Agency, Culture, and Human Personhood

Pastoral Thelogy and Intimate Partner Violence

Hoeft

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781630878269
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Agency, Culture and Human Personhood uses feminist theories, process and liberation theologies, psychodynamics and the problem of intimate partner violence to develop a pastoral theology of human agency. The turn to cultural context for understanding what makes human beings who they are and do the things they do, raises significant questions about human agency. To what extent is agency, the human capacity to act, self-determined, and to what extent is it determined by external factors? If we conceive of persons with too little agency we negate the possibility for change but too much agency negates the necessity for resistance movements. Hoeft argues that agency arises ambiguously from and is constituted of culture. She suggests that such a conception of agency enables the church to foster in victims, perpetrators, and congregations more resistance to violence and proposes practices of ministry that can do just that. The book will challenge deeply ingrained notions of personal responsibility and one's capacity to choose change, yet offers concrete proposals for a creating a less violent world.

1

Introduction

Pastors and other ministers of care spend time helping persons ascertain not only the meanings of and reasons for their suffering, but also the extent to which that suffering can be ameliorated and how to accomplish that amelioration. Persons who are hurting want to know not only why they are hurting but if and how that hurting can be made to stop, or at least lessened. Questions of cause blame, responsibility, and choice are closely tied to questions of what must be done in order for things to get better and who should and is able to do it. Persons come with questions such as: Whose fault is this? How did it get to be this way and what will make it stop? How much of this is my responsibility? What is wrong with me that I have ended up in this kind of situation and what can I do to change things? Or, what do I have to do to make someone else change? On the one hand, things happen to persons that leave them feeling, and often actually, powerless to change their lives and on the other they need a sense of efficacy, and many believe that one’s life is what one makes of it. These tensions within persons mirror similar tensions in the broader culture.

On one side of the tension is the realization that in many ways persons’ lives are bound by external factors and their position in society, and on the other side is a cultural belief, at least in the United States of America, that any person, however difficult it may be, has the internal capacity to rise above the circumstance of external realities and make life different for oneself if one so chooses. Over the last several decades there has been an increasing awareness of the dynamics of oppression and privilege and the resultant abuses of power in our culture. What could be called “victim movements,” social movements based on the claims of victims that they have been excluded, devalued, and abused, have been on the rise. These movements include the Civil Rights Movement, through which African-American persons demand that attention be given to the way racism has structured the world and human thinking, and the women’s movement, which similarly forced attention to the sexism that pervades homes, schools, churches, courts, and even psyches. The list can be continued with Native Americans, people with disabilities, and lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgendered persons. External sociocultural realities do limit, often severely, persons lives.

In light of these “victim movements,” more consideration has been given to the bias built into language, norms, and perceptions of reality. These movements have heightened sensitivity and changed responses to events such as rape, sexual abuse, domestic violence, hate crimes, and harassment. They are accompanied by a change in perception of what it means to be a person. Much has been learned in the wider culture about how some groups of people have been victimized or treated differently by culture and how that victimization has formed personhood and coerced behavior. It is now more likely that persons are defined by social location and status, as either privileged by or victims of culture. Identity is tied to sociocultural position. Thus we might hear these kinds of statements about who a person is: I am a woman oppressed by a patriarchal culture; I am a black woman in a white world; I am a lesbian in a culture of compulsory heterosexuality; I am a victim and survivor of sexual abuse, domestic violence, or rape in a society where men have power over women’s bodies. These messages call attention to the way power structures in culture form identity and act upon persons in order to limit some and encourage others. According to these movements each of us occupies a position of either privileged or oppressed, victim or agent of hegemonic culture. Victims are then called to resist the evils of the culture that oppresses them and the privileged are invoked by their sense of fairness, empathy, guilt, and sometimes fear, to change their ways and perhaps stand in solidarity with the victims.

On the other side of the tension, there seems to be another movement afoot, and this is a movement of choice, of personal responsibility, of self-determination and self-definition. The second movement is what I call the “I can” movement, in which these statements might be heard: I can choose to be who I want to be; I can therapeutically mold, shape and alter my personality; I can control my thoughts, my emotions and my body; I can master my body; I can change the color of my skin, my eyes, my hair, my shape or even my gender; I can be anyone I want to be; I am my own person; I can rise above the circumstances of my life; I refuse to be a victim. These messages that persons are agents of their own lives, that they can create and recreate their worlds, are also rampant in current expressions of cultural values. Although they are most often expressed directed at someone else, “you can,” they are taken in as “I should” and “if I don’t it is my fault.” Success is understood, then, as the result of a person’s choices and determination, which, of course, means also that failures are taken to be failures of the same.

Obvious to most is the reality that both of these movements, toward sociocultural limitation and personal responsibility, hold aspects of what we sense to be true and yet we struggle to find ways to hold these aspects of life and personhood together. As one who claims strong feminist convictions and works with victims of abuse, I am particularly concerned with what these tensions mean from the side of the “victim movements.” It is a complicated task to set up oneself and one’s identity group as victims, deeply harmed by an oppressive culture, who deserve and need the help of others to right the wrongs done to them, and, at the same time, assert that one and one’s peers can act as agents of change, can come together in a political struggle, resist oppression, and change self and the world. If they, or one, have, or has, the power to change the world, then how come they, or she or he, allowed the victimization to happen in the first place? If one can “take charge” of one’s life or “re-invent”1 oneself then who counts as a victim? Where should sympathies lie? How much change can be expected of self and others? Are there any “pure” or total victims, who are they and how do they survive?2

Behind these cultural/personal tensions are lurking some rather significant questions about what it means to be a person. To what extent are persons determined by or made of culture and to what extent are they determined by and made of their own choices and actions? As victims and perpetrators, oppressors and oppressed, how able is anyone to resist the prevailing messages of culture? Can we really “re-invent” ourselves? This volume asks the question: How deep does culture go in the construction of human personhood and what are the origins and conditions of the agency needed in order for persons to resist, or change, that culture and themselves? I have found these issues of cultural construction and agency particularly salient in the context of pastoral care with victims of intimate partner violence and it is from that context that this work is forged. I believe that victims of intimate partner violence, and those who care with and for them, have something to offer in the construction of a theological anthropology that can articulate responses to these questions which are in keeping with feminist commitments to social justice. This kind of construction is necessary to help pastors and other ministers of care assist others in resisting injustice and meaningless suffering.

This book develops a pastoral theology of human agency via practice of pastoral care in the context of intimate partner violence, the theoretical work done by those who have studied intimate partner violence, pastoral theological work in the area, and feminist theory. The rest of this chapter explores the ways that the tensions between agency and resistance, victim and agent, become apparent in the fields of intimate partner violence, pastoral theology, and feminist theory. First we explore the development of various perspectives in the field of intimate partner violence and demonstrate some of the concrete ways that the victim/agent tension arises in efforts to stop domestic violence. Next we turn to the move in pastoral theology from individualized psychological understandings to concern for cultural construction and identify the need for a pastoral theological anthropological of agency in light of this turn. Finally in this introductory chapter, we look at the debates in feminist theory over the extent to which a cultural construction of personhood can be useful to a movement that requires agential subjects.

Intimate Partner Violence

The battered women’s movement, organized thirty years ago, has worked to raise the public’s awareness of domestic violence and to move the focus away from the problems of individual women and toward the problems of culture.3 According to the battered women’s movement, he primary dynamic of intimate partner violence is rooted in patriarchal control of women’s bodies and the abuse of power when it is used to maintain control of women. The purpose of ba...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Ontological Interrelatedness
• Chapter 3: The Constructed Psyche
• Chapter 4: The Constructed Body
• Chapter 5: A Pastoral Theology of Human Agency
• Chapter 6: A Pastoral Care For Resistance
• Bibliography