The New Image

"The God who supposedly transcends sexuality, who is presumably one and whole, comes to us through language that is incomplete and narrow. The images we use to describe God, the qualities we attribute to God, draw on male pronouns and experience and convey a sense of power and authority that is clearly male." Plaskow, 6-7.

"The new Image must be a deity that embodies the male-associated items ...and the essence of those female-associated ideas ... this Image, a "What," will include an acceptable means-by-which, that is the PATTERNS through which we might wish ourselves and others to perceive the world. No one needs to invent or concort such an image. A powerful Image already exists--the Great Mother Goddess." -- Wilshire, 106.

I'm female bodied. I don't identify as a man, I don't feel like a man, I'm not a man. By any measure I should find comfort in the Goddess, who expands gender roles for women. I like the Goddess, I would rather have a world with the Goddess then a world without. But this "expanded" view of the Goddess (as feminine and masculine) just isn't enough for me. And neither was an expanded, feminine view of God.

I can't figure out what I'm looking for in a divinity. But I believe in one, probably with many many faces, names, and ways of being that I can identify within both the Goddess and the God. Maybe I need to stop looking and start getting-to-know Her/Him/Hir/Shim/Esh/...

In a related quest for role models, I had a conversation recently with Max Dashu. She gave a marvelous presentation on the Goddess and Her priestesses (really, I recommend her if you get the chance). She mentioned some male bodied queer priests of the Goddess and I asked her questions about them after the presentation, which led us to a conversation about the bias in a lot of queer spirituality writing towards male bodied people.

Its true, a lot of the writing out there is by people with male bodies who are interested in exploring their historical spiritual paths. She's absolutely right, that bias is real. Which is not to diminish the needs of people like Randy Connor who do great work unearthing a queer spirituality, especially for folks assigned male at birth. But there's bias, for a number of reasons, including lack of hstorical data and lack of people assigned female at birth doing the work (and Randy would agree with me on those points). Max also pointed out that often this kind of scholarship might come at a cost to women and I see that too. There's an androcentrism -- a phallocentrism -- that can pervade queer writing.

But then there's the fact that it was the men folk I latched onto, despite my gender, because of their queerness. There's no specific reason I would identify with male bodied folks who pursue gender transgression for spiritual reasons or within a spiritual system. But I'm unsure who I'm looking for historically, so that is who ends up resting the in the void. It allows me to deal with a feminine spirituality that has nothing to do with child birth, isn't essentialist, and doesn't force me to look at what it would mean to have the masculine traits I dislike.

How do you traverse these issues? What do you read that helps? Does the expanded Goddess image do it for you? I'm not just asking if you have brilliant ideas, I want to know. Share your thoughts, really!

Currently Reading:
Wilshire, Donna, "The Uses of Myth, Image, and the Female Body in the Re-visioning of Knowledge" in Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing. Jaggar, Alison M., and Susan Bordo, eds. 92-114. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989.

Plaskow, Judith. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. New York, NY: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.

Both of these readings are through a class taught by Mara Lynn Keller. Max Dashu was in a class taught by Arisika Razak.