3. When the subject is re-imagined
By employing the norm of turning the subject, theologians can become more cogent at addressing contemporary urgent concerns and can write theology that more astutely advances a just world. Indeed, when the subject suggested here is the one presumed by theologians, then the complexity and nuance of today’s pressing calamities and abuses come more sharply into view as illustrated below.
In their initial phase, liberation theologies focused sustained attention on one form of domination, for example, either classism, racism, heterosexism, anthropocentrism, or sexism but not on several intersecting forms of domination. Today, however, a more adequate understanding of the people requires a clearer analysis of the intersection of several forms of domination, and of how these intersections creates an intensified experience of domination and oppression. For example, Ivone Gebara masterfully analyzes the convergence of poverty, sexism, and ecological devastation as experienced by many Brazilian women as well as women throughout Latin America.[17] Similarly, Silvia Regina de Lima Silva investigates not only classism and sexism but also racism, claiming that the bodily experience of women helps us to understand Jesus Christ.[18] The philosophy of interculturality, used today by many liberation theologians, addresses the convergence of many forms of domination. Relatedly, interculturality foregrounds the historical context of distinct groups of people, and then values how these groups might live together transnationally, not in a spirit of mere toleration, but out of a call to grow precisely by being in an intentional relationship with one another as Raúl Fornet-Betancourt has explained.[19]
Second, to be critically conscious of the people presumed in our theologizing requires a more adequate understanding of the economic global context. The global economic world has embraced neoliberal capitalism so completely that almost all forms of socially responsible capitalism are decidedly quite limited to non-existent. Socially responsible capitalism is distinguished by inviolable restraints that protect the public good. International organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Trade Organization (WTO), safeguard an ever-increasing profit margin for wealthy stakeholders at the expense of everyone else, especially the economically poor and destitute. These organizations have tacitly institutionalized a neoliberal market ideology. In our increasingly globalized economic world, nation-states, both wealthy and poor, have become much more beholden to market interests and far less accountable to their citizenry than mere decades past. Liberation theologies today, as Joerg Rieger has argued, need to pay greater attention to the economic contexts in which we find ourselves when we write theology. The imperialism of economics is part of the air we breathe.[20] Our contexts today demand that liberation theologies be in conversation with economists like Amartya Sen to rethink the nature of the systemic evils that give rise to poverty, famine, and trauma.[21]
Finally, and most importantly, theology can never advocate on behalf of the people if it ignores gender. In recent decades, the eruption of violence against women has increased exponentially. This violence does not erupt without cause. More than ever, transnational, neoliberal economics is re-organizing political power, and, in the process, encouraging the forcible and insidious use of women’s bodies to challenge and discourage whatever as well as whoever resists the rise of neoliberal interests. At the most basic level, this re-organization has increasingly generated the disposability of labor, particularly female labor. For example, women are considered as socially low-valued individuals or as ‘ciudadanas x’ of a denationalized city/region.[22] The term, ‘ciudadanas x,’ recognizes the absence of a state and national power to act on behalf of civil society and its individual members. Today, women increasingly suffer innumerable forms of violence unto death, almost always crimes the state overlooks. Arguably, the condition of dispossession is the condition of women of the two-thirds world, and, according to Judith Butler, is ‘precisely what happens when populations lose their land, their citizenship, their means of livelihood, and become subject to military and legal violence.’[23] Indeed, the systematic killing of women is the killing of innocents and not the killing of enemies. The killing of innocents serves a drive to control by fear, that is, to terrorize the population by creating a public imagination marked by fear. How is theology responding to this growing, gendered tragedy?
If theology fails in turning toward this vulnerable population as privileged among the people presumed in theologizing, then theology fails in its endeavor to advance the reign of God. Althaus-Reid’s caution bears repeating:
As political economic systems evict people so does theology. It is easy… theology has literally been putting people out on the pavements of the church for centuries. Of course, these were the poor. Women in theology are the androcentric ontological representation of poverty: poverty of reason; poverty of spirituality; poverty of independence; poverty of divine gender representation. Systematic Theology also made me and my mother and grandmothers homeless.[24]
Theology in the decades to come will need to address itself to these challenges if it is to remain faithful to its ground-breaking insight, that is, to write theology as if poor and oppressed people mattered.
Notes
[17] I. GEBARA, Out of the Depths: Women’s Experience of Evil and Salvation, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002; I. GEBARA, Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999.
[18] S. R. de LIMA SILVA, ‘Dialogue of Memories: Ways Toward a Black Feminist Christology from Latin America’, in M. P. AQUINO and M. J. ROSADO-NUNES (eds), Feminist Intercultural Theology: Latina Explorations for a Just World, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2007.
[19] R. FORNET-BETANCOURT, Filosofar Para Nuestro Tiempo en Clave Intercultural, Aachen, Germany: Verlag Mainz, 2004.
[20] J. RIEGER, No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009.
[21] A. SEN, Development as Freedom, New York: Knopf, 1999; A. SEN, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, New York: Norton & Company, 2006.
[22] A. SCHMIDT CAMACHO, ‘La Ciudadana X Reglamentando los Derechos de las Mujeres en la Frontera México-Estados Unidos’, in J. E. MONÁRREZ FRAGOSO and M. S. TABUENCA CÓRDOVA (eds), Bordeando la Violencia Contra Las Jujeres en la Frontera Norte de México, Tijuana, B. C., México: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 2007.
[23] J. BUTLER and A. Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013, p. 3.
[24] M. M. ALTHAUS-REID, ‘¿Bién Sonados? The Future of Mystical Connections in Liberation Theology’, Political Theology, 3 (2000), p. 54.
Author
Nancy Pineda-Madrid is Associate Professor of Theology at Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, USA. She is the author of Suffering and Salvation in Ciudad Juárez. She is past president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States, and past vice president of the International Network of Societies of Catholic Theology.
Address: Boston College – STM; 140 Commonwealth Ave.; Chestnut Hill, MA 02467, USA.