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81 4 Domination Divides Us, Feminist Differences Make Us Strong The Ethics and Politics of Liberation Postmodern feminist theories have pointed out that the ways we situate our texts and choose our rhetorical strategies raise questions about power that need to be made clear again and again.1 In her poem, “Heroines,”2 the American poet Adrienne Rich drew attention to the place of feminist theory and the*logy defined by the divided heritage of the nineteenth-century white wo/men’s movement . She pointed out that this heritage is still important today, but speaks to us “in the shattered language of a partial vision.” Therefore she asks the nineteenthcentury white suffragists: How can we fail to love your “clarity and fury . . . give you all your due, take courage from your courage, honor your exact legacy as it is, recognizing as well that it is not enough?” 1. First published as “Patriarchale Herrschaft spaltet/Feministische Verschiedenheit macht stark: Ethik und Politik der Befreiung,” in Frauenkirchen: Vernetzung und Reflexion im europäischen Kontext, ed. Angela Berlis, Julie Hopkins, Hedwig Meyer-Wilmes, and Karoline Vander Stichele (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1995), 5-29. I am indebted to Professors Lieve Troch and Hedwig Meyer-Wilmes. They not only encouraged me to work on this theme but also insisted that I engage theoretically with the general discussion of feminist theory. The often-technical language of my essay is required by this engagement with theory. At the same time I want to extend my great thanks for the interest and enthusiasm with which the wo/men’s movement in the churches of the Netherlands has supported and enriched my work. I also want to thank Linda Maloney for her translation of this chapter. 2. Adrienne Rich, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978–1981 (New York: Norton, 1981), 33-36. 82 | Transforming Vision Like our white feminist predecessors of the nineteenth century, so also most of us who are able to participate in feminist conferences are, in the words of Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak, “infinitely privileged” wo/men.3 Since even feminists remain entangled in the web of kyriarchal super- and subordination, feminist discourses must make theoretically visible the institutional structures and academic or ecclesiastical kyriarchal locations from which we speak. The place from which I begin my critical intervention is North American feminist the*logy.4 In order to mark this location, I have prefaced my theoretical reflections with a reference to the poem “Heroines,” by Adrienne Rich. I will close my reflections with an extract from an address given by the AfricanAmerican intellectual Anna Julia Cooper in 1893 at a world congress of wo/men in Chicago. By marking my text in this way, I attempt to locate my discussion of a feminist ethics and politics of liberation explicitly within the historical discourses of the North American wo/men’s movement and its heritage. In doing so I want to invite readers to judge for themselves whether and to what extent my theoretical reflections may contribute to feminist conversations in other geopolitical situations. Although I speak out of the context of the United States wo/men’s movement in the*logy and church, I speak not as a “native” but as a “resident alien,” a foreigner living there. The label “resident alien” situates me as someone who is both “inside and outside”: On the basis of my long residency and my professional position in the United States I “belong.” But at the same time I remain a foreigner because of my German accent, my experience, and my history. When I visit Germany I am regarded as a “native” on the basis of citizenship, culture, and language. At the same time I am seen as “a foreigner” who as a “representative” of American feminist the*logy does not “belong.” For similar reasons, though these are rooted in quite different experiences, Patricia Hill Collins has argued that black citizens, especially womanist intellectuals, always have to assume a “double” insider/outsider position.5 I therefore suggest that the metaphor of the “resident alien” is an appropriate image for a feminist movement and politics of liberation in the context of 3. Gayatra Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990), 42. 4. Here, I refer also to “womanist” and “mujerista” the*logy. African American feminists have adopted the concept of “womanist” from Alice Walker. See also Katie G. Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta: Scholars, 1998) and the round...

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