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Where Have We Been? Where Do We Need to Go? Key Questions for Women Studies in Religion and Feminist Theology As someone who helped found the disciplines of women studies in religion and feminist theology and as someone who has written a great deal on these topics, I have a long vantage point from which to view our concerns . In this chapter, I seek more to review the essentials of our disciplines than to blaze new methodological trails. That is a task for younger scholars who have the freshness that I had in 1967 when I wrote my first paper on women and religion, which was then unexplored and novel territory that quickly became controversial.1 I suggest that it is instructive to ascertain what we have clearly established as scholars of women studies and as feminist theologians, what has been suggested but is not yet firmly in place, and what needs to be integrated into our scholarly and theological agendas. I will be as concerned about how best to maintain and advance our agendas, given the politics of academia , as I will be about purely scholarly concerns. what we have established: a paradigm shift in models of humanity In my view, the single most important accomplishment of women studies and the feminist movement has been to change the model of humanity with which many people and many scholars operate. There is no question that I was socialized, both as a human being and as a scholar, to think with an androcentric model of humanity. Widespread use of the 65 chapter 3 Gross_Ch03 10/17/08 14:31 Page 65 term androcentric is itself a product of the conceptual revolution initiated by women studies.2 Before that time, the term had been rarely used, because it was not understood that there was any other way to conceptualize humanity or that we all operated with a model of humanity that put men in the center of attention as normal and normative human beings and women on the periphery as a “special case” and a bit abnormal . Such a mode of language and scholarship and such a model of humanity were normal and without alternatives. Only when we began to ask why women so rarely appeared on the pages of the books we read, even in descriptive accounts of religion, did we begin to figure out that the model of humanity we had imbibed from our culture made women invisible or that there were alternatives to that model of humanity. I will never forget how hard and long I struggled as a graduate student to figure out why all the scholarship on women and religion seemed so inadequate and unbalanced until one day when I realized the problem was that whenever women were studied, a rare occurrence, they were studied as objects in an androcentric universe. I also realized that we would never get anywhere in understanding women until we changed that basic methodological assumption. These things were already quite clear to me in 1968, when I took my doctoral prelims. The distinction between androcentric models of humanity and what I called “androgynous models of humanity” for many years is clear and explicit in my doctoral dissertation, most of which was written in 1974,3 and it is very explicit in one of my early publications, written in 1975 and finally published in 1977.4 In that work, I suggested that most topics in the field of religious studies could benefit from the application of an androgynous model of humanity. The relative success of this conceptual revolution can be measured by the facts that the generic masculine has largely gone out of style, even in many popular media, and that many general accounts of religion, such as introductory textbooks, are gender-balanced. Of course, there are holdouts, such as conservative religious groups who refuse to change their liturgies to gender-inclusive language, but it is a significant victory that most academic journals now demand nonsexist language, that textbooks publishers solicit gender-inclusive manuscripts, and that daily newspapers avoid the generic masculine. In my view, these changes in more popular and more widely accessible venues are more important and more significant than the rather considerable body of women studies scholarship that has accumulated in the last thirty years. Such changes indicate real changes in cultural consciousness, whereas 66 Key Questions for Women Studies Gross_Ch03 10/17/08 14:31 Page 66 [3.145.97.248] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 11:56 GMT...

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