This article discusses two well‐known texts that respectively describe learning and teaching, drawn from the work of Freud and Plato. These texts are considered in psychoanalytic terms using a methodology drawn from the philosophy of Luce Irigaray. In particular the article addresses Irigaray's approach to the analysis of speech and utterance as a ‘cohesion between the source of the utterance and the utterance itself’ (Hass, 2000). I apply this approach to ask whether educational tradition has fractured the relationship between pedagogy (...) and the body of the teacher/pupil. Teaching and learning are re‐addressed in ways that challenge the gender‐neutral representation of pedagogy as a systematic technique. (shrink)

_Essays on Beauvoir’s influences, contemporary engagements, and legacy in the philosophical tradition._.

Метою статті є порівняння антропології статі В. Розанова та етики статевої відмінності Л. Ірігаре, виявлення подібностей та відмінностей цих концепцій, оцінка їхньої ролі у становленні гендерних досліджень. Теоретичний базис об’єднує компаративістський метод та гендерний підхід, основою якого є не просто опис різниці статусів, ролей та інших аспектів життя чоловіків та жінок, а й подолання андроцентризму сучасного світу. Наукова новизна полягає, в тому, що в статті вперше в контексті гендерних досліджень було зроблено спеціальне філософсько-антропологічне порівняння концепцій статі Розанова та Ірігаре. Це (...) дозволило розанівську концепцію зарахувати до есенціалізму, а концепцію Ірігаре – до анти-есенціалізму. У статті також виявлена схожість антропології статі Розанова та етики статевої відмінності Ірігаре в аспекті поняття сексуальності, проаналізовані та детально зіставлені їхні основні ідеї. Висновок. Спільним в концепціях Розанова та Ірігаре є утвердження жіночої суб’єктивності, яка є рівноцінною чоловічий. Жіночий еквівалент сексуальності у Розанова проявляється в понятті "самочності", а у Ірігаре – в метонімії "двох губ". Методологічною основою їхніх концепцій виступає непереборна опозиція "чоловічого" та "жіночого". Розанов прагне до ототожнення "чоловічого" та "жіночого", а Ірігаре більше зосереджується на їхній радикальній відмінності. За Розановим гендерні відмінності детерміновані біологічно або метафізично, що визначає їхній вічний та незмінний характер. У свою чергу Ірігаре стверджує, що гендерні відмінності обумовлені фалоцентричною культурою та можуть бути подолані разом зі зміною мовних структур. Принципова ж схожість концепцій двох філософів полягає в тому, що в них сексуалізовоно не лише чоловіче, а й жіноче начало. Таким чином, Розанов у своїй стилістиці, акцентованій на увазі до тілесності, напрочуд близький теперішній гендерній антропології та може розглядатися як її предтеча. Разом з тим вплив філософських концепцій Ірігаре на сучасні гендерні дослідження полягає в тому, що вона вперше вказала на необхідність створення жіночого іншого дискурсу, який поважає статеву відмінність, та показала проблематичність виділення відмінності жіночого іншого від будь-якого іншого в ньому. (shrink)

In Kate Bush’s 1993 album, The Red Shoes, and her film, The Line, the Cross and the Curve, she engages with the symbolism of The Red Shoes fairytale as first depicted in Hans Christian Andersen’s 1845 fairy tale and later developed by the Powell and Pressburger film of the same name. In Bush’s versions of the tale she attempts to find a space of agency for the main female protagonist in a plot structure over-determined by patriarchal narrative and symbolic logic. (...) I will argue that it is through her own use of mystical symbolism — the Line, the Cross and the Curve — mediated through the deployment of ritual magick and kabbalistic ritual — that she breaks the ‘spell’ of the red shoes story where the main female character can escape the gender specific ‘curse’ of the red shoes. (shrink)

Antigone fascinates G. W. F. Hegel and Luce Irigaray, both of whom turn to her in their explorations and articulations of ethics. Hegel and Irigaray make these re-turns to Antigone through the double and related lenses of nature and sexual difference. This essay investigates these figures of Antigone and the accompanying ethical accounts of nature and sexual difference as a way of examining Irigaray's complex relation to and creative uses of Hegel's thought.

This paper derives from an exploration of the ways in which the letters of Holocaust writer Etty Hillesum, which are seemingly resistant to many of the interests of current trauma theory, can be read in relation to contemporary writing on testimonial. In particular, the three theorists I shall discuss here, Derrida, Caruth and Irigaray, directly address Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a central text in the current refiguring of trauma. This paper traces the ways in which Hillesum's letters can be (...) read across the theoretical accounts. An interpretation of Hillesum's writing emerges in which the conventional emphasis on the mystical aspect of her texts is reinterpreted in terms of Caruth's emphasis on the life drive. Viewed as forging a creative language of departure, Hillesum's letters are situated in a central relation to the most recent developments in the theoretical discourse around testimony. (shrink)

Over the last 30 years or more the feminist and ecological movements have contributed significantly to two major shifts in the human social imaginary. These shifts have lead to new ways of reading/interpreting classical texts, and in this instance, biblical texts. This article addresses the political function of readings which have attended to gender, power and a range of multiplicative vectors over the recent decades of feminist interpretation. The more recent shift in the social imaginary to what Lorraine Code calls (...) ‘ecological thinking’ has called for a move beyond anthropocentrism. Such a shift requires new ways of reading. This article concludes with a reading of Mt. 26.6–13 from an ecological perspective taking account of the materiality and sociality encoded in the text. (shrink)

: My essay incorporates Irigaray's notion of the sensible transcendental, a dynamic attempt to reconstitute the body/mind dualism which founds Western thought, into a reading of the practice of European concert dance. I contend that Irigaray's efforts toward articulating a language of the body as active agent have much to offer (feminist) analyses of dance practice, and develop this claim through a reading which reflects philosophically on the changing nature of my own dance activity.

My essay incorporates Irigaray's notion of the sensible transcendental, a dynamic attempt to reconstitute the body/mind dualism which founds Western thought, into a reading of the practice of European concert dance. I contend that Irigaray's efforts toward articulating a language of the body as active agent have much to offer analyses of dance practice, and develop this claim through a reading which reflects philosophically on the changing nature of my own dance activity.

I argue that Irigaray's recent work develops a theoretically cogent and politically radical form of realist essentialism. I suggest that she identifies sexual difference with a fundamental difference between the rhythms of percipient fluids constituting women's and men's bodies, supporting this with a philosophy of nature that she justifies phenomenologically and ethically. I explore the politics Irigaray derives from this philosophy, which affirms the sexes' rights to realize the possibilities of their rhythmically diverse bodies.

: I argue that Irigaray's recent work develops a theoretically cogent and politically radical form of realist essentialism. I suggest that she identifies sexual difference with a fundamental difference between the rhythms of percipient fluids constituting women's and men's bodies, supporting this with a philosophy of nature that she justifies phenomenologically and ethically. I explore the politics Irigaray derives from this philosophy, which affirms the sexes' rights to realize the possibilities of their rhythmically diverse bodies.

Three-way baby making is not new: genetic surrogacy existed in Biblical times and donor insemination was recorded in Britain over 200 years ago. However, the gift of gametes between women breaks all social conventions. This paper examines the phenomenon of gamete-donation questioning whether a ‘gift’ of such magnitude can ever be ‘free’ (as the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Authority advocates), or a ‘true’ gift (in Derridian terms). Exploration of this unprecedented ‘gift’ from a psychoanalytic approach is supplemented by an interdisciplinary (...) one, drawing on the gift literature in philosophy, anthropology, ethnography and socioeconomics, as well as neonatal research and reproductive medicine. Critics note the dearth of analyses that take seriously the psychological ramifications of contemporary treatments, protocols and expectations in reproductive medicine. Based on psychoanalytic therapy within a clinical practice devoted to reproductive issues, the author argues that institutionalised asexual reproduction alters unconscious conceptualisations of the act of procreation – converting the passionate intimacy of primal scene into a clinical coupling of gametes in a mechanised arena. The author argues that, too charged to contemplate, the gamete's transcendent quality and blurring of elementary personae/res distinctions leads protagonists, including professionals, to defensive commodification. Multiple emotional meanings are ascribed to gifted gametes by each in the triangle of donor, recipient and offspring, illustrated here with verbatim material. This article addresses some of the far-reaching socio-political consequences for class, race, age, gender and sexuality of asexual reproduction, related to selection procedures and uneven global and local distribution of fertility treatment and its cost in financial, physical, practical and emotional terms. Similarly, feminist unease over (patriarchal) reproductive control and gatekeeping policies are considered, as well as ethical concerns over genetic manipulation, pre-implantation screening, sex selection, selective foetocide and potential exploitation of transnational donors and surrogates. (shrink)

The attempt to rearticulate traditional conceptions of nature can be both a useful strategy and a stumbling block when it comes to feminist examinations of continuity between the objectification of women’s bodies and the domination of nature. This paper contributes to existing debates by providing a critique of what I term the “duality view” of nature: a view stipulating that nature is primarily characterised by a stable sexual duality, and advancing that the objectification of women’s bodies arises because the specificity (...) of “femaleness” is ignored and duality is therefore neglected. I focus, specifically, on Alison Stone’s interpretation of Luce Irigaray, insofar as the account emerging from Stone’s interpretation clearly outlines the principles that most versions of the duality view should endorse. I problematise this account by showing that it becomes inconsistent with the critique of objectification which grounds it in the first place. I conclude by advancing that, overall, a view insisting on a natural sexual duality because of normative reasons conflicts with the feminist considerations at its basis. I also suggest that while the present analysis is primarily condemnatory, it can contribute to the development of feminist philosophies of nature by fleshing out avoidable pitfalls. (shrink)

This essay empasizes the dimensions of opticality in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle and in Caruth's Parting Words. Thinking how to move from the ‘o‐o‐o‐o’ to the ‘a‐a‐a‐a’ central to the Fort/Da game, suggest that ‘u’ must be drawn into the creative act that inspires testimony, critical theory, psychoanalysis and love.

In what sense, if any, does the dominant conception of the traditional theistic God as disembodied inform our embodied experiences? Feminist philosophers of religion have been either explicitly or implicitly preoccupied by a philosophical failure to address such questions concerning embodiment and its relationship to the divine. To redress this failure, certain feminist philosophers have sought to appropriate Luce Irigaray’s argument that embodied divinity depends upon women themselves becoming divine. This article assesses weaknesses in the Irigarayan position, notably the problematic (...) move from a woman’s subjectivity to divinity. In the light of these weaknesses the author looks for a better alternative. Drawing on the work of feminist and nonfeminist philosophers, a feminist-friendly conception of theism is sketched in terms of incarnation and intersubjectivity. Philosophical accounts of the ethical formation of gendered subjects by way of bodily practices offer new concepts for con. (shrink)

In 1992, in a historic move, the Church of England voted to allow women's ordination to priesthood and in 1994 the first women priests started to be ordained. Despite much research interest, the experiences of priests who are mothers to dependent children have been minimally investigated. Based on in-depth interviews with seventeen mothers ordained in the Church, this paper will focus on how the sacred-profane boundary is managed. Priests who are mothers have a particular insight into the Church hierarchy as (...) they symbolically straddle the competing discourses of sacred and profane. However, instead of reifying these binaries, the experiences of these women show how such dualisms are challenged and managed in everyday life. Indeed, in terms of experience, ritual, ministry and preaching, priests who are mothers are resisting, recasting and renegotiating sacred terrain in subtle and nuanced ways. Mothers thus not only negotiate the practical and sacramental demands placed on priests, but also illuminate how the sacred domain is regulated and constructed. (shrink)

: I begin to suggest an alternative to the notion of vision based in alienation and hostility put forth by Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan. I diagnose this alienating vision as a result of a particular alienating notion of space presupposed by their theories. I develop Irigaray's comments about light and air to suggest an alternative notion of space that opens up the possibility that vision connects us to others rather than alienates us from them.

I begin to suggest an alternative to the notion of vision based in alienation and hostility put forth by Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan. I diagnose this alienating vision as a result of a particular alienating notion of space presupposed by their theories. I develop lrigaray's comments about light and air to suggest an alternative notion of space that opens up the possibility that vision connects us to others rather than alienates us from them.

The distinction between heterosexuality and homosexuality does not allow for sufficient attention to be given to the question of non-normative heterosexualities. This paper develops a feminist critique of normative sexuality, focusing on alternative readings of sex and/or gender offered by Beauvoir and Irigaray. Despite their differences, both accounts contribute significantly to dismantling the lure of normative sexuality in heterosexual relations-a dismantling necessary to the construction of a feminist social and political order.

Luce Irigaray classically challenges what she takes to be the masculine foundations of knowledge in Western liberal culture. The present article contends not only that this epistemological challenge implicates a radical feminist politics, but that it is also more helpful in formulating a multicultural feminist theory than is often acknowledged by her readers. This is because her account responds to the false neutrality of liberal feminist approaches to multiculturalism. It does so by supporting, at the socio-political level, transformative genealogical practices (...) that are aimed at fostering women's agency in culturally sensitive ways. However, Irigaray's recent work on multiculturalism does not sustain the necessary continuity between her core epistemological critique and her political claims. In particular, the continuity between her criticism of the West's sexual indifference and the cultural multiplicity of female identity becomes problematic in her recent work. The author finally contends that Irigaray's writings pose difficulties for a multicultural feminism, because they fail to specify the different forms of policy necessary to promote diverse women's equality in the postcolonial contexts on which she recently focuses. (shrink)

This article addresses research that deals with approaches to psychological and social trauma and ways to manage its disruptive power. In the first instance I apply this to the life of my great-grandmother in order to help understand why her life became unbearably difficult, the treatment she received as a female ‘hysteric’ in the 1940s and most importantly the impact that her life has continued to have through four generations of family life. In the second instance, I apply trauma theory (...) to the history of forgetting women and its implications for feminist action and recovery with specific reference to Feminist Theology. I suggest that there are powerful connections between the individual and collective forgetting of women’s lives, and that this forgetting is premised on forms of symbolic violence. I turn to the work of psychiatrists Judith Herman, and Russell Meares and feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, in order to provide an account of forgetting, remembering and finally recovery. (shrink)

This is the story of a woman, now long dead and almost forgotten, but for a crumbling gravesite overlooking the ocean at Bronte in Sydney and some small acts of remembrance that functioned to restore her voice ever so partially. The hint of her voice allowed genealogical traces to emerge and help heal the wounds of not only the individual family genealogy to which this woman was almost lost but also for the monumental primordial forgetting of women. The story of (...) this woman whose life seems exceptionally different from my own, whom I never met, is re-told a hundred years after she lived and breathed, to heal deep ancestral wounds and give voice to the struggles of the living and in particular to us—their grand-daughters. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that only women, and in particular women who have recently given birth, are able to breastfeed. However, through induced lactation, adoptive mothers, fathers and trans people have begun breastfeeding with greater frequency. Although breastfeeding is often regarded as a paradigmatic example of sexual difference, it actually exposes the instability of binary categories of sex. Luce Irigaray insists that sexual difference demands a new poetics, a language that is dynamic and fluid, capable of expressing difference while always (...) keeping open the possibility of transformation and change. This article extends Irigaray’s work in order to theorise breastfeeding from a perspective that is both feminist and queer. (shrink)

Reading Hegel's 1827 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion alongside his Phenomenology of Spirit, I argue that his vision for becoming a self-conscious subject-or seeing (oneself as) "spirit"-requires taking responsibility for the insight that every act of reason expresses an experience of sexual difference. It entails working to bring into being communities whose conceptions of gender and the absolute realize this idea.

The “fathers’ rights” movement represents policies that undermine women’s reproductive autonomy as furthering the cause of gender equality. Khader argues that this movement exploits two general weaknesses of equality claims identified by Luce Irigaray. She shows that Irigaray criticizes equality claims for their appeal to a genderneutral universal subject and for their acceptance of our existing symbolic repertoire. This article examines how the plaintiffs’ rhetoric in two contemporary “fathers’ rights” court cases takes advantage of these weaknesses.

The “fathers’ rights” movement represents policies that undermine women's reproductive autonomy as furthering the cause of gender equality. Khader argues that this movement exploits two general weaknesses of equality claims identified by Luce Irigaray. She shows that Irigaray criticizes equality claims for their appeal to a genderneutral universal subject and for their acceptance of our existing symbolic repertoire. This article examines how the plaintiffs’ rhetoric in two contemporary “fathers’ rights” court cases takes advantage of these weaknesses.

In this essay, I argue that Luce Irigaray’s recent, seemingly esoteric readings of the Madonna, actually provide us with a constructive, perhaps even politically progressive, interpretive mode for engaging with the religious texts and figures of our tradition as women. As such, I argue that through her own specific interpretive practice Irigaray provides us with a new image of Mary, and this new Madonna figures the very interrelational interpretive practice that Irigaray believes essential when it comes to our engagements with (...) the texts of our tradition. Irigaray’s Madonna is an ethical listener, interpreter and exchanger of ‘sacred’ discourse and it is this aspect of Mary that warrants our allegiance. To imitate Mary is to practice reading, listening, and interpreting in the feminine, practices that can aid us in our ‘becoming spiritual’, which in Irigarayan terms is another way of saying ‘becoming woman’. (shrink)

This essay argues that Hegel's discussion of the family in "The Ethical Order" section of Phenomenology of Spirit undermines the entire project of that text. Hegel's project demands that every element of consciousness be conceptualizable, and yet, woman, an essential unconscious element of consciousness, is in principle unconceptualizable. The end of the essay attempts to relate Hegel's discussion of the family to contemporary discussions of family values.

This paper describes the multi-methodological approach employed in a partial, situated, contingent and interpretive feminist political analysis of Catholic mothers and daughters. The study draws on a number of sources including transcripts of mother-daughter interviews, autobiographical anecdotes, photographs, music, icons of Catholicism and poetry. It is argued in this paper that a feminist multi-methodological approach is valuable to feminist research as it disrupts the linear and logocentric construct of traditional social science research. Moreover, a multi-methodological and multi-sourced approach opens up (...) sites so that the mothers and daughters in this study could be positioned within specific histories and contexts, and provided with a space so that as women they could reconstruct themselves as self-referential subjects. (shrink)

Drawing Wittgenstein's and Irigaray's philosophies into conversation might help resolve certain misunderstandings that have so far hampered both the reception of Irigaray's work and the development of feminist praxis in general. A Wittgensteinian reading of Irigaray can furnish an anti-essentialist conception of "woman" that retains the theoretical and political specificity feminism requires while dispelling charges that Irigaray's attempt to delineate a "feminine" language is either groundlessly utopian or entails a biological essentialism.

This article challenges the widely held view that mysticism is essentially characterized by intense, ineffable, subjective experiences. Instead, I show that mysticism has undergone a series of social constructions, which were never innocent of gendered struggles for power. When philosophers of religion and popular writers on mysticism ignore these gendered constructions, as they regularly do, they are in turn perpetuating a post-Jamesian understanding of mysticism which removes mysticism and women from involvement with political and social justice.

: Through a close reading of Klein and Irigaray's work on the mother-daughter relationship via the Electra myth, Jacobs diagnoses what she considers a fundamental problem in psychoanalytic and feminist psychoanalytic theory. She shows that neither thinker is able to theorize the mother-daughter relationship on a structural level but is only able to describe its symptoms. Jacobs makes a crucial distinction between description and theory and argues that the need to go beyond description and phenomenology toward the creation of a (...) structural theory is the only way that feminist philosophy and psychoanalysis can avoid reproducing the terms of the male imaginary. The essay concludes by arguing that theorization of the mother-daughter relationship can only be achieved if we analyze manifestations of the mother-daughter relationship in clinical, cultural, and mythical material through the framework of a foreclosed or absent underlying maternal law. (shrink)

Through a close reading of Klein and Irigaray's work on the mother-daughter relation’ ship via the Electra myth, Jacobs diagnoses what she considers a fundamental problem in psychoanalytic and feminist psychoanalytic theory. She shows that neither thinker is able to theorize the mother-daughter relationship on a structural level but is only able to describe its symptoms. Jacobs makes a crucial distinction between description and theory and argues that the need to go beyond description and phenomenology toward the creation of a (...) structural theory is the only way that feminist philosophy and psychoanalysis can avoid reproducing the terms of the male imaginary. The essay concludes by arguing that theorization of the mother-daughter relationship can only be achieved if we analyze manifestations of the mother-daughter relationship in clinical, cultural, and mythical material through the framework of a foreclosed or absent underlying maternal law. (shrink)

Increasingly, feminist theorists, such as Alison Martin and Ellen T. Armour, are attending to the numerous religious allusions within texts by Luce Irigaray. Engaging with this scholarship, this paper focuses on the problematic of evil that is elaborated within Irigarayan texts. Mobilizing the work of Catherine Malabou, the paper argues that Malabou's methodology of reading, which she identifies as "plastic," illuminates the logic at work within Irigaray's deployment of sacred stories.

Juxtaposing Cherríe Moraga's Loving in the War Years and Luce Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman, I explore the ways that sex and race intersect to complicate an Irigarayan account of the relations between mother and daughter. Irigaray's work is an effective tool for understanding the disruptive and potentially healing desire between mothers and daughters, but her insistence on sex as primary difference must be challenged in order to acknowledge the intersectionality of sex and race. Working from recent work on (...) the psychoanalysis of race, I argue that whiteness functions as a master signifier in its own right, and as a means of differentiation between the light-skinned Moraga and her brown-skinned mother. Irigaray's concept of blood deepens Moraga's account of her healing and subversive return to her mother. The juxtaposition of Moraga, Irigaray, and contemporary psychoanalysis of race can allow for a necessary revision of Irigaray's psychoanalysis that acknowledges the ways in which sexual difference is indexed by race and sheds new light on her account of the mother–daughter relation. (shrink)

The question of the transcendent, that which operates above and beyond the material stuff of the world, remains an enduring one for feminism, bound up as it is with the foundations of feminism's corporeal politics and the definition of its political subject. With the specificity of the situated and meaningful body grounding feminist politics, the universal and neutral status of the speaking subject has been diagnosed as masculine, and unable to properly account for sexed differences. On this basis, political community, (...) collectivity forged along the lines of a common identity, is considered important in the realization of feminist political goals, yet is also problematic in view of its reliance upon a universal category of identity through which to motivate for political change. Acknowledging these tensions, this paper revisits Luce Irigaray's essay “Divine Women” to suggest that in her rethinking of the divine as a shared horizon through which women can potentially achieve autonomy, the nature of the transcendent, the universal, and the identity of the feminine are also reconfigured in surprising ways. In a specific address to the dilemma of political community, Irigaray makes available a notion of the divine that is already differently inhabited. (shrink)

One of the central themes of contemporary feminist literature is the exclusion of the female subject from the Western tradition. Luce Irigaray has made significant contributions to this literature. In this article I examine one aspect of Irigaray’s work on the feminine subject, her discussion of divine women. She argues that in order to achieve full subjectivity women must worship a female god that will give them the divinity that they lack, the divinity that the patriarchal god provides for men. (...) I argue that this thesis is both counterproductive and incoherent. It perpetuates the male/female binarism that is at the root of patriarchy. It also fails to define the concept of a female god which is at the centre of Irigaray’s argument. I conclude that the approach of process theology is much more successful in removing the maleness of God and providing women with a deity compatible with feminist beliefs. (shrink)

: I argue that Irigaray's linguistic research is not merely supplementary to her theoretical writing, but, in its depiction of sexed linguistic "styles," illuminates Irigaray's call for a new syntax. I show the effect of this research on her analysis of the unconscious meaning of interrogative expressions. I address the question of Irigaray's standing as a social scientist and argue that attention to her method reveals her positive program in this domain.

I argue that Irigaray's linguistic research is not merely supplementary to her theoretical writing, but, in its depiction of sexed linguistic “styles,” illuminates Irigaray's call for a new syntax. I show the effect of this research on her analysis of the unconscious meaning of interrogative expressions. 1 address the question of Irigaray's standing as a social scientist and argue that attention to her method reveals her positive program in this domain.

The presence of the woman priest presiding at the Eucharist causes a `collision' with traditional phallocentric Christian rites, not least around blood sacrifice. Sociological, philosophical and psychological research has found this to be a male-only practice designed to control women. I argue that the woman priest brings new and recovered meanings and possibilities relating to the maternal divine that revivify and enrich old interpretations associated with the Eucharist. A doubly gendered priesthood symbolically connects bloodshed not only with violence and death (...) but with birth and nurturing, with nature and with community. Women's priesthood calls for sexual difference to be acknowledged and celebrated within the Christian narrative in a way that allows both women and men to flourish as children of God. (shrink)

The article reflects on a 2006 keynote about sex and religion discussing a topic the author has addressed as a central issue. Although the author has been involved in what has been known as the field of women and religion for decades, theory that is now emerging under the rubric of what is at times called ‘critical religion’, has led her to a different approach to the topic. The article reflects on the past and moves forward to introduce this trajectory (...) of theory. The hope is to convince the reader that thinking critically about sex and religion together is a new and necessary adventure. (shrink)