Interdependence

A Postcolonial Feminist Practical Theology

HyeRan Kim-Cragg

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781498241809
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Teologia cristiana

This book calls attention to an urgent need for postcolonial feminist approaches to practical theology. It not only advocates for the inclusion of colonialism as a critical optic for practical theology but also demands a close look at how colonialism is entangled with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, disability, and sexual orientation. Seeking to highlight the importance of the interdependence of life, the author challenges and contests the notion of independence as the desirable goal of the human being. Lifting up the experiences of overlooked groups--including children at adult-centered worship, queer and interracial youth in heterosexual and white normative family discourse, and non-human species in human-centered academic and theological realms--the book contributes to expanding the concerns of practical theology in ways that create healthy community for all human beings and non-human fellow creatures. It also takes up issues of multiple religious belonging and migration that practical theology has not sufficiently explored. These illuminating new possibilities promise to renew and even transform church communities through the inclusion of often-neglected groups with whom God is already present.

1

Beyond Independence

How does a person become a whole self? How can a person become an agent of personal and social transformation? Can we achieve the human virtues of equality and freedom alone? This chapter ponders these questions. It contests the notion that a person can be totally self-sufficient and self-reliable. A whole self, as the chapter seeks to demonstrate, is achieved only through the support of communities and multiple tangled and situated relationships. A wholeness of personhood is only formed and sustained by depending on others. And yet, society, especially Western society since the modern era, instills the myth that we can and should be independent. The modernist notion of the self, which is determined by individual freedom, goes back to the European Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. John Locke, among other philosophers, for example, contends that ideal society is built upon a contract between and among “free, equal, and independent” persons.1 As it happens, Locke’s philosophy assumed that the participants in this social contract would be European white wealthy males whose wealth, education, and class gave them a sense of independence and control. Postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon argues how European individual freedom was used as a colonial strategy to divide colonized groups in the colonial process in Algeria.2 This sugar-coated idea of freedom forms the basis of Europe’s pretensions to being a universal standard of culture and civilization while dismissing the culture of the colonized and labeling it as uncivilized.

The other problem with this myth of equality and freedom was that it presumed that every person was essentially the same. To state that people are equal may speak to a sense of fairness but it also tends to disqualify real differences from consideration, forcing all to conform to standardized conventions. Writing a theology of disability, Tom Reynolds successfully exposes the myth of equality, arguing that “among the vulnerable in society not everyone is the same. For instance, [a person] with disabilities has specific needs that cannot be addressed adequately if all are treated equally as cases to be handled impartially. . . . [I]n the name of equality a social power can be bandied that pressures minorities to accept the dominant culture’s definition of who they are.”3 Feminist philosopher Eva Kittay makes a similar point: “the ideology of equality relies on a vision of autonomous individuals who stand outside relations of dependency.”4 Thus, a liberal notion of a personhood based on freedom, equality, and independence needs scrutiny.

To scrutinize such a notion we need, first, to critique independent selfhood through a gender and disability analysis. We will do this in the first part of the chapter. In the second part, we investigate the pitfalls of a notion of adulthood as independence as we also address the problems of patronizing attitudes towards children and young people. The third part includes a case study of a local congregation’s communal supper event. This case study demonstrates the importance of unlearning, the practice of taking risks for new learning, and being open to unfamiliar practices. The final part of this chapter includes a reflection of a practical theology of interdependence.

Gender and Independence

John Locke’s notion of personhood is gendered. When he spoke of individual independence he had men in mind; European, educated, wealthy men to be exact. Using the lens of gender and the critical tools that feminism affords, it is possible to show the ways Locke’s ideas about equality and independence mask real inequality and exploitation. This is not to say that the gender category is more important than other analytical identity categories such as race and class. But it is fruitful to discuss gender because the polarized dichotomy of women and men is reinforced by other categories: nature/culture, experience/reason, domestic/public, profane/sacred, emotional/rational, weak/strong, and dependent/independent. These binary polarizations create a gender hierarchy where women are subordinate to men. In this dualistic view, women and men are fundamentally and irreducibly born as unequal. This deterministic outlook justifies men’s superiority as ontologically given, thus rendering any attempt to reverse that order unnatural, i.e., against the nature of things. Feminist scholars suggest, however, that gender hierarchy is constructed by society rather than a biological and ontological reality that is given at birth. Philosopher Judith Butler argues that gender only exists in a heterosexual society based on gender binary.5 It operates “within the terms of a hegemonic cultural discourse predicted on binary structures that appear as the language of universal rationality.”6 Gender roles are “transmitted, learned, and upheld by social institutions such as education, the media, religion and family,” as Elaine Graham notes.7 This transmission is a process of gender construction and socialization. That is why feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir claims that “one is not born a woman, but, rather, becomes one.”8 Gender is cultivated and practiced. Gender as an act is learned and repeated. Gender is a product of human action and social relations. In light of how gender is constructed, it is false to claim that humans are independent. This critically informed understanding of gender allows us to look at the importance of relationships formed in social interactions. Humans are made in their interactions with one another.9

Selfhood, generally understood as a separate independent state of being as a goal of personhood, is another problematic concept. Separation coupled with independence has operated well for many centuries to promote the status of men’s selfhood, representing masculinity and privileging male gender. Selfhood, when it is gendered, meaning feminized, is viewed as the lack of independence. The ideal of independence has resulted in separation and sexism, the two notions, which together have functioned as one of the most fundamental self-shaping assumptions of our culture.10 Autonomy based on independence and separation has been regarded as a human virtue. Catherine Keller connects the particle “vir” in the term “virtue” to masculinity pointing out that “virility” is another sign of autonomy. However, the irony is that the concept of autonomous masculinized personhood needs a concept of the other. “He” is dependent on its complementary opposite. He needs her in a possessive and oppressive sense in order to be autonomous.11 There is an incongruous juxtaposition of what is said (he is independent) with what is true (he is not independent). This, albeit flawed, selfhood construction has been in the Western imagination from the time of ancient Greece, as evidenced by Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, and still haunts our current culture including economic and political realms. Male selfhood requiring possession and control of women is extended to the dynamics of nations between the so-called First World and the Third World where the former is dependent on the latter, while the latter carries the burden and the cost of the ecological and economic devastation.12 Many postcolonial scholars have demon...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Foreword by Mary Elizabeth Moore
• Foreword by Musa W. Dube
• Chapter 1: Beyond Independence
• Chapter 2: Beyond Homogenous Heterosexual Family
• Chapter 3: Beyond Adult-Centered Worship
• Chapter 4: Beyond Christian-Centrism
• Chapter 5: Beyond Belonging and Borders
• Chapter 6: Beyond Anthropocentric Borders
• Bibliography