The Challenge of Violence: Toward a Theology of Women's Bodies
by Anne Marie Dalton

In a well-known work of feminist theology, Phyllis Trible identifies a number of biblical texts which speak of incredible cruelty to women. She calls such texts, "texts of terror" and indeed they are; stories of rape and violence justified by the blessings of holy men.¹ If we could boast that we live in a more enlightened age where acts of violence against women's bodies were practically non-existent, then such tales could be repented, lamented and then stored in the shame of our history. However such is not the case. Stories of terror involving the subjugation and violent abuse of women's bodies abound worldwide. These may be individual acts of violence or systemic conditions of violence, such as occurred during the Serbian conflict when women on both sides were raped for the intent of having them bear the children of the enemy. ² Or when Western media consistently holds up images of anorexic-looking young women as models of beauty. The now famous dictum of Simone de Beauvoir, "biology is our destiny" remains true for women. Moreover and regrettably, we as Christians cannot rest in the assurance that our own tradition has effectively countered the history of violence against women's bodies.

While some of what I will say below applies to all bodies and to violence in general, I will speak particularly of women's bodies; that is of a gendered violence--a violence that can be identified as applying in a particular way to the bodies of women (or alternately of men). Gendered violence is enculturated and systemic violence directed against women simply because they are female bodies. Others have enumerated the horrors of this kind of violence and it is not necessary to do so any further here.

If we were to conclude that Christianity has nothing to offer and in fact can only produce a negative influence on this issue, then why bother with this concern. However, sufficient work has been done to lead us to believe that there is enough ambiguity and are indeed resources within the tradition to support a faith that can address this issue and bring about change. It could be argued that since women were especially associated with the body in the body/soul dualism throughout the Christian West the recovery of a theology of women's bodies is the critical starting point for any theology of the body.

Certainly the problems of violence against women's bodies do not all stem from the Christian tradition, and no tradition so far as we know is exempt from the oppression of women or from negative perceptions of women's bodies. Each tradition has work to do to examine the ideology about bodies, in particular women's bodies, that it carries. My concern, however, is with the Christian tradition. What have been its teachings and actions with regard to the female body? Why has Christianity not succeeded in empowering women to "put on the new body of Christ," that is, to achieve a religious subjectivity, which values the body as a medium of liberation? Is there any possibility that it could succeed in the future? What this discussion will attempt to show is that the tradition has been ambiguous with regard to women's bodies. Why there are quite obvious teachings and practices that degrade bodies, women's in particular, there are also historical instances of the tradition offering alternatives to the prevailing negative notions of society towards women.

There has been discussion among feminists about the actual meaning of the word body. The points of view range from those who argue that the body is a given physical gendered reality which then interacts with its environment to those who argue that the body as such has no meaning apart from its socio-cultural construction. ³ This is a significant discussion the complexities of which are not immediately relevant to our purposes here. In the conversation of feminists about the nature of the body, however, there are important insights that enable us to take a new look at perceptions and roles of the female body in the Christian tradition. For the most part, gender and bodies, for example, have been viewed from an essentialist perspective, as "natural," the given and determined kind of body with which one is born. While one may assume different roles during one's life, these are generally considered to fit within boundaries that are naturally either male or female. Any transgression of these boundaries is unnatural and therefore against the will of God the Creator. New perceptions of the gendered body have challenged and continue to challenge this notion of what is "natural" about the body.

Two of these notions are (1) the body as figure, and (2) the body as performance. Both these notions are helpful in understanding the way in which a religious tradition that valued material life, the life of this world, entered into the social construction of women's bodies. An examination of aspects of the Christian tradition in the light of these concepts reveals negative as well as more hopeful and positive sides of the tradition's treatment of the body, in particular the female body.

1. The Body as Figure

The idea of the body as figure is that what one sees as the female body (or the male body) is really a representation of a set of values, expectations, and cultural interpretations. One might ask for example what values, expectations and cultural interpretations leads a young woman to conclude that her boyfriend left her because she is not beautiful enough, in fact, because she is ugly. The answer has little to do with real women's bodies-but rather with the figure of women's bodies that exist in the culture. In her work entitled Carnal Knowledge: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West, Margaret Miles illustrates through the study of female nudes, especially in religious art, how Eve, as interpreted in the Genesis story, comes to represent the female body. ⁴ Two contrasts are particularly revealing in this study: one is the contrast of the portrayal of Eve with that of Mary and the other is the contrast of the female nude with that of the male nude. ⁵ When representations of Mary and Eve are compared, we find that Mary is fully clothed, and generally surrounded by celestial beings, whereas Eve is often naked, presented in erotic poses, and surrounded by nature, including the serpent, and some symbol of death. Her hair is long and uncovered. (Women's hair had and has sexual connotations in many cultures). There is evidence of fetishes with certain parts of the female body-the breasts, the abdomen, the legs-in many of the portrayals of Eve. In both representations of Eve and representations of Mary, the eyes are averted-the figures are gazed upon-they do not gaze out of the painting. They are the objects of the male gaze-the Other subjected to interpretation. Mary is the figure of the good woman taken up in heavenly pursuits, demure and seeking her religious identity outside the body. Even birth is subject to divine intervention and she does not suffer the effects of original sin. Eve, however, is the figure of the bad woman; she is her body-the seductress, the weak one. As Miles concludes, "Her naked body...signals her sinfulness, just as the Virgin's lack of body reveals her goodness." ⁶The female body as figure of evil is particularly evident in the representations of witches-where the features prominent on Eve's body are amplified and distorted to the point of the grotesque. Evil resides in the female body. To quote from the Malleus Malificarum (Manual on the identification and treatment of witches, which was printed and reprinted fourteen times between 1496 and 1520):

[That a woman] is more carnal than a man is clear from her many carnal abominations. And it should be noted that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, a rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives... .All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable. ⁷

The male body is a different figure. From antiquity male nakedness was used to represent strength, heroism, struggle against temptation, moments of self-awareness. In Christian art, similarly, the naked male body is portrayed as "the perfect vehicle and expression of the difficult and committed work of the creation and cultivation of religious subjectivity." ⁸In Renaissance art, in particular, the naked body of Christ including the genitals, is an intentional representation of the full humanity assumed by God in the incarnation. In Miles' words, "The heroic male nakedness of athletic asceticism adds visual associations to Christ's nakedness, constructing a richly complex visual symbol in which strength and weakness, triumph and vulnerability are resolved." ⁹There are clothed female representations such as the Annunciation and the Pieta in which moments of religious awareness and sublime subjectivity are portrayed, but not of the naked female body. The naked female body is a figure, too erotic to portray religious subjectivity. It remains so today. Hence, for example, some of the controversy around Edwina Sandy's Christa, the naked female body on the cross. The female body thus remains a figure mastered as "an object of male desire." ¹⁰ In further discussion below, some ambiguity will be introduced into this conclusion (as Miles does) in terms of Christian treatments of the female body, but first let us examine another way of thinking about the body; that is the body as performance.

2. The Body as Performance

The notion of bodies as performance stems from the work of feminists such as Judith Butler, in attempts to explain gendered roles outside the traditional division of male and female. How do we explain homosexual, transsexual, bisexual, etc. choices or are they really choices? . Her assertion is that the body (which is always a gendered body) performs as a gendered body always in some particular time. In other words, what constitutes one as a woman in Canadian culture in the year 2000 is one's performance within the scale of what the cultural expectations of woman are at this time. Because of her interest in gay, lesbian, and transsexually performing bodies, Butler sees this theory both as a way of explaining all the varieties of bodies without resorting to the dyad male/female and also as a means of attributing elements of subjectivity to woman's choices of appearance and personal presentation. ¹¹ My interest arises from a quite different setting. The claim here is that this understanding of gender as performance, if it is taken to mean simply that there is a strong element of performance inherent in the notion of the body (as gendered), can lead to a more nuanced understanding of what the Christian tradition has said about women's bodies. Before looking at the role of performance, however, it is necessary to examine briefly the problematic notion of "God's image" as it applies to women and, in particular, to women's bodies. It is usually around this notion that the value given to women and to women's bodies in particular can be seen. Recent examination of teachings about the "image of God" shows that the Christian tradition struggled with this notion as it applies to women and that the notion was not entirely negative towards women. It should be noted that it was because of women's bodies that the negativity did arise, but there were consistently raised counter voices. This give significant credence to other evidences of positive valuation of women's bodies that can be seen more clearly through the notions of figure and performance.

The Image of God in Women's Bodies

The role of Christian theology in the oppression of women has been documented extensively, so it need not be repeated here. As Maryanne Cline Horowitz (in her article The Image of God in Man--is Woman Included?) points out, however, women's (understandable) outrage brought to the interpretation of the Christian tradition has not always served women well and has often resulted in women's repudiation of what she calls "a usable tradition" for women.. ¹² Her own work strenuously revisits the problematic texts of the tradition related to the image of God, Genesis 1 and 2, in particular Gen. 1:26-27, "In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." The tradition, she concludes, covers a range of interpretations. One is that humans were divided by sex only after the Fall and for the purpose of procreation. In another reference masculinity and femininity are used in the sense of an allegory to apply to different parts of the soul, the higher being male and the lower female. While this is only allegory, the sexist language reflects no doubt the perception of male and females relationship within the society. Then there are direct arguments for the equality of male and female. Basil the Great argued that the image of God is in both male and female and refuted those who claimed that women had an inherent weakness toward sin. As Horowitz summarizes Basil's position: "Equally they share the privilege of creation in God's image and thus equally can they be virtuous and do good works, and equally can they deserve reward or punishment for their deeds." ¹³ Likewise we can find in the writings of Augustine and Aquinas, the assertion that both man and woman are made in God's image despite the sexist overtones of metaphorical comparisons such as the analogy of man to Christ and woman to the church

What is surprising and noteworthy in Christian history is the recurrence of the question of whether or not woman was made in God's image throughout the tradition into the late modern period. Why did Church leaders and theologians return to this question? A likely and reasonable answer to this query is that there existed within the tradition the lived experience of equality among men and women living during the New Testament era as well as for sometime before and after that era. The difficulty of maintaining lived equality in the light of the patriarchal culture called for a way of explaining both. In other words, the reality was that women were not equal to men in the societies in which Christianity was enculturated; so how did one remain faithful to the biblical revelation and yet maintain the power structures enacted in home, church and civil society? Thus, we find in Aquinas, for example, the distinction between the primary sense and secondary sense of the meaning of the image of God. The primary sense is that ontologically (in their essence or being) both male and female are equally made in the image of God, but the secondary sense is that with regard to authority the woman is not in God's image. She is subordinate to man in the home and his helpmate in reproduction. Thus, with regard to power, only man is in God's image. ¹⁴ As Horowitz points out, there is also an early mistranslation of the Cor. 11:7-9 which became a difficult source for Christian writers and influenced many of their interpretations of the 'image of God' text in Genesis. ¹⁵ The mistranslation read, "For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God: but woman ought to, since she is neither in the glory or image of God."

What effect does the ambiguous teaching about the image of God have with regard to women's bodies? Why does the woman's body become the figure of weakness, seduction and sin? The first candidate for the answer to this question is the dualism of body and soul read into the doctrines on the image of God. Thus, Basil, so positive in asserting that women, equally with men, were indeed created in God's image, nevertheless, held that the image must be spiritual, since two such different corporeal forms as man and woman could not both be in God's image. ¹⁶ This notion together with the repeated allegory of man as the higher spiritual form and woman the lower or sensual form and with the concurrent sexist reading of the Adam and Eve narrative (itself influenced by a patriarchal society) created an ideology of the female body that matched the practice of the society. The persistence of this ideology is obvious in assertions of modern theologians; Soren Kierkegaard, for instance, states "That woman is more sensuous than man appears at once in her physical structure... . The fact that woman's life culminates in procreation indicates precisely that she is more sensuous.... The female body before the Fall was already precariously tilted, by its aesthetic and ethical functions, toward the Fall that will make her sensuousness sinful." ¹⁷So it is not that the dualism of body and soul in itself acted as a causal factor in the figure of women's bodies that was created, but rather that the dualism acted as a means by which Christian interpreters of the biblical text negotiated the confrontation of the Biblical Word with the power structures of society. That the negotiation in the end did little to challenge the distribution of power is not surprising since the interpreters were themselves male subject to a society already constructed along patriarchal lines. The dualism works that way because that's how things are and they were that way before the concept of dualism entered the community of interpretation.

Athalya Brenner comments on the metaphorization of Judah and Israel as the faithless wife in Jer. 2. ¹⁸ The metaphor works, she claims, because both the speaker and the audience recognize female sexual behaviour as potentially deviant even when unprovoked by the male partner (in this case a metaphor for God). What the religious interpretation in which female sexuality is animalized adds to the audience's perceptions is a further legitimation of these perceptions. The figure of women's bodies was first and foremost a creation of "the male gaze" under which women's bodies were objectified, possessed, and conquered, and rightfully so, it was believed, lest the wild animal of passion gain control. For interpretation of the biblical text related to the image of God, women's bodies as well as their status in the existing society seemed to be the two stumbling blocks to seeing God's image in women as well as in men. Often the conclusion was that in spite of their bodies, women were made in God's image, as noted in Basil the Great for example. Hence, it was concluded the image must be in the soul only.

Nevertheless there are parts of the tradition, which exemplify the true ambiguity of the Christian tradition regarding women's bodies. On close examination these areas reveal liberatory moments in which women's bodies may have been recognized and experienced as vehicles of subjectivity and religious transformation. Two of these areas are: (1) the rituals of initiation in the early centuries of the Church, and (2) the mystical transformation of many women in the Middle Ages, as evidenced in their writings.

The Rituals of Initiation

In the early rituals of initiation, the taking on of the new body of Christ was the central focus. ¹⁹The conditions for the passage from the old body to the new body contained a strong element of performance, which was intimately linked with the expected emergence of the changed bodies. The question here is what happened to the women's bodies during the ritual when compared to what happened to men's bodies.

The ritual of initiation included what we now call baptism, confirmation and Eucharist. The ritual was preceded by a lengthy period of preparation, called the catechumenate, from the time in which a person approached a bishop until she or he was a full member of the Church. Each person had a witness to accompany him or her in the journey from the old life to the new. The focus was not only on learning what one had to believe, but also on changing one's life. The role of the witness was to observe and "witness to" the fact that change was occurring. Fasting, exorcisms, and scrutinies were all employed to purify the body, cast out the forces of sin, and to re-construct a new life. It was not merely the changing of one's mind that constituted becoming a Christian. Rather it was the performance of the Christian life. Exorcisms for example were accompanied by "breathing out" the devil. Fasting cast off the impurities of the previous life. Often the first food recommended and sometimes prescribed after the rituals was milk and honey-the food of the newly born and the newly liberated. The scrutinies investigated and probed all areas of one's behaviour. So, gradually one moved from the pagan performance of life to performance of the new life in Christ. The intense period of preparation occurred during the season of Lent and the rite of initiation itself was integrated into the drama of the Easter Vigil. Ordinary time was suspended and the period of the rituals was compared to a gestation period and a rebirth.

Both men and women participated equally in the preparation for the rites of initiation. Commenting on the rituals of initiation, Caesarius of Arles states "Men and women have been redeemed equally by Christ's blood, have been cleansed by the very same baptism, approach the Lord's altar to receive the body and blood together... with God there are no distinctions of male and female." ²⁰But, was it in fact true for women that ordinary time was suspended, a new creation brought forth, and a new body born (to paraphrase Augustine) within the initiation rituals? ²¹

Throughout the third and fourth century most records of the initiation rites indicate that baptism was performed on naked bodies. Men, women, and children entered the baptismal water, were baptized and confirmed naked. They were then clothed in a white robe and often proceeded to the celebration of the mystery of the Eucharist. Care was taken to discriminate the meaning of nakedness in Baptism from the nakedness of public mixed bathing, which was discouraged and even prohibited for Christians. As in the case of all other areas of life, nakedness took on new meaning. Cyril of Jerusalem (387-417) compared the nakedness in baptism to the nakedness of Adam before the fall-innocent and not ashamed. ²² Other interpretations included: shedding the "old man with his deeds," imitation of the naked Christ on the cross, taking off "the world," dying and being reborn-those first born to this world are now born to Christ." As the newly baptized came forward to participate in the Eucharist, Augustine explained, they become themselves the Eucharistic bread, "the body of Christ." "You are what you receive." ²³

Thus we see in the rhetoric of the early Church that all persons male and female leave the old life in the world and accept a countercultural world-new life in the Christian community, a life of equality, where there is neither male nor female. However, life is not so simple. Gender does in fact enter into the rituals of initiation. The procession of those to be baptized is described as men first, then children, then women. Furthermore, it was not permissible for naked women to stand before the bishop for the full anointing of the body-the confirmation. In a few places, Greek and Syrian Churches, there were female deacons who did the actual baptizing and anointing although deaconesses were not permitted to bless or to invoke the Divine Names (according to the Apostolic Constitutions). But in most cases there were no female assistants and the women were anointed on the head only by the bishop. In all cases, the participation in the church to which women and men were initiated and given the "freedom" of sons and daughters of God was different for the sons and the daughters. Women assumed the supportive roles, men the leadership roles in the Christian community as well as in public and in the home. If, however, as Judith Butler argues, and certainly as the early Christian communities held (in deed if not in word), performance enters into the re-construction of the self, it still remains at least a possibility that some early Christian women constructed a religious subjectivity that was mediated through the performance of their bodies in Christian initiation. This is all the more believable when one considers the extent to which early writers in the Church found it necessary to comment on women's place in the community and how, surprisingly often throughout the tradition, one finds women pushing the boundaries of definition and limitations. One such occasion that has been quite extensively researched, but still remains the subject of controversy is that of the medieval women saints or mystics. The notion of performance is helpful here, for it was in the performance of their spiritualities as described by the individual women, even when that description is filtered through a male scribe, that one can see how the body becomes the medium of religious subjectivity.

Women Saints in the Middle Ages

Elizabeth Alvida Petroff concludes of medieval women mystics that their bodies are problematic to their being understood by others as outstanding Christians or saints. ²⁴ First of all, women can not be trusted to be as they appear; their flesh is weak and hence the problem of deception. What looks like strength must be something else! Petroff examines a series of texts describing prominent women (religious and otherwise) that portray a phenomenon she calls "unmasking." A women who just died is found to be virtuous despite the apparently promiscuous life she led; a women who is put to death for prostitution is discovered by her widower to be a saint, and so on. Women are not what they appear to be. Petroff believes that the emergence of courtly love and the "entrancing" power of so-called female wiles may have posed a threat to the hegemony of that time and "unmasking" serves to destabilize the emerging female power. ²⁵

In her study The Lady as Saint: A Collection of French Hagiographic Romances of the Thirteenth Century, Brigitte Cazelles comments on the deep distrust of women's bodies that not only figures prominently in how women became saints and related their own experiences, but also in how male writers interpreted women's holiness. Virginity, the more trusted state of the female body insofar as virtue was concerned, was also associated with hiddenness. She writes:

Inspired by a deep distrust of the body, a number of Church Fathers posited that, in order to be a virgin, purity should neither be seen nor described. In their view, a virgin ceases to be a virgin when she becomes the object of sensual love (Cyprian; third century); when she endures unchaste gazing (John Chrysostom; fourth century); and when she is submitted to the adultery of the eyes (Novatian; third century). Tertullian goes even further when he declares that "every public exposure of a virgin is [to her] a suffering of rape." ²⁶

Hence, the truly good woman remained hidden. Saints and mystics were not truly good women. They "transgressed" the codes of hiddeness in two ways: (1) they practiced bodily asceticism to excess, and (2) they asserted a public presence (in many cases they learned to read and moved in public space). Both Petroff and Cazelles note that most hagiography of women saints was written by men; even some autobiography was dictated to or edited by men. What were the male writers to make of the transgressions of these women? How could they be made acceptable to society and still preserve the figure of woman? Petroff concludes that the transgressions were attributed to miracles. Only God by some extraordinary intervention could give women the ability to teach in public. Often, the spiritual insights and ensuing actions were the result of "voices." ²⁷ Women, no doubt, also internalized these expectations and attributed their own religious subjectivities to visions, voices and direct commands.

Again the reality is not quite so straightforward, however. Women's own writings, from the same period, give us an insight into more complex interactions of women with the way in which society has figured them, in particular their bodies. They used the rhetoric about the female body and transformed it into a vehicle for religious transformation. In Petroff's words, In medieval thought women were bodies, (men were characterized as mind or spirit), and bodies were dangerous-dangerous to men and, therefore, to society as a whole. The physical austerities undergone by women mystics, and that young women often imposed on themselves, underscored society's need to control and purify the female's body-a grotesque as opposed to a classical body. ²⁸ However, she continues, to women who entered religious life or became recluses something unexpected happened. The same techniques (prayer, meditation, silence, fasting) designed to "contain and suppress" her body, turned into "a powerful force that made women potent visionaries." ²⁹

Laurie Fink and Caroline Walker Bynum also conclude that the female mystics broke out of their bondage to their bodies as they were culturally constructed. To quote Laurie Fink: "the discourse of the female mystic was constructed out of disciplines designed to regulate the female body, and it is, paradoxically, through these disciplines that the mystic consolidated her power ...[and] fashioned ...the means of transcending [her] own secondariness." ³⁰ Some mystics wove an identity between the female body and the suffering body of Jesus. One such case was Marguerite d'Oignt (1260-1310) prioress of a Carthusian convent, Poletiens, France. Marguerite saw Jesus as "my own mother and more than my mother.... The mother who bore me labored in delivering me for one day and one night but you, my sweet and lovely Lord, labored for me for more than thirty years. Ah ... how painfully you labored for me and bore me through your whole life.... And truly it was no surprise that your veins burst when in one day you gave birth to the whole world. ³¹

Another mystic of the thirteenth century and a beguine, Hadejwich of Antwerp (Netherlands) identifies her experience of Minne (Lady Love) with the experience of Mary in conceiving and giving birth to the Son of God. (Minne was Hadjwich's term for the relationship of love between God and humankind). She writes of Mary:

It was by deep longing
That this mystery happened to her,
That this noble Love was released
To this noble woman
Of high praise
In overflowing measure:
Because she wished nothing else and owned nothing else,
She wholly possessed him of whom every Jewish woman had read.
Thus she became the conduit
Open to every humble heart. ³²

In the mysticism of Hadewijch, her own body became the conduit of Lady Love. Petroff illustrates in her account of Hadewijch's poetry that Hadewijch's own self-knowledge included the awareness that her female body did not have to be transcended but was "already transcendent in its ability to love." ³³ If one engages the notion of performance once again, one sees that in Hadewijch the performance of love is closely associated with the assigned roles of the female body as in the image of the virgin birth but achievement of transcendence is demonstrated in this performance.

One final example is of Angela of Foligno (1248-1309), an illiterate widow, Franciscan tertiary, who dictated her spiritual autobiography to a friar, Fra Arnaldo. ³⁴ Her autobiography is replete with images of the body; her body and the body of Jesus. Her journey is recounted as thirty steps on the path of penitence. In the eighth step, she recounts her awareness of the relationship between her sins and the crucifixion of Christ. The description is of a drama set in the Franciscan church in Foligno. Angela describes the baring of her body and the ritualistic offering of the parts of her body, promising that each will not sin. "In this understanding of the cross there was given to me such a great fire, that standing next to the cross I stripped myself of all my clothing, and I offered myself to him completely...I promised...not to offend him with any of my members, accusing all my members one by one." ³⁵ In Angela's conversation with Christ, he enumerates for her his wounds. In the final step, which she describes as reaching Assisi, she recounts Christ's word to her: "All your life, your eating and drinking, sleeping and all your living is pleasing to me." ³⁶ Angela's imitation of Christ is an enactment of Christ. As for other women mystics, her piety is, in Petroff's words, "palpably physical" and the result is a transformed self. The female body, figure of sensuality and sinfulness, "tilted toward sin"( to return to Kierdegaard) and created as a helpmate in reproduction becomes the vehicle of religious subjectivity.

One cannot conclude from these accounts that these women operated with liberty within the Christian community, however. In some cases, (the beguines for example), they were able to construct safe places for limited public roles outside the enclosures of convents or without the direction of male clerics. For the most part, the case can be made that they did little to permanently challenge the power structures of their societies. Yet they do not easily conform to the figure of the female body that had hegemony in the West, and their experiences, while cloaked in conflicting rhetorics, provide a text of women's bodies as the loci of spiritual transformation. May they indeed have become the new body in Christ promised at baptism? In so far as one can judge the past, the best answer remains "yes and no." There is at least the promise that it is possible.

Conclusion:

Does the Christian tradition have the resources to construct a theology of the body that allows for the empowerment of women through a re-claiming of their bodies? Can we recover a theology of the gendered body that can work as a vehicle of women's religious subjectivity in a way that is both personal and communal? In the face of contemporary violence against women's bodies, can we create a counter-cultural figuring of bodies that esteems the body, seeing it as it is: worthy of the metaphor "new body in Christ"?

The paradigmatic instances described in this essay indicate that the answer to all of these may be yes. They also, however, indicate some of the lines along which one must carefully proceed. (1) Further study is needed of the underside (context and unspoken assumptions, for example) of relevant Christian teaching. Questions to be considered include: Why is this question of women so persistent in the tradition? What is the urgency? What were the material conditions in the community which made this a relevant question? These are the kinds of question that many feminists and biblical scholars, in particular, have already learned to address. (2) There is need for astute and critical awareness of the ideologies informing the figures of female bodies in the different historical periods within which Christian textual interpretations were made. What did the "Barbie" of that era look like? As in the case of today's Barbie, the figure of women's bodies might literally and/or metaphorically topple over if it occurred in a real woman. (3). And perhaps most importantly, there must be consistency of performance. Rhetoric about the sacredness of women's bodies and their equality to men's bodies demand both rituals that celebrate that rhetoric and equality of access to the sacred spaces of the community. The conflict between the hidden virginity, the veiled heads, the place at the back of the procession and the call to recreation as the free daughters of God has its own expression in our Christian communities of today. The insights offered by feminist secular and religious scholars on the performance of gender, as well as the recorded experiences of our foremother mystics and saints, would indicate that an effective theology is a theology that is also enacted. The Christian community has tried otherwise and failed. Perhaps the admirable efforts of those women that have throughout history continued to raise the question of God's Word on women's bodies provide a basis for a more fruitful effort in the future.

We cannot have an adequate theological stance against violence without confronting our Christian heritage, especially as it regards women's bodies. This paper has attempted to highlight research efforts and feminist critiques which maintain that in the ambiguity of the tradition lie resources for a renewed theology of the body. It also implies that for such a theology to be effective it must learn from the past and respect the power of performance and the cultural conditioning of all our perceptions and interpretations.