Intersectionality, Sexual Violence, and the Future of Feminist Theory

This paper explores two photo collections by the feminist photographer Susan Meiselas, Carnival Strippers and A Room of Their Own, which respectively center the experiences of sex workers and domestic abuse survivors. Both photo series bring visibility to the lived experiences of women typically erased by the church. Moralizing narratives tend to structure Christian conversations around sex work or those who escape abusive relationships. These church-driven narratives lead to these women’s stories being simplified or judged without engaging in systemic analysis of the structures that contributed to their current situation. By engaging with the photos and stories of these women, with the work of feminist and womanist theologians, theorists, and ethicists, I hope to show an engagement with sex workers and domestic violence survivors that reshapes the narrative, engages with discomfort, and centers women’s voices over church authority. 

“The Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray was a twentieth-century human rights activist, legal scholar, author, labor organizer, poet, Episcopal priest, multiracial Black, LGBTQ+ Durhamite who lived one of the most remarkable lives of the 20th century.” What does this remarkable poet and priest have to teach us about time, temporality, and history? This presentation examines Murray’s theological view of history in their poem Dark Testament. I argue Murray’s theo-poetics disrupts our conceptions of linear time and racial progress. Instead, Murray tarries with America’s history of sexual subjection, chattel slavery, and settler colonialism to direct the reader to its repetitions and backslides. In doing so, Murray offers us a cross-shattered conception of history, one which locates Christ in solidarity with victims of racial violence. 

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. 

This project examines how Dalit women’s bodies in the caste system are imperilled within  the cultures of purity and pollution. Jeevana, is used as both an ethic and methodology to analyze the paradox of “touch” surrounding Dalit women’s bodies. It is a Kannada term refers to the experience of being alive, living, and the unfolding of human events and activities. However, for Dalit Women it signifies everyday acts of resistance against the interconnected oppressions of caste, class, and gender. Although Dalit women are defined as untouchable and impure, their bodies become “touchable” only in situations of violation; therefore, I term their bodies as un/touchable. This project asks why men from caste communities as well as Dalit communities perceive that Dalit women’s bodies can be touched anytime, anywhere, and everywhere without their consent. It argues that un/touchable bodies exist as witnesses carrying memories of abuse and discrimination, not as victims but resisters of oppression and oppressors.