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Texttext Text Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift. Årg. 92 (2016) Gendering Genesis, Engendering Difference A Catholic Theological Quest TINA BEATTIE Tina Beattie is professor of Catholic Studies and director of the Digby Stuart Re- search Centre and Catherine of Siena College at the University of Roehampton in London. Her main areas of research are Catholic sacramental theology; gender and psychoanalytic theory; Catholicism and art, and Catholic social teaching. She contributes regularly to the media (radio and television) and to the weekly journal The Tablet. The word “gender” has changed its meaning in to acknowledge.2 Pre-modern western culture the English-speaking world.1 Whereas once it and many non-western cultures even today have was a grammatical term, it is now associated a more fluid understanding of gender than post- with sexual difference, identity, and otherness, in Enlightenment scientific epistemologies are able ways that provoke strong reactions from many to accommodate. religious and cultural conservatives. At the bio- Laqueur pays insufficient attention to theolog- logical level, intersex people are recognized as a ical concepts of gender, but Roman Catholic the- significant minority occupying the spectrum be- ology has traditionally been gendered rather than tween those who are categorized as either male sexed. Sarah Coakley and others argue that con- or female in terms of their chromosomes, hor- cepts of gender had a formative influence on pa- mones, and/or sex organs, while transgender per- tristic theology, so that gender theory and sys- sonalities present a complex plurality of identi- tematic theology owe an inescapable debt to one ties that resist simple categorization as masculine another.3 Coakley goes so far as to argue that: or feminine. Yet as Thomas Laqueur argues, these contest- only systematic theology (of a particular sort) can ed sexual dualisms and essentialisms are a pro- adequately and effectively respond to the rightful duct of modernity, underwritten by scientific critiques that gender studies and political and lib- “evidence” that is more susceptible to the influ- eration theology have laid at its door. And only ence of culture than many scientists are willing gender studies, inversely, and its accompanying political insights, can thus properly re-animate systematic theology for the future.4 1 For more in-depth analysis of the issues referred to in this essay, see Tina Beattie, “The Theological Study of Gender”, 32–52 in The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Theology, Sexuality and Gender (ed. A. Thatcher; Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014); Tina Beattie, 2 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender Theology after Postmodernity: Divining the Void – a from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Lacanian Reading of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Ox- UP, 1990). ford UP, 2013); Tina Beattie, New Catholic Feminism: 3 Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Es- Theology and Theory (London: Routledge, 2006); Ti- say “On the Trinity” (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, na Beattie, God’s Mother, Eve’s Advocate: A Marian 2013). Narrative of Women’s Salvation (London: Continuum, 4 Sarah Coakley, “Is there a Future for Gender and 2002). Theology? On Gender, Contemplation, and the Sys- Gendering Genesis, Engendering Difference 103 In Roman Catholic ecclesiology, the gendered into our understanding of the possibilities and understanding of the Church as Mother, personi- limitations of the text. fied in the Virgin Mary, persisted in various Phyllis Trible’s pioneering scholarship ex- forms from the time of the Pauline epistles until posed the extent to which Christian interpreta- the Second Vatican Council, with an elaborate tions of Genesis have been filtered through the sacramental poetics of nuptial and parental im- lenses of gender in ways that have sustained pa- agery shaping human and divine relationships. triarchal ideologies and sexual hierarchies.7 Zi- After the Council, much of this gendered sacra- ony Zevit is one of several more recent Jewish mentality and ecclesiology was abandoned, only and Christian scholars who have contributed to to be reclaimed by Pope John Paul II, who was this project of gendered textual analysis by influenced by theologian Hans Urs von Bal- bringing their own particular challenges and in- thasar. This has given rise to a movement known sights to bear on the ancient Hebrew texts.8 Such as “theology of the body” (see below), which studies make clear the extent to which Christian continues to fuel deep divisions and disagree- interpretations of Genesis continue to lend divine ments among Roman Catholic theologians. legitimation to a heterosexual social order predi- This essay focuses on Roman Catholic ap- cated upon male authority and female subordina- proaches to issues of gender in the context of dif- tion. As Scott argues, “the male/female opposi- ferent readings of the early chapters of the Book tion” serves to “vindicate political power” by of Genesis. making references to gendered, hierarchical rela- tionships “seem sure and fixed, outside human construction, part of the natural or divine order. … To question or alter any aspect threatens the Gendering Genesis entire system.”9 Sandra Lipsitz Bem, in her 1993 book, The With this in mind, let me turn to “theology of Lenses of Gender, argues that we should look at the body” and its appeal to Genesis 2–3 to sup- rather than through the lenses of gender, in order port a modern, conservative Roman Catholic in- to analyse how our perceptions are shaped by terpretation of the significance of sexual differ- unchallenged assumptions rooted in normative ence. and polarized concepts of sexual difference.5 In a series of papal audiences between 1979 When we follow this advice in reading Genesis, and 1980, John Paul II sought to reanimate the we discover the truth of Joan Scott’s insight that, nuptial and maternal theology of the pre- while we have access to “culturally available conciliar Church through a reclamation of the symbols that evoke multiple (and often contra- sexual significance of the story of creation and dictory) representations,” we also find ourselves the fall in Genesis 2–3.10 This “theology of the confronted by “normative concepts that set forth body” has had a significant influence on official interpretations of the meaning of the symbols, Roman Catholic teachings about sex and gender that attempt to limit and contain their metaphoric since the 1980s. It looks to the story of the crea- possibilities.”6 When we try to read Genesis tion of male and female in Genesis 2 to under- anew, we might find ourselves struggling against write an essentialist theology of sexual differ- constraints that have insinuated themselves deep ence, claiming that the one-flesh union referred to in Genesis 2:24 constitutes the prototype in- tematic Task”, 52–61 in Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 85 (2009), 52 (emphasis in original). 7 Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality 5 Sandra Lipsitz Bem, The Lenses of Gender: Trans- (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978), 72–143. forming the Debate on Sexual Inequality (New Haven: 8 Ziony Zevit, What Really Happened in the Garden of Yale UP, 1993). Eden? (New Haven: Yale UP, 2013). 6 Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical 9 Scott, 75. Analysis”, 61–81 in Culture, Society and Sexuality: A 10 John Paul II, Original Unity of Man and Woman: Reader, 2nd ed. (eds. R. Parker & P. Aggleton; Lon- “Catechesis on the Book of Genesis” (Boston: Paul- don: Routledge, 2007), 71. ine Books and Media, 1981). 104 Tina Beattie tended by God for relationships between the sex- given to another journalist on a previous occa- es – i.e. monogamous, heterosexual marriage. sion: In place of the earlier model of sexual differ- ence as hierarchical, theology of the body posits In Catholic ecclesiology there are two dimensions the idea of complementarity to argue that the to consider: the Petrine dimension, from the apos- sexes are equal but different, and that these dif- tle Peter, and the apostolic college, which is the ferences pervade all aspects of human identity, pastoral activity of the bishops; and the Marian as created and willed by God. In his 1995 “Letter dimension, which is the feminine dimension of the to Women,” written on the occasion of the Unit- Church, and this I have said more than once. I ask myself: who is most important in theology and in ed Nations World Conference on Women in Bei- the mystic of the Church: the apostles or Mary on jing, John Paul II claims that “Womanhood and the day of Pentecost? It is Mary! The Church is a manhood are complementary not only from the woman. She is ‘la Chiesa (in Italian), not ‘il physical and psychological points of view, but Chiesa’ ... and the Church is the spouse of Christ. also from the ontological.’11 Such claims repre- It is a spousal mystery. And in light of this mys- sent a shift in Roman Catholic anthropology – tery you will understand the reason for these two from the predominantly one-sex model described dimensions. The Petrine dimension, which is the by Laqueur, to a two-sex model influenced by bishops, and the Marian dimension, which is the popular science and romantic sexual stereotypes. maternity of the Church ... but in the most pro- Mary Anne Case has argued persuasively that found sense. A Church does not exist without this sexual complementarity is a twentieth-century feminine dimension, because she herself is femi- nine.13 theological innovation.12 Advocates of theology of the body promote it as Roman Catholicism’s This informal response is a succinct summary of solution to the sexual crises of late modernity, many of the claims of theology of the body and but beneath its ostensibly positive representation its corresponding ecclesiology. It makes clear the of married sexual procreative love, it is rooted in incoherence of modern Catholic teaching with resistance to feminism, including women’s re- regard to gender and sexual difference, which productive rights, and to homosexual rights, results from grafting an essentialist and dualistic while also seeking to defend the essential mascu- model of sexual ontology onto the gender fluidi- linity of the sacramental priesthood by appealing ty of traditional ecclesiology.
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