As the lives and personhood of women, people of color, and those from the queer community of all backgrounds and identities continue to be increasingly devalued, marginalized, dehumanized, and brutalized in the current socio-cultural context of the U.S., this panel plumbs the depths of Kierkegaard’s writings in order to share the unexpected resources for constructing life-affirming and life-thriving feminist, womanist, and queer theologies. Although Kierkegaard was a product of his own nineteenth century cultural context of gender essentialism, he was ahead of his time in many ways and often challenges the assumptions of his culture through his celebration of women as exemplars/icons of the Christian life. The panel explores how he moves female identity from margin to center in his writings, highlights interdependence and certain types of community as key facets of his thought, and lifts up Christianity’s resources for going beyond survival toward thriving and flourishing for various marginalized identities.
Can a woman voluntarily imitate the suffering of Christ, and therefore enter into Christianity while yet living in a social context where the aims of feminism are not yet fully victorious? A recent interpreter of Kierkegaard has argued that women and all marginalized people are unable to imitate Christ’s self-giving love and therefore enter into Christianity. This paper challenges such an interpretation by engaging with Kierkegaard’s concept of the “double danger,” his understanding of what it means to be a human being, and the role of faith in becoming a particular individual in relationship to Christ/Love. It then engages with Emilie M. Townes womanist ethics as a case study that exemplifies a way that women may enter into the “double danger” of Christ.
Patriarchal names of God as the father, king, and lord have long been viewed as harmful in feminist, womanist, and queer theologies, due to their perceived legitimation of coercive hierarchy. However, when paired with Kierkegaard’s understanding of Jesus as the absolute paradox—as the incomprehensible union of the finite and the infinite, or omnipotence and abject powerlessness on the cross—these much-maligned names of the divine turn out to be liberating, because they render prophetic judgment on the power-mongering patriarchs today. That is, they call today’s patriarchs to imitate God’s self-emptying by resisting the temptation to wield as much power and control as possible. This is because, for Kierkegaard, Jesus represents the incarnation of infinite love that breaks into the finite world, disrupting the assumed boundary between the creator and creatures. Then the patriarchy of the kenotic God shatters the existing coercive hierarchy rather than reinforcing it.
This paper argues that Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Repetition together disclose a structure of human agency grounded in the resurrectional logic of faith. In Fear and Trembling, Abraham reveals faith as a paradoxical activity that suspends the ethical and transcends the limits of reason through a dialectic of loss and restoration. Repetition, Kierkegaard’s companion text, extends this dialectic into the existential sphere, reimagining repetition as the lived form of this same resurrectional logic: the death and renewal of the self through freedom/choice and memory. The first part of the paper argues that Fear and Trembling presents Abraham as an ideal model of human agency to be esteemed but not emulated. In the second part of the paper, I will argue that Repetition provides a model for emulation. What is lost and recovered in repetition is the subject itself. Through a dialectic of freedom and memory.