Religion, Feminism, and Idoloclasm

Being and Becoming in the Women's Liberation Movement

Melissa Raphael

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351780063
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Theologie & Religion
• Categoría: Sexualität & Gender in der Religion

Religion, Feminism, and Idoloclasm identifies religious and secular feminism's common critical moment as that of idol-breaking. It reads the women's liberation movement as founded upon a philosophically and emotionally risky attempt to liberate women's consciousness from a three-fold cognitive captivity to the self-idolizing god called 'Man'; the 'God' who is a projection of his power, and the idol of the feminine called 'Woman' that the god-called-God created for 'Man'.

Examining a period of feminist theory, theology, and culture from about 1965 to 2010, this book shows that secular, as well as Christian, Jewish, and post-Christian feminists drew on ancient and modern tropes of redemption from slavery to idols or false ideas as a means of overcoming the alienation of women's being from their own becoming. With an understanding of feminist theology as a pivotal contribution to the feminist criticism of culture, this original book also examines idoloclasm in feminist visual art, literature, direct action, and theory, not least that of the sexual politics of romantic love, the diet and beauty industry, sex robots, and other phenomena whose idolization of women reduces them to figures of the feminine same, experienced as a de-realization or death of the self.

This book demonstrates that secular and religious feminist critical engagements with the modern trauma of dehumanization were far more closely related than is often supposed. As such, it will be vital reading for scholars in theology, religious studies, gender studies, visual studies, and philosophy.

1
The appearance of the feminine

On September 7, 1968, about 150 feminists organized by the New York Radical Women group assembled on the Atlantic City Boardwalk outside the venue for the Miss America Pageant and ritually crowned a live sheep, comparing the beauty contest to a livestock auction at a county fair. They also sold off a large Miss America puppet and threw mops, pots and pans, copies of Cosmopolitan and Playboy, false eyelashes, high-heeled shoes, curlers, hairspray, make-up, girdles, corsets, and bras into a ‘Freedom Trash Can’. By ritually dismantling and throwing away, piece by piece, the idol of ‘the most beautiful girl in America’,¹ they were protesting patriarchy’s racist, classist, but otherwise aesthetically arbitrary, standard of beauty that reduced the very women it most promoted to entities whose ontological standing was somewhere between that of a doll and an animal. As Greer would write a couple of years later, ‘The gynolatry of our civilization is written large upon its face, upon hoardings, cinema screens, television, newspapers, magazines, tins, packets, cartons, bottles, all consecrated to the female reigning deity, the female fetish. Her dominion must not be thought to entail the rule of women, for she is not a woman … she is a doll’.²

Female beauty is political. One of the most persistent, if undertheorized, claims of second wave, and now fourth wave, feminism is that in a hetero-sexist culture female beautification is a cause and consequence of women’s subordination to men. Of course, any culture that can aestheticize its feminine ideal is a luxurious one, predicated on its having already met the more urgent demands of survival. Beauvoir notes that ‘the more relationships are concretely lived, the less they are idealized’.³ Modern patriarchy can afford a more elaborate feminine ideal than that of a woman expected to bear a child a year until she dies. In a prosperous modern culture, the essence and function of femininity can be ideologically defined in the more symbolic terms of a set of aesthetic qualities (prettiness or beauty). When their criteria are met, beauty so defined awards its bearer an at least notionally elite role and status, even to the point of re-paganizing her body as an image of the divinity the Abrahamic religions must destroy: a ‘goddess’.

Naturally, particular idols of the feminine come and go. It is undeniable that contemporary posts in modern secular public institutions are more accessible to women, disabled people, and sexual and ethnic minorities than at any time in their history. A western or westernized female elite is being promoted in increasing numbers to the exercise of authority in the institutions of education, law, finance, and government. An attractive appearance may be strongly in a woman’s favour, but her suitability for the job is primarily judged on the basis of her qualifications and expertise.

But even today, and in a culture where images have as much or more power than words, femaleness attracts temporary attention to itself by qualities of appearance before those of personality. That is, the aestheticization of the female body, where its appearance takes precedence over its substance, limits a woman’s social and political impact to the affective dimension before that of the ethical or political. The female body’s conformity to an idea, or failure to do so, locates her primary sphere of operation within that of the spectral and the spectacular. Even to the present day, to fall significantly short of the aesthetic ideal is to run the risk of entering the category and state of those with no image at all. In an insatiably scopophilic culture, to be imageless is to languish, in a sense, to die, outside the charmed circle of belonging, outside the ambit of social, sacral, and cultural regard.⁴ In a dispensation in which goods from material objects to romantic love are secured on the open markets of desire, to project the right image is an almost unavoidable precursor to their achievement.

The aestheticization of the feminine (or oppression by ‘the figures of beauty’)

The kind of human beauty in which a face and body meets and then exceeds all the criteria of an aesthetic norm confers a faux-sanctity on a woman that sets her apart from the common female run. It exempts her, notionally, if not actually, from the profane domestic labours that woman is otherwise created to undertake. That beauty relieves the ordinary burdens of female labour and offers access to a potent combination of material privilege and romantic excitement is why, at least since early modernity, the notion that an ideal woman is a beautiful one – a princess – has captivated women from childhood to old age. Because the perfect instantiation of any ideal is, necessarily, freakishly rare, women must ‘suffer to be beautiful’. That a woman might fail to squeeze her foot, as it were, into the impossibly small ‘glass slipper’ of beauty is, to varying degrees, the cause of anxiety, envy, low self-esteem, and various forms of mental ill-health and self-harm.

That the majority of women are or have once been ‘oppressed by the figure(s) of beauty’⁵ in pursuit of an aesthetically acceptable but transient quality of appearance that will afford some quality of existential fulfilment – a pursuit that may, in the event, cloud their existence with a chronic longing to look like some else – is no less a moral problem than any of the far more drastic and acute causes of human affliction. Indeed, it may be regarded as a symptom of the systemic suffering produced by a whole politics of alienation.

In the nineteenth century, young middle-class women were conscious of their appearance and took pains, for example, to cultivate an appearance too pale and dainty to be mistaken for that of a female labourer.⁶ In late modernity, a far more socially pervasive preoccupation with female appearance demands that one of the primary activities of a young woman is that of the cultivation of a minutely specified image. And it is in that image that her impact and telos resides, not her rational, moral, or otherwise creative agency. Persuading a woman to value the power of attraction over other competences is the work of an ideology. It is the means by which she will learn to subject herself, as much as others will subject her, to a reductive judgement of women’s personal worth, one whose aesthetic character psychologically and politically enisles women while it culturally collectivizes them. Over-rewarding conformity to an idea of female beauty alienates female being from becoming because it renders down female personhood to a resemblance of femininity that is always and everywhere the same. In Islam, a work of art that casts a shadow, namely, a sculpture or relief, may be regarded as an idol. So too, by analogy, when the female body is turned into a three-dimensional work of art this not only leaves those women whose body is not considered art in the cultural shadows, subject to discrimination of various kinds,⁷ but also leaves beautiful women over-shadowed by their own idol, ghosted, unknowable.

The idea of beauty has exhausted her being by aestheticizing it away. Its figure stands over and against her own person. What feminism has variously argued is that when the self is packaged as an aesthetic, that is, essentially spectacular phenomenon, a gift only to the glance, there is more than a risk of its arriving damaged. It is by encouraging women’s ‘dissatisfaction with the body as it is, and an insistent desire that it be otherwise, not natural but controlled, fabricated’,⁸ that femininity becomes a cultural confection: a substitutive idol or moulding fiction by which ‘woman’ can be patriarchally styled in ways that fix or deny subjectivity. As Firestone would have put it, after Marx, beauty makes women patriarchy’s ‘useful idiots’. Beauty romanticizes the female condition. It transmutes a real female body into a representation of a feminine ideal. An image is ideological in so far as it not merely mirrors its object, but interprets it by a distortive (perhaps inflated or diminished) reflection of its nature and form. An idol is an image of an entity that alienates its qualities by fetishizing them, attributing to that image or its parts greater, or other, powers than its object would naturally possess.

Numerous feminist commentators have noted that women in the Christian West lack a stable, usable iconographical tradition that would enable them to identity the cultivation of a centred self with the appearance and operation of an ordinary female body. Female beauty has been at once reviled by ascetic religion as a sign of the ‘femaleness’ of natural, unclean, materiality, and a worldly temptation whose seductive threat is defused only by a woman’s virginity, marriage or death,⁹ and venerated in the pagan, chivalric, and secular cultures that coexist with Christian ones. In both cases, whether demonized or glorified, an ideology of femininity as appearance over substance is an attack on its reality and its truth.

Clearly, given the right educational and social opportunities, contemporary women can achieve economic, cultural, and political leverage through the deployment of a range of competences that have little or nothing to do with their looks. It would be offensive to suggest otherwise. But it is the location of feminine power in a fantastic appearance that occludes the historicity of women by stopping the body in youth. It is the aesthetic idea of a woman that renders femininity, not specific women, not merely impossible but fictive. Where the cultural value of femininity is aesthetic, the vast majority of (relatively) natural female bodies situated in ordinary (profane) time and space are consigned to cultural sub-visibility. The ideology of femininity as an enchantment of the eye consigns women whose appearance is not especially pleasing to a vast third order of existence within a female ontological order that is already secondary to the male. And even the cultural mark made by a tiny visible minority of hyper-visible women at once demotes and promotes them to the incidental sphere of the ornamental and the imagined.

Lisa Isherwood is right that while an older Christian metaphysic did not ‘let us live in our skins’, in modernity, a remarkably similar secular metaphysic has emerged which accords the body an inordinate importance yet seems still to posit ‘a body that is not really there. We are still confronted with make-believe bodies, bodies that have no true value in themselves’, but which remain heavily freighted with cultural meaning.¹⁰ Irigaray made a similar point: ‘Female beauty is always considered a garment ultimately designed to attract the other into the self. It is almost never perceived as a manifestation of an appearance by a phenomenon expressive of interiority – whether of love, of thought, of flesh. We look at ourselves in the mirror to please someone… rarely for ourselves and in search of our own becoming. The mirror almost always serves to reduce us to a pure exteriority – of a very particular kind’.¹¹

‘Women’, wrote Elizabeth Grosz, ‘have been objectified and alienated as social subjects partly through the denigration and containment of the female body’.¹² A culture puts only its most beautiful things on display. The display of women idolized for their beauty makes an exhibition of them as objects of power and wonder. After Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir’s theorization of the idolized woman (the attribution of magical fertility to ‘woman’ compels men to worship the women for whom they feel sexual desire) laid the immediate foundations for Shulamith Firestone and Germaine Greer’s critique of gynolatry – the idolization of the feminine as a figure of beauty.

That an idolized woman is designed, not born, entails that her function and meaning is controlled by her manufacturer. Under patriarchy, to idolize a woman is to hand ideology the remote control of her machinery. By the time modernity had turned natural fecundity into a system of managed industrial production, the production of sons was no longer the sole purpose of the feminine. As a cultural adornment, femininity became emblematic of a gender order in which the masculine owns and controls the assets of female reproductivity and ‘female’ nature itself. As such, where masculine technology, not female biology, manages and en...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: Woman: the world’s first idol
• Introduction
• 1 The appearance of the feminine
• 2 Idolized women
• 3 Impossible women
• 4 Idoloclasm in Christian feminist theology
• 5 Second wave feminist Christology and Mariology in a counter-idolatrous mode
• 6 Jewish feminist idol-breakers
• 7 Jewish feminist theology out of the idoloclastic sources of Judaism
• 8 From broken idols, a Goddess feminist self
• 9 After idoloclasm
• Bibliography
• Index