“Uneasy Intersections”: Postcolonialism, Feminism, and the Study of Religions

Abstract

Feminists, in their efforts to reconstruct a heavily masculinist philosophy of religion, have developed insights that can also help the discipline recognize tedious reaffirmations of its history with respect to Eurocentric colonizations of other peoples. Specifically, the chapter discusses ceasing to speak for and about others, redescribing self in terms of “new” categories made evident in the experience of colonized peoples, and destabilizing the structural force of “Western” theological norms in the study of religions. The author essays to what extent feminist insights can be appropriated to the study of religion in relation to postcolonial discourse. Specific

We cannot content ourselves with reaffirming a certain history, a certain memory of the origins or the Western history of philosophy (Mediterranean or central-European, Greco-Roman-Arab or Germanic), nor can we be content with opposing or opposing denial to this memory and to these languages; rather we must try to displace the fundamental schema of this problematic by carrying ourselves beyond the old, tiresome, wearing, wearying opposition between Eurocentrism and anti-Eurocentrism. (Derrida 2002: 336)

[Editors’ note]: Prof. Jantzen died untimely before this volume could be brought to publication. She had no significant opportunity to revise her essay, which was presented at a session on “Postcolonial Theory and the Philosophy of Religion(s)” at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, in Toronto in 2002. We have retained its style and tone. The title-phrase, “uneasy intersections,” comes from Donaldson and Kwok (2002: 28).