She Who Imagines
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SHE WHO IMAGINES She Who Imagines Feminist Theological Aesthetics Edited by Laurie Cassidy Maureen H. O’Connell Foreword by Elizabeth A. Johnson A Michael Glazier Book LITURGICAL PRESS Collegeville, Minnesota www.litpress.org A Michael Glazier Book published by Liturgical Press © 2012 by Order of Saint Benedict, Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, microfilm, microfiche, mechanical recording, photocopying, translation, or by any other means, known or yet unknown, for any purpose except brief quotations in reviews, without the previous written permission of Liturgical Press, Saint John’s Abbey, PO Box 7500, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321-7500. Printed in the United States of America. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data She who imagines : feminist theological aesthetics / edited by Laurie Cassidy, Maureen H. O’Connell. p. cm. “A Michael Glazier book.” ISBN 978-0-8146-8027-8 — ISBN 978-0-8146-8028-5 (e-book) 1. Aesthetics—Religious aspects. 2. Feminist theology. 3. Feminine beauty (Aesthetics) I. Cassidy, Laurie M. II. O’Connell, Maureen H. BL65.A4S535 2012 230.082—dc23 2012029421 Contents Foreword vii Elizabeth A. Johnson Introduction ix Laurie Cassidy and Maureen H. O’Connell Acknowledgments xix Part 1: She Who Imagines For the Beauty of the Earth: Women, Sacramentality, and Justice 3 Susan A. Ross Theological Aesthetics and the Encounter with Tonantzin Guadalupe 17 Jeanette Rodriguez Kollwitz: The Beauty and Brutality of the Pietà 37 Jayme M. Hennessy Contemplating the Landscapes of Motherhood: The Discovery of Beauty in a Place We Thought We Knew 53 Colleen Mary Carpenter Part 2: She Who Is Imagined The Critical Aesthetics of Race 73 M. Shawn Copeland The Jennifer Effect: Race, Religion, and the Body 87 Michelle A. Gonzalez Picturing Suffering: The Moral Dilemmas in Gazing at Photographs of Human Anguish 103 Laurie Cassidy v vi Contents AIDS, Accountability, and Activism: The Beauty of Sue Williamson’s Resistance Art 125 Kimberly Vrudny Part 3: She Who Imagines Picturing Paradise: Imagination, Beauty, and Women’s Lives in a Peruvian Shantytown 145 Rebecca Berru Davis A Harsh and Dreadful Beauty: The Aesthetic Dimension of Dorothy Day’s Ethics 161 Maureen H. O’Connell Being Immaculate: Images of Oppression and Emancipation 181 Mary Ann Zimmer The Feminine Face of God Is My Face: On the Empowerment of Female Self-Portraiture 205 Susie Paulik Babka List of Contributors 225 Elizabeth A. Johnson Foreword In her essay “On Beauty and Being Just,” Elaine Scarry describes discovering the mistake she had made in ruling out palm trees as ob- jects of beauty. One day under the canopy of a high palm, she realized that a pair of eyes was looking back down at her. A large owl, plumage interwoven with the fronds, was resting face-down over the sixty-foot column of air. Typical of its kind, the bird had sought out this inverted nest at dawn: “It was as though she had stopped to sleep in midair, letting the giant arcing palm leaves take over the work of her wings, so that she could soar there in the shaded sunshine until night came and she was ready to fly on her own again.”1 New appreciation replaced the earlier dismissive stance Scarry attributes to “failed generosity.” Now she sees the featherlike tree capturing and scattering sunlight in cresting waves of aqua, green, and yellow, running its fingers up and down its own piano keys in the wind while its leaves stay perfectly parallel. Beautiful! In my imagination, this incident provides an evocative symbol for reading She Who Imagines. Calling into question the overlooked reality of women as creators and interpreters of beauty, it opens new dimensions in the developing area of theological aesthetics as well as the traditional field of theological anthropology.A nd surprises await. Introducing the issue of gender makes several lacunae apparent. To date, much recent discussion in theological aesthetics either neglects women and their work or describes them in ideal terms to which few, if any, actual women correspond. While theological anthropology has made efforts to rehabilitate the sacredness of the body, long identified with women and the earth and opposed to the supposed rational mas- culine spirit, the body remains a contested site of meaning in the overall 1. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 20. vii viii Foreword structure of theology. All the while, pop culture promotes the ideal of a certain type of female body preferred for its youth, shapeliness, race, and sex appeal. In the face of this mix of problems, this collection of essays repre- sents the wisdom of practicing scholars who challenge the exclusion and false definitions while constructing capacious ideas that discover beauty in unexpected places. Drawing mainly on the visual arts, both religious and secular—painting, photography, portraiture, craftwork— their proposals join beauty to truth and, in a richly defining way, to the practice of justice. Toward that end, the book’s tripartite subdivision is inspired. “SHE Who Imagines” presents women as active creators of and theorizers about rather than passive recipients of definitions of beauty. “She Who IS IMAGINED” challenges racist and sexist conventions and their at- tendant violence toward women in religious and pop art. “She Who IMAGINES” returns to women’s active roles in picturing and enacting possibilities of beauty that empower women’s flourishing in and beyond debilitating situations. In a variety of ways, all the essays link women’s definitions of beauty with experiences of suffering and hence with the yearning for justice. All clearly prize resistance to degradation as an essential element of thought. While focused on individual instances of women as agents making and interpreting beauty, contributors to this section see this action connected to wider communities: the family, local community, the whole world. Since this discussion is concerned overall with relationship to divine revelation about humanity, it moves in a dimension that honors religious experience and investigates with theological interest. Amid the suffering of life, at times beyond endurance, beauty is life- saving, “a plank amid the waves of the sea,” as Augustine wrote. With its diverse instances of women creating beauty, imagining its meaning, analyzing how it functions, and resisting its distortions, this book floats as such a life-affirming plank. Its contribution to theology lies in the way it knocks on the door of theological aesthetics, showing the enrichment that could ensue if it opened to include women, their imaginative work of critique and their constructive work of interpretation. More broadly, it takes its place in the growing body of work that contributes to the struggle for human dignity and spiritual self-determination for women that is a hallmark of our time. Read it with anticipation of bracing cri- tique and constructive ideas, especially regarding the linkage of beauty with justice. And keep your eye out for the owl. Laurie Cassidy and Maureen H. O’Connell Introduction “The world will be saved by beauty.” Dostoyevsky, The Idiot Dostoyevsky’s quote bespeaks the paradox for feminist theology in understanding beauty. How does beauty save women and young girls from violence, domination, and oppression? In contemporary American culture “beauty” is often associated with female physical appearance and judged in relationship to heterosexual standards of sexual attrac- tiveness. Contemplating the global status of women, in which women and girls make up 70 percent of the world’s poor, and looking into our own lives, we find the bitter consequences of these idealized notions of beauty.1 The omnipresence of pornography in popular culture and the 1. “Globally, 1 in 3 women will experience some type of domestic violence. There is little difference between poor and rich countries on this measure.” For these statistics and more on the status of women worldwide, see http://worldsavvy. org/monitor/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=548&Itemid=977 (accessed December 28, 2011). The Millennium Project describes violence against women as one of the global challenges facing humanity: “Violence against women is the largest war today, as measured by death and casualties per year. While the proportion of women exposed to physical violence in their lifetime ranges from 12% to 59%, a function of region and culture, sexual assaults remain one of the most underreported crimes worldwide, continuing to be perpetrated with impunity.” See http://www.millennium-project.org/millennium/Global_Challenges/chall-11. html (accessed December 28, 2011). Another impact for women of these oppressive notions of beauty is in the rise in women and girls electing to surgically augment bodily appearance. The number of breast implant surgeries for women and girls has tripled since 1997, from one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand in ix x Introduction proliferation of global sex trafficking of women and girls reveal a per- verse connection between sexist visions of women’s beauty and wom- en’s subjugation.2 Naomi Wolfe’s now-classic The Beauty Myth draws the undeniable connection between cultural construction of beauty and women’s continued political, economic, and social disenfranchisement, noting that “the beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men’s institutions and institutional power.”3 Women do not fare much better in religious contexts when it comes to beauty. In the Catholic tradition, out of which contributors to this volume write, women’s beauty is too often construed in narrow ways, either as something to be feared and denounced as evidenced by cen- turies of denigrating the female body as an invitation to grave sin, or as something to be understood vis-à-vis its relationship to masculinity as is the case in contemporary theologies of divinely intended gender complementarity.