Is There a Future for Feminist Theology?

Feminist theories and theologies have frequently grounded critiques of patriarchy in shared scenes of sexual trauma, presuming a foundational injury that structures women’s experiences. This paper argues that the persistent alignment of (sexual) injury with women’s experience has sometimes been wielded as a defense against attending to sexualized and racialized attachments that also sustain feminist theological desires and imaginations. In response, this paper demonstrates the utility of moving away from trauma-centric considerations of structural subordination in feminist theology. The paper asks not how identities are grounded in shared experiences of trauma, but how configurations of race, gender, and sexuality take form and acquire theological force. This shift opens space for a transfeminist theological approach attentive to the attachments that sustain feminist theological imaginations, including those that reproduce whiteness and transantagonism.