Asian and Asian American Women in Theology and Religion

Embodying Knowledge

Kwok Pui-lan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030368173
• eBook ISBN: 9783030368180
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Asian History

This book presents personal narratives and collective ethnography of the emergence and development of Asian and Asian American women's scholarship in theology and religious studies. It demonstrates how the authors' religious scholarship is based on an embodied epistemology influenced by their social locations. Contributors reflect on their understanding of their identity and how this changed over time, the contribution of Asian and Asian American women to the scholarship work that they do, and their hopes for the future of their fields of study. The volume is multireligious and intergenerational, and is divided into four parts: identities and intellectual journeys, expanding knowledge, integrating knowledge and practice, and dialogue across generations.

© The Author(s) 2020

K. Pui-lan (ed.)Asian and Asian American Women in Theology and ReligionAsian Christianity in the Diasporahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36818-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Kwok Pui-lan ¹

(1)

Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Kwok Pui-lan

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

In the past several decades, Asian and Asian American women have contributed to many theological and religious disciplines, including biblical studies, theology, history, ethics, practical theology, religious education, Asian and Asian American religious studies, interreligious studies, and so on. From the beginning of a small group of pioneers, their number has grown to include several generations of scholars and students using interdisciplinary, intersectional, and transnational approaches increasingly in their research methods and studies. By placing Asian and Asian American women as the focus of study, they have pointed to the complexity of women’s religious lives and the impact of religion in shaping identity, community engagement, and culture in their communities. Together they have created a community of discourse and crafted new subfields and entire areas of studies that others can build on.

An important network that supports this work by providing an interlocutory space for the exchange of ideas is Pacific, Asian, and North American Asian Women in Theology and Ministry (PANAAWTM). In the fall of 1984, a group of Asian and Asian American female seminarians and ministers met to form a network, and their first conference was held in 1985. Since then, the network has organized annual meetings in various cities in the U.S. and Canada, attended by faculty and students, local ministers, and community leaders and activists.¹ Its members have played active roles in religious communities, academia, and social movements in North America and Asia. Several have become leaders of their professional associations, guilds, and institutions, while others have spearheaded the creation of new subfields or approaches in their areas of studies. The network produced two anthologies Off the Menu and Leading Wisdom to celebrate its 20th and 30th anniversary, respectively.²

This volume focuses on how members and friends of the network have created theologies, religious understanding, and new knowledge and the ways they have contributed to transnational feminist theological and religious conversations. The production of new learning is done not in a vacuum but in the matrix of relationships and community built over a long time. It takes a lot of care, commitment, and persistence to create and nurture an intellectual neighborhood. In this neighborhood, people gradually learn the language, concepts and discourses, and the perspectives to look at their communities and world as Asian and Asian American women. They have created a community to listen to each other’s stories, affirm the validity of their common experiences, and discern how their own narrative is different when juxtaposed with that of others. In claiming to speak their own truths, they serve as role models or catalysts for others to do the same, however timid and provisional the voices might be in the beginning. By making visible what has been hitherto invisible, sometimes even initially to themselves, they explore religious worlds that are only partially known, while borrowing each other’s insights to develop theoretical frameworks that fit the subject under study.

This book is unusual because it describes the development of a new field and the social, cultural, religious, and political factors that both called it forth and to which the contributors responded. It is precious because of the generosity of spirit behind the sharing of moving personal narratives and collective ethnography³ that document why the contributors do the kind of work that they do. What were the twists and turns in their lives that prompted them to take a new departure from the kind of scholarship they were trained in or had been pursuing? Why could existing disciplinary boundaries or established research methods not quite explain their experiences or the lifeworlds they have come from? What were the inhibitions, censorship, or institutional barriers they have encountered in the process to gain a place at the table? Were there self-doubt, double checking, and moments of uncertainty? Is there a time to speak and a time to hold back? Is it easier to speak now than it was a generation ago? Who is their audience—imagined and real—and what kinds of impact do they want to make? What are the new possibilities of inhabiting the life as an intellectual with many demands and communities of accountabilities?

The subtitle of the book, “embodying knowledge,” signals that Asian and Asian American women’s religious scholarship is based on an embodied epistemology and influenced by the authors’ identity formation and social location. Contributors come from different Asian ethnicities and backgrounds, and two of them have biracial heritages. While a few are Asians studying or working in the U.S., many of them are Asian American women whose families have been in the U.S. for different periods of time (from new immigrants to third-generation Americans). The book includes the contributors’ reflections on how their identities have shaped the work that they do as scholars, activists, and/or public intellectuals. They also explore how their relations to other racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. affect their identity formation.

The contributors have weaved a rich and multicolored tapestry to showcase the various shapes, shades, and patterns of embodied knowing and knowledge. For them, the body is a site of knowledge. Many Asian and Asian American women have been socialized by their religious and cultural environment to regard the female body as taboo, dirty, or chaotic. Living in a world defined by white supremacy, they have been made to think that their body is less than, and that it does not quite measure up to society’s white heteropatriarchal ideals. As a site of knowledge, the body reveals and remembers the disciplinary mechanisms, the hurts and the guilts, as well the desires and passions. By reconnecting with this bodily knowledge, contributors gain new perspectives, disrupt existing patterns, and make creative turns in looking at the body, gender, and religion.

The body exists in a certain space, and the places that some of the contributors have inhabited shape their outlook and prompt them to ask critical questions—such as having grown up in a large Catholic family in a slum, being caught between black and white students during the heydays of the civil rights movement, teaching as an Asian feminist in a predominantly black college, studying theology in South Korea as a queer Christian woman, or having served as youth minsters in violence-plagued tribal communities in Myanmar. While this sense of place sharpens their standpoints and calls for responsibilities and accountabilities, their sense of belonging is not limited to their “original” place or any one place, whether defined by locale, region, or nation. They do not see their social location as fixed or over-determined, because they understand that, as gendered and racialized women, they simultaneously belong to multiple places and sometimes no places. The fluidity of conceptualizing space and place leads some of the authors to speak about the search for home as a continuous, life-long journey, while others talk about the body as being in transit or shuttling from here and there. Some authors articulate how the scope and approaches of their research have changed over time as their identities shifted from “Asian” to “Asian in diaspora” and/or “Asian American.”

The individual body is situated in the larger body politics shaped by gender, race, class, sexuality, nation, religion, colonialism, and so forth. This body politics has changed in the last several decades because of globalization and the shifting transnational relationships between the U.S. and Asian countries. Within the U.S., the Asian population has grown from 10.2 million in 2000 to 22.2 million in 2017, making Asians the fastest-growing racial ethnic community in the U.S.⁴ While there are encouraging signs that the number of Asian women business and political leaders in Asia and the U.S. has increased, reports of growing gender violence in South Asia and other Asian societies have been devastating. Asian women have been violated, raped, beaten, and killed amid ethnic and religious strife and wars, as well as during the treacherous journeys as refugees and migrants in search for survival.

The body and bodily practices provide the book’s contributors with metaphors, images, and language to discuss Asian and Asian American women’s identity and religious lives. For example, one of the frequently cited concepts in this book is “interstitial integrity” offered by Rita Nakashima Brock. Brock uses this concept to describe the process of integration of many diverse parts of herself as a mixed-race person who grew up across three continents. The term “interstitial” is rooted in biology of the body, coming from interstitium, which refers to tissues that connect organs to one another. She writes, “Interstitial integrity is how I improvise a self, recognizing the diverse cultures and experiences that have made me who I am. It is how I mix a life together from myriads of ingredients.”⁵ While Brock explores the connections between body, self, and identity, Sharon A. Suh, a Buddhist scholar and meditation and yoga teacher, uses language about the body to discuss religion, gender, and race in this volume. She describes the need for women of color to develop “somatic consciousness” and take “refuge in the body” because the body remembers and keeps scores. She helps women to connect emotions to physical sensations of the body so that they can seek resilience of both body and mind. Through bodily practices such as mindful eating, meditation, and yoga, women who have been traumatized by the white supremacist society can claim agency and freedom to make moral choices.

Embodied knowledge is different from the kind of rational knowledge emphasized in the Western philosophical tradition, which tends to dissociate the body from the mind, separating emotion from intellect.⁶ In embodied knowing, the knower does not perceive the outside world as the relationship between subject and object. Rather, there is mutuality and intersubjectivity. The aim of embodied knowing is not to grasp, control, classify, and manipulate, but rather to seek deeper understanding, appreciation, and creative transformation. Instead of conceiving the knower as a hero or a genius, embodied knowing stresses the need for learning in context and in community. As the body depends on others for survival, embodied knowledge relies on hearing others into speech, developing somatic consciousness of one’s environment, and conjuring images and words to describe new insights and perceptions. Jung Ha Kim and Su Yon Pak write, “Asian and Asian North American women point to remembering, witnessing, and cultivating wisdom in between and among various human relationships…As a result, wisdom is connective, integrative, and restorative.”⁷

Asian and Asian American women’s search for embodied knowledge and wisdom is subversive in a white heteronormative academy that does not acknowledge that their bodies and experiences count. While there are many books on white women’s religious history, there is at present no single volume on Asian American women’s religious history. Asian and Asian American queer women find that they are even more invisible in the church, faith communities, and academy. In order to expand the scope of available sources, the authors have investigated archival material, autobiographical and personal narratives, popular culture, films, social media, rituals, and bodily practices. They have used interview, participatory observation, and ethnography to generate new data and information. While honoring the religious practices of their ancestors, they at the same time critique androcentric and heteropatriarchal communal customs and traditions. In their interpretation of texts, they develop ideological criticism and postcolonial and resistance feminist readings to challenge the power dynamics inscribed in the texts as well in the history of interpretation.

Embodied knowledge and wisdom are pluralistic, open-ended, and invitational. There is no epistemological uneasiness to search for Plato’s Forms, an ultimate foundation of truth, or an Archimedean principle. Jin Young Choi points out that, in the Bible, there is a pluralistic understanding of wisdom with different names. While many feminist theologians have focused on sophia, translated as “wisdom” in Wisdom Literature, there is another term phronēsis, which has been variously translated as wisdom (Baruch 3), understanding (Proverbs 3:19), and insight (Proverbs 7:4).⁸ Sophia is more associated with objective and theoretical knowledge in the Greek tradition, while phronēsis is more like practical knowledge connected to action. Choi writes, phronēsis “is knowledge in action or knowing what to do in a particular situation.”⁹ Asian and Asian American women’s embodied knowing focuses not on detached, abstract, and logocentric knowledge, but on practical wisdom and somatic insights for living in the interstices and for the wholeness of the community.

To provide coherence to the book, contributors have been asked to reflect on their understanding of their identity as Asian and Asian American women and how this changed over time, the contribution of Asian and Asian American women to the scholarly work that they do, and their hopes for the future of their fields of study or scholarly work. Whether they were born in the US or came as immigrants or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Identities and Intellectual Journeys
• Part II. Expanding Knowledge
• Part III. Integrating Knowledge and Practice
• Part IV. Dialogue Across Generations
• Back Matter