Theo-critical feminism, mother nature and epistemological patriarchy

Our aim in this chapter is to argue that despite impressive advances in women’s liberation, the value presumptions inherent in what we shall here call ‘patriarchal theism’ remain firmly entrenched, even in developed institutions of putative moral conscience such as the Christian Church. In what follows we shall argue that the persistent persuasion of patriarchal theism stands as an impediment to a deeper and more comprehensive emancipation for women within the Church than has yet been achieved. Our analysis can be extrapolated as a theo-critical heuristic for other religions traditions, but to keep this paper within manageable bounds, we refer primarily to the restricted role of women within the Christian Church. We have created the term ‘theo-critical feminism’ to refer to specialist studies such as this which focus primarily on the philosophical and theological reflection of feminist issues in theology. The methodological model we use here to elucidate our concept of patriarchal theism is what we call ‘epistemological patriarchy’. We use the term ‘epistemological patriarchy’ to refer to the ascendancy and socio-cultural entrenchment of one particular form of knowledge whose institutional dominance provides the pretext for its superiority over other plausible ways of coming to know the world. The monopoly it enjoys amongst other contenders for the accolade of knowledge ensures that the role they might otherwise play in expanding a salutary community consciousness of variant perspectives of cognitive insight is marginalised and suppressed. What conditions the epistemological presumption as ‘patriarchal’ is that the concept of knowledge deployed is motivated and ‘valuationally’ informed by the obsession with power and control, subjugation and dominance, as regulated by institutional powerbrokers (still mostly male) motivated by vested interest. Given this preoccupation with power, we shall endeavour to establish that ‘knowledge’ is neither ‘value-free,’ nor for that matter, ‘socio-culturally neutral’, and thus that the concept of knowledge cannot be understood independently of the value presumptions which serve to motivate and characterise it. This being so, we contend that until the epistemological patriarchy which continues to condition the covert value hierarchy of institutional structures is explicitly challenged, the deprecation, denigration and discriminative abuse of women will continue, in any of a number of subtle and not so subtle ways. Because the dehumanising socio-cultural mechanisms to which we allude are epistemologically enshrined within the hidden agenda of seemingly innocent and innocuous processes, they easily go unnoticed. This is precisely why their existence is all the more pernicious and their social consequences, all the more problematic