Pamela Sue Anderson

New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion

Having enjoyed more than a decade of lively critique and creativity, feminist philosophy of religion continues to be a vital field of inquiry. New Topics in Feminist Philosophy of Religion maintains this vitality with both women and men, from their own distinctive social and material locations, contributing critically to the rich traditions in philosophy of religion. The twenty contributors open up new possibilities for spiritual practice, while contesting the gender-bias of traditional concepts in the field: the old models of human and divine will no longer ‘simply do’! A lively current debate develops in re-imagining and revaluing transcendence in terms of body, space and self-other relations.

Transcendence and Feminist Philosophy

This chapter intends to treat the title Women and the Divine: Touching Transcendence as a philosophical topic, offering one response to Luce Irigaray’s “Toward a Divine in the Feminine” (Chapter 1 in this volume), while also drawing from her “Divine Women” and “I Love to You.” I would like to raise a critical question for my readers: Can Irigaray, or those who follow her, avoid the ethically debilitating forms of transcendence-in-immanence that Simone de Beauvoir successfully uncovers in the immanence of the female narcissist, lover, and mystic?

Lost Confidence and Human Capability: A Hermeneutic Phenomenology of the Gendered, yet Capable Subject

Abstract In this contribution to Text Matters, I would like to introduce gender into my feminist response to Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology of the capable subject. The aim is to make, phenomenologically speaking, “visible” the gendering of this subject in a hermeneutic problematic: that of a subject’s loss of confidence in her own ability to understand herself. Ricoeurian hermeneutics enables us to elucidate the generally hidden dimensions in a phenomenology of lost self-confidence; Ricoeur describes capability as “originally given” to each lived body; but then, something has happened, gone wrong or been concealed in one’s loss of confidence. Ricoeur himself does not ask how the gender or sex of one’s own body affects this loss. So I draw on contemporary feminist debates about the phenomenology of the body, as well as Julia Kristeva’s hermeneutics of the Antigone figure, in order to demonstrate how women might reconfigure the epistemic limits of human capability, revealing themselves as “a horizon” of the political order, for better or worse.

Reviews and Interviews / Contributors

Reviews/Interviews/Contributors Tributes to Professor Andrzej Kopcewicz - Agnieszka Salska New Media Effects on Traditional News Sources: A Review of the State of American Newspapers - Richard Profozich Review of The Body, ed. by Ilona Dobosiewicz and Jacek Gutorow - Grzegorz Kość “Taste good iny?”: Images of and from Australian Indigenous Literature - Jared Thomas Speaks with Teresa Podemska-Abt Engaging the “Forbidden Texts” of Philosophy - Pamela Sue Anderson Talks to Alison Jasper

The Lived Body, Gender and Confidence

This chapter begins with a phenomenological reading of the awakening of a woman to her cognitive and non-cognitive capacities; traditional imagery elucidates the nature of “the lived body”, which is thought to exist as a kind of post-Kantian a priori, whose flesh knits human bodies together within a world. This body is a synthetic form capable of creating unity out of multiple sensations, but also capable of generating differentiations in its relation to a world. Granted the lived body, how does the body-subject lose confidence in her own capability? A doubt or weakness is something portrayed in traditional myths about Eve and similarly in twentieth-century portraits of the young Simone de Beauvoir. Each capable subject can imagine herself in the bodily situation of Eve: awakened to the incarnate modalities of our existence we discover the possibilities of “transcendence incarnate.” We appear to be given abilities for transcendence; and yet the ambiguity of transcendence within a fleshy, bodily existence suggests a loss of what is, in phenomenological terms, “originally” ours. The chapter demonstrates that what makes a particular person a woman has at a certain historical moment and within a western philosophical tradition also marked her as, in Beauvoir’s terms, “the second sex.” The gendered variations which distinguish confidence as a personal and social phenomenon indicate that neither women nor men are as we might be. The chapter concludes by advocating a transformation of this negative reality into something positive for transcendence incarnate: new ethical confidence in the abilities of capable subjects.

Book Review: The Philosophical Imaginary and The Sex of Knowing

children. ‘Same-race placements’ have been the subject of intense disagreement and Hawley Fogg-Davis asks us to engage in a thought experiment in which ‘racial randomization’ would be the norm for all placements. This approach forces us to make explicit ideas about the meaning of and reproduction of ‘race’ and whether we aim to maintain it or eradicate it entirely. Finally, Sally Haslanger uses her own family as a model in an attempt to reconfigure the meaning of ‘race’ through the concept of a ‘mixed family’. She considers how as a white mother of black children, it is not only their blackness that is potentially altered but her own whiteness. Limitations of space do not allow for a proper discussion of these papers, nor does this overview reflect the immense richness, depth and subtlety to the writing. I found this book fascinating, thought provoking and challenging, and will be certain to recommend it highly to anyone interested not only in families, but in issues of identification, belonging and racialization. Although based upon the US, and despite the legal and political differences, much of the theoretical material is directly relevant to the UK and Europe. The book serves as a timely reminder of the continued dominance of the heteronormative family model in Northern societies, and the importance of feminist challenges to this.

Can We Love as God Loves

Abstract I locate the starting point for this essay on the common ground between the traditionally conceived attribute of divine love and the moral theory known as divine command ethics. The latter assumes that something is good because God commands it; with the former, the gift of divine love requires love in return. In this light, Gods command to love is recognized as goodness itself by those ‘he’ loves. In other words, those persons loved by God are morally motivated to love. However, this theistic account of divine command theory simply assumes that love is knowable, do-able and so required. The obstacles to knowing love and loving are rarely made explicit. To tackle some of these, this essay is loosely structured around a dialogue with Kantian morality. Analysis of the gendered nature of love will take place indirectly in the course of my account of duty, pure goodness and moral motivation.

Jantzen, Grace, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion

Catholic images of the Virgin Mary have changed between the eleventh and twentieth centuries, but also argues that these changes are symptomatic of more fundamental developments in Western culture, concerning ’nature’ and ’gender’. Mediaeval images of the Virgin in Majesty-seated on a throne, with Christ on her lap, commanding the gaze of the devotee-and nineteenth-century images of Our Lady of Lourdes-childless and standing with her hands clasped, her gaze turned upward and inward, privately contemplating the divine majesty-figure either end of the development that Boss traces, and which she provocatively relates to the difference between iconic and pornographic imagery, between woman as subject and woman as object of the (male) gaze. Insofar as Mary as mother figures ’nature’ and the material, her objectification, in art and theology, together with an increasing stress on her passivity and acquiescence, signifies modernity’s attempt to dominate the natural world, which also requires the domination of women, since they signify nature, and, in their maternity, nature’s ’priority’ and resistance to such domination.