RT Article
T1 Suffering into Truth: Constructing the Patriarchal Sacred
JF Feminist theology
VO 17
IS 3
SP 356
OP 391
A1 Condren, Mary
LA English
PB Sage
YR 2009
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1776894782
AB Western practices and theories of the sacred have been ritually performed and culturally elaborated mostly by male theorists who ignored the historical exclusion of women from sacral arenas. Shaped by male morphologies, their practices and descriptions quickly became prescriptions for theological rectitude and/or healthy social functioning. Women's exclusion appears to have been essential rather than epiphenomenal to the political and ecclesiastical structures established.Through the lens of Sigmund Freud, in this article I will attempt to analyse why the question as to how the Western sacred has been achieved, defined, and elaborated is inherently antithetical to the future of the earth and of women. I will argue that Freud's focus on repression rather than nurture enables the Western sacred to forge gender dichotomies and legitimize those forms of religious and political mentalities that now carry lethal capacities. For that reason, we need to de-construct its most dangerous capacities, challenge the toxic stories, develop spiritual and disciplinary practices that nurture human creativity, foster independent thinking, and radically address the acute gendered imbalance that currently pervades the religious and political social imaginary.I argue that a feminist call for mere equality within existing theological or political frameworks fails to do justice to the issues at stake. I will then point briefly to some alternative approaches to the sacred mentioned above in the work of philosopher and psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray; anthropologist, Peggy Reeves Sanday; Jungian analyst, Marion Woodman, and artist, psychoanalyst and theorist, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger.
K1 Transgression
K1 Sacrifice
K1 Sacred
K1 Repression
K1 Freud
DO 10.1177/0966735009102364