Viable Category Research Articles

Roundtable Discussion: Native/First Nation Theology: Response

Response Michelle A. Gonzalez (bio) As a Cuban American I approach Andrea Smith's essay as a fellow U.S. minority woman who is engaged in theological reflection from a feminist standpoint that takes seriously questions of race, culture, and social location. As minority women, we are too often placed in the position of representing our entire people for a broader theological audience, aware that our work may be the sole entry point outsiders have into the worldview we represent. Therefore, I enter into this dialogue with Smith's essay as a Latina theologian, well aware of the limitations and the essentializing nature of this claim. Smith's essay offers an important contribution to theological studies, in particular to the fields of U.S. minority and feminist theologies. Her work continues the vital conversation on the role and function of marginalized discourses within theology. As Smith notes, the voices of Native women problematize the viability of liberation theologies and the ethical implications of the theological task. The inclusion of Native women organizers as the starting point of her work is a vital methodological gesture, grounding her work in the grassroots activism of the communities that her writing represents. [End Page 107] My response to Smith's work focuses on the themes that a dialogue between Native feminist liberation theology (as represented by Smith) and Latina feminist theology (as represented by me) provoke. I explore three areas in response to her essay. The first is the presentation of indigenous identity in her piece, especially as it is constructed in contrast to Christian and/or nonindigenous identity. The second is the role of the minority theologian herself and her relationship to the community she represents within the academy. Last, I explore the role of theology in Smith's essay. My comments emphasize those areas that are the most salient dialogue points among these theologies, and highlight where Latina and Native feminist theologies best challenge and consequently support each other's critical voices within the theological academy. Smith recognizes the importance of the politics of representation within U.S. liberationist theological discourses. Indeed her essay offers a construction of Native identity, whether intentional or not, which depicts a community that (1) is epistemologically distinct from Western communities, (2) has a land-based spirituality, (3) connects spirituality and liberation, and (4) is concerned with questions of sovereignty. It is the first of these characterizations that I would like to address from the perspective of Latina theology. Since its inception, Latino/a theology has defined Latino/as (and consequently Latin Americans) as mestizo and mulatto peoples. This mixture of Spanish, African, and indigenous cultures has been the clearest marker of Latino/a racial, ethnic, and cultural identity. Mestizaje, in particular, has come to be synonymous with Latino/a cultural hybridity. Anthropologically, mestizaje functions to name the ambiguity and in-between-ness of Latino/a identity. Within mujerista theologian Ada María Isasi-Díaz's scholarship, these terms function at various levels: as descriptors of the Latino/a condition, as ethical standpoints, and epistemological categories. Mestizaje and mulatez are theological locations for her mujerista theology and function as a hermeneutical tool and paradigm that reveal the nature of Latino/a epistemology. They contribute to a new understanding of plurality, diversity, and difference. In Isasi-Díaz's words, "Mestizaje/mulatez is the Hispanic/Latino incarnation of hybridity and diversity."1 This new conceptualization of mestizaje/mulatez, Isasi-Díaz argues, opens up avenues for discussions with other marginalized groups and grounds an understanding of difference that is not exclusive or oppositional. Within Smith's definition of Native identity, however, mestizaje would not function as a viable category. This is due to her construction of Native identity as essentially non-Western. This dualism of Native–non-Native, however, is a rigid construction of identity that excludes the nepantla that is Latino/a identity. Building on the work of essayist Pat Mora, Latina church historian Daisy Machado has used the [End Page 108] category of nepantla, the Nahuatl word for "place in the middle," as a descriptor of the ambiguity of Latino/a identity. "Mora," Machado wrote, "tries to put into words what it is like to...

Reclaiming Biblical Wisdom Psalms: a Response To Crenshaw

This piece targets Crenshaw's article, 'Wisdom Psalms?' (CRBS 2000) that debunks a broad array of scholarly attempts to identify canonical wisdom psalms. Convinced that Crenshaw's minimalist perception often skews his reading of the biblical text and its interpretation, Kuntz counters that the Hebrew Psalter hosts a limited number of psalms that are stylistically and thematically reminiscent of what transpires in the widely recognized trinity of wisdom books in the Hebrew canon (Proverbs, Job, Qoheleth). Despite their overlap with other genres, wisdom psalms of diverse format and length exhibit shared features that warrant our embracing them as a viable psalmic category.

Comic woman, victim woman: Pushing gender and genre boundaries in popular Hindi Cinema

“Women's film” in Hollywood is associated both with the genre of melodrama, the “weepie”, and with female spectatorship. In the Indian context of popular Hindi cinema, first, genre analysis itself is a questionable line of inquiry since several genres, the melodrama, musical, gangster, or mystery, combine in a single film, known locally as the masala (spicy) film; and second, films are scarcely divided by a gendered viewership. Yet I identify “women's films” as a distinct category in Hindi cinema, emerging around the ‘70s. These women's films typically center on female protagonists, dramatize their victimization and vindication; by the ‘80s under a range of influences these films mutated into rape‐revenge narratives. However, another strain emerged within the ‘70s’ “women's film,” which drew on cinema's rich visual iconographic tradition of the sight gag, promulgating the comedic/tomboy heroine figure. It favored laughing and mocking patriarchal structures rather than surrendering to them in tears. Focusing on Ramesh Sippy's Sita aur Gita [1972] emblematic of this trend I explore theoretical concerns about associating genres with gender. In keeping with recent poststructuralist theories about gender and media ‘consumption I show how the film destabilized clear‐cut gender identification and stood for a promising trend that was sadly undercut. Thus, while genre might still be a useful analytical tool for Hindi cinema, defining women's film as female‐centered narratives is a viable category as long as we appreciate the instability in gendered viewer identification.

Intersections and Differences: Integration of Women into the United States Survey Course, Part I

IN LESS THAN TWENTY YEARS women's history has become an accepted field in U.S. history.' The number of articles alone chronicles the rise of this specialty. Between 1968 and 1972, under 200 articles were published. By the 1980s, they multiplied to 700 or 800 per year. Textbooks, too, have incorporated women's history. They now generally include biographies of famous women to parallel those of famous men and women's history topics and themes like the cult of true womanhood, separate spheres, and mill women. However, even with these major changes, gender has not become a viable category in the teaching of survey courses in United States history. Textbooks provide a good indication of some of the problems in integrating women into U.S. history survey courses. Revised texts leave their basic approach to history untouched, but insert examples of women here and there.2 A picture or paragraph on Anne Hutchinson matches one on Roger Williams, or Sojourner Truth is paired with William Lloyd Garrison. This disappearing integration approach gives the impression that women and men share a common history. There is no sense that male and female public figures derived their intellectual justification from

Fine Fitnesses: Dickinson, Higginson, and Literary Luminism

As American Studies extends its interdisciplinary mandate to the pictorial arts, a manifest destiny that might be seen by some as but a new form of cultural imperialism, it behooves us to stop this juggernaut for a moment and consider the increasingly important question of historicism. An historicism strictly applied can provide us with a rubric rooted in fact rather than in speculation, chastening a self-reflexive presentism with documentary and contextual integrity. Nowhere is this discipline of the interdisciplinary more needed than in considering the application of a problematical term like “Luminism,” itself an ex-post-facto construct of American art history that, like a typical Baby Boomer, was born in the mid-fifties, came of age in the seventies, and now is an establishment figure of the late eighties. First conceived by John I.H. Baur, Luminism was nurtured by Barbara Novak in her magisterial American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, and all but beatified in the post-Bicentennial extravaganza of John Wilmerding's American Light exhibit at the National Gallery. With the acceptance of Luminism as a viable aesthetic category, American Romantic painting itself, so long international Modernism's stepchild and poor relation, came of age and was invested with the Toga Virilis of academic respectability. In looking backwards, Americanists once anxious about vindicating their attraction to a supposedly secondhand and second-rate pictorial tradition could proudly point out that the nation had always possessed a legitimate school of artists who responded in a unified yet creative way to the idiomatic qualities of the American scene.