Learning with JFSR

Abstract

Learning with JFSR Margaret M. Gower (bio) For my part in the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, I have been asked to offer critical reflection on my experience of learning with the journal. I am particularly happy to do this because, in the course of my first year in the Master of Theological Studies program at Harvard Divinity School, JFSR has come to be a source of inspiration, agitation, and regular reference. Even though I came to divinity school as a self-identified feminist and a graduate of a wo/men's college, I have been energized and radicalized by the vibrant and unapologetic feminism that I have encountered in my coursework here and as a reader of JFSR. The journal has guided me to see and to be willing to speak words of challenge to kyriarchal systems in two main ways. First, through JFSR I have come to understand more fully the animating conviction of feminist studies in religion, namely, that activism and the academy can be made to work together in constructive synergy. This is a conviction held in common by contributors to the journal, who speak from a wide range of social locations, academic disciplines, belief systems, and feminist visions. The first course I took with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza was the inaugural offering of a class on the contexts and methods for thinking about and constructing feminist theologies. Following a radical democratic teaching method, we students chose our own reading assignments, and about one-third of our options were selections from JFSR. That number is a testimony to the range of perspectives represented as well as to the diverse theological claims made in [End Page 114] the journal's corpus, often in a single roundtable discussion. Borrowing a term from Patricia Martinez, I have come to think of some contributions to JFSR as making up an intellectual rojak, Malay for a spicy mixed salad. 1 I take the many and continually increasing diversities of the contributors, who are all nonetheless committed to JFSR 's role at the intersection of feminist theory and religion, as evidence of the power of the journal's dual embrace of scholarship and activism. In a moment in which inauthentic notions of feminism have, on the one hand, dissolved into so-called cheerleader feminism and, on the other hand, resulted in what María Pilar Aquino has called "a tendency to confine [feminism] to matters of argumentation—as if it were a self-subsistent discourse, with no connection whatsoever with geoeconomic and geopolitical developments" and hence resulting in intense intellectual fragmentation among wo/men, JFSR has resisted both poles. 2 Rather, it has found balance by publishing rigorous thinking by a diverse group of contributors whose articles regularly reflect dissent and disagreement. However, their discourse is constructive, rather than fragmenting, because it falls within the parameters of theorizing toward the shared vision of a reconstructed approach to the discipline of religious studies and a feminist transformation of religious and cultural institutions. The second way that my reading JFSR has enabled me to participate in the dialogical encounters that it records is by the insistence of its many contributors that their readers appreciate the nature of knowledge itself as a constructed phenomenon. In reading JFSR, I have been struck not just by this insistence that knowledge is constructed and therefore can be reconstructed but also by the self-conscious vision of the journal as participating in the creation of feminist knowledge. Insofar as publishing represents a public exchange of ideas, the journal serves as a vehicle for the construction of feminist knowledge in the public arena. The twenty-plus volumes of JFSR give form to feminist knowledge, constructed in a particularly feminist way. The journal challenges readers to rethink so-called master narratives, but it offers no final resolution to the conflicts and tensions that arise out of the entangled interactions found within its pages. Thus, even as the journal can be taken as a coherent record of the past twenty years of feminist thought in religion, the editors of JFSR have resisted making certain voices canonical over others, a principle made concrete through such...