The body as hermeneutical category: guidelines for a feminist hermeneutics of liberation.

Pereira, Nancy Cardoso

Like land that needs tilling--that is what the Bible is like for women. The Bible is difficult terrain. Some parts are hard, and others are swampy ... yet there are countless fertile places to be worked on. It is the task of women and men who believe it is possible to remodel gender social relations to discover the liberating fertility of the Bible. The Bible has to be worked in the same way as the land: with tenacity, determination, wisdom and pleasure.

A feminist reading of the Bible is a complex affair. We must deal, as women, with a very ancient text which reflects different cultures, customs, epochs, relations, languages and grammars. Above all, we have to confront androcentric and patriarchal passages--and interpretations--that have accumulated over the centuries. A hermeneutics guided by a focus on gender social relations should, therefore, be daring and go beyond the traditional canons of exegetical science. We need a hermeneutics of suspicion which is operative in all areas: texts, interpretations, traditions, translations, and exegetical methods.

Gender theories are analytical tools that allow us to deconstruct texts and reveal the structure of the relations on which they are based. We can then construct a new text that seeks to be liberating in nature, including with regard to gender relations. We believe that this is the wish of the God who created men and women in God's own image and likeness.

The body as a hermeneutical category

For many centuries the importance of the body, of matter, has been devalued. Importance has always been given to the human "soul" or, in another generalizing view, a person's place in the socio-political structure and the economy. But history shows that the body has always been the main locus of the oppression and appropriation of women, as it has also been with other oppressed groups (for example indigenous and black peoples): this has been done through rape, aggression, denial, abuse, manipulation, idealization. For this very reason, the body cannot be considered as a mere side-issue in any reading of the Bible which asks questions about gender relations. Life and death manifest themselves through the body. Restoring the physical body to its rightful place is a fundamental part of our affirmation of a real and sensual life.

The text is also a body, one that shows itself to (and hides itself from) its readers. Those readers are also living bodies entering into dialogue and struggling with that other body, the text. Both reveal the tissue of their own body: as individual and social bodies, feminine and masculine. In the hermeneutical process conducted from a corporeal perspective, the bodies sometimes meet and celebrate in the same way as we gladly gather a good harvest from the land. Sometimes they detest each other, because they are disappointed that there is no fruit, or that the only fruit is sour and of no use to anyone. At times, the body holds out its arms, waiting for the other body to do the same ... but there is no response.

To think of the text as a body, as the fruit of gender and social relations, and to understand the process of interpretation as the product of a concrete relationship between bodies, sheds new light on what is being said. The body as a hermeneutical key offers alternative interpretations that invite us to dialogue and to experience new relations between men and women--in theology, at church, at home, through physical loss, in life.

Reading the passion and resurrection of Jesus with the lacerated bodies of Latin America in mind requires us to contemplate the raped bodies of men and women, boys and girls, and to feel the urgent need for resurrection of these bodies now. The recreation of the body as a place of sacred revelation means accepting and affirming the liberating dynamics of enjoyment, pleasure without shame, without the limits imposed by shame, stereotypes and oppressive censorship.

The subjects and their daily stories in the hermeneutical process

In the same way we approach the Bible as though it is land to be worked, we need to take a closer look at our daily lives: there are fertile parts, while others are full of stones; there are deserts and swamps ... but also great abundance.

A feminist hermeneutics of liberation, which uses gender social relations to analyze the text, discovers people as they really are, with their subjectivity, history, culture and differences. All our day-to-day experience of life goes into reading, interrogating and interpreting the text.

We are not impartial readers; we are people with bodies, colour, sex, age; our body works, suffers and experiences pleasure, whether we like our body or not, whether others find pleasure in it or not.

We approach the text with our lives--lives which, in most cases, are common and banal, with no great things worth mentioning: the housework, looking after our sons and daughters, worries about food, health and making a living; tiredness, routine; a passively accepted sexuality; dreams of a fuller life, of love and passion; the happiness we feel at the birth of our sons and daughters; sex which is full of pleasure. Perhaps there is a victory in the struggle, dignity at work, the solidarity of friendship.

These are lives and stories that will never be told in the history books, but they build and sustain the social fabric, social change and resistance. Even when they are the objects of the systems and structures of power and government, they can be a place of obstinate and creative resistance and hope, surviving all massacres.

We want to approach the texts through the diversity and richness of our daily lives, with its apparent absence of scientific rigour and assumed partiality. The experience of daily life also provides a dynamic way of seeing the structure and fabric of texts; it looks deeper to the more hidden aspects that are untouched by super-structural, super-objective and super-sociological interpretations.

So just as life, the texts are also the product of day-to-day relationships cut through by mechanisms of domination: of one sex over another, of one class over another, of one ethnic group over another, of one generation over another. These relations cannot be reduced to one category or arranged hierarchically. We need to work with the plurality of dimensions and systems that appear in the texts--and in our own lives. In this way, we can discover the visible and the invisible, and the many crises and differences that our faces, voices and bodies reflect ... this is what builds and conditions history, and the same goes for our reading of the Bible and our hermeneutics.

The hermeneutics of deconstruction and reconstruction

How can we discover the abundance of the earth? Where it allows life to germinate and grow? For this to happen, we need to uproot anything which gets in the way of its abundance, anything which disturbs its balance or is an obstacle to its fertility. Only then will it be possible to sow again and work the land to produce the fruits of life.

We approach the Bible as though it were land to be worked, with tools that help us to receive the fruits of life. Going beyond exegetical methods, with all their limitations and possibilities, gender theories have shown themselves to be fundamentally important in helping us to understand the land on which we work, its fertility and also its sterility.

Gender theories reveal the roles, identities, functions and relations that society attributes to men and women and understands that these attributes are a social construction, one that can be deconstructed and reconstructed on another basis and using other criteria. A feminist hermeneutics that examines the issue of gender asks questions such as: How do gender relations operate in the text? What are the "invisible" gender relations? How are the identities of women and men constructed? What attributes are they given? What stereotypes are present? What are the conditions of life actually like in practice?

We have to work at different levels to try to perceive the motivations and the normative intentions behind the texts: the story being narrated expresses the narrator's interpretation and understanding of the events being narrated; there is no reason to assume that what the text says is an accurate description of what women's lives are really like. The texts often portray ideal women or evil women as two constant, opposing extremes. Ironically, texts that seem to be favourable to women could be based on stereotypes of female identity (the seductive woman, the self sacrificing mother, and so on).

This is the process of deconstruction. We begin with the premise that the texts are constructed in a generic way, that is, they are hostage to the asymmetric interests and relations that subordinate women. That is precisely why they need to be deconstructed.

This approach needs to consider power relations and social and literary structures in a dynamic way so that it does not simply adopt the perspective that women are victims. The challenge is to understand and analyze the flow of power in a particular social or literary structure: power is not an absolute and static thing, rather it is a series of forces that move between--or against, or on or with--the various social subjects. Women also exercise power, often expressed in the form of resistance and survival, and they are never purely the victims of men and structures. And they can also be participants in their own subordination.

Analysis of gender social relations asks questions about the flow of power; I see here the confluence not only of relations between the sexes, but also between the ethnic groups, social classes, cultures and generations that form humanity, in all its complexity.

Some texts will turn out to be sterile for women. These texts provide no possibility of germination. When the text is deconstructed, and the earth fresh and clean, you can see that the material that has been there for years has caused the land to become sterile. It needs to be uprooted. The land can then be fed with other inputs, it needs to be ploughed and turned over to restore its balance and, who knows, perhaps its capacity to germinate the fruits of life. As we excavate the land, we find the stories of women, mutilated bodies that have been buried and hidden for centuries.

In this process of deconstruction, we draw on other hermeneutical elements such as inter-textuality (use of information from other texts), intra-textuality (texts within the text) and extra-textuality (extra-canonical documents, for example, the gnostic gospels).

This agricultural work requires us not only to "clean up" and get to know the text ... We must go on to ask about the possibility of germination. And this is how the process of reconstruction begins. Above all, it will mean reformulating the paradigms of interpretation and using new paradigms that allow other interpretations of the message or messages in the text.

The fact of reconstructing a text, of making it different from one that has for years been accepted as law and used to distort or limit the freedom of women to participate in history, places feminist hermeneutics of liberation in the position of challenging the traditional schemes of theology and church structures. In this sense, feminist hermeneutics represents the reconstruction of history and women's participation in it, by women who are no longer prepared to accept that they should be treated as though they are a minority and who are prepared to take responsibility for their plot of land: their body, their mind, their decisions, their dignity.

The women and men who read the texts from the standpoint of their daily experiences, their own particular histories and communities, and their relationships with others, make a commitment to deconstruct and reconstruct the meaning of the text, turning it into a human place that brings people together. That does not mean we have to eliminate all ambiguities, or homogenize the styles and resources of texts. To reconstruct the text is to make it into a tool for liberation, to leave the path open to alternative interpretations and so to invalidate any attempts to control the text and its message.

A hermeneutics that questions the concept of biblical authority

God is revealed in the Bible just as he is in the land ... but neither the Bible nor the land are God. The divinity is an inscrutable mystery. Our approaches to the sacred are human approaches, mediated by our culture and our daily lives. Nobody can define this mystery and declare the absolute truth. The text contains the word of God but it is not itself the word of God, because the word of God is more than a written text.

For women, it is fundamentally important to recognize that the Bible contains passages that are merely circumstantial and not normative. A patriarchal text that justifies discrimination against women cannot be normative, because it is contrary to the liberating spirit of the gospel. Nor can the oppressive cultural and social traditions of those who interpret the texts be portrayed as normative guidelines deriving from the text.

The revelation is good news and, because it is real, it is dynamic and changing. It is not limited to the text, but aims to promote the meeting of the word of God in the text with the word of God present in the daily lives of communities, women and men, boys and girls, in the lives of different peoples with their own religious cultures and traditions. That is why it is important for the community reading the text to discern which elements are specific to the context of the text, and which elements of it are relevant to their own context.

The revelation expresses itself through the recreation of the text, as the product of the liberating meeting between the bodies of the texts and the bodies of its readers.

The feminist hermeneutics of liberation is not our exclusive discovery. It is the fruit of a dialogue between feminist and liberation movements of Latin America and other continents. We want the land of the Bible to be converted into an Abya Yala for men and women, into an enriched and abundant land and soil, fertile for the liberating word: land which is no longer sterile and dead, land where new fruits of faith and spirituality can be harvested.

Women have heard what has been said ... now it is for us to say it!

This article is the result of a collective effort by the first Latin American conference of women biblical specialists in Bogota, Colombia, in February 1995. Many women contributed to putting these hermeneutical guidelines together: Elsa Tamez, Mercedes Brancher, Ana Maria Rizzante Gallazzi, Nancy Cardoso Pereira, Rebeca Montemayor, Irene Foulkes, Alicia Winters, Luz Gimenez, Debora Garcia, Violeta Rocha, Josefina Caviedes, Maribel Pertuz, Veronica Rozzotto.

We are on our way. We are learning to read the Bible in this way ... being faithful to ourselves, to our struggles and our liberation movements, and especially to the women in our churches and countries. We still have to battle with theories and procedures, against authorities and the limits they impose. The texts from this conference express our personal and collective efforts and we would like them to be part of the dialogue accompanying Latin America's biblical journey.

Nancy Cardoso Pereira is a Methodist pastor working at the Pastoral Commission of Land in Brazil. This article appeared in the Revista de Interpretacion Biblica Latinoamericana--RIBLA (Journal of Latin American biblical interpretation) No.5, 1997. Translated from the Portuguese by the WCC Language Service.