Constructing a Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust

The Female Face of God in Auschwitz: A Jewish Feminist Theology of the Holocaust , Melissa Raphael, Routledge 2003 (0-415-23665-7) pp. xii + 228, Pb. £18.99     

A Patrimony of Idols: Second-Wave Jewish and Christian Feminist Theology and the Criticism of Religion

This article suggests that second-wave feminist theology between around 1968 and 1995 undertook the quintessentially religious and task of theology, which is to break its own idols. Idoloclasm was the dynamic of Jewish and Christian feminist theological reformism and the means by which to clear a way back into its own tradition. Idoloclasm brought together an inter-religious coalition of feminists who believed that idolatry is not one of the pitfalls of patriarchy but its symptom and cause, not a subspecies of sin but the primary sin of alienated relationship. The first moment of feminist theology’s criticism of patriarchal power is not that it is socially unjust, but that it has licence to be unjust because it is idolatrous. Yet, neither opponents of feminist theology who dismiss it on the grounds that it is a secular import into the tradition, nor feminist students of theology and religion, have paid sufficient attention to feminist theology’s counter-idolatrous turn as the religious ground of women’s liberation. Here, the freedom and becoming of women is dependent on the liberation of the religious imagination from captivity to a trinity of idols: the patriarchal god called God who is no more than an inference from the political dispensation that created him; the idol of the masculine that created God in his own image and the idol of the feminine worshipped as an ideational object of desire only as the subordinated complement of the masculine and as a false image that becomes a substitute for the real, finite women whose agency and will it supplants.     

基于宗教、哲学和传统的创造

文明之间的对话总是源于压力和挑战,但机遇也随之而来。机遇在于,能否在对其他文明的学习、理解和观照中重新找到自信。没有这种自信,文明之间的对话将没有意义,也不可能真正发生。自信意味着在新的时空坐标中不断地对自己传统之宗教信仰、哲学理念和生命意识的重新反思、批判和再造。通过对话,重新理解、发现、再造并坚持自己,这是犹太哲学发展史所带来的重要启示。再造自己的传统和文明,不是回归,而是复兴,是基于新的时空可能性创造新的传统。     

Clocks,Creation and Clarity: Insights on Ethics and Economics from a Feminist Perspective

This essay discusses the origins, biases, and effects on contemporary discussions of economics and ethics of the unexamined use of the metaphor an economy is a machine. Both neoliberal economics and many critiques of capitalist systems take this metaphor as their starting point. The belief that economies run according to universal laws of motion, however, is shown to be based on a variety of rationalist thinking that – while widely held – is inadequate for explaining lived human experience. Feminist scholarship in the philosophy of science and economics has brought to light some of the biases that have supported the mechanistic worldview. Possible alternatives to the an economy is a machine include an economy is a creative process and an economy is an organism. Such metaphors are intellectually defensible as guides to scientific inquiry and provide a richer ground for moral imagination.     

Moving from Feminist Identity Politics To Coalition Politics Through a Feminist Materialist Standpoint of Intersubjectivity in Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Identity politics deployed by lesbian feminists of color challenges the philosophy of the subject and white feminisms based on sisterhood, and in so doing opens a space where feminist coalition building is possible. I articulate connections between Gloria Anzaldúa's epistemological-political action tools of complex identity narration and mestiza form of intersubject, Nancy Hartsock's feminist materialist standpoint, and Seyla Benhabib's standpoint of intersubjectivity in relation to using feminist identity politics for feminist coalition politics.     

The Grounding of Identities

Philosophia - A popular stance amongst philosophers is one according to which, in Lewis’ words, “identity is utterly simple and unproblematic”. Building from Lewis’ famous...     

The Medieval Commentary Tradition:

No abstract available for this article.     

My So-Called Felicity and the City: Coming of Age with and Through Feminist Media Studies

This essay uses autoethnography to investigate the intersection of the dual identities of feminist scholar and media consumer as one mode of investigating television’s role in women’s identity construction. I draw on my experiences with the popular television programs My So-Called Life, Felicity, and Sex and the City as examples of becoming intertwined with the main characters’ relational and purchasing choices on screen. I examine how women of the third wave, raised on television, have come to define our identities by the presence of a man, due in part to the limited, heteronormative media choices available to young women today. The essay closes with a discussion of how the author’s own coming of age as a feminist media scholar parallels the “coming of age” of the discipline of feminist media studies.     

The Politics of Self-Respect: A Feminist Perspective

Recent liberal moral and political philosophy has placed great emphasis on the good of self-respect. But it is not always evident what is involved in self-respect, nor is it evident how societies can promote it. Assuming that self-respect is highly desirable, I begin by considering how people can live in a self-respecting fashion, and I argue that autonomous envisaging and fulfillment of one's own life plans is necessary for self-respect. I next turn to the question of how societal implementation of rights may affect self-respect, and I urge that discretionary rights, which allow people to decline the benefits they confer, support self-respect more effectively than mandatory rights, which forbid people to refuse the benefits they confer. I conclude by examining the import of these contentions for feminist theory. I believe that my arguments are of particular concern to women because women have traditionally been victimized by a mandatory right to play a distinctively “feminine” role which has undermined their self-respect.     

Meditation: The Forgotten Western Tradition

In this article we discuss aspects of the history of the demise of meditation in the West and its recent re-emergence as an Eastern system. Reasons for this phenomenon will be explored. The differences between Eastern and Western meditation, the psychology of meditation, research in the field, as well as applications of meditation to counseling will be discussed.