These papers engage an array of anti-essentialist discourses on gender to talk about diverse forms of structural violence and gendered resistance in broad, international contexts. Taken together, these papers speak to gender based violence and trauma, societal moral injury, institutionalized violence, and social stereotypes, developing critical questions for the field of feminist theory in the 21st century.
This paper offers a trauma-informed, feminist, and postcolonial rereading of John 4 that challenges moralizing interpretations of the Samaritan woman. Historically rendered anonymous and sexually suspect the Samaritan woman has often been read through gendered and racialized lenses that reinscribe shame and obscure structural vulnerability. Introducing the concept of unarmed trauma this study examines how anonymity ethnic othering and interpretive power expose the woman to theological dehumanization without narrative defense. Engaging trauma theory and post colonial hermeneutics the paper argues that shame based readings emerge not from the Johannine text itself but from later interpretive traditions shaped by patriarchal and ethnocentric assumptions. A close reading of John 4 demonstrates that Jesus offers no explicit moral condemnation and positions the encounter as one of revelation rather than correction. Reframing the well as a liminal site of risk and agency this paper reclaims the Samaritan woman as a theological witness whose voice emerges from vulnerability rather than moral failure.
In an era of duress, it is important to explore the ethics and moral-developmental potential of resistance for a chance at combatting and resisting societal moral injury. Less well known than liberation theology, resistance studies, from which ethics of resistance can be derived and implemented, has developed as a budding field in recent years. Resistance studies addresses the life-giving nuance inherent in dialectical thinking and offers a route for more clearly recognizing, upholding, and teaching acts of bravery and critical consciousness where they do and can happen. This paper highlights womanist ethicist Traci West’s ethics of resistance in the context of supporting battered black women and Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s erudite exploration of learning and modeling bravery as cases in point. It concludes with a nod to an investigation into the intentional cultivation of moral courage on a social level as contributing to the theory and practice of resistance ethics.
Are trans women, in the words of Catherine Keller, “doing an apocalypse?” This paper conducts a (re)reading of Keller’s Apocalypse Now and Then, exploring whether and how her concept of “apocalypse pattern” can both enable and circumscribe the process of transitioning for trans women. Keller discusses the apocalypse pattern’s manifestation in essentialist feminist discourse that maintains a narrow view of womanhood in the anticipation of women’s liberation. She also echoes critiques of anti-essentialist feminist discourse and its own apocalyptic tendency to purge feminism of essentialism. This paper engages Keller’s reading of essentialist and anti-essentialist feminist discourses on gender to argue that their respective apocalyptic tendencies defer or close the possibility of womanhood for trans women. I conclude that Keller’s concept of “counter-apocalypse” proves useful for trans women’s negotiation of the tension between an immanent realization of womanhood and an eschatological horizon of womanhood.