Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Divining Prophetic Voices
- Part I The Crucible of Experience and the Life of Dialogue
- Part II Legacies of Colonialism and Resistance
- Part III Angles on Ecofeminism
- 11 To Make the World “Home:” Rosemary Radford Ruether and Ecofeminist Theology
- 12 Common Ground in Sacred Nature: Unearthing Ecological Solidarity between Nasr and Ruether
- 13 Divine Reciprocity: Alice Walker, Ecowomanist
- 14 Thinking Past the Identity Trilemma: Gender, Religion, and Nature in the Work of Rosemary Radford Ruether
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Contributors
- Index
14 - Thinking Past the Identity Trilemma: Gender, Religion, and Nature in the Work of Rosemary Radford Ruether
from Part III - Angles on Ecofeminism
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction: Divining Prophetic Voices
- Part I The Crucible of Experience and the Life of Dialogue
- Part II Legacies of Colonialism and Resistance
- Part III Angles on Ecofeminism
- 11 To Make the World “Home:” Rosemary Radford Ruether and Ecofeminist Theology
- 12 Common Ground in Sacred Nature: Unearthing Ecological Solidarity between Nasr and Ruether
- 13 Divine Reciprocity: Alice Walker, Ecowomanist
- 14 Thinking Past the Identity Trilemma: Gender, Religion, and Nature in the Work of Rosemary Radford Ruether
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Contributors
- Index
Summary
The power of the terms “woman” or “democracy” is not derived from their ability to describe adequately or comprehensively a political reality that already exists; on the contrary, the political signifier becomes politically efficacious by instituting and sustaining a set of connections as a political reality.
(Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter, 210)This metaphor of ontological hierarchy as a social hierarchy, with its descending levels of rationality and hence of fitness for servility, would be appropriated into Christianity in the early centuries of the Common Era and henceforth shape Western culture well into the modern period.
(Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God, 184)Though Judith Butler and Rosemary Radford Ruether are not placed into dialogue often, these two opening quotes are an attempt to bring the work of Ruether into the post-discourses (especially queer theory) exemplified by works such as Judith Butler's Bodies that Matter. Whereas Butler focuses on the performativity and politics of identity (especially sex and gender identities), Ruether focuses on how theological, metaphysical, and ontological performances and narratives underwrite the dimorphic performance of gender and sexuality in the mythical place known as “the West.” Though sidestepping the language of French deconstructionists, psychoanalysts and post-structuralists in general, Ruether's work moves in some of the same directions when it comes to gender. She is not bound to identity essentials, nor does she fall into the false opposing choice of complete identity construction; rather, she understands identity as co-constructed between humans and humans and the rest of the natural world, concepts that underwrite both understandings of “nature” and what is “natural,” and understandings of God and the Divine.
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- Information
- Voices of Feminist Liberation , pp. 219 - 232Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2012