Reckoning with Accountability

Abstract

Reckoning with Accountability Elizabeth A. Pritchard (bio) The near occasion for Judith Plaskow’s reflections on the history of white supremacy in Feminist Studies in Religion (FSR) (and, more specifically, the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, JFSR) was the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. The less proximate occasion was the FSR conference in the summer of 2017, “Making Alliances, Breaking Taboos, Transforming Religions.” The conflict that erupted at the conference should not have surprised anyone (and, no doubt, did not at all surprise many in attendance). Despite our best intentions and continued denunciations, no spaces, projects, or persons are free of the grip of white supremacy. Rather than perpetuate the conceit that FSR, and specifically JFSR, are ensconced on the sidelines of white supremacy and need only to dial up the frequency and thoroughness of its critiques of white supremacy, Judith, correctly in my estimation, describes JFSR as a white container. Judith repudiates the whiteness of this container and looks to the possibility of “creating a container in which all those voices or assumptions have equal weight” (12). I am wary, however, about the journal serving as a “container.” In what follows, I reflect further on the significance of the phrase white container by revisiting JFSR’s longstanding mission statement. I focus on JFSR as I served as managing editor of the journal from 1992 to 1998 and as coeditor from 2016 to 2020. In the intervening years, I served on the editorial board, and I continue to do so. From the start, JFSR positioned itself in relation to the academy and to activism. Its mission statement reads as follows: “The JFSR has two communities of accountability: the academy, in which it is situated, and the feminist movement, from which it draws its nourishment and vision. Its editors are committed to rigorous thinking and analysis in the service of the transformation of religious studies as a discipline and the feminist transformation of religious and cultural institutions.”1 I am curious about the choice to make a home in the academy. Sure, most authors [End Page 27] and board members are affiliated with institutions of higher education, and it is a scholarly publication, but do those facts mean that the journal is or should be situated in the academy? I am also not sure how an author or a particular work is to be held accountable to two generalized and homogenized abstractions: “the academy” and “the feminist movement.” Moreover, why seek to be accountable to the academy? The academy has been a key driver of the historical exclusions that reproduce white supremacy. Even now, as many institutions of higher education diversify (to some extent) their student bodies—and, less strenuously, their faculty—their status remains inextricably tied to low acceptance rates. The discipline of religion was welcomed into US colleges and universities as a tool for promoting good governance and Cold War nationalism. Moreover, the emergence and celebration of empathetic engagement with “religious pluralism” at Harvard Divinity School (and, likely, other divinity schools as well) was a strategy to suppress a student movement, which mobilized liberation theologies to protest racism.2 In a context of dwindling public funding, the future of the academy depends upon donations from alumni whose revolutionary energies must be contained and redirected toward accumulating wealth. In what way(s), then, should JFSR be accountable to the academy? And what of JFSR’s accountability to “the feminist movement”? And what, really, is “the feminist movement”? When one considers the persistence of a feminism that centers white women and valorizes neoliberal “choice,” it becomes clear that the generalization “the feminist movement” is a deeply flawed attempt at inclusion.3 A flattened and romanticized feminist movement that is a source of “nourishment” and “vision” is a depoliticized movement. It is a movement that is ill at ease with dissent and conflict, let alone revolution. The danger of a depoliticized movement is that the aspiration to inclusion too readily becomes a containment strategy. In reflecting on the conflict that erupted at the 2017 FSR conference, Judith laments the fact that “FSR had not created tools to work through those moments as they would inevitably arise” (7). I certainly...