Panel Response to Marcella Althaus-Reid's Indecent Theology

Marcella Althaus-Reid puts in print a discussion of sex, gender, and politics. For womanist theologian and ethicist, Townes, black women's experiences have been left out of the theoretical and material constructs of both black and feminist theologies in the United States. Townes argues that Althaus-Reid casts the reader in the role of voyeur as she describes (and objectifies) the women lemon vendors in Indecent Theology. The reader observes them from the safety of their own cultural, economic, theo-ethical and sociopolitical mud huts in the same way as the Europeans who queued to view the so-called'Hottentot Venus' in the early 1800s. Nevertheless, Althaus-Reid offers an integrated, interstructured analysis that helps pry open the dynamics of oppressions.