One place to start with Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s work Rhetoric and Ethics: The Politics of Biblical Studies is at the beginning. In her preface to the text, she defines a number of key terms to her project as well as her goal to “re-envision biblical studies as a theory and practice of justice” (Schüssler Fiorenza ix). Among the definitions present I find two to be particularly important to my understanding both of the direction forward within the discipline and of one of the largest hurdles along the way: ‘kyriarchy/kyriocentric’ and ‘wo/men’ (and ‘wo/man’ by extension). (Although I find problems in Schüssler Fiorenza’s use of ‘wo/men’ particularly, and ‘kyriarchy’ infrequently, it should be noted that I not only find ‘kyriarchy’ as a concept to be extremely useful, but Schüssler Fiorenza’s word ‘scientistic’ as well. It perfectly articulates the use of “scientific” modes of thinking within the institutionalization and production of knowledge that Michel Foucault identifies as an apparatus of power; combined with ‘kyriarchy,’ ’scientistic’ provides us with some simplistic vocabulary that otherwise is lacking in Foucault’s explanation of these processes.) Schüssler Fiorenza identifies her view of each term clearly; ‘kyriarchy’ is meant to “underscore . . . that domination is not simply a matter of patriarchal, gender-based dualism, but of . . . [the interstructures] of domination . . . such as racism, poverty, heterosexism and colonialism” (ix), while wo/men addresses the “instability of the term” (ix) and is intended for usage “in an inclusive way” (ix) that “is often equivalent to ‘people’” (ix). Since I, too, feel that we overlook the promise that biblical/religious studies holds as a transformative force in questioning present and past kyriarchal practices and ideologies, I am also on board with the heurminutical/epistemic shift that she proposes – to “reclaim the public space of the ekklesia as the arena of biblical and religious studies” (11).

But who are we fighting for ‘radical equality’ for? Who are we including in (excluding from) the fruits of this re-visioning and restructuring of the academic-religious contexts and methods within which and through which we read the Bible/religious texts? To more fully understand the “silencing, marginalization, and exploitation” (8) that Schüssler Fiorenza herself engages in, we must bring her discussion of ‘kyriarchy’ and ‘wo/men’ under closer scrutiny, as well as Schüssler Fiorenza’s later discussion of Galatians 3:28.

Initially, Schüssler Fiorenza hits on one of the most powerful features of her newly designed/introduced analytic. The neologism kyriarchy-kyriocentrism can allow the critical deconstruction of Western binaries (5) in a way that avoids the common pitfall of many other methods of articulating power dynamics, which “unwittingly re-inscribe [existing binaries/dualisms] through [their] cultural gender analysis” (5). She goes on to add: “it allows one to understand gender not just as an ideological concept but as an ever-shifting position and social formation constituted by structures of domination and networks of power” (5; emphasis added). Despite this great start, however, she quickly becomes imbricated in the very system that she attempts to overthrow with development of the term ‘kyriarchy;’ her inculsivity breaks down as she outlines what ‘wo/men’ means (to her). While kyriarchy represents a “broader range of oppressions” (5) in their interlocking structural context, ‘wo/men’ is utilized “as inclusive of men, s/he as inclusive of he, and fe/male as inclusive of male . . . seek[ing] to signify that the term wo/men has a meaning equivalent to that of people” (6). Here lies the crux of the problem. Weren’t we attempting to subvert existing binaries and dualisms (specifically those of gender) with the use of kyriarchy? Didn’t Schüssler Fiorenza herself recognize that gender should in essence be a ‘moving target,’ fluid and unstable in part to make it an inclusive concept?

It seems that while Schüssler Fiorenza recognizes the constructed nature of gender as a method of categorization, she fails to see it in practice; there are men and there are women walking around in the world, comprising the overarching category ‘people,’ but gender-variance lacks physical form – and hence, the need to be included in her linguistic representation of ‘people’ (where have all the gender-variant people gone?). She falls into a similar trap when discussion Galatians 3:28. Verses 26-28 read:

“For you are all children of God / For as many as were baptized into Christ / have put on Christ / There is [valid] neither Jew nor Greek / There is neither slave nor free / There is no male and female / For you are all one” (154).

In reading this formulation, it is highly conceivable to interpret the Galatians 3:26-28 baptismal formula as rejecting all structures of domination. Thus the kyriocentric language of Galatians would here be translated, according to Schüssler Fiorenza, to mean: “neither Jewish nor Greek wo/men, neither slave nor freeborn wo/men, neither husband and wife” (156). If we assume that Krister Stendahl is correct in suggesting that Galatians 3:28 is an allusion to Genesis 1:27 and procreation/marriage rather than to the myth of the primordial androgyne, this would at least seem a slightly more logical translation. However, given Schüssler Fiorenza’s awareness of “language as a form of power” (ix) and her understanding of this passage as subverting all structures of domination, how is the use of the gendered ‘husband and wife’ justified? Here again, it is only in a world where gender-variance is not actually included in the physical world of ‘all people’ that ‘husband and wife’ works as synonymous for the breakdown of all “biological gender divisions” (155) through baptism. Language does function as a form of power, and for Schüssler Fiorenza’s neologism ‘kyriarchy’ to truly work in the way that she earlier outlines, it is necessary for us not only to understand that the gender-variance present in the term ‘kyriarchy’ must be carried out to its fullest extent in the language we use, but that not doing so also does violence to those subjects we disembody.

Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. Rhetoric and Ethics: The Politics of Biblical Studies. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999.

This blog got started when Kate and I read an essay by Annette Kolodny, entitled “Dancing Through the Minefield.” We were both struck by the following statement:

The (usually male) reader who, both by experience and by reading, has never made acquaintance with those [unique literary traditions and sex-related] contexts — historically, the lying-in room, the parlor, the nursery, the kitchen, the laundry, and so on — will necessarily lack the capacity to fully interpret the dialogue or action embedded therein; for, as every good novelist knows, the meaning of any character’s action or statement is inescapably a function of the specific situation in which it is embedded. Virginia Woolf therefore quite properly anticipated the male reader’s disposition to write off what he could not understand, abandoning women’s writings as offering “not merely a difference of view, but a view that is weak, or trivial, or sentimental because it differs from his own.”

Sitting together, we exclaimed over how well it summed up what we had wished to tell people time and again. Upon reading Mrs. Dalloway in class and having to defend the story of a woman’s ordinary day, I wanted to say just this to my (male) detractors; I wanted to point out to them that their world view was necessarily different from mine simply due to the fact that I have been categorized as “woman,” with all its attendant duties and expectations, from the moment of my birth.

This is not to say that men do not have the capacity to understand a feminine view — quite the opposite. Women have been taught to understand a male view for time immemorial, in the ivory towers of this world. It is not to say that the female view ought to be privileged above the male, though there would be a poetic justice in that, after three thousand years. Instead, it is to say that men have the obligation to attempt to understand women’s writers and women’s concerns, and that we must recognize that as academics we do not exist in a genderless vacuum.

There are other important issues tied up in this too. Kate and I are classicists; we exist in a vacuum, all right, and that’s a vacuum in which there are no women. Medea, Electra, Helen, Antigone, Dido — these are the women we find in the classics. Occasionally a philosopher has a dialogue with a hetaera, a high-class prostitute, and that’s about the extent of our knowledge of a woman who might possibly have been a real person (and even then, a prostitute and a philosopher discussing the world was likely a rhetorical strategy). Historical women, like Cleopatra and Clodia Metelli, are reviled; the ones for whom the evidence is less biased, like Tullia (daughter of Cicero), are largely absent from scholarly work. In archaeological digs, women’s relics have been ignored, packed away in boxes because they are “insignificant.”

But the study of classics is important, and not only for old white men. I believe (and here I’m definitely not speaking for Kate; I have no idea how she feels on this issue) that one must understand the dominant culture before one can fight it. In certain circles, the circles that are often reviled by feminists as “academented ivory towers,” that means understanding classics. The Western canon that today includes so few women was created on a foundation of classical education. What’s more, the Roman empire provides an eerie foreshadowing of the modern U.S.A. (see Kate’s post on the Quiverfull movement). As Santayana said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

I hope we can remember it, and effect positive change using the lessons we learn. I hope we can somehow create not a feminist poetics but a female poetics, and also a female history, one which does not attempt to artificially inflate women’s influence on politics nor marginalize them but instead redefine, to some extent, what is important about history — what is worth our notice. Something that can stand along side men’s history and the male poetics that has historically been our outlook on literature. Something that, someday, will be unnecessary, as we move towards a holistic view of humanity.