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Limits of the Appeal to Women's Experiences Reconsidered

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2013

Jennifer Beste
Jennifer Beste
Affiliation:
Xavier University
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Abstract

In the light of what appears to be a growing consensus that historicist and postmodern thought undermines the credibility of appeals to women's experience as a source of theological and moral knowledge, I assess whether these criticisms do indeed discredit appeals to experience as a legitimate source of knowledge and norm for feminist theology. While such critiques pose insightful challenges to assumptions underlying the appeal to experience, I argue that they do not definitively discredit the appeal to experience itself. Drawing on trauma theory and the work of Margaret Farley and Martha Nussbaum, I seek to show how women's experiences can be defended as a credible source of knowledge and a norm for feminist theology.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , Spring 2006 , pp. 54 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 2006

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References

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49 In defense of this interpretation, Beverly Harrison argues that early feminist theologians, with the exception of Mary Daly, did not presume theological categories were ontological in the way assumed by classical theologians; they recognized that the foundations for their claims were situated, historical-cultural constructs. See Harrison, Beverly, “Feminist Theola(o)logies at the Millennium” in Liberating Eschatology: Essays in Honor of Letty Russell, eds. Farley, Margaret and Jones, Serene (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999), 157.Google Scholar

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53 Ibid.

54 Ibid., 152.

55 Ibid.

56 In my method of theological reflection, the importance of pragmatic criterion is grounded in the belief that God is passionately for the flourishing of human creation.

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