Among the most significant efforts to reckon with the Western- and Christian-centric history of comparative religious ethics are scholarly approaches rooted in the traditions of feminist and decolonial theory. This panel brings these two traditions together to suggest the promise of work in religious ethics that draws on both feminist and decolonial approaches. Given their commitment to the notion that knowledge requires beginning from the margins, feminist decolonial ethicists explicitly and intentionally unsettle classical approaches to religious ethics that are rooted in the Western/Christian center. Though representing a diverse range of traditions and addressing a variety of specific topics, the panelists collectively suggest that a feminist decolonial approach is rooted in practices and relationships, and is centrally concerned with how both practitioners and scholars forge new sorts of coalitions and shared identities that might contest dominant narratives and oppressive structures.
This presentation will address the implications of decolonial thinking for feminist religious ethical inquiry. The postcolonial scholarly enterprise, following an interpretation of Edward Said’s argument in Orientalism, is imbued with value judgments about which forms of knowledge “count,” as well as whose specific assessments of cultural and religious phenomena can be taken as authoritative. In ethical inquiry, this ranking of forms of knowledge often privileges theory above practice, in addition to giving credibility to certain voices as authoritative in the discourse. While approaches in feminist religious ethics are frequently sensitive to these issues, utilizing a more explicit decolonial methodology results in more attention to historicity, narratives of Otherness, and offers the possibility of substantive practices of solidarity.
A feminist prism deepens the responses to the ancient Rabbi Hillel’s interrelated questions (If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, who am I? And if not now, when?) and subsequent accounts of political ethics. I focus on Hillel’s formulation because 1) it has proven effective in community organizing intent on building solidarity across groups in order to articulate normative social claims and move power and (2) often the process of building non-chauvinistic forms of solidarity involves religious spaces, institutions, networks, and vocabularies as critical mechanisms for the consolidation of intercommunal solidarity but (3) solidarity here denotes both an intersectional critique of grievances that centers an analysis of power and structures and a sociopolitical normativity that shows the indispensability of a feminist hermeneutic from the margins to not only offer a critique but also a positive emancipatory imagination.
A close look at Buddhist ritual practices and newly established training center at a transnational, pilgrimage site in Bodhgaya, India illuminates the intersections of gender, feminist ethics, and solidarity among religious women. First, I consider whether being a Buddhist pilgrim is shaped in particular ways by gender. Does one’s own perception of identity foster a sense of belonging and cohesion among practitioners who identify as Buddhist women? Second, I account for social solidarity, the shared obligations of observing customs; civic solidarity, mutual commitments to one’s nationality; and political solidarity, the endeavor to strive for a shared common cause and sense of obligation towards a similar political vision. Do Buddhist women’s ritual practices foster a sense of social, civic, or political solidarity? If so, what types of solidarity emerge? Lastly, among these types of solidarity, are they fostered through ritual practices and do they extend within the larger social context of Buddhism and constitute a form of feminist ethics?
This presentation explores the limits of the concept of solidarity in contemporary ethical discourse, highlighting its increasing impotence in enhancing relationality and inspiring social change. Examples of how “solidarity” is deployed in theological, ethical, and political contexts will be used to support the broader claim that our understanding of solidarity facilitates a “monstrous intimacy,” which following the thought of Christina Sharpe, enables the continuation and reproduction of, and the indifference to, violent relations of domination under the logics of coloniality. As a potential corrective, I use my two-fold decolonial feminist method—a hermeneutics of el grito and a hermeneutics of vincularidad—to call for the cultivation of a “critical intimacy.” Ultimately, I argue that the frame of critical intimacy exceeds the frame of solidarity in its potential to realize ethical commitments to resistance, reparation, and re-existence.