 |
|
    |
 |
||
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Since the traditional sexual division of labor has begun to crumble (it is by no means gone if one looks, for example, at the meager number of hours men spend on household work), many of the liturgical divisions of labor based on gender have also begun to crumble. Other forms of the labor of being woman, however, continue. I want to highlight but one aspect—the simple risk of being born woman.3 Here are some indicators of this risk: Although the world's population continues to grow, the number of women is declining. Already there are between sixty and one hundred million fewer women than men owing to selective abortions, selective infanticide, and the widespread uneven allocation of basic resources such as food, healthcare, and education to girls. Despite these millions of women who are "missing" (Amartya Sen), women are overrepresented among the world's poor, the world's illiterate adults, and the world's children not in primary school: seventy percent of the world's poor are women, over sixty percent of the world's illiterate adults are women, and sixty percent of children not in primary school are girls. UNICEF reports that violence against girls and women is the most widespread violation of human rights. And this is not a "third-world" problem by any means. More than fifty percent of all women will experience violence from intimate partners; the battering of women results in more injuries requiring medical attention than auto accidents, muggings, and rapes combined. Furthermore, every minute, a woman dies somewhere on this globe owing to complications surrounding pregnancy and birth. And these statistics scratch only the surface of what Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has described as "structural normative practices" of violence against women.4 Schüssler Fiorenza includes in these normative practices not only physical violence but also the cultural construction of docile feminine bodies—be it through disciplining obsessions with food, dieting, and exercise, or the shaping of youthful and glamorous (but also constrained) female bodies through clothing, cosmetic products, and cosmetic surgery (which has become a billion-dollar industry). What does all this have to do with liturgy? Is there a relationship between the labor of being woman and the labor of liturgical meaning-making? For most liturgical assemblies with which I am familiar, the answer to that question has to come as a resounding no. Such a rift between women's lives and liturgy, however, raises an immediate question: given that none of us leaves her (or his) particularities, markers of difference, and gendered subjectivity behind when entering a place of worship, which powers discipline the boundaries between women's lives and liturgy? (And "powers" they must be, since these boundaries seem to be sealed.) Women and Worship: A Con-Celebration5One of the dynamics that disciplines the boundary between women's lives and liturgy is a particular understanding of the meaning of liturgy and of where this meaning is to be located. In the past, liturgical scholars have often identified the meaning of a liturgical rite with the texts of the liturgy in question and with what its rubrics govern. In recent years, however, scholars attentive to contemporary literary, critical, and social theories have insisted that the process of meaning-making, rather than being stable, unified, and given with a text or a rite, is better understood as a plurality of meaning-makings as liturgical givens are actively negotiated by those present. In other words, there is no simple way to identify the site of liturgical meaning, since no single meaning in any liturgical piece or liturgical event can be said to be definitive.6 The particularities of liturgical subjects, rather than being "context" to what is supposedly primary, namely the liturgical "text," are co-constitutive in the making of liturgical meaning. Moreover, not only are there "as many interpretations, or 'meanings,' for any liturgical act as there are people attending,"7 but there are more meanings than there are people attending, since, rather than being a unified self, most people are better understood as sites of multiple and contesting meanings. For the seemingly sealed boundaries between women's lives and liturgical meaning, this breaking open of the traditional understanding of liturgical meaning offers new possibilities. If liturgical subjects (other than the priest) come to be seen as co-constitutive of the production of liturgical meaning, then there is at least the theoretical possibility of acknowledging these subjects as always situated, particularized, gendered, and racialized. |
||||||
 |
||||||
|
Academics | Admissions | Alumni | Works | Listen | Look | Contact | Index | Home | Yale University
|