The Hebrew Bible

Feminist and Intersectional Perspectives

Gale A. Yee

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781506425481
• eBook ISBN: 9781506425498
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

This volume provides an introduction and essays on the four key sections of the Hebrew Scriptures from the perspective of top female biblical scholars:

Part One: Torah/Pentateuch
Part Two: Deuteronomistic History (Joshua–2 Kings)
Part Three: Prophets and Prophecy
Part Four: Writings and the Book of Daniel

This volume highlights key issues in the Hebrew Scriptures from the perspective of top female biblical scholars. This includes historical critical and literary textual analysis and exegesis, particularly as viewed through feminist and intersectional interpretive lenses. Intersectional lenses include the racial/ethnic, class, Global South, postcolonial, and so forth, and their interconnections with gender.

The introduction to the volume by the editor introduces feminist intersectional biblical scholarship, making the case that this scholarship addresses perspectives that are often missing from even very thorough survey texts: feminist and intersectional issues regarding the women characters, sexual assumptions, sexual and domestic violence, symbolization of women, class and race relations, and so forth.

The essays have been created for students who may be encountering feminist biblical and intersectional scholarship for the first time.

Other contributors to this volume include Carolyn J. Sharp, Vanessa Lynn Lovelace, Corrine L. Carvalho, Melody Knowles, and Judy Fentress-Williams.

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Introduction: Definitions, Explorations, and Intersections

Introduction

Gale A. Yee

Definitions

The Bible has been a foundational text, not only for the religious communities of Jews and Christians, but particularly for its influence in the formation and perpetuation of certain gender relations that privileged men and disenfranchised women. Serious critique against this inequality between the genders arose particularly in the latter half of the twentieth century by the proponents of feminism and intersectionality and continues in the present day. Let’s begin this introductory essay by defining “feminism” and “intersectionality,” the major themes of this book. After this, I will present a short history of the women’s movement and the various modes of feminist theorizing, and then turn to feminist and intersectional perspectives on the Bible.

In its most general sense, the word “feminism” refers to the political activism by women on behalf of women.^[1] When used in biblical studies, feminist criticism is one of a series of recent methods of biblical exegesis (interpretation) that fall under the term “ideological criticism.” The ideological criticisms investigate the power differentials in certain social relationships in the production of the text (who wrote it, when, and why), how these power relations are reproduced in the text itself, and how they are consumed by readers of various social groups. For example, materialist criticism (aka Marxist or socioeconomic criticism) investigates ideologies of economic class relations that keep certain classes wealthier and others poorer. Postcolonial criticism looks at relations between colonizer and colonized and the ideologies that keep the conquerors and the natives in their respective places. Cultural criticism examines the ideologies of how the Bible was received and used in high and popular culture throughout the ages and globally. And so, for our purposes, feminist criticism studies the ideologies of gender that legitimize unequal relations between men and women. Many schools of thought exist in feminist studies, such as liberal feminism, radical feminism, Marxist/socialist feminism, postmodern feminism, psychoanalytic feminism, postcolonial feminism, feminisms of color, ecofeminism, to name a few.^[2] This rich diversity of feminist thinking will be reflected in the various theoretical approaches of feminist biblical scholars.

“Intersectionality” was a term coined in 1989 by the African American lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw to theorize the complex interconnections between gender, race, and class that have marginalized black and nonwhite women in the subjugation they routinely experienced. Rich white men experience “oppression” differently from poor women of color, because both occupy different but intersected and often conflicted locations on gender, race, and class continuums. These interconnections, however, had been explored by African American theorists long before the term became fashionable.^[3] Moreover, intersectional interfaces have sometimes been broadened theoretically to include other categories of analysis along with gender, race, and class, such as sexuality, colonial status, ethnicity, physical ability, and so forth.^[4]

Can women become like men? Do women want to? Should they want to?

The feminist movement has often been described through the metaphor of “waves.”^[5] The first wave possibly began in the eighteenth century with the treatise by Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, who argued that the dependence of (privileged) women on men kept them in their homes and deprived them of becoming educated and being independent rational agents like men. The movement toward women’s rights continued in the nineteenth century with the women’s suffrage movement through other liberal feminists, such as Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The so-called second wave of US feminism began during the politically turbulent 1960s, sparked by the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique and the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other liberal feminist women’s rights groups. Liberal feminism advocated equal rights for women in employment, education, reproduction, and other legal matters. Some of its gains were the right to vote, to education, to work outside the home, access to birth control and legalized abortion, the enactment of affirmative action laws, and laws against sexual and domestic violence. However, liberal feminism primarily advanced the concerns of white, heterosexual, middle-class, educated women and neglected the concerns of poor women of color. Furthermore, it made being “male” the ideal by presuming that women could become like men if they wanted to, that women wanted to become like men, and that they should want to become like men.^[6]

However, for many women, becoming male was not the ideal to be strived for. Rather, the sexism and misogyny of men was the very source of their oppression. The radical feminists criticized the “rights” focus in the liberal feminist agenda, because they did not think that women’s oppression would be eliminated simply by changing the laws, educating women, and letting them have careers outside the home. Women’s oppression went much deeper because it was embedded in a male system characterized by power, dominance, hierarchy, and competition. According to Andrea Dworkin, “Sexism is the foundation on which all tyranny is built. Every social form of hierarchy and abuse is modeled on male-over-female domination.” Investigating the biblical text as embedded in a patriarchal system that subordinated women would be influential in the work of feminist biblical scholars, as we will see.

A good starting point to understand the different forms of radical feminism is the essay by Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women.” Rubin traced the roots of women’s oppression by analyzing the male thinkers Karl Marx, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan on how they theorized what she called “the sex/gender system.” The sex/gender system “is the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity.”^[7] Sex referred to one’s biological anatomy; gender referred to the social constructions based on one’s biological anatomy. Patriarchy^[8] took certain aspects related to male and female physical biology (such as, men are stronger than women, women have no penis) to construct gendered identities of maleness and femaleness and social arrangements that served to empower men and disempower women. Patriarchy convinced men and women that these social constructions of gender were somehow “natural,” “essential,” or “normal,” and any deviance from them was “evil” and “abnormal.” Using these constructions to give themselves power and authority, men kept women under their control. Women became objects of exchange by men “given in marriage, taken in battle, exchanged for favors, sent as tribute, traded, bought and sold.”^[9]

This conceptual separation of sex from gender helps us understand the different forms of radical feminism and their contrasting views on how to combat sexism. Radical-libertarian feminists believed that just focusing on female gender identity would limit their development as full human persons. They encouraged women to become androgynous, encouraging both masculine and feminine characteristics. This view worked on the presumption that male characteristics were aggressive, independent, and competitive, while female characteristics were compassionate, nurturing, and obedient. The radical-cultural feminist theologian Mary Daly scoffed at the notion of androgyny for women, as “John Travolta and Farrah Fawcett-Majors scotch-taped together” (or George Clooney and Beyoncé taped together). Radical-cultural feminists saw men and women as essentially different and wanted to reassert values of female culture that have been suppressed by male culture. Some radical-cultural feminists would go so far as advocating the overthrow of the existing male order and creating a new socie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Definitions, Explorations, and Intersections
• The Torah/Pentateuch
• The Deuteronomistic History
• Prophecy
• The Writings
• Contributors
• Index of Names & Subjects