From: Mary Keller <m.l.keller-AT-stir.ac.uk>
Subject: RE: Feminist Pedagogy
Date: Fri, 28 Nov 1997 10:42:48 -0000


I have found myself questioning the claim that feminism is a politics,
not a methodology.  I think Tom Craig is correct in noting that any
politics must have a method of practice.  Probably we are right back at
the place where the idea of practice comes in.  Catherine Bell gives a
critical analysis of how practice worked in two ways in Marx: 
"In the first sense the term is explored as descriptive of human nature
and all human activity.  In a second sense the term appears to be more
prescriptive, arguing for the proper way of being thoeretical and using
theory.  In the first, descriptive sense, practice was a methodological
focus through which to solve the problems posed by the work of Hegel on
the one hand and Feuerbach on the other--namely, the relationship
between consciousness and reality,  subject and object, idealims and
materialism.  In that sense, Marx defined practice as "practical
activity," a unity of consciousness and social being characterized by
the potential to transform real existence.  As such, practice was
nothing less than the irreduciblye unity of real human existence itself.
In this framework, practice mediates or reintegrates subject and object
(consciousness and reaity), which is to say that these polarized
constructs are thought to exist only as they exist in and through
practice.  The second, or prescriptive, sense emerges in Marx's other
analyses, where practice is seen as inextricably related to theory.
Theris is a dialiectical relationship in which pracitce both actualizes
and tests theroy while also providing the data for ongoing thoery.  This
dialiectical unity of theory and practice was meant to indict the
inadquacy of abstract thinking, knowledge, and truth.  At the same time,
it gave theory an important place in the practice of political
activity." (Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, Oxford, 1992) 75.

I would argue that feminism is practice.  When I teach a course , I
present  the methodology we employ in our cross-cultural and
transhistorical studies of women in religion as one which is  informed
by feminist and post-colonial theory, which means trying to interpret,
through layers of representation, what is missing.  Through this we can
shift the framework of examination, rather than trying to insert women,
"natives," others into the old history.  The moral imperative here is
methodological: to examine how systems of discourse exclude, delimit, or
avail people to power. Due to the largely Western bifurcation between
politics as real power and religion as a guise for power or an opiate
for living without power, I'm shy of using politics as the goal of
feminism.  

Mary Keller
Department of Religious Studies
University of Stirling


     --- from list french-feminism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---