The Infertile Womb of God: Ableism in Feminist Doctrine of God Lisa D. Powell Since its burgeoning in the 1970s and 80s, Christian feminist theology has deployed a variety of metaphors and symbols to wrest conceptions of God from the oppressive structures and formulations dominating Christian thinking and worship. A significant focus of much of this early work was on the exclusive use of masculine imagery and language for God. Feminist theologians sought fresh symbols inclusive of women's experience. Quickly the work expanded not only to question patriarchy in theology and Christian worship, but also to expose currents of white supremacy in theology and theological institutions. In recent decades, responding to queer theory, post‐colonial theory, and ecology, feminist theology discovers still more symbols to express the relationship between God, humanity, and the cosmos in ways that do not perpetuate kyriarchy but undermine those systems of power and oppression. One such challenge to rethink Christian systems comes from disability theory, which exposes the ableist assumptions in theology that consecrate a norm constructed against differently abled persons; Christian disability theology envisions new symbols for God that rebuff conceptions of power modeled after a militarized ableist culture and fosters an understanding of power appropriate to a religion in which God is disfigured on the cross, in which God is even disabled. Disability theorists also probe feminist thought to expose the ableism in its celebration of independence and the idealization of a certain form of female embodiment, which reinforces the idea of a “normal” female body. Even as feminism challenges society's objectification of women and its standards of beauty, disabled women find they do not embody the feminist ideal. Susan Wendell critiques the exaltation in feminism of a woman's control of her body. She quotes Adrienne Rich, who writes in Of Women Born: “In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal ground of our intelligence.” Rich emphasizes our control of our bodies and asserts a universal unity among women based in a shared physiology. Rich's volume, and many texts influenced by it, contains this glorification of woman's ability to control her body, particularly when speaking about conception and birth, maintaining that women are universally connected in their corporeal fertility. Wendell writes “Until feminists criticize our own body ideals and confront the weak, suffering, and uncontrollable body in our theorizing and practice, women with disabilities and illness are likely to feel that we are embarrassments to feminism.” Rosmarie Garland‐Thompson makes a similar charge, instead noting the idealization of self‐sufficiency: “One of the most pervasive feminist assumptions that undermines some disabled women's struggle is the liberal ideology of autonomy and independence that fuels the broader impulse toward female empowerment.” Doreen Freeman brings these critiques to thealogy and feminist theology, arguing that disabled women “embody all that the blossoming feminist does not want to be,” as they often “reinforce the stereotypes as ‘passive, dependent, needy’ recipients of care.” She asks if thealogians can celebrate the body as an image of the divine if it is a “deformed, leaky, sometimes smelly, constantly fatigued, psychotic, [and/or] dysfunctional body.” She charges that in its emphasis on “wholeness of mind, body and spirit,” feminist theology centers on “goals of competence, wisdom and well being, [and] the flourishing of the woman's physical cycle,” which then marginalizes disabled women. In the process, the disabled woman is “negated, isolated and alienated.” Disability theory has yet to lay bare the implicit ableism in some accounts of the doctrine of God in feminist theology, namely the image of God as mother in the face of infertility. This essay exposes how Christian feminist theology glorified female fertility, grounding reconstruction of the doctrine of God in this notion of a shared physiological capacity for childbearing, thus negating the infertile woman, rendering her an invisible outsider. However, recent feminist theology exhibits a shift in the way Christian theologians depict God as mother. This essay traces this change in the use of mother imagery in the doctrine of...