Abstract
The female body whether it be child or woman has in the past and in the present struggled for human equality on multiple levels. There have of course been changes but the socio-political boundaries still shift this way and that under the weight of unequal power relations between genders within the ever unfolding fields of patriarchy. Sometimes it seems there are moments of clarity of achieved equality but more often than not the reality is hidden under a pseudo agenda of token offerings. This is a battle that continues within the fields of economics, politics and the language that defines the status quo of the feminine. Feminist liberation theologies as we know begin with the experience of women and as women expand their experience and education through the worlds of politics, economics in academia, the church and other institutions so does the awareness of their subjugation to heteronormative values both past and present. Art has a way of expressing something that the word cannot, this is the language of feeling and emotion. Emotions and feelings have been historically allocated materially to women as a chaotic assemblage that does not fit into the rational world of men. I argue that feminist art describes powerfully the effect patriarchal power has had over female bodies through both personal and collective experiences and that is without doubt a political matter.
Introduction
In this article I will explore the way the developing body of the child and the bodies of woman are affected by what is done to them through the unequal power relations of patriarchy. I will illustrate how my body speaks through that damage within the process of those unfolding experiences from childhood to womanhood in both colour and form. Through this interwoven plurality of language I hope to demonstrate how the transitional process of painting and feminist liberation theologies can become a liberating tool. This will involve looking at the personal which can never be separated from the political and ultimately will always be entangled within both the economic and political system in which we live. Audrey Lorde said, ‘we can never dismantle the masters’ house with the masters tools’, 1 this is where I begin with a different tool the creative tool of the artist.
Discovering the Artist Language/Tool to Speak
I discovered this tool when I awoke to a realization that all was not well in my world at the age of 33. Not wanting to dwell too much on this but wanting to explain that my journey had taken me to a place where I was to rediscover my Christian faith held in childhood. This experience of going back to Church became a catalyst which triggered my childhood experiences to resurface. Church proved to be a difficult environment for me as a single parent and as a woman, although at first, I felt empowered because of the recent reawakening to my faith, but I quickly became disempowered because of the doctrine and mixed messages that the Church doctrine taught. My reawakening to God did not match what the Church taught. After two years of attending Church and trying to make some sense of this community and what it believed compared with my own experience I painted a picture that expressed my experience of God. I had not used acrylic paint before so this was my first acrylic painting and I had no idea what it would end up looking like but this was a creative impulse I felt I could not ignore. I painted energetically for a few days in various shades of blue with white, no idea of what form it would take but I painted with a sense of urgency. I could feel and hear the energy as I painted, I then proudly presented it to the Anglican community in which I worshipped, I was like a child showing her parents I was so proud but they did not get it. I told them that this was how I felt inside about God.
The vicar hung this painting on the wall in the vestibule after telling the congregation that this was a spiritual painting and that I was filled with the Holy Spirit. I was never really accepted by the community because of my difference, I did not know my place but I wanted desperately to belong. I always felt very heavy after each service and went home feeling worse than I had when I arrived. I spent a lot of time upset and crying and wanting to be prayed for to make everything feel better. It was eventually suggested that perhaps I needed counselling. During the 14 month period I attended these sessions I spent the time talking and drawing, with crayons, my way through my feelings and emotions in relation to my childhood experiences. It was toward the end of counselling that I produced six oil paintings each one told the unfolding narrative of my body and my experience in the world both as a female child and woman.
It dawned on me, much later, that each painting reflected the same process as that first acrylic painting, they were all giving birth to that same impulsive burst of creative energy. I had attended Art College as a young student in the early 1970s but had never painted like this. These six paintings expressed for me the divine which manifested within as energy enabling the process of healing to begin. As each painting revealed a different aspect of my experience I became energetically charged. This active energetic process of painting was tinged with a sense of urgency and drama which was also fused with my emotional world.
This deep exploration of my embodied life changed me and made me question everything at a deeper level, questions about the duality of thinking and practice, do we really listen to the child’s voice or need and do we value difference, why are women treated differently to men and so on. It was this questioning that took me into higher education, an access course and then onto University. Even in the early part of this educational process my hunger was not satisfied until I met feminist liberation theologies. It was at this point I was able to give a voice to those paintings I had painted six years earlier and everything began to make more sense.
Art that Speaks through Feminist Theological Discourses
As an undergraduate in Theology/Philosophy I was given an opportunity to exhibit the six paintings that had been born out of my earlier therapeutic process. This was an extremely vulnerable time for me and I was deeply affected by the responses of male students and lecturers alike because they were extraordinarily angry and denigrating. This response immediately reminded me of my experience of Church and of the world about me. The general response of most of the female students and lecturers was very different in that they wanted to explore, talk and listen to what I had to say about my work and most important of all they could relate to the images. I realized at this point that my paintings were speaking to male and female people, in very diverse ways. At this stage of my journey, through feminist theology the seeds for a verbal language for my images were being planted. Lisa Isherwood’s multifaceted Christology really spoke to me as did her discourse on the dangers of the ‘impotency of metaphysics… to Christian theology’ 2 and her suggestion that maybe the early Christian writers had been mis-interpreted – ‘It seems entirely possible that what the early Christian writers were conveying about incarnation was not a once-and-for-all-event but the knowledge that unless we are fully in our bodies, we will never be able to explore our divinity’. 3 It was here that I started making theological connections with my art which I began to experience anew. A narrative of understanding was being released and I started seeing the language of my own containment within the images of my six therapeutic paintings. Isherwood’s words of ‘spiralling incarnation being the diverse experience of women within feminist liberation theological discourse that involves itself with the many and diverse struggles for women’s dignity, equality and humanity’ 4 made a huge impact on me. This enabled me to realize that even through the pain of my experience, I could see the movement and release within my paintings that showed not only obvious violation but were also celebratory and transformative in their form. This demonstrates that however diverse the experience our bodies are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’. 5
Carter Heyward’s ‘mutuality in relationship’ along with her thoughts and writings on dunamis 6 as being the raw erotic energy of the Divine, that enables us to god the earth as co-creators, helped me understand that I was part of the body of Christ within the cosmos. As my earlier experience had suggested, dunamis expanded the picture showing me that the Church was only one part of a much bigger picture. Heyward suggested that we needed to reimage Jesus as a way forward to be more inclusive. ‘Re-imaging may mean letting go of tradition, one such letting go is realising that Jesus only matters if he was human and if we view his Incarnation as a relational experience’. 7 This idea of experiential mutual vulnerability, made me think about my humanity as a woman and that along a broader spectrum I realized that I was very much part of a Christological community or as Rita Brock calls it Christa community, I was part of a ‘community of wounded healers’, 8 which included women and others on the margins of many different global societies and traditions. The concepts of dunamis and wounded healers enabled me to bring my past experience into the present in a revelatory way, bringing me to consciousness and connecting me to that first acrylic painting of Figure 1: ‘In the Depths of the Divine’. I was now able to put these experiences within a theological frame that were part of the bigger Christa community. The language of my colonized body was changing, I had begun a process of being set free because I had begun to find my voice and my art was part of my theological method.
In the Depths of the Divine, 1992.
‘Choices’, 1993.
‘Rising’, 1993.
‘Child Christa’, 1993.
‘Oppression, Suppression, Repression’, 1993.
‘Mother’, 1994.
‘New Beginnings’, 1994.
I found the fourth element, of creative actualization, in Schüssler Fiorenza’s hermeneutics of suspicion 9 particularly useful for my images. However, I would not have been able to come to a constructive use of creative actualization had I not reflected on her first three elements, suspicion, proclamation and remembrance, in relation to the Church and my own body within that community. It was understanding her examination of biblical texts and their patriarchal language, which had made women invisible historically, that highlighted my own embodied history. Once this is located, she expands spaces to be filled with women’s presence and discourse making them visible in order to re-create and re-image their narrative and presence. In this theoretical practice Schüssler Fiorenza says it is important to reclaim Christian heritage for women because of their power, because of their presence that has gone largely unnoticed or has not been respected. She is not alone in this as the creator of ‘The Dinner Party’, artist Judy Chicago, tells us that ‘…women’s heritage is their power’. 10
I see the correlation between their words and the narrative of my body which had laboured under patriarchal restraints. I began to realize my absence, and the lack of presence to myself let alone to others. Now I see that my paintings made me painfully present, in fact they were screaming out to be noticed because of their content. I later discovered that this is what Schüssler Fiorenza would call creative actualization. 11 Her intention is to put women literally back into the picture in a creative way by the use of imagination. Schüssler Fiorenza does this by not only re-creating biblical narrative within the text for women, she also acknowledges this process through the various art forms and ritual of other women. The act of painting did indeed create a liturgical space that told my story that actually brought to life what had for me been lost in translation through the various words and actions of patriarchal power. This process of creating the art work was a co-redemptive liturgical praxis. I had put myself back into the picture, this was the beginning of re-imaging and re-creating of my life – in my daily life I was well into Schüssler Fiorenza’s hermeneutical cycle.
‘The Secret’ which I also call the child Christa is the third image I painted in the series of this unfolding process. That particular image is significant, because, it is the wellspring of my first conscious sexual/spiritual experience. As the painting of my unfolding continued the experience of loss and woundedness circulated and coursed through my body and the healing process had begun. During this period of painting I felt I was being unfolded and revealed. My journey had been one of sexual, physical, verbal and emotional violence.
Witnessing Each Other Rise
The process of painting and being seen are integral, the meeting of the artist and spectator is a relationship, art and performance do not exist outside the space of the artist and spectator. 12 Both need each other to be present in the creation of the art and in this process the observer can be emotionally moved. This is the space for realizing a sense of mutual relationship even across time and space. It could be seen as communion and prayer or the unfolding of a Christa community. I think that art or any creative art form is needed to express what is intrinsically important to women’s subjectivity because it translates what Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray call jouissance the sexuality of woman which is lost in translation within phallocentric language and monotheism. Both Kristeva and Irigaray use this term in relation to women’s creative value, energy and power. 13
Feminist liberation theologies enable the passionate language of visual art as another way to ‘hear women into speech’. 14 The foundations of this valuable methodological praxis have been built on the voices and action of feminist liberation theologians such as Letty Russell, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Carter Heyward, Beverly Wildung Harrison, Valerie Saiving, Katy Cannon, Mary Hunt, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Lisa Isherwood, Marcella Althaus-Reid. The list is nowhere near exhaustive. Not only have feminist liberation theologies enabled and empowered me to interweave my art with the language of theological experience but I continue to fill my flesh by feasting on their words of wisdom. What I am so mindful of now through engaging with feminist theologies, as with my art, is that what happens to our bodies is important in terms of what we take into them, what is said to us, how we are treated and what is done to us. These attitudes and ideas all impact on human beings and affect the subjectivity of girls and women particularly in theology for my research, where negative attitudes have damaged females in the name of the divine.
As my research had continued for my recent doctoral thesis I realized that I did not stand alone in my experience. Many women have suffered similar experiences 15 to mine and this includes young adolescent women with problems that stem from girlhood. Girlhood seems to be ignored as a category, even with feminist and liberation theologies, yet girls in girlhood desperately need nurturing into healthy adolescence and beyond. The cost of the socialization of gender conformity within our patriarchal world is high. Rosemary Radford Ruether points out, ‘that adolescent girls pay a heavy price to learn these lessons of silence and submission. Eating disorders, cutting, depression, even suicide are some of the extreme ways that the stresses of conformity express themselves.’ 16 The silenced voice of the girl child within the categorized conformity of stereotypical gender norms is the legacy that they are born into, the questioning of which takes its toll at different experiential stages of life. There needs to be another starting point to create another way of expressing these anxieties. I personally have found that writing is not enough to express my thoughts and feelings. Painting becomes another way to speak and express what I am thinking theologically.
During Easter 2004 I completed two watercolour paintings which I named ‘Awaiting Resurrection’ and ‘She is Risen’. Awaiting Resurrection was painted out of a feeling of melancholy and as the paint started to take form a volcanic resonance of anger and frustration took place within me, I was remembering the struggle to survive to live as a voiceless child and also as a woman, not knowing what to say or even how to speak in a way that would be heard, but, equally knowing that I had something to say. This feeling, this emotion that had become so physical was waiting in my gut, waiting to speak out, this something that held the possibility of becoming more. This image demonstrates not only my own experience but potentially, the experience of other women who I have read or met, all of which seem to tell a similar story. These include women both within and outside of the Church, in the west and beyond, who labour under oppressive situations both personally and politically and are indeed awaiting resurrection into equal participation. However, it is not a passive waiting it is full of loss pain and anger as the image shows the female form has a fiery furnace in her solar plexus and the genital area of her body. What I also felt whilst painting this image was a sense of imminent explosion that spoke to me with the hope of infinite possibilities beyond the control of patriarchal constraints. This impulse again was a need to break out into life vigorously in the freedom that the promise of abundant life has to offer. There was a sense of death and resurrection for me. The body as a revelatory space for such paradoxes is not new to the Christian journey. This image marked another beginning, a new way for my art to be seen as part of a feminist theological discourse because again it is located in my embodied experience. Feminist body theology takes seriously the experiences and conditions of ‘the bodies’ of women.
‘Awaiting Resurrection’, 2004.
‘She is Risen’, 2004.
Conclusion
The inter-relationality between all of these images is that they reflect a journey of growing consciousness. There are moments of being stuck but painting along with the language of feminist liberation theologies allows the flow to continue. Although the Child Christa painting has its starting point in a place of secrecy and holds a position of disparity within an adult/child power sexual relationship it was also the beginning of the journey that has progressively unfolded into the present which helps to explain that change takes time and holds within it a learning process. The Christic figure of the female child (me) whose journey because of both my femaleness and sexual vulnerability has been one of rough terrain and one that was difficult at times to make sense of. It has been however transformed after much questioning, resisting, and shouting in a dissenting voice through my experience and learning from those experiences. Entering into academic education enabled me to question and reject the social reality of the heteropatriarchal order, which, was forever battering against my body, reinforcing what I had learned through my experience in the world as a female child and woman. It is because of this that I realized there was another story to tell. This follows a feminist theological praxis where other dissenting voices speak and are awaiting to be heard. The images I paint are a political response to that early experience in childhood and my developing womanhood. With confidence and a better understanding of my internal world and journey, I am now putting woman back into the picture and rewriting her story from the beginning through these images which evolved within and so are situated in the body, my body as a metaphor of my own divine cosmic Christic becoming.
‘Sophia Wisdom’, 2007.
Isherwood says, ‘we need to keep insisting on the bodies of women as a starting point for Christological reflection and this raises many interesting questions in relation to sex, sexuality and gender.’ 17 Woman’s experience is seeded in childhood and gathers her constructed identity of the feminine as she journeys, to her detriment, into womanhood, like a stone that gathers moss, the moss of the masculinized form of heteronormativity which imposes fixed definitions of what it is to be female in the world. This disrupts the full potential of the creative flow within the feminine. I have developed out of other paintings the idea of a free flowing cosmic Christa that enters the cosmic story. The cosmic story tells us something otherwise and has the potential for multiple possibilities of becoming woman. The free flowing cosmic Christa takes on many forms because of the diversity of woman’s experience. She freely expresses who she is as woman breaking free of the constraints that have defined her. The intuitive Christa, Sophia celebrates other ways of knowing and begins in another place from her internal world which she has grown from her experience. She has always known but has been held back and hidden in the background of Christian history. I continue to look and create models for the girl child within my research that will make her less vulnerable to patriarchal systems while not losing the strength of mutual vulnerability of which theologians speak.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
1.
Lorde A (1984) Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Berkley, CA: The Crossing Press, 112.
2.
Isherwood L (1999) Liberating Christ Exploring Christologies of Contemporary Liberation Movements. Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 145.
3.
Isherwood L (1999) Liberating Christ Exploring Christologies of Contemporary Liberation Movements. Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, 144.
4.
Isherwood L (2004) The embodiment of feminist liberation theology: spiralling of incarnation. In: Clack B (ed.) Embodying Feminist Liberation Theologies: A Special Edition of The Journal of Feminist Theology, BISFT 12(2): 154.
5.
Psalm 139: 14.
6.
Heyward C (1982) The Redemption of God: A Theology of Mutual Relationship. Lanham, MD: University Press America, 41.
7.
Heyward C (1982) The Redemption of God: A Theology of Mutual Relationship. Lanham, MD: University Press America, 31.
8.
Nakashima Brock R (1991) Journeys by Heart: A Christology of Erotic Power. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 71–88.
9.
Schüssler Fiorenza E (1983) In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. London: SCM Press, 32.
10.
Chicago J (1979) The Dinner Party: A Symbol of Our Heritage. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 246–49.
11.
Schüssler Fiorenza E (1995) Bread Not Stone: the Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation, 10th Anniversary Edition. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, xx.
12.
Adler J (2002) Offering of the Conscious Body: The Discipline of Authentic Movement. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 34.
13.
See for e.g. Kristeva J (1984) Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press; and Irigaray L (1992) Elemental Passions. London: The Athlone Press.
14.
Morton N (1985) The Journey is Home. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 205.
15.
16.
Rosemary Radford Ruether in Grinenko Baker D (2005) Girlfriend Theology: God Talk With Young Women. Cleveland, OH: The Pilgrim Press, vii.
17.
Isherwood L (2007) Christology. In: Althaus-Reid M, Isherwood L (eds) Controversies in Feminist Theologies: Controversies Contextual Theology. London: SCM Press, 101.