Therein lies the question...@ IDENTITIES The Female Exhibitionist: ROWAN O’NEILL explores the ultimate taboo of patriarchy and the present problem with female ordination.
Janis, Me aud Bobby McGee Cambridge without personally engaging with any theological issue to do with gender. I avoided the issues that seemed so obviously pressing to my female compatriots but I did so for a reason, the simple one that I didn’t believe in gender differentiation and therefore gender issues could not possibly exist for me, let alone be relevant.
Yesterday I became a feminist (I’ve always been a late developer). This coincided with my becoming a Janis Joplin fan and my final resolution to give up any of the fancy ideas and fine ideals I had of becoming a priest. Janis’s story is a tragic one, as is that of the priesting of women in the Church of England — and no, I’m not being facetious.
In a book on the history of women in rock music the fatal flaw in Janis’s character is cited as her public identification as “one of the lads” and all the expectations of hedonistic hard rock excesses that such a perception of her required her to live up to. For, to be one of the lads women always have to be more than one of the lads. For the greater part of my life I have been a complete and utter tomboy, to the extent that I can’t remember ever being really aware that I was a girl until my early teens. For me, to be deemed one of the lads by my almost exclusively male friends would have been, through most of my teenage years (and even through my university career) the highest compliment and token of esteem I could imagine, yet I’m beginning to question this naive assumption.
In the book mentioned above reference is made to an old pal of Janis’s who complained in an interview that within the group of male friends she ran with Janis would always be the one to take things to the limit, out-maling the male in terms of crudeness or vulgarity.
If we consider the term “one of the lads” as representative of a patriarchal attempt to contain and thus abrogate modes of the feminine which appear resolutely unfeminine through the rose-tinted spectacles of patriarchy then, to be all that and more, (as Janis undoubtedly was), is to show up the inadequacy of such terminology to achieve that aim and thus the inadequacy of patriarchy itself to deal justly with all manifestations of the other, the female. Why did I, like Janis feel more at home as one of the lads than as a terribly nice young lady? (Which of course underneath it all I still was, as was she). The reason lies in the inadequacy of the perception of what it is to be female in society and what it is to be acceptably female which despite women’s supposed liberation and the sexual revolution still remain. I would like to assert that to be a tomboy is not the manifestation of a great desire to be a man in terms of any essentialism that could be railed at the male. Quite the contrary, for a girl to identify with the boys is rather to identify with a sense of individualism and nonessentialism of which post-Lutheran man is our most potent symbol. Here I stand, I can do no other. Janis was wild and boisterous on stage like no woman performer before her or to my mind since. Perhaps the world wasn’t ready for a star as individually female as her; a sexy, fully embodied woman whose stage act oozed a rampant physicality which could not be inhibited or dominated.
This begs the question, if Janis arrived on the scene today would she have fared any better? And the answer? An emphatic no.
Feminist theology is probably regarded as a bit of a joke in the world of feminism proper where religion is regarded tout court as one more instrument of patriarchal oppression which must be seen beyond if the world is to change.
Within the discipline itself there appears to be a rather radical polarization between those advocates of a Christian feminist theology and those who think rather in terms of creating a discipline almost co-terminous with the old, that of thealogy. Thealogy represents the move to sacralise “the feminine principle” through the symbolization of the Goddess. Goddess spirituality is everywhere in feminist journals of religion apparently providing the spiritual emancipation that women have been crying out for. Though the popularity of this pendulum swing to the Goddess is well attested to, I myself find it incredibly difficult to identify with and think Janis would have had problems too (and countless other females in the world).
The Goddess, as a transcendent concept in opposition to the God relies on the positing of woman as opposite to man, opposite and different in more than the obvious sphere of biology. Moreover, Goddess spirituality is nothing more than an essentialising of woman as that which patriarchy itself has achieved without the added collusion of women themselves (please note how I avoid saying, “Woman herself”). The Goddess symbol is utterly, almost sickeningly palatable to men for it has associations within patriarchy which are impossible to shift even if recourse is made to hags and crones as intrinsic to its conception. In fact the Goddess cannot help but invite associations with a lesser transcendence to that of the God, a “sugar and spice and all things nice” type of transcendence which I myself find uncomfortable and alienating.
For me it has never been the preRaphaelite Goddess, or even the wise woman or witch that has fuelled my conception of who I am as a person in the world but I have always been awestruck by the figure known as Sheela—na-Gig. Found decorating numerous medieval churches the figure is that of a wild and crazed looking woman who is distinguished as such solely by the centrality of her vagina which she holds open like a gaping void. Apart from this major detail it is difficult to ascertain the sex of this figure which I have always considered a vindication of my ambiguous position: the vagina just is, that is biology just is and sex as gender stereotype is impossible.
The Sheela—na-Gig is the unbridled power of a woman, unafraid of her biological feminine attributes, ruling them rather than being ruled by them.
She is also unashamedly aggressive in outlook, a screaming, wailing, banshee of a woman with power in abundance. I am confused as to why such a striking image has not been made more use of within feminist theology. Why has this figure been so neglected? I suggest because unlike the Goddess the Sheela—na-Gig figure is extremely disturbing to men, more so than that of the witch, hag or crone who has always been eminently transformable into the picture of domestic bliss (Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Tale is an obvious example of this).
I've never been satisfied with the discussions of the role and symbolism of the Sheela—na—Gig found in academic scholarship (she is generally dismissed as an ancient fertility symbol) just as ’m dissatisfied now with the status accorded to the ordained female in the Church of England. I pinpoint this dissatisfaction now to the uneasiness which both display towards concepts of women and power.
Iris Murdoch in her novel, The Sea, the Sea, writes that the exercise of power is a Sheela-na-Gig, carved on Kilpeck Church, Herefordshire “dangerous delight”, a theme which is taken up in Monica Furlong’s 1991 book, A Dangerous Delight: Women and Power in the Church. Issues raised in this work articulate very clearly the fundamental difficulty that my ever wanting to be a priest entails. That is, that the priest’s role has traditionally been one of extreme power and power essentially of the male over the female. Why should a role with such obvious connotations be appealing to me, a woman? The answer to this lies once more in the power of the woman as individual that woman as priest signifies, as does woman as Sheela—na-Gig, woman as Janis Joplin and my own identification from earliest memory with “the lads”. For woman as priest is in one sense nothing more than woman as exhibitionist, a role denied to her through centuries of patriarchy and denied even today. This includes; the right to be funny, the right to be loud, the right to be brash and outrageous, the right to scream and shout, the right to be at the centre of things. Moreover, the right to do all this and the right not to be dismissed as a hysterical and abnormal unfeminine female but to be accepted as men are accepted, to wield authority through individualism and exhibitionism, our inalienable right.
I am therefore rejecting notions that the importance of the priesting of women lies in the, often bandied about, trite pastoral virtues of caring and nurturing that women supposedly bring to the role. (Though I will not deny that these attributes are of paramount importance to the priesthood and as such should transcend sexual differentiation). The importance of the priesting of women lies in fact with the placing of women at the apex of power, not in opposition to men but in mutuality with men; not as masculine clones but as individuals incapable of essentialism just as all beings are incapable of such reduction. Until that level of equality is achieved the church abrogates the validity of the momentous step that the ordination of women should have represented. The cry goes up, “Hold on a moment, you’re being too hasty. Give it time, work from the inside and things can change”. Today I’ve given up on working from the inside.
Women have been given the opportunity to play priest within the church but only if they play it as “woman”. It is a role that has been conceded only on the understanding that equality in action does not lead as a consequence to equality of being and the relationship to power that this would entail.
But, what is this power that needs to be claimed by the woman priest? It is CONFERENCE PREVIEW the power symbolised in the Sheela—na-Gig and the glorious and all too rare talent of a Janis Joplin recording. The power of transforming and transcendent love evinced by the gaping void of the vagina or the banshee shriek of the utterly engaged and engaging performer. It is thus the reclamation of Sheela—na-Gig that ought to be claiming the attentions of feminist theologians today (rather than the wishywashy Goddess) a figure whose appearance alongside the orthodox Christian symbolism of the Medieval church has always proved a tricky pill to swallow. And yet none the less a figure that could be viewed as having pointed towards an untapped potential for centuries: that of the female priest.
Virginia Woolf believed that gender identity, despite biology, is socially constructed and can and must be challenged and changed. This is the absolute necessity that the priesting of women represents, the opportunity for challenge and change. Until that function is recognised by women as well as men the priesthood of women, like the transcendence of the “Goddess”, remains an inferior brand to the existent male standard. Thus, for me, it is only in symbols that evince the female and more than the female as society deems it acceptable for her to be, that women will ever emerge emancipated and more than just “other” and reflexive to men.
I would like to conclude then by engaging in a piece of completely selfindulgent rock criticism. As I sit putting the finishing touches to this piece I’m playing the Janis Joplin version of the song, “Me and Bobby McGee” (over and over again!) which features on her posthumously released album “Pear!” (1971). The song was originally written and recorded by Kris Kristofferson and the “Bobby” referred to is undoubtedly a girl (possibly even referring to his own relationship with Janis). However, though Janis re-genders the lyrics in her version, the power of her rendering of the song lies, for me, in the ambiguity of gender that remains. To state this I am not trying to claim some facile lesbian subtext (yet another example of the great patriarchal filing system in the sky). On the contrary, this ambiguity merely betrays the transcendence of the power of love and the inadequacy of any attempt to marginalise that power within the utterly deficient social constructs of sexual differentiation @ Rowan O’Neill is a 21-year-old postgraduate theology student at University College, Chester CONFERENCE PREVIEW DR C. RAM PRASAD of Clare Hall, Cambridge has been exploring what “nonrealism and similar issues” mean in his own Hindu culture. He is to be one of the three main speakers at the 1999 SoF annual conference in July, and here, at our invitation, he sets the scene. “NJ onrealism”’ You cant do without it — but what do you do with it?