Contested Terms: History, Feminism, Religion Having been asked to join Margaret Miles and others in reflecting on "writing feminist religious history," I am immediately struck by the ambiguity that attends each of the terms in question. History Miles notes that writing feminist history mandates questioning "basic assumptions about historiography." Open to question, it seems to me, are not only the schemes of periodization and models of progress that Miles rightly identifies but also the very epistemological claims that undergird the writing of history. If the "past" is irretrievable, what (if anything) distinguishes historiography from fiction? The rules of the game may differ: for example, historians arguably perform a different kind of fidelity to their "sources" than novelists (as refl ected in the austere practices of philological and historical-contextual studies), and they may also be more committed than novelists to provoking awareness of the alterity of the never-quite-knowable past. It remains the case, nonetheless, that history writing—like fiction writing (or even as a particular kind of fiction writ-ing)—entails an inventive narrative production. As a speculative (albeit also a "disciplined") exercise of imagination, historiography engages the operations of projection while also inviting interruptions and transformations of such operations. To put it simply, we historians embark on the search for an ever-elusive past in order to discover something new and unexpected about our (perhaps equally elusive) present moment. It may be, however, that history writing—pre-cisely because of the uncertainty and openness of its epistemological claims and eschatological goals—is distinctly well suited for pursuing questions about both feminism and religion. Both feminism and religion are, after all, themselves remarkably ambivalent and unstable terms. Feminism Feminism, it is by now widely agreed, constitutes less a static and monolithic intellectual or political project than a shifting field of coalitions and tensions. This is the case in large part because women—whose particular subjugation is arguably the focus of feminist critique and resistance—are not all the same, even "as women"; indeed, the term woman demarcates a subjectivity both distinctly unstable and irreducibly fissured by difference, as Miles acknowledges. "Woman" may also, paradoxically, be the creation of the very structures of domination that feminism seeks to expose and subvert—regardless of whether "she" [End Page 53] is understood to be produced biologically, socially, or discursively. Does feminist history, then, not only always rewrite but also always unwrite (that is, iteratively deconstruct and reconstruct) woman as such? What, furthermore, is the relation between the (particular) feminist historian as subject and the "subject" that "she" studies and thus also produces? Religion But there is more. At first glance, the adjectives feminist and religious seem parallel as qualifiers of history. At second glance, such an interpretation will not quite do. Whereas feminist appears to tell us who and what the history is for, religious appears to tell us what it is about. We might transpose religious history to history of religions without any significant change in meaning. Here history of religion(s) parallels history of gender(s)—not feminist history (or even women's history). Like gender, the term religion partly covers over asymmetries of power with a deceptive appearance of neutrality. If gender coyly refuses to name directly the particular masculine hegemony of which it is a product, religion likewise refuses to name the particular Christian hegemony of which it is, arguably, a product. A history of religion thus implicitly invokes resistances of a dominant Christianity's interpellated religious "others," even as a history of gender implicitly invokes resistances of a dominant masculinity's interpellated gendered "others." So how do we proceed from here? Disciplinary Dis/Locations:Church History, Late Antiquity, Religious Studies As a feminist scholar both trained and currently housed in a "church history" department (as distinct from a "religious studies" department) while also being powerfully influenced by a "late antiquity studies" approach to Christianity, I have a perspective on the question of "religious history" that is both particular and somewhat indirect. Late antiquity...
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