EDITORIAL
New Feminist Theologies:
The Third Wave

I had graduated from college a year earlier, and was just coming to dim awareness of my own feminism. While still in school I asked a friend whether she thought of herself as a feminist. She said, "No, because I've never had to be. I've always been able to do everything I wanted to do regardless of my gender." It took me a long time to correlate this sense of entitlement, one I mostly shared, with not only my post-baby boomer, pre-generation X demographic but also with my middle-class background, my Euro-American racial heritage, and, eventually, my heterosexual privilege as a married woman. I, too, have mostly been able to do "everything I wanted to do."

The ten intervening years between the last "gender" focused issue of Cross Currents and this one were years when the transition from "second" to "third wave" feminism was well underway in feminist theology. In graduate school in theology, I found myself plunged right away into the "third wave," entering the conversation at a point where feminist theology and various forms of poststructural and postmodern theory were beginning to forge tentative alliances. The impetus for such alliances lay in the need to find better ways to display and honor difference, integrating serious critical analysis of not only sex and gender but of race, class, and sexual orientation into feminist theological work. In other words, feminist theology is not just about gender anymore.

But the conventional metaphor of "waves" can be misleading, if read as suggesting that later "waves" supersede and wipe out all traces of the former. Rather, new directions in feminist theology draw their impetus from previous "waves," mining the rich materials left in their wake. Third wave theologies pay homage to, while moving away from, previous feminist formulations; they are, to paraphrase Laura Levitt's words about her mentor in this issue, "our way of both holding onto and letting go" of the second wave's legacy to us.

Marian Ronan's review article of recent feminist theologies displays this movement of embrace and release, tracing the trajectory of "women's experience" as the basis for doing theology from its inception in the second wave to its reclamation/transformation in the third. "Too often," she warns, "discussions of women's experience 'reflect' the salvation-bearing human which the history of the twentieth century calls into question." The turn to theory allows feminist theology to utilize women's experience once again, not as transparent windows onto women's real lives, but as "complex, textured amalgams of resistance and collusion demanding critique as well as invocation."

The "wave" metaphor seems appropriate, too, in reflecting the ever-shifting perspectives of feminist theology. Feminist theologies are not only forming new alliances but questioning old ones, refusing to take previous, even feminist, grounds for granted. "Covenant or Contract? Marriage as Theology," for instance, chronicles Levitt's search for a Jewish feminist theological home. She finds that liberalism, the intellectual home in which she was raised, was for her only a temporary resting place. In the end, its seductive yet elusive promises, blessed by covenant marriage in the theology of Eugene Borowitz, cannot provide a safe home for women, and she must move on.

Paula Cooey's "That Every Child Who Wants Might Learn to Dance" addresses the question of what sustains us as we navigate theologically, with no firm ground to stand upon. She discovers, in a real-life parable about working-class mothers in the fifties finding ways to bring dancing into their children's lives, the subversive power of joy in resisting oppressive class as well as gender oppressions. For Cooey, the joy manifested in biblical and present-day parables "lure[s] us to recognize the party wherever we find it in human life, however grim the circumstances that surround it." This openness to the unexpected, this willingness to accept the messy and fragmented, is, perhaps, another hallmark of the "third wave."

Marie Sabin's "Women Transformed: The Ending of Mark is the Beginning of Wisdom," depicts the women of the Markan narrative as wise women who minister to Jesus in place of the faithless disciples, and are transformed, heralding Jesus' own resurrection and transformation. Her reading draws on the midrashic theological tradition of refusing to limit God's revelation, which "allows for infinite repetitions of the divine being." This notion of creative repetition resonates with my own piece, "The Risks of Repeating Ourselves: Reading Feminist/Womanist Figures of Jesus," in its implication that the notion of women embodying Jesus is at once a surprising reversal of expectation and a fruitful theological trope. My vision of a citational chain of Jesus figures leading from the suffering servant to Sojourner Truth yearns toward Sabin's insight that "God's will and word are fulfilled in ceaselessly new and surprising ways."

KAREN TRIMBLE ALLIAUME