M. Hidalgo queries the ways that academic disciplinary discursive formations, and not only socioeconomic structures, write US Latinas out of the field. She therefore does not turn directly to the question of the future but to the “multifaceted ways in which biblical studies has participated in, challenged, and reinforced larger social injustices” (121). Hidalgo draws on Maylei Blackwell’s concept of “retrofitted memory,” to examine it in Demetria Martínez’s 1994 novel Mother Tongue as a potential reading practice that undermines a scholarly politics of authorization and hence has great significance for the future.
By attending not just to memory in the historically ancient formation of the Bible but also by foregrounding its role in contemporary worlds, her contribution leaves open the limits of memory. It problematizes the place and power of the scholar in shaping memory for the future by telling a story of the painful injustices of the past, reshaping it so that it draws attention to present needs and serves “as a practice of communal motion and transformation, of getting us where we need to go together, within a shared space—at least for the time being” (131).
In “Uncertain Futures: Institutional Brokenness and Other Feminist Quandaries of Belonging,” Maia Kotrosits also “gestures more broadly to the ironies of institutional life: the ways institutions and fields mediate and, in certain circumstances, abrogate relationships while legitimizing, engendering, and co-opting our work” (131). In conversation with Jane Gallop and recent work within affect theory, she offers “a set of reconceptualizations that address the problem of how feminist biblical studies might proceed politically in a...