N. T. Wrong Targets Biblical Feminism

I almost entitled this post, "N. T. Wrong Is a biblical feminist (because Anne Carson is also one of his 'Favourite' poets)." But I realized we might get into discussions about the proper spelling of favorite and whether eats shoots & leaves is really on target at all for the conversation. That realization (which my British English teacher in high school insists is a "realisation") is not too far from what N. T. is asking. Who gets to define these things? Are we stuck with Illinois Republican Representative Henry Hyde's decade-plus-old statement as he sought to target President Bill Clinton for impeachment? I guess you have to list and litanize and catalogue every possible circumstance to have standards for due process. It's like pornography. You know it when you see it.

N. T., Thank you for asking me in such kind and thoughtful ways:

" 'the reclaim-the-Bible type of feminist criticism' . . . feminist

What do you mean by this?"

How can I give you a rigid, straightforward answer? What if instead I replied, "What do you mean by sexism?" Or by Aristotle's phallogocentric binary? Or by what a feminist biblical scholar has called "perpetrators of androcentric patriarchy [which certainly] applies to feminists as well, especially to those who by race and class are caught in the double web of being both oppressed and oppressor"?

If I only replied to you that way, then I might only be playing the postmodernism game of winning against modernism. (The death of postmodernism comes when modernism dies. Pomo depends on modernism. The leech cannot survive except as a parasite. Why would it?)

But feminisms tend not to be dependent (entirely) on bad men or on oppression by the world of men. Translation, by analogy, does not entirely depend on what the "original" text says or on what the "author" intended once upon a time. So we're closing in on the "target" as if stalking and hunting something wild. I'm playing with you.

"Simply put," bell hooks defines feminism in contrast to sexism. Black men, likewise, can and do define themselves in relation to sexism too. Nancy Mairs says best why feminisms are not a binary, with her ironic feminist binary; notice her NOT: Aristotle's binary "is not women’s language, since women, for a variety of reasons, live in a polymorphic rather than a dimorphic world, a world in which the differentiation of self from other may never completely take place, in which multiple selves may engage multiply with the multiple desires of the creatures in it." I've complained that (we) feminists have to "undefine definition as something more than mere opposition and binary." This has implications for blogging and essaying and publication in biblical journals, suggests Alice Walker. And biblical scholar Carolyn Osiek has outlined biblical feminismS, at least five of them, punctuating her whole list with her own subjective perspective, another alternative(?).

Maybe an initial analogy is simpler. Sometimes I ask the ESL teachers I work with to define the "letter A" in English. They protest further, "What do you mean by..." So I try to put a bulls-eye on the target: "Okay, how do you describe the 'shape' of the 'letter a'." I'm trying to get them to essentialize (or essentialise) something that they are long-time insiders to. Something that many of their students, even adults who have never had the 'English letter A' in language, may struggle with when trying to write with a pen by hand. The teachers begin listing features of the shape. They try contrasting it with the shapes of the other 4 vowel letters or all of the other 25 letters. They admit to uppercase and to lower case, saying those two cases are "different" shapes for the very "same" letter. Somehow they see "A" and "a" as the same shape. And when an indefinite article in English, the the sonic shape has to include nasalization (or nasalisation): "an". But when we bring in the cursive hand writing, and then the type print, we have to talk of fonts and various shapes. Infinity creeps in on our defining. When does the difference stop? "And what if," I ask, "the keyboard has a broken key -- the letter A is missing or sticking or something? Could you use a substitute, say a "*" or a "^" or an "@"? Don't young native English speakers text the letter A this way?"

The principles from the analogy of the shape(S) of the letter A include these:

Those who are unfortunate insiders to the experiences of sexism, and Western Aristotelian binarying, and phallogocentric patriarchy begin to get not only the shapes but also the value(S) of feminisms. One of the values is this kind of dialectic (a back-and-forth method too often only attributed to father Socrates by father Plato though disparaged by father Aristotle who would supplant dialectic with pure 'logic'; shhh: the secret is that probably dialectic is invented by the woman Aspasia -- a prostitute or a cultured non-Greek concubine or some other such creature with the scent of a woman taught both -- who taught the method to Pericles her lover and Socrates too). Dialectic opens up convers-ation into things very personal. The personal recognizes insiderness and outsiderness, where one has come from and where you are going too. It's hard to say you and you and nothing more. That a thing is a thing in itself. That you or that thing (i.e., "biblical feminism" or "sexism in the bible") cannot or will never ever change.

So I end with a complicated quotation of Nancy Mairs. She's published a paragraph on publication. I think the "shapeS" of "publication" are analogous to the "shapeS" of "biblical feminisms" and "lexiconS". Aristotle, and many men (and some phallogocentric women), resist these kinds of insider-outsider very-PERSONally dependent transformations:

"Publication of any sort is an intrinsically social act, 'I' having no reason to speak aloud unless I posit 'you' there listening; but your presence is especially vital if I am seeking not to disclose the economic benefits of fish farming in Zäire, or to recount the imaginary tribulations of an adulterous doctor's wife in nineteenth-century France, but to reconnect myself—now so utterly transformed by events unlike any I've experienced before as to seem a stranger even to myself—to the human community....lending materiality to my readerly ideal, transform monologue into intercourse."
--Nancy Mairs, Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer

ex-plaining

Somehow I feel this obligation to explain to you what I mean by this blog. I wonder, always, what you mean by it. Can we make it plain?

Explanation comes in four sorts. The ancient Greeks say so, and so does Jesus. (I'm bringing this up because a blogger friend, John Hobbins, has boxed me into one position of only two possible positions on "translation [method]"; and a blogger friend, Henry Neufeld, has now rightly written of his problem with John's "division of the types of translations" and how that too may mis-type him. Henry also notes in passing how he doesn't "claim to completely understand" this blog of mine.)

So back to the four sorts. First, men tend to reduce explaining to proposition. Second, when listeners or readers don't "get it," then men tend to explain by imposition. Third, more clever men tend to explain by transposition. And, lastly, even fewer men will find answers in apposition.

What's that mean? Well, appositions may help us here. In other words, we may have to use other words. We may best paraphrase. We might put one story beside another to see how that helps us interpret better.

Historian Bettany Hughes remembers how one Greek man gave this parable (i.e., one story thrown alongside another), as a joke:

When, in Ancient Greece, the rhetorician Gorgias stood up and delivered his 'Encomium of Helen' (a defence of Helen of Troy's indefensible character) - this was a great joke. How can you laud the most sluttish femme fatale of all time? But the rhetoric also got people thinking - maybe, just maybe the skilled speaker had a point.

Why would this woman ever leave the Greek men to join an enemy, a Trojan? In short, Gorgias said Helen was obedient to a command (i.e., a proposition of the gods), was forced by might (through imposition by Trojan men), or was conned by words (i.e., a kind of transposing "If you go with us, then we'll give you this and that and such"). Or, she might have been in love, her story voluntarily put in position right beside her so-called abductor's story.

Mark's Rabbi told a parable (the parable to explain all parables) that is similar. Actually, Mark "translated" what this Joshua (aka Jesus) spoke into another language -- two languages side by side. Wow, this is hard to claim to understand completely. Joshua said (and Mark said Jesus said) that there are four positions for sown seed to find itself in. First, seed falls along the wayside (like a proposition falls without being understood). Second, seed falls into shallow soil where rocks and sun force it to die (like an imposition forces a reduced understanding of a statement). Third, seed falls among other plants to engage with them (but like Hegel's synthesis of a thesis with an antithesis, the thesis dies). Fourth, seed falls and dies but in good soil without rocks or too much sun or the choking of other plants comes up multiply, after its own kind but different that way too (like a parable or an appositive or Helen's love beside her lover's love).

What I'm wondering is whether the first Jewish translation of their scripture is like this fourth sort of ex-plain-ing. The translators put Hebrew into Hellene, and they put themselves into it. It's very personal. It changes them and their Greek and Jewish readers in exponential ways.

Tomorrow, I'll try to begin with the Jewish story of the Beginning. In Greek, it is a parable, a throwing of one story alongside another. The story dies but comes up something different, something more, something still after its own kind.