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  • Celebrating Feminist Work by Knowing It
  • Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

Let me first contextualize these reflections: I was greatly honored to have had the privilege of participating in the celebration of the ninetieth birthday of Catharina Halkes, an eminent European feminist theologian. The event was great and I am very grateful to the Halkes organizing committee for bringing us together for this feminist landmark. I wished we had done the same for the eightieth birthday of Mary Daly. While memorials are important, birthday celebrations are even more so, I argued in my keynote, because birthdays of feminists are milestones not only in the life of the wo/man whose birthday we celebrate but also for the feminist movement she has shaped. Celebrations like this are necessary to show that the feminist struggle for justice and well-being is still alive and ongoing.

Using my birthday reflections for Catharina Halkes this roundtable introduction seeks to explore and argue that we need to see such birthday celebrations not primarily in individualistic but in structural terms as shaping a feminist intellectual tradition. In celebrating the work of feminists, we tell what they have done and what we hope they continue to do. In so doing, we simultaneously articulate and celebrate a feminist history of struggle and vision. One might object that such celebrations foster individualism and elitism. Yet such an objection, which is deeply rooted in feminist egalitarianism and critiques of "stardom," overlooks the fact that equality does not mean sameness but rather richly variegated giftedness and equal standing.

After having finished these reflections and discussed them in my seminar on Feminist Theory and The*logy, a student in my class drew my attention to Susan Faludi's article "American Electra: Feminism's Ritual Matricide."1 Faludi [End Page 97] presents a similar diagnosis but focuses on matrophobia and matricide as well as commodification:

These two legacies—the continued matricide and the shape-shifting contamination of commercialism and commercially infused relativism in feminist activism and scholarship—have created a generational donnybrook where the transmission of power repeatedly fails and feminism's heritage is repeatedly hurled onto the scrap heap. What gets passed on is the predisposition to dispossess a legacy of no legacy.2

Although Faludi's essay is depressing, it substantiates my point that it is necessary to ask how feminists can claim their heritage without succumbing to intellectual matricide or commercial sellout. I use the term feminist here as a political umbrella term fully aware of the variegated expressions of feminism as for instance womanist, mujerista, Latina, Africana, Asian, indigenous, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, Lutheran, Pentecostal confessional, LGBT, critical, postmodern, global, and many more feminisms so that it would be more appropriate to speak of feminist the*logies and theoretical positions in the plural. In a context of capitalist globalization and fundamentalist heterosexist hierarchalism, I continue to argue that in the face of progressive social injustice feminist the*logy must be articulated in one way or another as a critical the*logy of liberation or emancipation, that is, as a radical democratic discourse of conscientization, self-respect, and transformation.

In celebrating Halkes's or any other feminist's birthday, we celebrate not only the life and work of a great feminist the*logian and scholar but also the feminist the*logical movements in Europe and around the world that have been decisively shaped by her leadership and efforts. Birthday celebrations of feminists are not private events but public acknowledgments of feminist work and public investments in a feminist future. They seek to recognize the intellectual and practical significance of feminist work not only by creating a feminist intellectual the*logical tradition but also by setting pointers toward a more just future. They are a small but important public gesture to ensure that future generations will know and tell what feminists have done. Therefore, public feminist birthday celebrations are important not only for envisioning a feminist future in society and religion but also for fostering it. They do important feminist work in the following ways:

First: Celebrating publicly the lifework of scholars such as Catharina Halkes highlights the the*logical ideas and intellectual contributions feminist scholars have made. Australian feminist Dale Spender has...

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