This article examines the relationship between feminist theologies and
women’s poetry and fiction. Using Sheila Hassell Hughes’ work on
this same relationship as a point of departure, I contend that feminist theologians
rely on literature by women for a variety of reasons, and I focus on how literature
by women offers feminist theologies a multitude of examples of women’s
experience, embodied experience in particular. If women’s experience is
the starting point for a truly feminist theology, women’s writing seems an
obvious source of the theologian’s materialist and semiotic quest.
Gilmore, Leigh1989‘The Gaze of the Other Woman: Dickinson, Moore, and
Rich’, in
Temma F. Berg
(ed.), Engendering the Word: Feminist Essays in Psychosexual
Poetics (
Urbana: University of Illinois Press
), pp. 81-102.
8.
Gray, Elizabeth Dodson
(ed.) 1988Sacred Dimensions of Women’s Experience (
Wellesley, MA: Roundtable
).
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Grey, Mary1990Redeeming the Dream: Feminism, Redemption, and the Christian Tradition (
Mystic, CN: Twenty-Third
).
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Hughes, Sheila Hassell 1997 ‘Bridging Bodies of Work: The Poetic
and the Prophetic in Women’s Literature and Feminist Theology’
(Dissertation, Emory University).
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Johnson, Elizabeth A.1992She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (
New York: Crossroad
).
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Keyes, Clair1985The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich (
Athens: University of Georgia Press
).
16.
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Justice (
Cleveland: Pilgrim Press
).
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Rankka, Kristine M.1998Women and the Value of Suffering: An Aw(e)ful Rowing Toward God (
Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press
).
19.
Rich, Adrienne2003‘Transcendental Etude’, in
Paul Lauteret al.
(eds.), The Norton Anthology of American Literature (
New York: W.W. Norton
, 6th edn, 2003), pp. 2952-2956.
20.
Ruether, Rosemary Radford1990‘Feminist Interpretation: A Method of
Correlation’, in
Ann Loades
(ed.), Feminist Theology (
London: SPCK
), pp. 111-124.
21.
Saiving, Valerie1992‘The Human Situation: A Feminine View’, in
Carol P. Christ
and
Judith Plaskow
(eds.), Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (
San Francisco: Harper
, 2nd edn), pp. 25-42.
22.
Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth1996‘G*d at Work in Our Midst: From a Politics of Identity to a
Politics of Struggle’, Feminist Theology 13 (
Sheffield, Sheffield Academic Press
), pp. 47-72.
23.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty1996The Spivak Reader (ed.
Donna Landry
and
Gerald McLean
;
New Brunswick, NJ: Routledge University Press
).
24.
Young, Pamela Dickey1995b‘Feminist Theology: From Past to Future’, in
Morny Joy
and
Eva K. Neumaier-Dargyay
(eds.), Gender, Genre, and Religion: Feminist Reflections (
Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press for
the Calgary Institute for the Humanities
), pp. 71-82.
