Challenges and Opportunities in Current Feminist Biblical Studies

In my opening comments during the presentation of this paper at the Society of Biblical Literature, I thanked Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre, Susanne Scholz, and Dora Mbuwayesango for having included me in the roundtable. At that time, I noted that although, as an American academician, I found myself eager to respond to the many different things Scholz and Mbuwayesango addressed in their introductory statements, as a good Asian student, I planned respectfully to follow their directions about how to respond as delineated by a series of questions they had included at the end of their remarks. As a feminist hermeneutic, however, I could not help rearranging and reinterpreting those inviting questions to make them more helpful to me from the perspective of my sociogeographical locations. And with that, I shared my thoughts on the following three topics: (1) the accomplishments of feminist biblical scholarship, (2) my lingering concerns/questions, and (3) a proposal/agenda for the future.

Not only in their quantity but also in their diversity and quality the accomplishments of feminist biblical scholarship are truly amazing. At least six years ago I gave up counting the number of Schüssler Fiorenza's works alone, which have been gathered in several festschrifts honoring her, including Walk in the Ways of Wisdom and the most recent issue of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (JFSR).¹ Furthermore, along with two major multivolume series of the Feminist Companion to the Bible, edited by Athalya Brenner for the Hebrew Bible and Amy-Jill Levine for the New Testament, numerous articles and monographs are available.² The diversity and quality of work in feminist biblical studies also is growing alongside the number of works being published. To quote Levine's well-expressed remark from the 2001 inaugural volume of her New Testament Feminist Companion series:

As feminist readers recognize the effects of their work and meet the criticisms of their analyses brought by feminists and non-feminists alike, our interpretive processes mature and expand. Today there are countless readings that could be labeled feminist, even as there are countless ways that the term has been and can be defined. The feminist choir no longer sounds the single note of white, Western, middle-class, Christian concern; "feminist biblical studies" is now a symphony. It acknowledges the different concerns social location and experience bring to interpretation and recognizes the tentativeness and partiality of each conclusion: no instrument alone is complete; no two musicians play the music exactly alike.³

Although great strides have been taken, I have lingering concerns. Despite the mature quality of current feminist biblical scholarship, I find myself constantly struggling with something I often come across in feminist biblical studies. It is not easy to pin down this "something" with a clear word, concept, or phrase, but it is related to certain assumptions that lead one to view the world in an oppositional binary mode, and often, in a hierarchical binary mode. Let me share three specific observations.

First, I have concerns about the language of East, West, South, and North. My frustration stems from a sense that both the direction markers and their connotations are relative, rather than absolute. When I lived in the Bay Area, for example, I used to look at the Pacific Ocean, saying to myself: "If I swim west, I will get to my homeland—a country in the East!" In other words, whereas in the United States, people in general associate West and North as better or superior than East and South, in my home country, Korea, it is quite the contrary. There, East and South have positive implications as the sources of energy, warmth, brightness, sunrise, hope, life, and so on, whereas West and North carry opposite meanings. More frustrating for me is that no matter which we call East, West, South, or North, so-called Easterners are now Westerners not only in terms of their residences and workplaces but also in their ways of thinking, behaviors, and cultural settings.

Second, I worry about using the terms third world, on the one side...